DOGE employee 'Big Balls' reveals how he got his name, warns of 'no checks' on government spending
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employee nicknamed "Big Balls" told Fox News on Thursday how he got his moniker and detailed his department's latest findings about government fraud.
In an interview with Fox News anchor Jesse Watters, the DOGE employee — whose real name is Edward Coristine — disclosed that his nickname originally came from his LinkedIn social media account.
"I use it as my LinkedIn username," Coristine told Watters, prompting laughter from the host as well as DOGE leader Elon Musk and the rest of his team at the interview.
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"Well, people on LinkedIn take themselves super seriously, and they're pretty averse to risk, and I was like, 'Well, I want to be neither of those things.' So I just, I set it and honestly, I didn't think anybody would notice," the DOGE employee continued, mocking the career-focused social media platform.
Musk piled on, stating, "LinkedIn is so cringe."
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Coristine, a 19-year-old college student and software developer, drew ire from Democrats and liberal media pundits during DOGE's first few weeks of investigating wasteful and fraudulent spending in the federal government. Many were upset over the young, irreverently named government employee being given access to government records to pursue DOGE's work.
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Watters asked Coristine about his latest work within DOGE and what he'd uncovered. He said that he's been looking through U.S. Treasury Department payment computers and finding a multitude of outgoing payments from the federal government that include no details about who they're going to and why.
"So one of our initiatives is to root out fraud and waste, and to do that we started looking at the payment computers. And, as mentioned earlier, there's no accounting of what payments actually go to in the payment computer," he said.
Coristine continued, "You look at a specific line item — $20 million. You're like, 'OK, what is this money going to?' And for the majority of payment systems, it's like, 'Well, we don't really know.'"
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He went on to say that the system that distributes government or taxpayer money "literally has no checks and no accountability to the actual American taxpayer. So it's a huge vector for fraud, waste, and abuse."
The U.S. Treasury Department and DOGE discovered earlier this week that hundreds of millions of dollars in improper payment requests were identified after the Treasury went live with its first automated payment system last week.
The system found $334 million in improper payment requests that were flagged because of missing budget codes, invalid budget codes and budget codes without authorization.Original article source: DOGE employee 'Big Balls' reveals how he got his name, warns of 'no checks' on government spending
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It would also allow the Department of Homeland Security to waive personal interviews of U.S. nationals as part of the process and to reduce fees for them. ___ Bohrer reported from Juneau, Alaska, and Johnson from Seattle.
