Elon Musk has spent decades building a universe of companies that has served as an incubator for up-and-coming engineers and a proving ground for his inner circle.
That universe — an ecosystem of Silicon Valley tech titans, veterans of his companies like Tesla and SpaceX, and a crop of fresh-faced hackers and software engineers — has now collided with the U.S. federal government.
The dozens of individuals who work under, or advise, Musk and the Trump-ordered Department of Government Efficiency — individuals who TechCrunch has identified or confirmed independently — reflects more than the billionaire’s proclivity to collect talent. They are a real-life illustration of Musk’s web-like reach in the tech industry.
TechCrunch set out to report on or confirm the individuals working as Musk representatives in the U.S. government. Importantly, we’ve sought to show the connections between them, and how and when they entered Musk’s orbit. Along the way, TechCrunch has made some new discoveries, including new details about DOGE and its workers and an xAI-powered chatbot on a DOGE-related website subdomain that is hosted on a Musk acolyte’s website.
How we got here
TechCrunch interviewed people who have worked with Musk and DOGE staffers. We used public and open-source data, such as historical internet records and chat logs, to confirm parts of our reporting. We also relied on services like the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to access archived copies of websites that are no longer online. Public information, such as court records, payments transactions, other media reports, and past TechCrunch reporting were also used.
TechCrunch reached out to all those named for an opportunity to comment. For those whose contact information we did not have, TechCrunch contacted known representatives, including the Trump administration.
When reached for comment, a White House spokesperson provided a statement to TechCrunch. (The spokesperson sent the email “on background,” but we are publishing in full as we were given no opportunity to decline the terms.)
“DOGE is fulfilling President Trump’s commitment to making government more accountable, efficient, and, most importantly, restoring proper stewardship of the American taxpayer’s hard-earned dollars. Those leading this mission with Elon Musk are doing so in full compliance with federal law, appropriate security clearances, and as employees of the relevant agencies, not as outside advisors or entities. The ongoing operations of DOGE may be seen as disruptive by those entrenched in the federal bureaucracy, who resist change. While change can be uncomfortable, it is necessary and aligns with the mandate supported by more than 77 million American voters,” the statement read.
This is a living document as the DOGE team is likely to expand and evolve over the coming weeks. Scroll down to learn about the individuals in the DOGE universe, which have been broken down by type: Musk’s inner circle; senior figures; worker bees; and aides, some of whom are advising and recruiting for DOGE.
If you know more about DOGE, contact TechCrunch securely. You can also share documents via SecureDrop.
Inner circle
Elon Musk
Role: DOGE Lead, Unpaid “Special Government Employee”
Gravitas. Obsession. Ambition. Risk-taker.
Elon Musk observers and sycophants have pointed to these traits to explain his rise from a bright-eyed immigrant landing in the United States to one of the world’s richest and most powerful people, and now a right-hand to President Donald Trump.
The overlooked secret sauce is Musk’s ability to get talented people to sign on to “the mission.”
That there are multiple, overlapping, and evolving missions — saving the planet through sustainable transport and energy, solving traffic, making humanity multiplanetary, or protecting public conversation — doesn’t really matter.
The biggest carrot was, and has always been, Musk’s “us versus them” framing, according to five sources who had lengthy stints at Tesla and spoke to TechCrunch on condition of anonymity.
In the past, the “them” might be local regulators, the press, or legacy automakers. Today, the people working closely with Musk to complete his next mission via the Department of Government Efficiency have a new “them” to battle: Waste and bureaucrats.
Musk has talked at length about government agencies that should be “deleted entirely.” Meanwhile, Musk’s companies have benefited from government contracts and incentives. His company SpaceX has been awarded more than $20 billion in contracts from NASA, the Department of Defense and other federal agencies, according to data from USASpending.gov.
Musk is an unpaid special government employee, according to the White House. Per a filing on February 17, the Trump administration said Musk is a White House employee and a senior advisor to the president. According to the Trump administration’s executive order, DOGE is a temporary government organization whose authorities are set to expire in July 2026.
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Steve Davis
Role: Long-time Musk insider
Steve Davis is a long-time Musk confidant. He began working at SpaceX as one of its earliest employees in 2003 after earning a master’s degree in aerospace engineering from Stanford University, according to the Los Angeles Times.
By 2016, Musk tapped Davis to run what at the time was his newest far-fetched idea: An underground transit play known as The Boring Company. On his watch, The Boring Company raised hundreds of millions of dollars and built a few short so-called “Tesla tunnels” in Las Vegas. But the company has also ended up dropping its previously announced plans for tunnels in cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Davis has a reputation as a relentless negotiator, and Musk brought him on board at Twitter to help with the takeover and subsequent slash-and-burn. Davis and his family reportedly slept in a makeshift bedroom at the company’s headquarters during this time. In a 2023 lawsuit against Twitter filed by former employees, the plaintiffs alleged that Davis said to the effect of, “we don’t have to follow those rules,” in response to a request to get permits to install a bathroom for Musk.
Davis has served as a member of the board of advisors of the Atlas Society, a group centered around the philosophy of Ayn Rand, per Bloomberg. Davis is now helping Musk slash government headcount, which Rand once called the “worst part” of the “producers’ burden.”
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Nicole Hollander
Role: X employee
Nicole Hollander garnered public attention in the aftermath of Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in early 2022.
The George Washington University alum and former employee of real estate developer JGB Smith (per her LinkedIn profile) was part of the polarizing Twitter transition team that upended the company and slashed its workforce. As part of that transition, Hollander and Musk ally Steve Davis moved into the company’s headquarters with their infant, according to a civil lawsuit filed in 2023. The lawsuit was filed by several former Twitter employees against X Corp., the Musk entity that took over. The plaintiffs said in the complaint Hollander was not employed by any of Musk’s companies at that time.
Hollander’s relationship with Davis — and her current employment at X — has kept her in Musk’s circle. Her role at DOGE doesn’t have an official title, at least one that is public. However, Wired reported in late January that Hollander has high-level access to federal agencies and an official government email address.
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Brian Bjelde
Role: Senior Advisor, Office of Personnel Management
Brian Bjelde is a true Elon Musk veteran with 21 years at SpaceX, where he was employee number 14 at SpaceX and continues to work today. While he started as an avionics engineer, Bjelde has spent the last decade running the company’s human resources department.
In a 2014 Reddit “ask me anything”, Bjelde said that at SpaceX, “We try not to limit our thinking except by the limits imposed by physics.”
Several former employees sued SpaceX and Musk in 2024 alleging sexual harassment and a hostile work environment. According to the complaint, Bjelde once starred in a video for the space company where a staffer spanked him — an apparent attempt at tongue-in-cheek humor — and he also was involved in the firings of several employees who spoke up about the company’s culture in 2022.
Prior to SpaceX, Bjelde spent a year at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, after graduating from the University of Southern California with a Master’s degree in astronautical engineering.
At DOGE, Bjelde is reportedly a senior advisor at OPM.
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Amanda Scales
Role: Chief of Staff, Office of Personnel Management
Amanda Scales doesn’t directly work for DOGE, but is now chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s main human resources department, according to an OPM memo.
Scales used to work on talent acquisition at Musk’s company x.AI until January 2025, according to her LinkedIn profile. She also worked in human resources and talent at San Francisco-based VC firm Human Capital, as well as at Uber. Scales graduated from University of California, Davis in 2012 with degrees in psychology and economics, per her LinkedIn.
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Senior figures
Jehn Balajadia
Role: Long-time Musk assistant
Jehn Balajadia first joined the Musk ecosystem in 2017, according to her LinkedIn profile, which lists her title as operations coordinator at The Boring Company.
But LinkedIn records don’t always reflect actual positions — and their evolution — in Musk’s world. In 2018, Balajadia took over the executive assistant to the office of CEO position, a role that included managing all of Musk’s activities and often those of his family members, according to interactions between a TechCrunch reporter and SpaceX and Musk employees at the time.
Today, Balajadia has a role within DOGE. According to The New York Times, she is listed in the employee directory of the Education Department.
The book “Breaking Twitter” claims Balajadia once told another Musk official that her job was to “take care” of him, and she reportedly often travels with Musk. When Musk took over Twitter, Balajadia was named chief of staff, and she was the one who delivered letters of dismissal to several Twitter executives, per Walter Isaacson’s book on Elon Musk.
Prior to joining Tesla, Balajadia worked at Red Bull, NBCUniversal, and Walt Disney.
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Riccardo Biasini
Role: Senior Advisor to the Director of the Office of Personnel Management
Ricardo Biasini entered into Musk’s orbit in 2011 when he joined Tesla as an engineer after completing his master’s degree in automotive engineering from the University of Pisa, Italy the previous year.
During his five years at Tesla, Biasini focused much of his attention on Autopilot, the company’s branded advanced driver assistance system, according to his own account outlined in a Medium post. He led development of Autopilot’s traffic aware cruise control and other driver assistance features before taking responsibility for the architecture of controls, safety, and functional behavior of the electric propulsion system.
Biasini left Tesla and joined Comma.ai in 2016, where he developed the automated lateral and longitudinal controls for the startup’s first self-driving car system. He later became VP of quality and eventually was named CEO in 2018 after founder George Hotz stepped down from the leadership role.
Biasini went back to work for Musk in 2019; this time as director of electrical and software engineering at The Boring Company.
At DOGE, Biasini is senior advisor to the director of the Office of Personnel Management, according to a lawsuit filed against the OPM in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which provides his title as listed on an OPM document entitled “Privacy Impact Assessment for Government-Wide Email System.”
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Christopher Stanley
Role: Unspecified role at White House
Stanley began working for Musk in October 2022, per his LinkedIn profile, when he was hired for the “core transition team” at Twitter after Musk’s takeover. Stanley can be seen at the time taking this widely-seen selfie at Twitter’s headquarters with other people who were not fired or quit when Musk took control of Twitter.
Stanley has since taken on an unspecified role at the White House, according to The New York Times. Stanley himself has hinted at working in the Trump administration on his X account.
On January 20, the day of Trump’s inauguration, Stanley posed next to two January 6 convicts, brothers Matthew and Andrew Valentin, who were pardoned by Trump. Stanley wrote in an X post that he was “boots on ground to ensure this was executed.” Trump’s Department of Justice liaison Paul Ingrassia wrote on X that the Valentin brothers were the first January 6 prisoners to be released.
Stanley is also the head of security engineering at X and the principal security engineer at SpaceX, according to his website. On his LinkedIn, Stanley says he is also the chief information security officer at X Payments, a payment service that Musk has wanted to launch as part of his “everything app” aspiration for X.
Before entering Musk’s orbit, Stanley had his own cybersecurity firm, named Stanley Networks, and worked as a contractor at the state of Kentucky. He also worked at Kentucky health provider Baptist Health, which includes hospitals and other facilities.
TechCrunch found an xAI-powered chatbot on a DOGE-related website subdomain on Stanley’s website, called the “Department of Government Efficiency AI Assistant,” which says it is “here to help government personnel like you identify and eliminate waste, improve efficiency, and streamline processes using a first principles approach.”
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Worker bees at DOGE
Akash Bobba
Role: Expert, Office of Personnel Management
Akash Bobba is a DOGE engineer who is reportedly a student at the University of California, Berkeley, according to Wired. The New Jersey native graduated high school in 2021, according to public records seen by TechCrunch. It’s unclear how his past experiences brought him to DOGE. But he has had some interactions with the tech world.
According to a since-deleted podcast with Aman Manazir, Bobba said he previously interned at Meta and Palantir. He also worked at Bridgewater Associates.
Bobba’s website as of February 2025 points to a specific point in a YouTube video, titled, “How Tech Billionaires Plan to Destroy America,” in which Elon Musk says, “I’m not just MAGA. I’m dark gothic MAGA.”
Per Wired, Bobba is listed as an “expert” in internal OPM correspondence, and reports directly to OPM’s chief of staff Amanda Scales.
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Edward Coristine
Role: Special Government Employee
Edward Coristine, a former intern at Neuralink and now known by his infamous LinkedIn profile handle “bigballs,” is one of the core members of the DOGE team and the youngest-known Musk aide at age 19, TechCrunch has confirmed.
Since arriving in Washington D.C., Coristine has been actively involved in accessing federal systems at several government departments, including Office of Personnel Management, the SBA, GSA and USAID, the State Department, Homeland Security and FEMA.
Prior to DOGE, Coristine ran several companies under his name from his family home in New York, including DiamondCDN and Packetware, both which offered forms of DDoS protection.
Coristine also used to work for DDoS mitigation company Path Network until he was fired in June 2022 following an alleged “leaking of proprietary company information that coincided with his tenure,” Path CEO Marshal Webb told TechCrunch in an email. Coristine said in a later Discord post under his handle “Rivage,” seen by TechCrunch and per other news reports, in response to his firing that he had done “nothing contractually wrong.”
It was around May 2024 that Coristine went to work for Elon Musk’s Neuralink. Coristine is also a mechanical engineering and physics student at Northeastern University, and expected to graduate in 2028.
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Marko Elez
Role: Special Government Employee, U.S. Treasury
Since joining DOGE, Marko Elez has become a central figure in a legal battle over DOGE’s access to some of the federal government’s most sensitive systems. Now as a senior Treasury employee, Elez has access to the U.S. Treasury’s payments systems responsible for disbursing around $6 trillion in federal funds to Americans, such as Social Security checks and federal tax refunds.
Named in a lawsuit challenging DOGE’s access, Elez is a “special government employee” and reportedly had wide data access privileges to the department’s systems before that access was curtailed by a federal court. He works closely with Tom Krause, another DOGE staffer and senior Treasury employee. Per a February 11 court filing, Elez is the only DOGE staffer with access to payment systems.
Before government, the 25-year-old Rutgers University graduate previously worked at SpaceX, where he focused on vehicle telemetry, starship and satellite software, according to an archived copy of his website seen by TechCrunch. Elez later worked on search AI at Musk’s social media company X, per an archived copy of his website. Elez does not list any prior government experience.
On February 6, Elez briefly resigned from his position at DOGE, according to the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, after The Wall Street Journal surfaced racist posts from Elez’s social media accounts. Elez may return to government after Musk posted a poll on X asking whether Elez should be rehired.
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Luke Farritor
Role: Senior Advisor, DOGE
Luke Farritor is listed as a senior advisor in several U.S. government department employee directories, including the State Department, USAID, and the Department of Energy. He also requested access to data held by Medicare and Medicaid, as well as the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau.
Before government, Farritor, 23, was a student at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln and was well known for decoding the writings on ancient Roman scrolls, for which he won a $700,000 prize. Later, Farritor was among the 2024 Thiel Fellowship class, an annual award given by the billionaire Peter Thiel. An archived copy of Farritor’s website says he worked for Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, who he helped to “invest a large, multistage VC fund and help run AI Grant.” (Neither Friedman or Gross responded to a request for comment.)
Farritor worked as an intern at Elon Musk’s satellite internet company Starlink in mid-2022, then went on to work at SpaceX between May 2022 and July 2023, where he worked on “several mission-critical projects” leading up to Starship Flights 1 and 2, per his website.
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Gautier ‘Cole’ Killian
Role: DOGE “Volunteer”; Federal Detailee
Gautier “Cole” Killian is described as a DOGE “volunteer” who was designated a “federal detailee” at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in early February. A federal detailee is a federal employee usually seconded from another government agency.
Killian was a student at McGill University in Canada where he studied math and computer science, and was a member of McGill’s AI team between 2021 and 2022. His personal website was scrubbed from the internet in late 2024, according to his website’s public DNS records.
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Gavin Kliger
Role: Special Advisor to the Director of the Office of Personnel Management
Gavin Kliger is an alum of University of California, Berkeley, and works at Databricks. Kliger joined the DOGE team earlier in 2025.
Kliger is listed as special advisor to the director of the OPM on his LinkedIn profile, per Reuters, though much of Kliger’s online life, including his X account, has since been scrubbed from the internet, including the Wayback Machine, which archives copies of webpages in case they later become unavailable.
A copy of Kliger’s resume that TechCrunch has seen said he previously interned at Twitter in mid-2019.
According to an email sent to USAID staff, Kliger also has a USAID email address, and was one of the DOGE staffers who is now listed in the CFPB’s staff directory, according to the CFBP’s union.
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Tom Krause
Role: Special Government Employee, U.S. Treasury; CEO, Cloud Software Group
Tom Krause is a special government employee and a senior DOGE staffer in the U.S. Treasury. He concurrently serves as the chief executive of Cloud Software Group, a private company that owns several tech firms, including remote access giant Citrix, a once public outfit that went private through a series of deals.
Bloomberg reports that Krause eliminated jobs at Citrix that staff said were critical to the security of the company’s products, according to multiple employees both named and unnamed for the story. Cloud Software Group told Bloomberg it inherited weaknesses at Citrix and faced rising security threats across the industry, and that cybersecurity has improved since its private equity buyout and meets or exceeds all industry standards.
Before becoming CEO of Cloud Software, Krause, who is 47, was a former executive at Broadcom and prior to that, ran a consultancy firm.
Since working at the Treasury as one of Musk’s DOGE front-line staffers, Krause has worked closely with Marko Elez, another senior Treasury employee.
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Jeremy Lewin
Role: DOGE Staffer
Jeremy Lewin is a DOGE staffer assigned to the General Services Administration, which oversees the federal government’s massive procurement and logistics operations, Bloomberg reported. Lewin reportedly failed to gain access to a secure GSA area, resulting in a superior of his lobbying the CIA for a clearance.
Lewin is a 27-year-old Harvard Law School graduate who recently worked at the same law firm, Munger, Tolles & Olson, as did U.S. Second Lady Usha Vance, The Handbasket reported.
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Nikhil Rajpal
Role: DOGE Staffer
Nikhil Rajpal studied computer science and history at the University of California, Berkeley, where Rajpal served as the president of the libertarian-leaning student political group, Students for Liberty.
According to archived snapshots of his website, Rajpal worked at Twitter from 2016 until some time before Musk’s acquisition. He may have first entered Musk’s orbit prior to this, reportedly doing work redesigning a Tesla console.
On behalf of DOGE, Rajpal works at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and has a DOGE email address.
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Kyle Schutt
Role: DOGE Technologist
Schutt is a technologist with longstanding links to Republican politics and was more recently linked to political operations by Elon Musk. Schutt reportedly has access to systems at FEMA.
According to his since-deleted GitHub profile, which TechCrunch has seen, Schutt works at a company called Outburst Data. According to security researchers, Outburst Data hosts part of DOGE’s website and several other Musk-related sites, including his America PAC political fundraiser. TechCrunch has also seen the same DNS records, which reference a DOGE-named subdomain.
On February 14, 404 Media reported a flaw that it said allows anyone to edit DOGE’s website.
Schutt also serves as the chief technology officer at Revv, an online fundraising platform that is widely used by the Republican Party, as well as co-founder of Virginia-based software company KAMM.
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Ethan Shaotran
Role: DOGE Staffer
Ethan Shaotran, 22, and California native, is a DOGE staffer and also a Harvard University student in the class of 2025. Shaotran was first publicly linked to Musk in September 2024, when he was runner-up in a hackathon run by the billionaire’s AI company xAI.
Shaotran was previously the founder of Energize.ai, though its website no longer loads. He also developed several iPhone apps, including a Donald Trump-themed running game called “Donald Dash.”
Shaotran reportedly has a working GSA email address and requested access to a decade’s worth of GSA data. Shaotran also has access to email systems at the Department of Education and access to the department’s backend website.
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Jordan Wick
Role: DOGE Staffer
Jordan Wick is a former Waymo software engineer who appears to have a DOGE email account associated with the Executive Office of the President, Wired reported. Wick is among the team that was given access to Consumer Financial Protection Bureau systems.
Wick is also the co-founder of Y Combinator startup Intercept, according to YC’s website. An archived version of Wick’s website says that as of 2022, he had “recently” graduated with a master’s degree in engineering from MIT.
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Christopher Young
Role: DOGE Staffer
Young is a DOGE staffer who was given a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau email address, per Bloomberg.
That address was reportedly copied in an email about four other DOGE workers needing to be onboarded and provided with CFPB building access. Young is a “top Republican field operative” who was hired as Musk’s political advisor in 2024, The New York Times reported. Young has worked in Republican politics since at least 2007, according to his LinkedIn profile.
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Aides and advisors
Marc Andreessen
Role: Unofficial Advisor to DOGE
Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Silicon Valley VC firm Andreesen Horowitz, doesn’t formally work for DOGE but has acted as “a key networker for talent recruitment” at the agency, according to The Washington Post.
Andreessen has jokingly referred to himself as an “unpaid intern” for DOGE, as well.
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George Cooper
Role: DOGE Recruiter
Cooper is a Palantir engineer who worked on DOGE’s recruiting efforts in late 2024, according to Wired. He graduated from Pennsylvania’s Lehigh University in 2019 with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and business, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Cooper worked to hire other Palantirians to join DOGE as they are “the most exceptional people I know,” he wrote in a message, seen by Wired.
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Vinay Hiremath
Role: DOGE Recruiter
Hiremath, 32, is the co-founder of video recording startup Loom, which was sold to Atlassian in 2023 for $975 million. According to a blog post on his website titled “I am rich and have no idea what to do with my life,” Hiremath worked for DOGE in late 2024 for about a month making hundreds of recruiting calls. He wrote that he was added to DOGE-tied Signal groups and “immediately put to work.”
While Hiremath praised DOGE’s work as “extremely important,” Hiremath said he quit as he needed to focus on himself, calling off plans to move to Washington D.C. and going to Hawaii instead.
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Anthony Jancso
Role: DOGE Recruiter
Jancso is former Palantir software engineer who also worked on DOGE’s recruitment efforts late in 2024, according to Wired. In 2023, Jancso co-founded Accelerate SF, an initiative that taps engineers to solve the city’s problems with AI. Jancso’s exact age isn’t public, but he graduated from University College London in 2021 with a bachelor’s degree in economics according to his LinkedIn profile, seen by TechCrunch. Jancso was himself recruited to DOGE by Boring Company president Steve Davis.
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Michael Kratsios
Role: DOGE Recruiter
Kratsios helped lead efforts to staff DOGE in late 2024, conducting interviews of prospective staff, Bloomberg reported. Kratsios was previously managing director of Scale AI and the chief technology officer of the United States under President Trump’s first term. He was also a principal at Thiel Capital, a VC firm founded by Peter Thiel, from 2014 to 2017, according to his LinkedIn.
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Katie Miller
Role: DOGE Advisor & Spokesperson
Katie Miller is a Trump-appointed advisor to DOGE, and has served as its spokesperson. Miller served in the first Trump administration and is the spouse of Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller. Miller also serves on a presidential advisory board related to intelligence matters.
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