DOGE Isn’t Dead. Here’s What Its Operatives Are Doing Now

In a slideshow of photos and videos posted to Instagram last month, Yat Choi—who joined DOGE this spring—posted clips of Trump administration officials dancing on the White House lawn to “Y.M.C.A”; people loading into what appears to be a private jet; and house parties decorated with American flags and attendees donning red, white, and blue hats holding red Solo cups and cans of High Noon.

It’s not just Choi. Many of the original young and inexperienced DOGE technologists whose identities were first reported by WIRED appear to still be enmeshed in federal agencies. Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, Gavin Kliger, Marko Elez, Akash Bobba, and Ethan Shaotran all still claim to be affiliated with DOGE or the US government. So do other tech workers from Silicon Valley and Musk companies like xAI and SpaceX.

The DOGE ethos—characterized by cutting contracts and government workers, consolidating data across agencies, and importing private sector practices—remains fully in force. While several media reports have suggested that DOGE has all but fizzled out, DOGE affiliates are scattered across the federal government working as developers, designers, and even leading agencies in powerful roles.

Lambert here: “[C]onsolidating data” is a remarkably mild way of characterizing the massive theft of public data by DOGE operatives. And “importing private sector practices” is a remarkably mild way of characterizing, say, DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts,” which would be accounting control fraud within a firm — theft and fraud being the ethos of today’s AI capital-addled Silicon Valley, reluctant though the otherwise excellent and tireless Wired team may be to say it.

“That’s absolutely false,” one USDA source says of reporting that DOGE has disbanded. “They are in fact burrowed into the agencies like ticks.”

Scott Langmack, a DOGE operative at the Department of Housing and Urban Development until July, is now serving as the executive director of “deregulation AI” at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

Sam Beyda, who has reportedly been linked to DOGE, is now deputy chief of staff for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), after serving as a policy advisor to deputy secretary of Health and Human Services Jim O’Neill. He does not appear to have any public health experience….

Over the last few months, a handful of DOGE operatives have migrated to a new White House office. In August, Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia, who was previously DOGE’s lead overhauling the federal retirement system, was appointed as US chief design officer. His new role was established through an executive order that would oversee a new group called the National Design Studio (NDS).

NDS is housed within the [Executive Office of the President (EOP)], just like the US DOGE Service (USDS). In August, WIRED reported that DOGE personnel who had been assigned to the General Services Administration (GSA) would transfer over to NDS. Several of the original DOGE operatives have joined the studio as well, including Coristine, who identifies as [sic] a member of the group in the bio of his X account as of last week. Choi cites both DOGE and NDS on his Instagram profile.

Lambert here: Being programmers, the weasels at NDS will want to optimize their inputs (that being the preferred “solution” when the algo fails). Wouldn’t designing public-facing front ends — if “design” is the word I want — be a lot simpler with an API to a single backend, instead of a interfacing with a squillion different agencies, most of which shouldn’t exist anymore anyhow? Say, a backend from Palantir?

In August, Anthony Armstrong, a former investment banker at Morgan Stanley, left DOGE and his post in government at OPM and EOP to join Musk’s xAI as its chief financial officer, according to his LinkedIn profile. John Solly, who was part of the DOGE team at the Social Security Administration, now works for Leidos, a major government contractor with projects across several government agencies. Solly and Armstrong did not respond to requests for comment.

Despite the apparent confusion over DOGE’s continual work and existence in government, DOGE affiliates are proceeding as usual.

In his photo dump on Instagram about his work with DOGE and the government, Choi posted a banner with the phrase: “We do this not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy.” On the banner is a blue handwritten sticky note that reads “and we STILL think its [sic] easy!”