Elon Musk recently announced that with the approval of President Trump, he plans to shutter the United States Agency for International Development, also known as USAID. This week, all USAID staff were placed on leave.
The announcement was met with lots of criticism because each year USAID distributes billions of dollars in foreign assistance. Musk says the move is part of a larger effort to modernize and streamline the federal bureaucracy.
Musk currently sits at the helm of the self-styled Department of Government Efficiency, where he’s using a team of young engineers to reshape the government. Vittoria Elliott, the platforms and power reporter for Wired, broke this story and joined the Texas Standard with the details.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: You report about six men who work in the Department of Government Efficiency. What did you find out about them? Who are they?
Vittoria Elliott: What we do know about them is that they appear to be college age. A couple of them graduated, but a couple of them, it seems, may have dropped out or maybe had taken leave of absence to be part of those. It’s unclear, but they otherwise seem to have most recently been in their junior or senior years in college.
What’s interesting is that all of them either have worked or interned with either one of Musk’s companies or with one of Peter Thiel’s companies. Peter Thiel, for those who don’t know, is the billionaire who is the chair of Palantir, which is a big tech company that works on big data analytics and is a massive government contractor, particularly for the military.
Thiel and Musk have been close allies for quite some time, and Thiel has been a longtime Trump supporter going back to 2016, 2015. And critically, they had basically no experience working on on government stuff, either at a sort of local level and certainly not at the federal level.
Well, what exactly are they doing? Do you get any sense of what their roles entail?
You know, that’s part of the reason that we felt it was important to publish the story, which is that, Elon came in saying that the next Trump administration was going to be the most transparent, that DOGE was going to ensure this sort of extra level of transparency that he claims that the government doesn’t have.
But in reality, they’ve not made public the names of the people who are part of DOGE, who are going to be part of this effort towards reform and transparency. I think if there are going to be major government overhauls, we should certainly know who’s conducting them and what their interests are.
Secondarily, it’s not just that the public doesn’t know these things. Federal workers themselves don’t know who these people are. And so you have the federal workers themselves who work on these projects not knowing who’s evaluating them, who’s accessing their work, who’s seeing their work.
Frankly, from what we’ve gathered, these young engineers are being given otherwise incredibly high access to these big government agencies that control things like government contracts with outside businesses, outside workers, that deal with basically the H.R. function of the entire government and now most recently the treasury system, which is trillions of dollars in payments.
To add to that, I think what a lot of people don’t understand about DOGE is there’s actually technically two DOGEs. One DOGE is sort of the permanent thing. It’s what used to be the U.S. Digital Services and that nested within the executive branch. That started as an Obama initiative, and that will continue. And then there’s the temporary organization nested within that, and that’s the one that ends on July 4, 2026.
When you set up a temporary organization, you are allowed to hire what’s called special government employees. Those can be people hired for a particular period of time, or those can be people who come in as volunteers for between 60 and 130 days, depending on their capacity or depending on the regulations.
They’re not subject to the same level of transparency requirements that other government employees are. They don’t go through the same vetting process. And critically, they’re probably going to go back to their private sector job.
So if these people are being brought in as special government employees and we know that they’re working for Tesla, for Space X, for X AI, think about what it means for people who ultimately are coming from the private sector – what does it mean to have essentially people from Tesla or Space X coming in with the ability to look at government contracts for their competitors who are then there on a volunteer basis and they’re going to be able to go back to the private sector with information that no other company has.
