The DOGE boys

On the first Sunday in February, Wired magazine identified six of those who had responded to Musk’s call. Luke Farritor was among them. They were easy to mock, maybe to fear: They were young and inexperienced, all male, part of another army of nerds. One called himself Big Balls and, Bloomberg News revealed, had been fired from an internship for sharing information with a competitor. The Wall Street Journal reported that another had posted racist comments. None were as tech famous as Farritor. The White House’s executive order creating DOGE said it would modernize technology and maximize productivity. “It took a couple of weeks to realize that, despite the stated mission, their main focus would be destruction,” says a current government employee who, like others we interviewed, requested anonymity because they’re not authorized to speak with the media. “That it was less about evolving and improving than tearing down to the floorboards. I think part of what confused everybody was that you had these foot soldiers you were seeing and you assumed that they were there just to support the generals, but they weren’t. The generals had delegated everything to the foot soldiers.”

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The great undoing, with its firings, humiliation, lacerating and gloating, received a lot of gleeful encouragement on X. But in the days to come, someone posted “traitor” under Farritor’s TikTok videos. Someone on Discord warned him that the internet “hates fascists.” Another that he would end up in prison.

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Scott Henderson, who mentors young entrepreneurs and knows the Farritors, wrote an email to Farritor’s father [Shane]. He says he asked something like: Is this true? As a father of a son the same age, you can do something about this. If this is true, what are you going to do about this? He didn’t get a response. Charley Friedman checked in and didn’t hear back either. “Fascist” appeared in the comments to a LinkedIn post by Shane Farritor that had nothing to do with his son. A talk he was supposed to give at the Nebraska Innovation Studio a few days later—Lab to Launch—was canceled after online threats to disrupt it.

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They were called the DOGE kids, the DOGE bros, Muskovites and Muskrats. They sometimes walked the halls of Washington with Musk, who moved around with his own security guards. They bragged about how hard they were working. At first they slept on the sixth floor of the General Services Administration building; one supporter sent biotracking covers for their mattresses. Some moved into an Airbnb known as DOGE Town, dined out together. “They come as a group,” says the former senior government official. “That’s the whole DOGE thing. It’s all DOGE all the time. Like they’re literally not given the mental space to go have an independent life experience and perhaps reflect on what they’re doing.”

  Bloomberg

Would they even if they had the space?

Musk promised transparency, but they operated in secrecy. For the first month no one would confirm who was overseeing their efforts. Media reports named Steve Davis, who’d helped Musk cut costs at X and SpaceX, as being effectively in charge. DOGE members didn’t identify themselves when they came into an agency, government employees told us, and demanded access to sensitive data but wouldn’t explain why. They communicated on Signal, where they could make their messages disappear. They shielded their work from public-records review. No one from DOGE, including Musk and Davis, replied to our emailed questions about their work or Farritor.

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Farritor helped assess, slash or dismantle at least nine departments and agencies after USAID— the Offices of Personnel Management and of Management and Budget; the Departments of Education, Energy, Labor, and Health and Human Services; the National Science Foundation; the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

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Some of Farritor’s classmates wondered about the power he seemed to have been given. “Like the entirety of DOGE is scary. It’s very much like going into government and dismantling the core foundations. It’s scary from that perspective. And it’s scary that it’s 22- and 23-year-olds doing it. And I’m saying this as a 23-year-old,” one classmate says. “Normally I think experience shouldn’t matter all that much. But for the government I would like people to have experience.”

Wouldn't we all?

In a lawsuit filed in February, one former government employee calls the breadth of Farritor’s access to data at Health and Human Services “without precedent.” Another, Jeffrey Grant, who’d overseen consumer and insurance information at Medicare and Medicaid, calls it alarming. Farritor could get into systems used for payment management, grants, health-care accounting, acquisitions and human resources. He could get into the National Institutes of Health’s grant management and contract systems, as well as the Medicare and Medicaid acquisition system and its integrated data repository, which includes information on claims, beneficiaries and providers, according to the lawsuit’s records. He could access grants.gov and two contracting systems for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On Signal chats, employees shared sightings of Farritor and his colleagues walking around Food and Drug Administration and NIH buildings, observing workers and asking what they did.

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“The DOGE team wasn’t what I expected,” says a current government employee who’s interacted with Farritor and other core members of DOGE. “Marketed as tech geniuses, yet they could barely keep up with basic tasks. In reality, they were overconfident, drunk on power and utterly clueless. They giggled and asked me how my day was going—right as they hit the keys to obliterate nearly a decade of my work. There wasn’t even a flicker of understanding or care. It wasn’t just the loss that gutted me. It was the audacity of their casual cruelty.”

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What was lost or disrupted this spring: A study of agricultural methods to help the poorest farmers around the world. A project to help Indigenous communities adopt traditional and sustainable farming to mitigate food insecurity. A project to “cultivate a diverse engineering workforce.” [...] A new program to recruit, pay for and otherwise support students from rural areas to return as teachers.

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[The day after Musk left the White House and DOGE], as senior staff like Davis followed Musk out of Washington, Farritor became a permanent government employee. He’s a senior adviser at the General Services Administration, designated a GS-15, the highest salary rank for civilians, earning $167,603. He was living in a historic neighborhood in the District of Columbia, being driven around in a black SUV.

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Jan English-Lueck, an anthropologist who’s been studying Silicon Valley engineers since the 1990s, says Farritor and others made a wager that will be “intellectually and emotionally celebrated,” no matter DOGE’s success or failure. “To gamble like that shows you understand the theater of Silicon Valley.” On July 23, Trump spoke at an AI summit in Washington. Afterward, there was a private party at a new members-only club. Farritor was among those invited.

This whole picture is reminiscent of the young, arrogant assholes who blew up the economy in 2008.