Some DOGE staffers hold high-powered jobs at multiple federal agencies
Their positions raise the possibility that even if Elon Musk leaves government service at the end of May, as he has suggested, his allies will still have power, potentially for years to come.
Gavin Kliger, a U.S. DOGE Service software engineer in his mid-20s, arrived at Internal Revenue Service headquarters in February, telling senior agency officials he was there to root out waste, fraud and abuse.
Then, according to three people with direct knowledge of the events, he placed five government-issued laptops on a conference table and requested a sixth computer that would give him access at the IRS.
At the time, court records show, Kliger held two job titles at the Office of Personnel Management, as well as positions at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He was also working on dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Earlier this month, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, Kliger showed up at the Federal Trade Commission, too.
Kliger is not alone. His expanding portfolio — which now includes jobs in as many as seven federal offices — is typical of at least a handful of DOGE staffers. The unorthodox practice affords acolytes of billionaire Elon Musk authority across broad swaths of government, as well as access to an array of confidential information, including tax documents, federal workforce records and consumer data.
Because their jobs are embedded within agencies, the DOGE staffers have far more influence than those who might have worked collaboratively across government before — and their positions raise the possibility that even if Musk leaves government service at the end of May, as he has suggested, his allies will still have power, potentially for years to come.
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“Your people are fantastic,” Trump told Musk in a Cabinet meeting on Thursday. “In fact, hopefully they’ll stay around for the long haul. We’d like to keep as many as we can. They’re great — smart, sharp, right? Finding things that nobody would have thought of.”
Government policy and ethics experts say the arrangement is unusual — and unprecedented — for the sweeping amount of access it grants to relatively low-level bureaucrats. Government officials have argued that DOGE and Musk do not have formal authority over decisions but rather advise officials at Cabinet departments on actions to take. But that makes the appointments DOGE liaisons are taking at multiple agencies even more influential.
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In addition to Kliger, who worked for Twitter before Musk bought the platform in 2022 and later joined an AI-focused data software firm, numerous DOGE associates have been given extraordinary power to shape government policy at multiple agencies. Among them:
- Software engineer Christopher Stanley, who worked on the White House WiFi system and was serving at the Office of Personnel Management, was appointed as a director on the board of the mortgage financing giant Fannie Mae. The appointment came with an annual salary ranging from at least $160,000, but Stanley quickly resigned. Stanley, who has worked for X and SpaceX, did not respond to a request for comment.
- Former Tesla engineer Thomas Shedd, 28, is running the digital arm of the General Services Administration, known as the Technology Transformation Services division, but also has served in the office of the chief information officer at the Department of Labor, according to records reviewed by The Washington Post.
- Luke Farritor, a former SpaceX intern in his 20s who won a prestigious prize for decoding a Roman scroll, is detailed to at least five agencies, according to a lawsuit challenging DOGE’s authority.
- And in perhaps the most high-profile case of cross-posting, Edward Coristine, the 19-year-old software engineer who used the online moniker “Big Balls,” was appointed to the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security, in addition to his position at DOGE.
Even Amy Gleason, the official administrator of DOGE, is also an “expert/consultant” at the Department of Health and Human Services, a court filing shows. Gleason’s appointment to HHS was reported earlier by Politico.
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White House spokesman Harrison Fields did not directly address multiple positions held by DOGE staffers, but he touted DOGE’s work in a statement to The Post.
“President Trump is committed to ending waste, fraud, and abuse, and his entire Cabinet, in coordination with DOGE, is working seamlessly to execute this mission efficiently and effectively,” he said.
In his business empire, Musk has frequently moved staffers and resources across companies, sometimes inviting scrutiny. But such arrangements are unusual in the federal government, where employees traditionally are assigned to one job and one agency at a time.
Staffers in DOGE’s predecessor agency — the U.S. Digital Service — worked collaboratively across government to improve technology, according to a former employee of the office, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. Though they might sometimes receive an additional government-issued laptop from an agency they were assigned to work with, they did not typically work with more than one organization at a time, the person said.
Earlier this month, after Politico reported that Trump had told his inner circle Musk would soon depart government service, Trump told reporters that Musk would leave after “a few months.” Before that, Musk said most of DOGE’s work to find $1 trillion in annual spending cuts would be complete by about the end of May, when his status as a special government employee requires him to leave his White House post.
Max Stier, president and CEO of the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, which advocates for better government, said that cross-postings might fly at a tech company but that they pose a “huge problem when it’s a governmental entity keeping people safe and providing critical support to millions of Americans.”
“You’ve got people who have been deputized who have no business doing what they’re doing,” Stier said.
State Democracy Defenders Fund, a group that aims to safeguard elections and perceived threats to democracy, has filed a lawsuit on behalf of more than two dozen USAID workers challenging DOGE’s constitutional authority, claiming Musk exercised authority that would typically be unavailable to a person who lacked a presidential nomination and Senate confirmation.
The lawsuit argues that multiple simultaneous postings provide Musk and his allies with extraordinary authority over government functions, as well as backdoor access to agencies that DOGE aims to target for spending reductions.
The suit cites the case of Farritor, a software engineer who, according to court records, was detailed to five agencies at the same time.
“You have to ask yourself: When you have people who are appointed to as many as five agencies at times — a single person — and you have others who are obviously not qualified, are those legally valid appointments or are they sham appointments done with intent to evade the law?” Norm Eisen, executive chair of State Democracy Defenders Fund, said in an interview.
He added: “I have been working for or around the federal government for almost 35 years and I never heard of a detailee with that many different jobs.”
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In court filings, Eisen’s group argues that the multiple postings of DOGE staffers with jobs inside agencies give them powers that typical agency staffers lack.
“DOGE members working inside USAID are not similar to employees of USAID,” the group said in a reply brief filed in court, noting, for example, how Kliger “also operates extensively in other agencies across the federal government.”
In defending the case, attorneys for the Trump administration argued that USAID officials conducted the cuts across the agency, not DOGE, relying on a similar argument to the government’s claim that Musk, for example, does not have formal authority over decisions.
In remarks to the court in the same case in February, a Justice Department lawyer said Kliger and Farritor had been detailed from other agencies to USAID. When the judge interjected to ask which agencies those were, the lawyer responded that he didn’t know.
The judge was incredulous, court documents show, saying it would be easy to provide the names of the agencies where the two worked. But the government attorney said the enormous number of cases being handled by Justice Department attorneys — along with cuts that have eliminated half the staff of his Justice Department unit since November — had posed a hurdle.
A federal court granted a preliminary injunction in the case last month, blocking Musk and DOGE from continuing to dismantle USAID. But a U.S. Court of Appeals panel later set aside the order, and the Trump administration moved to formally dissolve the agency around the same time.
Meanwhile, government filings and directories have shown that DOGE associates assigned to USAID and other initial targets of DOGE’s work have moved on — and are now popping up at other agencies.