DOGE 2.0

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0:27Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Wired's Senior Politics Editor, Leah Figer, filling in for Zoe. Today on the show, Doge 2.0. As you may recall, in late May, Elon Musk announced that he and other top leaders of the Department of Government Efficiency, Doge, would be leaving. This is around the time that President Trump and Musk had a bit of a public spell. Oh man, the girls are fighting, aren't they? While Musk has officially left D.C., Doge is continuing its whole-scale assault on federal agencies. I'm joined by my colleagues, senior writers McKenna Kelly and Vittoria Elliott here at Wired.

1:04Welcome to Uncanny Valley. Hi, Leah. Hey, it's great to be here.

1:14so let's get into it right from the gate so our listeners can get their bearings who exactly is edward big balls corstein yeah so he is one of the young inexperienced doge staffers he is 19 years old and the thing that makes corstein so unique is that like this handful of really young engineers, most of them under the age of 25 and the majority under the age of 30, he has been deployed across multiple government agencies. We've seen him show up at USAID, at the General Services Administration, Office of Personnel Management, at the Social Security Administration, all these different places. And I cannot stress how highly uncommon it would be for someone to have access to sensitive data or systems or even be working across that many agencies at once.

2:05And when we're talking about people in high-level government roles who might be touching sensitive information like social security numbers or immigration status or might be accessing information that you would need years and years and years of experience and a security clearance of some kind to get to or at least some kind of background check, I think Edward Corstein was sort of emblematic of the way in which Doge was this sort of haphazard project with young, inexperienced people doing some of the most consequential work in government with very little oversight. Yeah. And that's why at the end of June, when we saw that his name had disappeared from one of our internal directories that we try and keep an eye on, it seemed like maybe the end of Doge or maybe the end of Corstein was imminent, right?

2:52And then we go to the White House. The White House tells us that, oh yeah, he's gone. He just resigned this week. And then a couple days later, we're hearing from sources at the Social Security Administration that no, no, no, So he's here, he's at SSA. And that kind of got us into the direction of where the reporting led for Doge 2.0, right? Where it's not necessarily as if we have this huge group of Doge folks who are like sleeping at the GSA offices anymore, right? They are becoming employees, full-time employees at the agencies that I guess have decided to keep them. And in Coristein's case, what exactly is he doing at the Social Security Administration?

3:27Do we know? Yeah, at this point, we don't really have a clear picture of what it is that he's doing. From our reporting and the sources that we've been speaking to, the work that's going on at SSA is more focused on something called the Pneumadent database. And that's one of the databases that is huge, has a bunch of information about everyone in the country. And so the information that SSA has is incredibly important. I mean, so much of this with Corstein is incredibly emblematic of what you guys have been reporting with DOGE 2.0, right? these inside details that Doge is actually just kind of quietly getting inserted into all of these agencies in a different way, which in so many cases ends up being entirely chaotic, disruptive, and destructive.

4:10Yeah. So, you know, what we found is that while they may not call it Doge anymore, Doge is still really Doge-ing, but in this more sprawling way and in this way where they have always sort of been inserted across agencies. And from what we understood, there wasn't a ton of coordination between them. But now it's even more so where it seems like the answer is that a lot of the people who are remaining as part of DOJ are really getting absorbed into agencies. So I think like Aaron Mogadese, who is now at Social Security Administration, is a really great example where he sort of came in as part of this DOJ strike force.

4:51Now he's the CIO. Right. And McKenna, you also found that people were actually being told to not call Doge operatives Doge anymore, right? Like, talk about being secretly integrated. Yeah, I feel like this was something that was bubbling up for the last couple months, but really hit recently with Elon Musk, of course, formally leaving government. At the Department of Veteran Affairs, for example, a lot of people who work there were being told that these Doge people are just employees of the agency and they should be considered their own colleagues, right? They're not this outside force any longer.

5:26And then at the USDA, the Department of Agriculture, specifically some of these tech workers were told that members of what was previously the Department of Government Efficiency, they should now call them the USDA Digital Service, which is really funny when you remember that Doge took over what was previously called the U.S. Digital Services. It's just so wild to me. So is that's not really a different department or is it a rebranding of Doge as we've known it? At this point, it's very unclear. Every agency, from what I've gathered, is handling things a little bit differently. But I think the trend, right, is that you should treat these people as their colleagues.

6:05They're not this foreign strike force any longer. And you shouldn't be freaked out, right, if they start asking you to do things or trying to work alongside you. Right. And you guys also reported, and we've talked about a couple of them, Mogadessi amongst them, but of Doge folks who've really been integrated into new agencies recently. Yeah, there was a man named John Solly who has been at SSA for quite a while and is still, you know, getting more and more embedded in the agency's internal org chart. Luke Farreter, one of the original young engineers, has now appeared at the Department of Labor.

6:43And, you know, we've seen a bunch of people who have connections to either Musk or Palantir, the company founded by Peter Thiel, which is a major government and defense contractor that's been trying to vacuum up a bunch of contracts in the new Trump administration, are now chief information officers at different agencies. And the projects that they introduced, even if some people have cycled out, many of those projects are continuing. Unreal. And yeah, that's the thing is that these projects, they have not cut. Musk walked out of D.C. and things did not end. Yeah. And if anything, you know, experts that we spoke to sort of said that Doge was actually a really great cover for some of the most unpopular goals of the Trump administration.

7:29You know, cutting federal workers, really reducing the federal workforce, really ramping up use of AI. That's all stuff that people like Russ Vought have wanted to do for a while. and the fact that Doge was the entity that sort of came in and broke the seal while really taking a lot of the heat off of Trump himself was kind of a gift. That makes sense to me. So who is leading Doge right now? Do we know? It's to me very unclear. From my reporting, it seems like Amy Gleason, who is supposed to be the acting administrator of the U.S. Doge service now, isn't as involved. Her leadership is still very much focused on these like legacy USDS folks and the projects that they were working on for several years now.

8:15There's been talk about Joe Gebbia, who is a co-founder of Airbnb, taking on the role as leader of Doge. But that sounds like something he doesn't even want to be a part of. And if he does, he wants it to be a larger group, an advisory council, not just one person who can take all of the blame, right, if Doge ends up screwing up again. But one of the more important parts of the reporting that we did this week was that Steve Davis, a lieutenant to Elon Musk, right, did a ton of work for him, helped set up the Twitter acquisition in 2022, all of this work. He is still communicating with people on Signal in other ways who are currently working with Doge or are currently, you know, working on Doge projects across government.

8:58Wow. I can't believe that he's still around. Well, that's at least what we're hearing. And keep in mind that most of the communication that, at least from what we understand from my conversations with Sahil Lavinja, a former Doge member, is that pretty much all of the organization's work happened over Signal. So we have a pretty clear understanding that this entity really runs off this encrypted messaging app where you can auto-delete messages. And so it's kind of not that difficult to imagine that it would be very easy for someone like Davis to maintain contact with all these people in the same way they were doing when he was functionally in government.

9:41And both Sahil and some people that McKenna spoke to have indicated that Davis remains in contact with certain people who are working on those projects. And not even just Davis, right, but Musk himself, like even though he's exited government, he runs one of the most powerful social media platforms where he can just say whatever he wants. And people at Doge, right, we know like as part of a reporting of uncovering them that they have Twitter accounts or actively use the app, if not worked for it. Right. And so Elon can just post whatever he wants. And maybe these folks right in government get a clue about, you know, how to continue to be on Elon's good side if they were to exit government at some point in time and want to return to one of his businesses.

10:27We're going to take a quick break. But next up, we're going to dive into Doge's current hiring spree and controversial government contracts.

10:43This week on the political scene from The New Yorker, Trump's rupture in the world order. Europe caught between two adversarial great powers. That's basically dialing back the clock to not only pre-World War II, but really it's a pre-20th century view of the world. And I would say it's a world of permanent insecurity that we're looking at. Join me, Evan Osnos, and my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser, every Friday on the political scene, available wherever you get your podcasts.

11:25So, McKenna, Tori, you have been giving us the lay of the land on Doge 2.0, this fun manspreading across the federal government. But Doge, as in this so-called agency, they're also still expanding and hiring, right? Yeah. So here's the thing. The executive order that established Doge, as we have really reported on it and thought about it, which is like the strike force of people from the tech industry coming into the government, doing these cuts, starting these projects, that's one part of it. But it also repurposed what was known as the U.S. Digital Service, which was an existing entity to bring in people with tech backgrounds to modernize the government, it transformed that into the U.S.

12:13Doge service. And that entity, which is, as McKenna mentioned, headed by Amy Gleason, is still hiring, desperately looking for people because they lost a lot of people at the beginning of the administration. Recently, I was speaking to some sources and it was around, it was somewhere between 150 and 200 folks who were a part of USDS prior to Doge. And now they're around about 30 people. And so they They are struggling to maintain headcount. Oh, that's wild. And you guys reported they're hiring tech workers in development, operations, software, product, and they're being promised these really lucrative contracts, right?

12:51Well, lucrative for government, right? You know, a lot of people in the tech industry would probably say that what USDS or a government job pays is like not as much as they would hope to make for their skill set at a startup, for instance. But yeah, for government work, it's at the highest end of the pay scale. Someone with a lot of experience could make close to$200 ,000. Wow. And so tell me about some of the new Doge names that our listeners should know about. Yeah, I think specifically the Office of Personnel Management, right, OPM. That was basically the first agency that Doge took over. There's a handful of new folks.

13:27The one that really stands out, though, is this man named Yat Choi. and he is formerly an engineer at Airbnb. We don't know specifically if there's any, you know, close relationship between him and Gebbia, who is the co-founder of the organization, of the app. But man, is Choi a character? So his name on Instagram is Yatshitcray. Awesome, awesome. Love to have this person in charge of our government functionalities. He's a SoundCloud musician and he makes some TikTok videos, one in which he is covered in a blanket and seemingly saying that he loves what Doge is doing with USAID and cutting all of its contracts and funding.

14:16Just even before joining Doge, it seemed like he was really interested in the mission. And you can see that across his social media. Interesting. And he's also Canadian, right? Yes. He is first and foremost a character, but also appears to be a non-U.S. citizen. So to clarify, like, it's pretty uncommon for people who are not U.S. citizens to be able to work in government. There often are only certain special exceptions. And, you know, Barris Akis, who is one of Musk's closest advisors and who Sahil Lavinja told us was a sort of recruiter for DOJ, was, as The Atlantic reported, prevented from joining the actual official DOJ effort in government because he is a Turkish citizen.

15:08And that does not appear to have kept him from informally or somewhat covertly participating in the project. But I think, you know, it's really important to note that it is pretty uncommon for non-U.S. citizens to hold civil service type of jobs. And it's only in special cases. Talk us through some of these controversial initiatives that are full steam ahead at the moment. Yeah. So one is a project that started at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The project seeks to use AI to flag certain regulations or sub-regulations to be rolled back. And what that means is that the AI is crawling through thousands and thousands of pages of documentation and flagging things for HUD workers to review as either in compliance with this executive order to roll back regulation or make justifications about why they want to keep or why they feel they need to keep that regulation.

16:10And as one HUD worker told me, the AI is pretty shitty and it's really time consuming. But this is a project that was headed by a Doge operative, Chris Sweet, at HUD, who appears to still be taking meetings there to push this project forward. And it's seemingly not limited to HUD. we received memos from the VA that show that they're also being asked to turn over and compile all their regulatory and sub-regulatory documents in preparation for an AI to crawl through that as well. Another one of the major projects that is still ongoing is taking place at the IRS, where a bunch of engineers are working on what has been called a mega API layer, essentially trying to connect all of the database systems within IRS into one space that can be easily searchable and possibly shared across different agencies, right?

17:05Sam Korkos, he is a former health tech founder. He is a Doge affiliate. And now he's become the chief information officer of the treasury. And so now he's in a really major leadership role at an agency that now is hoping to connect all of this data together. And they brought on Palantir to help create this entire system. It's wild to me because obviously on one hand you have Musk and Doge or former Doge staffers in these government positions and on the other are these government contracts that also link back to some of Musk's interests. Palantir's co-founder Peter Thiel and Musk are longtime allies.

17:46It's wild to see this all kind of coalesce into a very similar thing. Yeah, it's difficult to know if there was some kind of master plan in all of this, right? But I think one thing is for certain, though, is that all of the chaos that Doge has wrought has created a ton of opportunity for Elon Musk and his, you know, close associates. In the words of Peter Baelish, chaos is a ladder. No, those are really good points. And I also want to note that as you guys were reporting this story, the White House, the VA, Elon Musk, John Soley, Roland Shen, Yat Choy, Steve Davis, no one responded to our requests for comment.

18:27So we talked about Doge 1.0, the Musk version. We've been talking about Doge 2.0, and we're only seven months into this, into Doge generally. Should we be expecting a Doge 3.0 this year? What is the next upgrade like? Like, so we don't really know. But what we can see here is a pattern of outsourcing to tech companies that are advantageous to the tech industry. So, for instance, as McKenna mentioned, Palantir has been brought on to help with this big mega API project at the IRS. And, you know, when you cut a bunch of contracts at an agency, that work still needs to get done. Palantir is there and ready.

19:07Similarly, you know, we see other startups like Andrew Real, the defense startup that has been backed by Andreessen Horowitz that is looking for more and more defense contracts. And in the instance of the Treasury, for instance, we saw a young engineer hired named Roland Shen. He had previously worked at a company called Ramp, which is also backed by Peter Thiel. It's a payment system and the General Services Administration is considering using Ramp to manage its internal payment system. So I think what we're really seeing in maybe a third iteration of Doge is that we're going to see more and more of this fusion between these companies that are in the tech space that have backing from people who were either involved with or supported the Doge effort and seeing those companies as being like the preferred vendors for the Trump administration and seeing much more fusion between the tech industry and government through these outsourcing contracts.

20:06When we come back, we'll share our recommendations for what to check out on Wired.com this week.

20:20The economy never stops shifting. Markets move, global trade gets disrupted, and policies shift. And all these factors have a tremendous influence on the ways we live and work. I'm Kimberly Adams, host of Marketplace Morning Report, a daily 10-minute podcast where a team of award-winning reporters helps you make sense of our evolving economy. Listen to Marketplace Morning Report on your favorite podcast app.

20:50Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. Before we take off, McKenna, Tori, tell our listeners what they absolutely should read on Wired.com today. Tori, what do you have for us? Our colleague Kate Nibbs wrote about the looming malnutrition crisis in the wake of USAID cuts. And I think this is really important because if you've ever worked abroad, Leah and I have both worked in some capacity in international development or sort of around those circles, you know exactly how important U.S. food aid is. and a it's really helpful for farmers to have the u.s government buy their excess crops and ship them overseas it provides a really important market for u.s farmers but in humanitarian crises like we're seeing all over the world right now u.s food is a real lifeline for people in in dire situations and what kate's reporting found is that because usa was so severely cut by the trump administration and Doge.

21:46This food is sitting in warehouses, going to waste. And in places like South Sudan, children are going hungry. And I think it's a really great example of the way in which, you know, these systems that are not super visible to the average everyday person in the U.S. are so critical to other people around the world and frankly really help the U.S.'s diplomatic position as a powerful and supportive entity to a lot of people. Good recommendation. Highly, highly agree. McKenna, how about you? Yeah, I mean, this week has been quite the week for Grok, Elon Musk's chat bot. It went complete Hitler mode this week and said some very just horrifying anti-Semitic posts online.

22:35But I think what I would recommend everyone read after all of this is Prash Dave's reporting on Grok 4. So the brand new version of this chatbot that is being released after this absolute chaos of a week for Elon and his company. Leah, what is your pick for this week? Okay, it is incredibly different than both of yours, which I think is a good thing, and a slightly lighter note to end us out on. Alana Klein wrote an article about Zillow and how people are looking up how much their friends' houses cost and this entire culture around it. It's in the culture section. It is such a good read. Everyone is like very gossipy and fun and obsessed with finding out information about their friends' net worth.

23:24Highly recommend. I will say I'm guilty of this. Yeah, of course you are. We all are. I will say that after going to a particular party once in the past year, my partner, after we left, was like, you know, I'm beginning to believe that this person might have family money. As I like looked up their Zillow thing. All of these articles that we recommended are really like wired at its finest as well. It's like, OK, AI is Hitler now, USAID, Doge, all of these crumbles and also Zillow. Like what's what's happening there? How can we use tech to spy on our friends and family?

24:05that's our show for today we'll link to all the stories we spoke about in the show notes make sure to check out thursday's episode of uncanny valley where we dive into the mailbag and answer listeners questions your questions adriana tapia produced this episode ammar lal at macrosound mixed this episode kate osborne is our executive producer Condé Nast's head of global audio is Chris Bannon. And Katie Drummond is Wired's global editorial director.

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