It’s not every day that a group of young Silicon Valley technology prodigies gets the keys to the most powerful nation on Earth. In fact, it appears that has not happened on any day. Ever. Until now.
Six men aged 19 to 24 — most with strong Bay Area connections — have been identified as associates of the controversial, Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, aka DOGE, that has gained unprecedented access to several federal agencies, including the Department of the Treasury.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Stanford University economics professor Neale Mahoney said. The incursion into government systems by members of DOGE, an entity created via executive order by Republican President Donald Trump on his first day in office, was meant to “maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”
The DOGE team’s access to agencies — reportedly including the Office of Personnel Management, General Services Administration and U.S. Agency for International Development, known as USAID — have drawn outrage and sharp questions from Democrats.
“I am deeply appalled by the access that Treasury has granted to DOGE employees concerning the Social Security numbers of every American and sensitive payment information,” Democratic Silicon Valley Rep. Ro Khanna said.
Revelations about the youthful tech squad came Sunday in Wired magazine, which identified them by name. In providing expertise to the Trump administration, the young men join a number of high-profile Silicon Valley figures, including venture capitalists David Sacks and Marc Andreessen, who have been brought in as advisers and given the tech industry a new-found and powerful voice in the White House.
Musk, responding to an X post about the six, posted, “Not many Spartans are needed to win battles.”
Among the group are Ethan Shaotran, a 2020 Gunn graduate and semi-finalist that year in the prestigious U.S. Presidential Scholars Program. Shaotran caught attention from Musk’s xAI artificial intelligence company in October, when his team was a runner-up in the firm’s hack-a-thon and he was featured in the firm’s announcement.
A Harvard University bio of Shaotran lists two papers he wrote — one on pursuit of human-surpassing AI, another on improvement of self-driving vehicles — and a 111-page book published on Amazon about using AI for stock predictions. The bio identified him as the founder of Energize.AI, a “scheduling assistant for professionals,” and said he has filed patents related to AI computer vision, and logistical systems. Affiliations with the Harvard Mountaineering Club and work as a scuba dive master in Hawaii are also cited in the bio.
Another of the young DOGE crew was reported to be Gavin Kliger, whose LinkedIn profile touts a position as a full-time “special advisor to the director” in the Office of Personnel Management. He earned a bachelor’s degree in 2020 from UC Berkeley in electrical engineering and computer science, the school said. Kliger worked at Twitter for less than a year in 2019 during college, according to the profile. Between graduating from UC Berkeley and this January, Kliger worked in software engineering for San Francisco tech company Databricks, according to his profile.
A former Eagle Scout with a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, Kliger enjoyed playing piano and clarinet, along with online speed chess, the profile said.
A Vox reporter on Monday posted on X a screenshot of an email, purportedly informing USAID workers that the agency’s Washington, D.C., headquarters were closed, and indicating replies should go to a USAID email address that appeared to belong to Kliger.
The second UC Berkeley student is Akash Bobba, who pursued a triple major in electrical engineering, computer science and business administration from 2021 until this January, but has not graduated, according to the school. According to Wired, Bobba interned at Menlo Park social-media giant Meta, and at Palantir, a Denver intelligence and military software company co-founded in Palo Alto by Thiel, an influential conservative Silicon Valley billionaire closely tied to Musk.
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Also connected to Thiel is Luke Farritor, said by Wired to have a working email address in the federal General Services Administration, and to have interned at SpaceX. Farritor is a Thiel Fellow, receiving a two-year, $100,000 grant awarded to people under 22 “who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom,” according to the Thiel Foundation.
The fifth young worker identified as working for DOGE is Edward Coristine, who according to Wired “appears to have recently graduated from high school and to have been enrolled at Northeastern University.” The magazine said a copy of his resume shows he spent three months at Neuralink, a Musk-founded company developing brain-computer interface to treat paralysis.
Bobba and Coristine are listed as “experts” in Office of Personnel Management records, Wired reported. The magazine cited unspecified sources at the General Services Administration who said Coristine had “appeared on calls where workers were made to go over code they had written and justify their jobs.”
None of the five could be reached for comment by this news organization this week.
Musk — CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and co-founder of Neuralink — has defended DOGE’s work, posting Tuesday on X, the platform he owns, that it is “dismantling the radical-left shadow government in full view of the public.”
San Jose Democrat Rep. Zoe Lofgren said DOGE’s entry into government agencies and databases is breaking privacy and data-access laws.
“There is no such thing as the Department of Government Efficiency,” Lofgren said Tuesday. “Departments can only be created through an act of Congress.”
