It’s been more than half a year since DOGE was established, but questions remain about who is even working for it. While Elon Musk’s threat to punish anyone who revealed the names of DOGE employees certainly didn’t help, there are deeper reasons behind this confusion. Several federal agencies have denied that they have dedicated DOGE teams, even when public reporting contradicts those claims.
On President Trump’s first day back in office, he issued an executive order requiring all agencies to establish DOGE teams made up of at least four people. In response, American Oversight sent FOIA requests to dozens of agencies asking for records that would identify the people on these teams. But the agencies’ responses only sparked more questions about who exactly was working for DOGE. “[T]he CDC does not have a DOGE team, and therefore there are no documents pertaining to your request,” the agency said in response to our request. So did the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of the Interior.
But public reporting indicates that this is misleading at best. ProPublica and the New York Times have both identified one DOGE staffer connected to the CDC. ProPublica identified three DOGE employees connected to the Department of the Interior; the New York Times identified five, including two DOGE liaisons assigned to the department. In February, Politico reported that DOGE staff had visited the FDA, and DOGE itself has boasted of cuts it made to the agency.
Reporting from Wired and the Federal News Network point to similar discrepancies. At a press conference in March, Stephen Ehikian, the acting administrator of the General Services Administration, told reporters that GSA did not have a DOGE team. But Wired found that at least six DOGE workers have GSA email accounts and are listed in the staff directory. DOGE members also dominated a list, obtained by the Federal News Network, of individuals with C-suite access at GSA.
But even with this obfuscation, other responses to our FOIA requests have shed some light on DOGE’s operations. The Department of Agriculture’s response identified three individuals working for DOGE whose names were previously unreported: Jeremy Lichtman, Timothy Ronan, and Samuel Berry. We also recently obtained resumes of several political appointees at the Department of Labor who are known DOGE staffers: Miles Collins, Marko Elez, and Aram Moghaddassi. We received the resume and SF-50 form, which provides notification of new personnel actions, of Gavin Hamrick, who may also be a DOGE staffer. These records offer more details on the individuals’ previous experience and connections as well as their pay.
It’s also difficult to track DOGE’s work because the ways its employees are hired has shifted several times. Many, like Elon Musk, were hired as “special government employees,” a category that permits them to skirt the ethics and financial disclosures required of most government workers. There is also no clear definition of what it means to work for DOGE because its members have worked in many different capacities, including being employed by the DOGE unit inside the White House, working for the U.S. Digital Service (USDS, renamed the U.S. DOGE Service in Trump’s executive order), being detailed to or embedded at various agencies, and being hired as permanent employees of the agencies. Some, like billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, have said they are helping DOGE — but it is not clear how.
We also know from public reporting and court filings that DOGE has assigned some of its members to multiple agencies. For example, Marko Elez is an employee of the Department of Labor who is detailed to or has been tied to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Treasury Department, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and associated agencies, the Social Security Administration, and USDS. Aram Moghaddassi is a DOGE member associated not only with Labor, but with the Treasury, the SSA, the Transportation Security Administration, and several DHS sub-agencies. Additionally, a response we received from the Small Business Administration to a separate FOIA request lists Moghaddassi as a “Special Advisor” to Administrator Kelly Loeffler, indicating that Moghaddassi may have also done DOGE work at SBA.
Luke Farritor, Kyle Schutt, and Edward Coristine are employees of GSA who are detailed to HHS as well as USDS, and Coristine also has a Department of Homeland Security email address. The fact that these individuals are officially employed by agencies distinct from DOGE and detailed to multiple agencies to conduct DOGE’s work makes it difficult to track DOGE’s actions and staffers, making it easier for DOGE to conceal important details. The overlapping assignments also indicate that there is a core DOGE team carrying out a central mission.
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