On Monday, June 23, Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, one of the first young, inexperienced technologists to join Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), disappeared from the internal directory of the General Services Administration (GSA). Less than a month before, centibillionaire Elon Musk and other DOGE leaders had announced their departure from government. After months of slashing through the federal government, it seemed like the end for DOGE was in sight.
But later that week, Coristine was back. This time he was at the Social Security Administration (SSA), working alongside another known DOGE member, Aram Moghaddassi. Coristine, an SSA spokesperson told WIRED, would focus “on improving the functionality of the Social Security website and advancing our mission of delivering more efficient service to the American people.”
Coristine’s disappearance from government—and sudden reappearance in it—is emblematic of DOGE 2.0, a new iteration of the organization that, post-Musk’s formal participation, is still very much present and continuing its wholesale assault on federal agencies. But without flashy leadership, DOGE technologists are now quietly cycling into federal agencies, spending days or weeks building products and cutting contracts before cycling out once again. This is all done with little oversight from the White House or the United States DOGE Service (USDS), which these technologists purportedly represent.
The White House and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
Legacy federal workers in agencies across the government have been told that the DOGE affiliates are their coworkers, operating as agency employees, not part of a separate organization.
“We used to say things like ‘DOGE wants to review X, Y, Z.’ But now our boss says not to call them DOGE anymore,” one US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) employee says. At the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), another federal employee told WIRED that DOGE is now being referred to as “The USDA Digital Service.”
When Musk left government in an official capacity, it was unclear what would happen to DOGE. Steve Davis, the president of Musk’s Boring Company who helped architect the Twitter takeover and was functionally in charge of DOGE, announced his exit, as well. However, WIRED has learned that Davis appears to still communicate with DOGE’s technologists, seemingly continuing to flex influence on US government staffers from inside Musk’s empire.
Sahil Lavingia, a former DOGE member previously identified by WIRED and stationed at the VA, claims that Davis hasn’t fully broken with DOGE. “I've just heard that he's still involved, he's still meeting folks and trying to push forward the DOGE agenda,” he says. Another government source, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, says they’ve heard DOGE representatives have on occasion been speaking with Davis through Signal after his supposed departure.
“All it takes is people taking you seriously for you to be there,” says Lavingia. “The whole operation has always been done on Signal, so nothing actually has to change about that operationally for him to continue telling people what to do, getting reports, et cetera …You don't need a government laptop or email or anything like that to tell people what to do.”
“The executive order of creating DOGE and structuring that so that it has a presence in every agency remains in place. So it is a tool that can be used even when Musk is not around,” says Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan.
In addition to apparent “informal guidance” that might be invisible to the public or even other government workers, says Moynihan, Musk can also use “more visible communication on X to direct attention to what he views as the priorities,” leading to sustained influence beyond his time in government. And while Musk has taken aim at Trump’s flagship One Big Beautiful Bill, “the type of work that DOGE will do is not gonna be one that's at the center of the fight between Musk and Trump.”
There are a number of new names representing the DOGE brand as well. Despite Musk’s formal departure, DOGE has continued to hire tech workers in development, operations, software, and product. Recruits are being promised two-year terms at a variety of agencies. The salaries for these jobs can range anywhere between $120,000 and $195,000, toward the top of the government payscale. Projects that DOGE members helped to lead—including cutting contracts across the federal government—have continued to move forward, and DOGE teams have continued to visit agency headquarters.
In June, GSA administrator Stephen Ehikian and Technology Transformation Services director Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who is also the chief information officer for the Department of Labor, introduced Brian Burroughs, an IT consultant, to agency staff in a meeting. One GSA source said it appeared “like they were looking for things for him to work on.” Burroughs was previously the chief technology officer of a company called Business Operational Concepts. Before he joined GSA, Burroughs’ company was awarded two contracts, one of which began in 2020, worth upwards of nearly $60 million to provide IT services for the US Peace Corps. Burroughs confirmed to WIRED that he is working with GSA but said he “can’t talk too much about it.” When asked if he was familiar with Ehikian and Shedd, he said, “Who isn't familiar with those names? They are out there in the public.”
In April, a young engineer named Roland Shen appeared at the Treasury. Shen interned at Apple, Microsoft, and Coinbase and previously worked at the payments startup Ramp, which is backed by Musk ally and longtime Trump supporter Peter Thiel and members of the Kushner family. ProPublica previously reported that GSA was considering Ramp to take over part of its internal expense system.
Shen did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Office of Personnel Management, one of the first agencies DOGE took over in January, has received several new engineers over the last few weeks who are affiliated with DOGE, including a man named Yat Choi. Before joining the government, Choi worked as an engineer at Airbnb. On TikTok, he has shared a number of videos, some in which he talks about DOGE while discussing waste in the federal government. “POV: [point of view] just got fired from USAID. I was in charge of the ‘is grass greener on the other side’ research project in Antarctica,” the caption of the video says, as Choi wraps himself in a blanket before panning to a city view.
In a number of Instagram posts, Choi also referred to Canada as home. He has also been identified as a founder of a website for lyricists searching for multisyllable rhymes. According to multiple Reddit posts, an individual with a similar username to Choi's social handles confirmed they founded this site and is also "a Canadian working in the US on a temporary visa.” Except in special circumstances, foreign nationals cannot hold US government jobs. Choi did not respond to requests for comment.
“I've talked to a few people now who were pre-inauguration [DOGE] people, who were really early, but because they were not US citizens, they couldn't join post-inauguration,” says Lavingia. Baris Akis, a member of Musk’s inner circle, was reportedly blocked from formally joining the Trump administration because he is a Turkish citizen, though Lavingia says that Akis recruited him to DOGE.
During a House Appropriations Committee meeting in June, Russell Vought, the current Office of Management and Budget director, reassured lawmakers that DOGE would not end with Musk’s departure. He described DOGE’s new leadership structure as “much more decentralized” and said that the group’s members would become “far more institutionalized” within the agencies where they work. In May, The Wall Street Journal reported that Vought would continue to implement DOGE-affiliated cuts once Musk left government.
According to Lavingia, the DOGE teams were already highly decentralized, with little interaction or feedback across different agencies. “You think you're joining the group, but you're really joining a subgroup of a subgroup of the group, and if you go all the way to the top there's like two people there,” he says.
WIRED previously reported that a number of early DOGE operatives have burrowed further into the government: Luke Farritor and Ethan Shaotran’s employment designations at GSA were converted to full-time from the restricted special government employee (SGE) classification that limited their time in government to a period of 130 days. Coristine was also converted into a full-time worker on May 31, before his brief resignation, and returned to the Social Security Administration as an SGE.
“I’m mildly disappointed that all of Elon's people didn't get pulled,” one GSA worker tells WIRED. “But ultimately, it looks like it's back to the same, just with DOGE being a bit more subtle.”
Some DOGE members have also been detailed to new agencies. Farritor, one of the earliest members of Musk’s DOGE team who has been linked to over a dozen federal agencies, has been detailed to the Labor Department, WIRED has confirmed.
John Solly, an early DOGE-aligned hire, has been meeting with employees at the SSA, according to two sources, even though he isn’t listed in the agency’s internal org chart. Solly, whose résumé lists his experience at “building cloud-native geospatial solutions,” began working in early March as an expert within the office of the SSA’s chief information officer, drawing a salary near the very top of the federal pay grade. At the SSA, Solly has mainly been focused on analyzing the Numident record with death data and, according to documents filed as part of the administrative record of a lawsuit several months ago, potentially looking at data from “SSA payment files sent to Treasury and … Master Beneficiary Record (MBR), and Supplemental Security Record (SSR).” (Solly’s LinkedIn had previously indicated his current work was in “stealth mode” for a “key skunkswork project at a major org,” but he now describes the project as “redacted.”) Solly did not respond to requests for comment.
Sam Corcos, another DOGE member, has also become the CIO at Treasury. Aram Moghaddassi was recently named the CIO at SSA, according to an official government list of CIOs. There are now at least six agency CIOs with ties to either Musk or Palantir, which was cofounded by Thiel. Federal CIO Gregory Barbaccia worked at Palantir for 10 years.
Richard Pierce, a law professor at George Washington University, says that he does “see the lines blurring” between DOGE and the rest of the federal government. “Trump was greatly aided by the fact that he could disassociate himself from Musk as Musk became increasingly unpopular with the public. And so Musk was a very useful tool” for both implementing and absorbing the public displeasure caused by some parts of the administration’s agenda.
Some of DOGE’s flagship projects also appear to be moving forward. At the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), a project using AI to review and possibly rescind regulations continues unabated. Sources tell WIRED that Christopher Sweet, the DOGE affiliate leading the project, was present at a meeting last week to discuss hosting options for the AI deregulation tool. One HUD worker, who asked to remain anonymous as they were not authorized to speak to the press, described the AI as “pretty shitty” at the job. “It is painful to comb through the minutiae it has problems with and explain why we still need it because this is a regulation not a statute,” they say.
According to an April memo viewed by WIRED, this project has expanded to include the VA, where federal employees were told that they would need to submit any regulatory and subregulatory documents and guidance materials for review by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and possible rescission. The memo specifically states that AI will be used to analyze and flag certain documents during review. “VA will assess the complete suite of sub-regulatory documents against all OMB-identified criteria using artificial intelligence tools to narrow the field of documents requiring further reviews,” the memo reads.
The VA did not respond to a request for comment.
At the USDA, legacy tech workers are being asked to earn additional certifications and take “IT competency assessments,” one USDA employee tells WIRED. ““Real private-sector stuff. Funny thing is, DOGE axed out LinkedIn learning subscription to now gripe with us about how many certifications we don’t have and also try to give skills assessments.”
Meanwhile at the IRS, WIRED previously identified that Palantir, the defense contractor cofounded by Musk ally and longtime Trump supporter Peter Thiel, was helping DOGE build a “mega API” at the agency. In an all-hands meeting with IT staff last month, creating the API layer was mentioned as a priority.
“DOGE is not like any other entity we've seen with the federal government. Its structure and its mode of operation were really unprecedented,” says Moynihan. “I do think that it is like this period of real uncertainty. It by itself is not going to disappear, but it is going to iterate into something different.”
Additional reporting by Leah Feiger and Matt Giles.
The Chatroom
As you can glean from our reporting above, DOGE isn’t gone. It’s just taken a new form. With Musk (mostly) out of the picture, what do you think is going to happen to the group and its engineers?
Send your thoughts to [email protected].
WIRED Reads
- ‘People Are Going to Die’: A Malnutrition Crisis Looms in the Wake of USAID Cuts: Warehouses full of food, like fortified peanut butter, are wasting away after DOGE dramatically cut funding for the US Agency for International Development earlier this year.
- Grok Is Spewing Antisemitic Garbage on X: Grok's Hitler dial got ramped up to 11 on Tuesday as it made a series of deeply antisemitic comments on X, calling people with Jewish surnames “radical” left-wing activists and praising Hitler.
- Conspiracy Theories About the Texas Floods Lead to Death Threats: After the horrifying floods in Texas over the weekend, conspiracy theories surrounding the devastation have contributed to confusion and prompted death threats to government workers.
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What Else We’re Reading
🔗 The Fight Between Musk Acolytes and the White House for Control of DOGE: Close Musk associates are trying to win back the White House’s trust as they move into a new phase of DOGE. (Wall Street Journal)
🔗 Trump on DOGE Cuts: ‘I Would Have Done It Differently’: Before their volcanic breakup, Trump had nothing but wonderful things to say about Musk and DOGE. Now, the president is suggesting that he would have run the cost-cutting group a bit differently. (Politico)
🔗 US Contractors Cut Off by DOGE Given Lifeline by Private Credit: Many of the federal contracting firms DOGE left for dead are turning to private credit to keep their business afloat. (Financial Times)
The Download
Jake linked back to this week’s Uncanny Valley podcast a few days ago, but it’s so fantastic we’re linking back to it again. You can listen to our senior politics editor Leah Feiger chat with investigative data reporter Dhruv Mehrotra about his recent reporting into 911 calls from ICE detention facilities here.
That’s it for today—thanks again for subscribing. You can get in touch with Makena via email, Instagram, Bluesky, and Signal at makenakelly.32. Vittoria can be reached at Vittoria89.82 on Signal or via Bluesky and email.
