TBD | New DOGE, New Tricks
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I'm going to go ahead and assume that if you are listening to this show, you are aware of President Trump and Elon Musk's little posting war. Trump said Elon was wearing thin. Elon said Trump would have lost the election without him. The Epstein files were invoked. It got middle school messy. But even before the online flaming, McKenna Kelly knew that all was not well in this particular bromance.

We'd been hearing, you know, about some tension between Stephen Miller and Elon Musk. And I think something was happening, but I don't think anyone expected it to blow up the way it did. It kind of covers Doge for Wired. But I guess now looking back on it, of course, this relationship ends with both of these billionaires tweeting at each other from their own personal platforms.

All of that came after this press conference where the president said, well, Elon will be stepping back and then said, well, actually, he'll stay around. And there was just all this back and forth about that.

whether he was going, whether his lieutenants were leaving. And I feel like a lot of that may have obscured the story about what was happening behind the scenes and what is happening within Doge. Based on your reporting, is Doge here to stay?

Yeah, I think Doge is here to stay. That same week that Elon was saying, you know, that he finally announced that he was going to step back. He had that meeting with Trump, like you mentioned, and got the key to the White House. That same week, I did some reporting and some of the young engineers that Elon brought with him, Luke Faraday, for example, the guy who used AI to read ancient scrolls. And then Edward Korostein, who famously goes by Big Balls. Big Balls. On May 31st, they were...

made full-time employees. And you could read that as a small hiring detail, or you could read it as what it is, a recognition that Doge is no longer Elon Musk's guerrilla project to slash the government. As OMB Director Russell Vogt told Congress last week, Doge is becoming institutionalized.

It's just going to become a presence at these agencies, at least, you know, for the next few months and maybe the entire administration. Today on the show, Doge is here to stay. What does it look like in a post-Elon world? I'm Lizzie O'Leary, and you're listening to What Next TBD, a show about technology, power, and how the future will be determined. Stick around. Elon posted his way through his breakup with the administration, but he didn't go alone.

Several of his confidants, like longtime Lieutenant Steve Davis and Doge spokeswoman Katie Miller, have left, too. Still, there's a sizable group of people left.

The majority of people, a part of Doge, are still floating around somewhere in our government. The inexperienced engineers that we reported on the beginning all of this, for the most part, I think they're all still here. With all the reporting that we've done, I mean, it's very clear that they're sticking around. At the same time, they're still recruiting. McKenna knows this because she is following projects on the software platform GitHub. She can see prospective Doge hires uploading their work.

So even though Elon is stepping back, they're like on a recruiting spree. Do we know how many people in total...

work for Doge? I mean, no. It's very weird because with Doge, even now, that's getting even fuzzier because as I'm talking to sources, any new person who comes into an agency, folks who have been there for a while assume that they're Doge, right? And so at this point, anyone in the administration who's like new, a new political or something, folks just assume that

It's Doge. So when it comes to like tracking these people down in government, it's becoming increasingly more difficult, especially because these Doge folks in the administration are trying to blur the lines themselves on who is Doge and who is not. There's been some reporting that agencies have told their workers not to refer to Doge people as Doge.

which is bonkers. So it's just like now it's a total mess trying to identify anyone who's a part of it. I want to talk about the people because you did a lot of reporting on certainly the young staffers, big balls, et cetera, who came in because they were really enthusiastic about Elon. They had worked at his companies or they had been part of hackathons that had to do with SpaceX or XAI, right?

How did they feel about his departure?

It's kind of a mixed bag. Some folks want to stick around. Some folks now feel as if there's a target on their back because of this blowout between Elon and Trump. It's created a lot of tension in the organization. And I think we're still trying to figure out what the aftermath is. But still, the administration is trying to appoint new leadership for Doge to like who will take Elon's place. And I think that will also play a significant role in who stays.

Who is in charge of Doge now? On paper, it's Amy Gleeson. Ah, yes, the Doge administrator. I'm using air quotes. Yes, the acting administrator who has been very, very quiet. And behind the scenes, what I've been hearing from sources is that she's been very, very quiet.

she has been trying to keep USDS, like the USDS, the original legacy USDS, as much intact as possible, which has been very, very hard to do with everyone leaving. So it seems like she's doing a lot of disaster mitigation.

in some ways, and not necessarily leading the Doge organization. When it comes to leadership, right, Joe Gebbia, who is an Airbnb co-founder, he has been at the Office of Personnel Management since like February, I think, and he's been working on retirement services and things like that. And the New York Times had a report this week saying that he's being eyed to be the new leader, but it doesn't sound like he really wants to have that role.

Another name is Anthony Armstrong, who's a banker, worked at Morgan Stanley. Right. Morgan Stanley is sort of famously Elon's associated bank. Exactly. And so Anthony Armstrong, he helped...

figure out financing the Twitter deal. And so he's also at OPM. And so it seems like those two have stood out. But what could be building is some kind of council of folks just because whoever is the face of Doge, right, will be under such intense scrutiny.

What about the role that Russ Vogt may or may not be playing? He's the head of OMB, but certainly I think you could say a philosophical leader for a large part of what the administration is doing.

I think the best way to answer that question is to kind of zoom out a little bit. Last year, right, when Elon Musk all of a sudden supported Trump, we had the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 swirling around. And, you know, at the time, as we were getting into the fall, these two worlds kind of collided just because of their support for Trump, mostly led by Elon and Silicon Valley, right, and then merging with these, you know, traditional think tanker conservative folks. Right.

And so I think both of them found an opportunity in each other when it came to earning and asserting power in this administration.

And so Elon's side of all of this, right, as we get into 2025 and after the inauguration, they were really great as acting as some kind of strike force, right? They came in, they asserted power over these systems, they got unprecedented access to so much data, and were able to start removing things, right? Deleting contracts, rebuilding things, deleting things. And now with Elon gone...

And just even the word that Vought chose to use in that hearing, institutionalized, right? It's a very formal word to describe something that has been so informal, right, for the last six months. I just see Vought coming in and maybe acting as...

a new architect, right? We have all of this destruction that the Elon Musk doge has like left in its wake, right? That I think now Vought will be in charge of rebuilding that. And maybe being the person who looks at Project 2025, right? The way that the conservative movement wants to rebuild our government and our administrative state and start enacting that through rebuilding.

How does that intersect with the series of lawsuits that have been filed? I'm scrolling through a long list of them right now. You know, for example, the U.S. Institute of Peace, which Doge sort of dismantled, a federal judge ruled that the administration's actions were a gross usurpation of power. And so I would imagine whoever is in charge now is dealing with this large menu of lawsuits that

Do the lawsuits slow down the work that the Doge people are doing, or are they just doing it anyway? I mean, I have not seen...

a lot to show that it's slowing folks down. And maybe that's just because if they get slowed down in one space, they just get sent somewhere else, right, to go do work somewhere else. But I think the one case that felt really important to me was recently there was the decision with the Social Security Administration granting DOGE all the access that it wants, right, at the Social Security Administration.

I think SSA is such an important agency because it houses so much data about all of us, right? Even undocumented people. And so I think that will be a driver over at least the next few weeks, especially as the administration focuses its energy and time on immigration policy. When we come back, how Doge could fit into the administration's deportation drive.

When we first started reporting on Doge, it was clear that their priority was cutting. Cutting people, cutting programs, cutting whole agencies. But over the past few months, the focus has shifted to data and to centralizing it. I think a good example of what they're doing is at the IRS. Sam Korkos, who is like a health tech guy who's associated with, I think his company was backed by Andreessen.

And Jason Horowitz, the Silicon Valley VC. Yep. Exactly. Exactly. And so he came into IRS. He, of course, got rid of direct file, which is like the lamest thing ever to do because it's like a free tax filing service. And it works really well. And like 96 plus percent of people who use it love it.

Not to go on a tangent, but he also started this effort to unify data at IRS. He brought in Palantir, which is the Teal-backed, co-founded software company that does a lot of defense industry work. A lot of data analytics with the government.

Exactly, exactly. And so they're moving into, you know, just more public sector, like not defense stuff. And so he brought in them to create this like mega API to unify data all in IRS. And so...

I'm not entirely sure where that project is at right now. Clearly, Corcos made a goal of doing it in 30 days or a couple months. That clearly didn't happen. It's very difficult work to do. But I think you can see...

those kinds of similar efforts at other agencies as well, right? Just maybe not as clear. There was, of course, the executive order a couple months ago trying to streamline data and get rid of data silos and have these systems interact with each other a lot more easily.

And so if you were to do, if you were to replicate this, not to say that I know that this is, this is just a trajectory that I see it going on. I don't really have any reporting or confirmation that this is like some kind of big master plan. But if you were to do this at IRS and then do it at a bunch of different agencies, these systems, if they're running on interoperable systems like Foundry, Palantir's Foundry software, they could then talk to each other.

And then you could do a federated query, right, where you could access, you could be at IRS wanting some data from SSA and then call for it and have that data pulled into that system. And so, I mean, I think the centralization was a goal at the beginning, especially like General Services Administration, GSA folks said that we want to centralize all data. Centralization in like one huge database is like baseless.

basically impossible. So I think this kind of federated system would be something that they would move to rather than the big messy thing that it seemed like they were trying to do earlier. Now, of course, I don't know for sure if that's what they're doing, but if you look at what it is that they're doing, you can kind of track it to go in that direction. And I should say that reporting from your colleague, Victoria Elliott, seems to be trending toward that direction. And

We talked about Palantir on this show last week with New York Times reporter Shira Frankel. There is a lot of reporting about what one could do with a centralized federal either database or API that sort of crosstabs and collates data from multiple agencies.

And a lot of threats, right? I like to think of like the Numident database at SSA, which is like all of our identifying information. It has citizenship data in there.

It is not regularly updated. So you can imagine someone running one of these queries and pulling back someone's name. It says that they're not a citizen. Maybe they are, right? And then targeting them in some way. Data is great, but it's hardly ever perfect. And these are really, really serious situations that we find ourselves in right now. When I look at that and overlay it with data,

the ICE actions of the past week, the protests that have been happening across the country, that seems like one could build a tool to identify people. Is that a fair read? Yeah, I think it's a fair read. We don't know if it's something that's happening. There, of course, has been some work at USCIS, which is, you know, basically the place where

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service. Yes, where all of these, where people who want, you know, who are immigrating into the United States, that they have a portal that you access. And that's how you track all of your immigration. Like they'll send you a notification if they need some data from you or some documentation or something, and you'll upload it there. We saw in our reporting a couple months ago that they were using this USCIS database and cross-referencing data from the Social Security Administration.

IRS and then even voting data not specifically like who voted and did what right but voter records in Pennsylvania and Florida so they're

Obviously, trying to, you know, mix data in some way when it comes to identifying migrants or, you know, trying to figure out if someone voted illegally or something like that. That is clearly something that they're playing with. I don't know if they've used it or deployed it, but it's certainly a possibility. What do they say when they're asked about that?

Nothing. It's been very, very difficult for me to get answers from the White House or these agencies about what exactly Doge is doing technically. I think it's because maybe they don't, these spokespeople don't necessarily understand what it is that they're doing. I think there is a

language barrier in a way between like how you talk about tech and truly like understand it and like message on it and so yeah it's been very very difficult and the best way to get any insight really has been just sourcing at these agencies um they've been very very quiet and also argumentative like pushing back on a lot of things in a way that hasn't been super productive but

You know, when they first came in, obviously the stated mission was rooting out waste, fraud and abuse. But the actions seem to have told a slightly different story. What happened to that stated mission? You know, was this always the endgame?

I mean, I think if you talk to Elon and folks at Doge, the data work that they're doing falls under the efficiency category. They are, you know, trying to streamline systems so government services work better. In many ways, they're breaking things and making it more difficult and making things very questionable when it comes to civil liberties. But yeah, I think they would say that they're moving quickly and well on efficiency. Fraud, they like.

They like to say that, you know, on their account on X that they found so many people over 150 or whatever who are getting Social Security benefits, even though that's not true. There was a former Doge engineer, Sahil Lavingia, I believe his name is, who spoke to NPR who said, I personally was pretty surprised, actually, at how efficient the government was.

No, I did not find the federal government to be rife with waste, fraud, and abuse. I was expecting some more easy wins. I was hoping for opportunity to cut waste, fraud, and abuse. And I do believe that there is a lot of waste. There's minimal amounts of fraud. And abuse, to me, feels relatively non-existent.

My colleague, Vittoria, talked to him, too. He very much cared about the mission when it came to transparency. I know that he applied for USDS when it was the original digital services years ago. He did not get in, but he was very clear then that

from folks that I've spoken to who know him, that he was very much in support of making government more transparent. He went into the White House and spoke to Elon and was like, we should live stream all of these meetings and then maybe people won't think it's so shady. Or even trying to, just recently, if you go to his GitHub, he's tried to open source some of the VA stuff that he did as well. And so...

I think he's a very interesting example of someone who maybe had good intentions but was a little naive to what was actually going on. And I wonder, he seems to be the first person who cracked right and left and did this, but I imagine that more people will do that in the future. I want to talk about this sort of question of permanence or liminal doge as we've been thinking about it.

A lot of these people who came in to join Doge were supposed to be special government employees, right? They were supposed to be sort of timed out and leave. But a lot of your reporting shows that they are, if not on staff now in these different agencies, at least present in these agencies. Is this permanent? Is this sort of the state of play going forward?

have a hard time believing that it's not. There are so many people who have been brought into government who otherwise wouldn't be in government, right? Now building out these networks of people that could now

you know, join and do tech things and work in the same doge-like capacity. I feel like what has changed the most would be the culture, right, of government. And I think that might make things a bit more enticing to folks in Silicon Valley to continue having this, you know, quote-unquote tech talent circling in and circling out. I also think, like, in a couple years,

If we just, you know, if we decide that we cut too many things, we're already seeing people needing to be rehired. If it's not permanent, it's going to take a very long, long time to clean up this mess, which is going to be another effort in and of itself. Which I guess brings us back to where we started. Elon gone, not gone, gone.

Whether it matters. The day I am speaking to you, June 11th, he tweeted at 3.04 a.m. Eastern Time, I regret some of my posts about President Real Donald Trump last week. They went too far. I don't know if that's someone just tweeting in the middle of the night or if...

That's a recognition that Trump won, but Elon's legacy within the government continues. Looking at that post...

The word that stands out to me is some. I regret some of my posts about real Donald Trump last week. Maybe they are trying to make amends in some way, but I don't think that Elon would ever truly put his ego aside. And I think that's why the sum is in that post. It's reserving him the right to make criticism down the line, even if now he's trying to get back in the president's good graces.

And maybe it doesn't matter. I mean, one of the stories you wrote about Doge's hiring spree, people are asked about projects that might include leveraging AI to improve medical services for veterans or streamlining financial aid applications, working on natural disaster stuff. I mean, those are all permanent functions of the government.

Elon Musk be damned. Yeah, that was also work that was happening prior to Doge as well, right? I think that was the thing that stood out to me most when they were hiring for projects when I found that out. Because a lot of those things, there was tech talent working on them actively that were then fired and then seemingly now going to be replaced with folks who are more like aligned with Elon. But yeah, I do think that if anything...

All of this has put people in positions of power who are more eager right now to deploy technology in ways that it's never been deployed before in government. And I think that means we're going to see more and more of it. McKenna Kelly, as always, it is illuminating to talk to you. Thank you for coming on. Yeah, always happy to be here.

McKenna Kelly is a reporter for Wired. And that is it for our show today. What Next TBD is produced by Patrick Fort and Shaina Roth. Our show is edited by Evan Campbell. TBD is part of the larger What Next family. And if you want to check out more Slate podcasts, listen to this week's episode of The Discourse, our special Slate Plus bonus episode from What Next TBD.

This week, we're talking with Slate's Henry Grabar about hot robo-taxi summer, why people are lighting Waymos on fire, and whether or not they're going to pay for them to drive around. Sign up for Slate Plus to hear it right now. We'll be back on Sunday with an episode about how to protect your digital life when you're coming into the United States. I'm Lizzie O'Leary. Thanks so much for listening.