The seven techies barely out of college helping Musk to slash billions from federal government

A group of young tech industry workers between 19 to 25 years old have been recruited by Elon Musk to carry out the Trump administration and Department of Government Efficiency’s goals of cutting trillions from the federal government - and now have access to numerous sensitive systems.

Among them is a recent high school graduate and a Matt Gaetz defender who claims he quit a “seven-figure salary” to join DOGE and “save America.”

The group has little to no experience working in government, and yet some of them have been given central roles within Musk’s DOGE, including access to the U.S. Treasury’s internal payments system, according to WIRED.

Musk’s young crew have been unmasked as Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger and Ethan Shaotran, WIRED first reported. As their names were published, the group rushed to disable any trace of their social media profiles.

After the names of the engineers became public, the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Ed Martin, said he was working with Musk over the alleged “threats” made against the DOGE workers.

“Don’t mess with @DOGE,” Musk stated.

Elez, a former X and SpaceX engineer, was one of two DOGE staff with direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for dispersing almost all payments made by the federal government, according to WIRED.

The 25-year-old Rutgers University graduate was able to access and write code on the most sensitive systems within government — The Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, according to WIRED.

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The payment system at the bureau is, in essence, the federal government’s checkbook. It contains highly sensitive and confidential personal information belonging to every taxpayer in the U.S and its scale is vast. It disbursed 87.9 percent of all federal payments through the 2023 fiscal year, according to figures on its website. In the same period, it collected $5.47 trillion in federal revenue.

Elez had reportedly been given administrator-level privileges that theoretically allow someone to change user permissions, delete and modify critical files that contain highly sensitive and confidential information.

“You could do anything with these privileges,” a concerned source told WIRED.

On Thursday, it emerged that Elez had already quit his post after the White House was asked about his history of racist social media posts, including those supporting eugenics and repealing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Elez posted on X that he supported a “eugenic immigration policy,” and made other racist statements. Eugenics supports “racial improvement” through “selective breeding” to improve the human race.

After the White House was asked about the posts, press secretary Karoline Leavitt revealed that Elez had quit government service.

Kliger, who worked at AI company Databricks, was named on Monday as the individual who sent a staff-wide email to USAID workers ordering them to work from home as Musk moved to shut down the department, the New York Times reported.

He is listed as a “Special Adviser to the Director” in the Office of Personnel Management, according to his LinkedIn.

His Substack page has a post titled: “Why DOGE” and explains “Why I gave up a seven-figure salary to save America.” Kliger posts on his Substack in support of failed attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz and Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Daily Beast reported. Kliger referred to Gaetz as a victim “of the deep state” and described Hegseth as “the warrior Washington doesn’t want but desperately need[s].”

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The youngest of Musk’s crew, Coristine, is still in college, according to reports, and is the heir to his father’s popcorn brand Lesser Evil.

Coristine completed a summer internship at Musk’s brain-computer interface company Neuralink, according to his resume seen by WIRED.

He is listed as an “expert” within internal Office of Personnel Management records and reportedly appeared on a General Services Administration staff call, who did not know who he was or why he was there.

Farritor has a working General Services Administration email address, according to WIRED, and has ties to Musk and the billionaire Peter Thiel.

He dropped out of the University of Nebraska and was also an intern at Musk’s SpaceX. The Thiel fellow said he dropped out of college to work for Nat Friedman, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur and former CEO of GitHub and Xamarin.

The 23-year-old has been lauded for using AI to help decipher an ancient scroll from Pompeii that had been damaged beyond recognition. Scientists had been trying to study the document for years and Farritor was awarded a $700,000 prize for his efforts.

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Killian, 24, served as an engineer at computerized trading firm Jump Trading and is working for DOGE as a volunteer, according to WIRED.

He graduated high school in 2019 and studied at McGill University in Canada.

Shaotran, 22, along with Bobba, Coristine, and Farritor, has a working General Service Administration email, according to WIRED. The four have access to the agency’s IT systems, a source told the ou

As a high school student in Silicon Valley, Shaotran was given money by his parents to invest in stocks, the Daily Beast reports. He studied computer science at Harvard and was named runner-up in a hackathon held by Musk’s AI company xAI.

Bobba, 21, is listed as an “expert” within the OPM and attended the University of California-Berkeley. He has interned at hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, Meta and Thiel’s Palantir.

The Independent has contacted DOGE for comment.

Senior Democrats, academics, economists and political commentators have sounded the alarm over the unconventional hires — the latest anomaly in the DOGE effort and Musk’s larger role within the administration, where he has reportedly been granted the status of special government employee.

“What we're seeing is unprecedented in that you have these actors who are not really public officials gaining access to the most sensitive data in government,” Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan told WIRED. “We really have very little eyes on what's going on. Congress has no ability to really intervene and monitor what's happening because these aren't really accountable public officials. So this feels like a hostile takeover of the machinery of governments by the richest man in the world.”

Musk responded to the backlash by posting on X: “Media reports saying that @DOGE has some of world’s best software engineers are in fact true.”

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The billionaire also shared a post by an account that said “judging an engineer by age is BS.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is one of the many Democrats calling for Congress to take action over DOGE. “An unelected shadow government is conducting a hostile takeover of the federal government,” he said. “DOGE is not a real government agency. DOGE has no authority to make spending decisions.”

Musk said Schumer’s response was “hysterical.”

Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren also wrote a furious letter to Treasury secretary Scott Bessent on Monday where she accused him of handing over access to the system “to an unelected billionaire and an unknown number of his unqualified flunkies.”

“It is extraordinarily dangerous to meddle with the critical systems that process trillions of dollars of transactions each year,” Warren warned.

Fellow Democratic senator Ron Wyden, a ranking member of the Senate Committee on Finance, also accused Musk of “politically-motivated meddling.”

“I am deeply concerned that following the federal grant and loan freeze earlier this week, these officials associated with Musk may have intended to access these payment systems to illegally withhold payments to any number of programs,” Wyden said in a statement.

Three federal employees’ unions announced Monday they were suing the Trump administration to block DOGE’s access to confidential Treasury data.

When President Donald Trump was asked on Monday why Musk needs access to payment systems at the Treasury, he said: “He’s got access only to letting people go that he thinks are no good, if we agree with him and it’s only if we agree with him.”

“We’ll give him the approval when appropriate, where not appropriate, we won’t. But he reports in, and it’s something that he feels very strongly about,” Trump added. “If there’s conflict, then we won’t let him get near it.”