Latest news with #AkashBobba
Politico
5 days ago
- Business
- Politico
This DOGE project is still full steam ahead
'Gebbia carries a lot of clout,' said one official close to DOGE, granted anonymity to speak candidly. The need for modernization is unquestioned. Roughly 100,000 federal workers retire every year, and their forms are largely stored on paper in the vast mine located roughly an hour outside Pittsburgh. And this is unlikely to be a typical year. The Office of Personnel Management is bracing for a surge in retirements at the end of the year from the crush of federal employees who have opted into the administration's Voluntary Early Retirement and deferred resignation programs. OPM on July 15 stopped accepting paper applications and launched the third iteration of its Online Retirement Application system, which is replacing the Government Benefits Platform. The push is led by a small coalition of DOGE members and civil servants based at OPM. Alongside Gebbia, the group includes DOGE veterans Akash Bobba and Jamie Sullivan, OPM Director Scott Kupor, and a pair of former Airbnb engineers — Yat Choi and Andrew Vilcsak — who joined over the summer, according to agency records viewed by West Wing Playbook. They've worked hand-in-hand with longtime OPM career staff like Kimya Lee and human resources officials from the IRS. 'We started with low-hanging fruit including the automation of the retirement application process, the calculation of basic retirement annuities, and with the capability to support digital signatures on a subset of retirement-related documents,' former OPM Chief Technology Officer Al Himler, who left government earlier this year, wrote in a blog post last month. 'The team at OPM have been working tirelessly to take the federal retirement system digital,' Kupor said in a statement. 'Success will be for nearly all federal employees to self retire in a matter of seconds as opposed to the antiquated process that can take several months if not years to complete.' Gebbia's presence, in particular, has helped inoculate the project from the political drama that stymied other DOGE efforts. Unlike Steve Davis, the former DOGE lead who tried to stay past his welcome and had a falling out with senior White House officials as a result, Gebbia has maintained a low profile inside government. 'Joe's got a name that's well recognized, and the work that he's doing is not political,' said a person familiar with DOGE, also granted anonymity to speak freely. That wasn't always obvious. When Gebbia joined DOGE in February while the group was slashing and burning its way through federal agencies, Airbnb moved quickly to distance itself from its co-founder.
Yahoo
17-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Elon Musk left the fate of your Social Security payments in the hands of a 21-year-old DOGE tech bro
The wealthiest man on earth was so distrustful of the nonpartisan experts at the Social Security Administration that he and his allies insisted on giving a 21-year-old former Silicon Valley intern sweeping access to personal data on hundreds of millions of Americans, living and dead, in hopes of proving his outlandish claims about fraudulent payments passing though the agency. Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency team made no attempt to understand data the tech billionaire was citing when he began claiming that 'massive fraud' was allowing Social Security payments to flow to 'illegals' in a series of X posts in early February, despite warnings from Social Security officials who told them they did not know what they were talking about, the The New York Times reported. Instead, he ordered 21-year-old Akash Bobba, a former Palantir intern who'd been hired as a programmer for DOGE, be granted access to Social Security data without proper training so he could run his own analysis, the Times reported When the acting commissioner, Michelle King, declined to do so, Musk had her fired and replaced with Leland Dudek. Dudek, brought back from a suspension on the DOGE team's recommendation, got Bobba the access. But according to the Times, Bobba knew the Musk fraud claims were bunk. He reportedly told others at the agency that he'd 'tried to deliverthe accurate context' to the world's richest person, apparently without success. Citing interviews with dozens of people in the agency and throughout the Trump administration, the Times said Musk 'became fixated' on Social Security after he and his team misread government spending data and began to believe, incorrectly, that they'd uncovered fraud at the nation's old-age and disability pension program. Musk's team reportedly became so obsessed and driven to prove the false claims as true that they pushed SSA officials to disregard a court order cutting off DOGE's access to sensitive data including Americans' Social Security numbers, employment history and other sensitive matters, even as the SpaceX and Tesla CEO became a target for administration critics after he referred to the massively popular New Deal program as a 'Ponzi scheme.' One Musk ally, Michael Russo, was installed as the SSA's chief information officer. He pushed the then-acting commissioner to have agency workers analyze the data the Tesla billionaire and his team were claiming to be evidence of fraudulent payments. When the Social Security experts said the payments in question were valid, Russo ignored them and said Musk's team wouldn't accept the conclusions of civil servants. Musk departed government service earlier this month amid a falling-out with Trump, but his outsized wealth and ownership of the X platform mean he could create chaos surrounding the GOP's agenda and its plans for the 2026 midterms. According to the most recent poll by The Economist and YouGov, a full 76 percent of Republicans see Musk favorably while just 18 percent view him unfavorably. According to a poll conducted by The New York Times and Siena College in late April, 77 percent of Republicans view Musk favorably. The billionaire is more popular than House Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, or almost anyone else in the GOP save for President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. But at the same time, just fifteen percent of Democrats and 34 percent of independents have favorable views of the tech mogul. A week after he blew up his relationship with Trump by, among other things, accusing him of being a pedophile, Musk took to X to express regret over his war of words with the president and back down by conceding that 'some' of his posts attacking the commander-in-chief had been excessive. 'I regret some of my posts about President Donald Trump last week. They went too far,' he said, just days after Trump said 'very disappointed' in his former special adviser and campaign donor for criticizing the 'Big, Beautiful Bill' he is attempting to push through the Senate.
The Independent
16-06-2025
- Business
- The Independent
Elon Musk left the fate of your Social Security payments in the hands of a 21-year-old DOGE tech bro
The wealthiest man on earth was so distrustful of the nonpartisan experts at the Social Security Administration that he and his allies insisted on giving a 21-year-old former Silicon Valley intern sweeping access to personal data on hundreds of millions of Americans, living and dead, in hopes of proving his outlandish claims about fraudulent payments passing though the agency. Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency team made no attempt to understand data the tech billionaire was citing when he began claiming that 'massive fraud' was allowing Social Security payments to flow to 'illegals' in a series of X posts in early February, despite warnings from Social Security officials who told them they did not know what they were talking about, the The New York Times reported. Instead, he ordered 21-year-old Akash Bobba, a former Palantir intern who'd been hired as a programmer for DOGE, be granted access to Social Security data without proper training so he could run his own analysis, the Times reported When the acting commissioner, Michelle King, declined to do so, Musk had her fired and replaced with Leland Dudek. Dudek, brought back from a suspension on the DOGE team's recommendation, got Bobba the access. But according to the Times, Bobba knew the Musk fraud claims were bunk. He reportedly told others at the agency that he'd 'tried to deliverthe accurate context' to the world's richest person, apparently without success. Citing interviews with dozens of people in the agency and throughout the Trump administration, the Times said Musk 'became fixated' on Social Security after he and his team misread government spending data and began to believe, incorrectly, that they'd uncovered fraud at the nation's old-age and disability pension program. Musk's team reportedly became so obsessed and driven to prove the false claims as true that they pushed SSA officials to disregard a court order cutting off DOGE's access to sensitive data including Americans' Social Security numbers, employment history and other sensitive matters, even as the SpaceX and Tesla CEO became a target for administration critics after he referred to the massively popular New Deal program as a 'Ponzi scheme.' One Musk ally, Michael Russo, was installed as the SSA's chief information officer. He pushed the then-acting commissioner to have agency workers analyze the data the Tesla billionaire and his team were claiming to be evidence of fraudulent payments. When the Social Security experts said the payments in question were valid, Russo ignored them and said Musk's team wouldn't accept the conclusions of civil servants. Musk departed government service earlier this month amid a falling-out with Trump, but his outsized wealth and ownership of the X platform mean he could create chaos surrounding the GOP's agenda and its plans for the 2026 midterms. According to the most recent poll by The Economist and YouGov, a full 76 percent of Republicans see Musk favorably while just 18 percent view him unfavorably. According to a poll conducted by The New York Times and Siena College in late April, 77 percent of Republicans view Musk favorably. The billionaire is more popular than House Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, or almost anyone else in the GOP save for President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. But at the same time, just fifteen percent of Democrats and 34 percent of independents have favorable views of the tech mogul. A week after he blew up his relationship with Trump by, among other things, accusing him of being a pedophile, Musk took to X to express regret over his war of words with the president and back down by conceding that 'some' of his posts attacking the commander-in-chief had been excessive. 'I regret some of my posts about President Donald Trump last week. They went too far,' he said, just days after Trump said 'very disappointed' in his former special adviser and campaign donor for criticizing the 'Big, Beautiful Bill' he is attempting to push through the Senate.
