Since the first days of the Trump administration, Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been everywhere in the federal government, moving fast and breaking things. In a matter of weeks, DOGE operatives have spread across dozens of government agencies as they have attempted to terminate tens of thousands of federal employees. With so much focus on where DOGE is going, WIRED wanted to take a beat to look at where they’ve come from and what that might tell us about how they’re thinking about reshaping the federal government.
The big takeaway: Many on the DOGE team are from Musk’s world. If Musk is America’s CEO, then DOGE has become his Silicon Valley executive branch.
We’ve mapped out a non-exhaustive list of people affiliated with DOGE, including creating a searchable table with each member, their corporate history, and the agencies they’ve been connected to. Readers can check that out, and click through it, below. We plan to keep updating this as we find more DOGE operatives or as known affiliates move to new agencies.
We’re focused on the new people brought in under the second Trump administration or directly hired into agencies—as Special Government Employees (SGEs) or regular employees—who are operating as members of DOGE teams. This gets a little tricky because there are technically two DOGEs established under the president’s executive order. There’s the US DOGE Service (USDS), formerly the US Digital Service, that’s a permanent organization. Then there’s the temporary USDS organization, which wraps up on July 4, 2026, and through which SGEs can be hired.
Here’s what we’ve learned:
The DOGE world, as it stands, seems to break down into roughly three categories: former Trump officials, conservative lawyers, and imports from the Silicon Valley area (funders, founders, technologists, or people connected to them). In that first category we find people like DOGE spokesperson Katie Miller, the wife of White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller. The two of them have been Musk’s guides to DC.
In that second category are people like James Burnham and Austin Raynor, both former clerks for conservative Supreme Court justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, respectively. Jacob Altik, another conservative lawyer on the DOGE squad, has been selected to clerk for Gorsuch. Jeremy Lewin, who was part of DOGE’s dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), worked with Second Lady Usha Vance’s former law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson, a firm that has also represented Tesla.
Then, the biggest throughline of all: Of those Silicon Valley imports, one of the most clear themes across DOGE’s ranks is fairly obvious: a connection to Elon Musk. Forty-nine people on our list have connections to Musk, his companies, or his greater network. This connection is most often through one of his allies or one of his companies. There are the obvious people like Steve Davis, president of Musk’s Boring Company, who have followed Musk across his various ventures. (Davis previously worked at SpaceX and assisted Musk in his overhaul of X, formerly Twitter.) Davis spearheaded the DOGE recruitment efforts before inauguration day and has continued to play a pivotal role in the organization. Similarly, SpaceX employee Brian Bjelde, who is now at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), also helped Musk downsize Twitter’s staff in 2022.
There are people like many of the young engineers WIRED first identified who were given the keys to different government agencies, like Marko Elez, Luke Farritor, and Edward Coristine, who were all interns or employees at one of Musk’s companies: SpaceX, Tesla, xAI, X, and Neuralink. (Musk has been involved in others, but these are the ones he controls.)
A number of these DOGE operatives have spread from the Office of Personnel Management to the General Services Administration (GSA), USAID, the departments of the Treasury, Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Health and Human Services, and the Social Security Administration (SSA), just to name a few.
More than any other company, SpaceX has significant representation in DOGE, with 16 of the 80 listed DOGE operatives having worked there in some capacity. SpaceX employees have appeared at the Federal Aviation Administration, which could present a worrisome conflict of interest, and have also appeared at SSA, OPM, and the Department of Energy.
Then there are the second-degree connections to people in Musk’s network. Connections to billionaire and PayPal Mafia member Peter Thiel and to Palantir, the defense-focused tech company he cofounded, pop up frequently. Farritor, for instance, was a Thiel Fellow. Several other DOGE members have also worked for Palantir. (Even non-DOGE members who have found their way into the Chief Information Offices of several agencies similarly have these connections to Musk or Palantir.) Thiel was an early Trump supporter and helped bankroll the 2022 Senate campaign of Vice President JD Vance. He has also invested in several of Musk’s companies.
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The Musk connection reaches beyond the tech industry. DOGE also contains a cohort of people from the finance industry, including Michael Grimes and Anthony Armstrong, who both worked to help Musk structure the deal to buy Twitter while at Morgan Stanley (Armstrong has since left the firm). Antonio Gracias, CEO of Valor Equity Partners, was an early investor in Tesla (and a donor to Musk’s America PAC) and is also part of DOGE, along with two other people who have been employed there, Jon Koval and Payton Rehling.
And then there are those with personal connections to the Musk network. Stephen Ehikian, DOGE’s lead at GSA, is married to Andrea Conway, who was a designer at X. Kathryn Armstrong Loving, who has appeared as part of DOGE at the Environmental Protection Agency, is the sister of Brian Armstrong, the CEO of the crypto company Coinbase. The relationship here comes through Marc Andreessen and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, which has invested in Coinbase as well as the defense startup Anduril. Before inauguration, there were reports that Andreessen was helping to interview DOGE candidates, and he jokingly described himself as an “unpaid intern” for DOGE. Ryan Wunderly, who is slated to be the new DOGE member at the Treasury, according to lawsuits, comes from Anduril.
While there are people who don’t neatly fit in one of these categories, like Gavin Kliger, a young engineer who worked at Databricks and was one of the earliest members of DOGE, or Scott Langmack, an executive at the AI property tech company Kukun who is now part of DOGE’s incursion into HUD, the big takeaway remains the same: Silicon Valley experience is almost mandatory, and connections to Musk and his associates even more so.
For many weeks, it was unclear who was even in charge of DOGE, and while Amy Gleason was announced as DOGE’s administrator, President Donald Trump has indicated that he put Musk in control. (Musk’s own lawyers have also stated in a court filing that because he is in charge of DOGE, it would be an undue burden for him to be deposed in an alleged wage-theft case filed against X Corp.) To make matters murkier, last week, Ehikian, the acting GSA administrator (who is himself heading the DOGE efforts at the agency), told staff in a meeting that “there is no DOGE team at GSA.” All to say, it’s more important than ever to understand who is actually a part of this strike team.
Again and again members of the administration have asserted that there is no conflict of interest between members of DOGE or DOGE affiliates and their work in government. But that becomes harder to believe when people like Musk and others in government—who benefit from government contracts—continue to hold positions in the private sector. Particularly when those companies, not the government, could be their ultimate return destination.
The Chatroom
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The Download
Check out this week’s news episode on Uncanny Valley: Good Quests, Christianity & Caviar Bumps. WIRED’s Michael Calore, Lauren Goode, and Zoë Schiffer talked about Silicon Valley’s relationship with God. Listen now.
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