Here’s an important resource being maintained by ProPublica. It’s a list of everyone associated with the DOGE operation. (Nice to see two TPM alums on the list of those compiling and maintaining it.) The page says it hasn’t been updated since February 11th, which by today’s standards is semi-ancient history. But presumably they’ll be doing more updates soon.
I want to add a few additional points that provide context.
First of all, there’s DOGE proper. The White House took the U.S. Digital Service, an organization which grew out of the botched launch of the Obamacare exchange system in 2014, and rebranded it as the U.S. DOGE Service. Get it? They keep the same initials, USDS. That gave DOGE a ready-made administrative shell, based out of the White House, to operate from. As 404 Media reported, they’ve also rerouted their place in the executive branch org chart to go through the White House Chief of Staff rather than OMB, where it was heretofore, so it won’t be subject to FOIA disclosure. So there’s people who are formally part of what’s now called the U.S. DOGE Service. But a number of people who are part of the same operation have gotten appointments at various agencies around the executive branch. They’re not formally part of the rebranded USDS. But they’re part of the same operation, the same group of Musk operatives carrying out Musk’s plans across the federal government.
So, for example, one person in this latter group is Tom Krause. He was one of two members of the DOGE Treasury team along with Marko Elez doing that payment stuff a week ago that made so much news. He’s now been appointed Fiscal Assistant Secretary at Treasury, basically the head of payments, a job heretofore held by a senior civil servant. He also continues to be CEO of his company, Cloud Software Group. (You wouldn’t have thought that would be possible. But apparently it is.) Thomas Shedd is Director of TTS, Technology Transformation Services, another agency charged with bringing top-flight tech expertise to the federal government. Unlike what was the U.S. Digital Service, it’s housed within the GSA (Government Services Administration) as opposed to the White House. There are many similar examples of guys like Krause and Shedd. But the point is that despite being part of Musk’s operation they now have formal, traditional appointments in the executive branch.
One additional observation.
If you go down ProPublica’s list, it’s a group that’s generally on the young side for government service. But nothing out of the ordinary. It’s mostly people in their 30s and a few in their early 40s There’s even one guy in his late 50s, one of Musk’s bankers from the Twitter acquisition. In other words, it’s quite different from the subset group first identified by Wired on February 2nd, most of whom were college dropouts ranging from 19 to 24 years of age. The “older” group is mostly made up of longtime employees of or executives at various Musk companies and in most cases they don’t seem to have hard ideological backgrounds.
On it’s face it might seem like the centrality of what we might call the feral/incel group was overplayed, or that as events have proceeded they’ve been joined by a more established group. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Each time we hear of DOGE showing up at a new federal agency it usually or perhaps always includes a member of that original feral/incel group in the lead. So for instance, when DOGE showed up at the IRS on Thursday that group was lead by Gavin Kliger, 25, part of the original group who said Matt Gaetz had been a victim of the “Deep State” when he was forced to withdraw his nomination to serve as Attorney General. He also played a lead role in the dismantlement of USAID.
I could speculate as to why this is the case. But for whatever reason Musk seems to place especial trust in that group of seven or eight young men.
