Internal agency records reviewed by POLITICO show that a Uruguayan X employee and two Canadians, who had worked at Airbnb, are working inside the federal government on DOGE projects as contractors through the General Services Administration.
Federal hiring laws generally limit full-time government employment to U.S. citizens or nationals, with only narrow exceptions. And while it’s common for the GSA to employ foreign contractors, these three have been given similar access and authority as full-time DOGE employees, a senior GSA official said, calling it “striking.”
Andrew Vilcsak and Yat Choi, both Canadian, are working inside the Office of Personnel Management alongside Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia on the effort to digitize the federal retirement system.
Vilcsak’s title is senior technologist, while Choi is a scientific technologist.
Both were hired as government contractors through MSI Consulting, a boutique firm in Virginia that works closely with DOGE and has primarily provided consulting and administrative support, agency records show.
Micaela Lopez Ballefin, a Uruguayan citizen who has worked at X since 2020, serves as a senior engineering manager at GSA. She is also a contractor and has been involved in projects that include the effort to reduce unused phone lines, GSA’s OneGov negotiations, and migrating agencies’ IT infrastructure onto the cloud.
She works with DOGE members Matthew Markhurst-Session [Parkhurst, per Wikipedia] and Thomas Shedd, head of the Technology Transformation Services at GSA. She also has an email address at the Small Business Administration, similar to other DOGE full-time employees, who have contact points at multiple agencies.
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