(NewsNation) —Tech billionaire Elon Musk may be in charge of the Trump administration’s new Department of Government Efficiency, but he’s also got a group of helpers to who are running the controversial agency.
While Musk has been the face of DOGE, several others are working behind the scenes to keep on with the agency’s stated mission of cutting costs in the federal government by rapidly burrowing deep into federal agencies including The United States Agency for International Development and the Department of Education.
While DOGE does not have an official roster because it’s not not technically a government agency, Musk appears to have tapped into several people within his sphere, including a group of young engineers with minimal work experience.
Here’s who is running DOGE with Musk:
Steve Davis
Musk has installed Steve Davis, an engineer who has been with the tech billionaire for 20 years and over several of his companies including SpaceX and X as his deputy, reported the Los Angeles Times.
Davis is currently also the president of Boring, Musk’s tunneling company.
Musk’s deputy has had a reputation for being a shrewd cost-cutter and running fast-paced operations, which have at times resulted with him at odds with safety regulators, the Guardian reported.
Boring’s former safety manager told Fortune that Davis had isolated him in ways that stopped him from doing his job when the Occupational Safety and Health Administration found that several Boring employees had been burned with chemical accelerants due to hazardous working conditions at the site.
Davis undertook much of the hiring for DOGE prior to Trump taking office and was at the United States Agency for International Development when Doge staffers and agency security officials clashed over Musk’s demands for access to restricted areas, the Guardian reported.
Marko Elez
Musk brought Marko Elez, a 25-year-old Rutgers University graduate who worked at Musk’s SpaceX and X.
Elez was a temporary appointee at Treasury who was given access to sensitive account data with administrator-level privileges, reported Wired.
He resigned last week after racist social media posts of his came to light by the Wall Street Journal.
“Normalize Indian hate,” the account associated with Elez posted in September, regarding people of Indian ethnicity who work in the U.S. tech sector, the outlet reported.
Elez was reinstated one day later.
Vice President Vance on Friday said he disagrees with Elez’s posts but that “stupid social media activity” should not “ruin a kid’s life,” he wrote on X. “So I say bring him back,” which President Trump said he would support.
Musk replied with: “He will be brought back. To err is human, to forgive divine.”
Edward Coristine
19-year-old Edward Coristine was also tapped by Musk for DOGE. Coristine briefly worked for Musk’s brain chip start-up Neuralink.
Coristine has gone by the username “Big Balls” online and founded a company called “Tesla.Sexy LLC”, according to Wired.
Coristine is a high school graduate with a history of launching startups and has founded at least five companies; many of these were erased from his now-deleted LinkedIn profile.
Coristine has been given access to sensitive data and has been on calls with government employees as they are asked to defend their jobs, Wired reported.
The Washington Post reported Coristine has taken on new roles as a senior adviser at the State Department and at the Department of Homeland Security.
Some U.S. officials expressed alarm about Coristine’s being given the role.
“This is dangerous,” a U.S. officials told The Post, noting Coristine’s age and a report by Bloomberg News that he was fired for leaking a data security firm’s information to a competitor.
Akash Bobba
Another young engineer, Akash Bobba, 22, is also a part of DOGE.
According to a copy of his now-deleted LinkedIn obtained by Wired, Bobba was an investment engineering intern at the Bridgewater Associates hedge fund as of last spring and was previously an intern at both Meta and Palantir.
Luke Farritor
Farritor, 23, is a former intern at SpaceX, Musk’s space company, and currently a Thiel Fellow, Wired reported.
He dropped out of the University of Nebraska, but was part of an award-winning team that deciphered portions of an ancient Greek scroll while he was enrolled, according to the outlet.
Gavin Kliger
Kliger is listed as “special advisor to the director” at the Office of Personnel Management on his LinkedIn page and is listed as being in internal records as a special adviser to the director for information technology, reported Wired.
Kliger had worked at Twitter in 2019 and as a senior software engineer at the data analytics company Databricks.
He also has an email address at USAID, reported NPR. His name also appeared in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s internal staff directory.
Wired reported that his Substack includes a post titled, “The Curious Case of Matt Gaetz: How the Deep State Destroys Its Enemies,” as well as another titled, “Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense: The Warrior Washington Fears.”
Other DOGE-related players
Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is the chair of a congressional subcommittee aimed at eliminating government waste under DOGE.
Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen told the New York Times that he was “helping Doge.” The billionaire did not go into detail on what his role will be exactly and said he was not speaking for Musk, but he appeared to have advance knowledge of Doge’s goals and said he had plans to take part in “the money side,” head count and regulation.
Tom Krause, CEO of the Cloud Software Group, was put in charge of the Treasury Department’s system.
Amanda Scales, who worked for Musk at xAI, has been named chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management.
Riccardo Biasini, who worked at Musk’s Tesla and the Boring Company, is senior adviser to the director at OPM.
This story is developing. Refresh for updates.
