Ex-employees of Elon Musk’s DOGE, which sought to slash waste federal expenditure in the first six months of President Donald Trump’s second term, are monetizing their experience in the private sector, a new analysis has found.
According to The Washington Post, at least two dozen former staffers of Musk’s short-lived department have since “leveraged their government stints to fuel private sector ambitions: building companies that tap government largesse or that deploy knowledge they garnered during their brief tenures in Washington.”
The staffers identified have turned their hands to a variety of ventures, effectively bridging the gap between Silicon Valley and D.C. by capitalizing on their newfound insider knowledge to launch new companies, win executive posts or secure large stakes in start-ups pursuing government contracts.
New businesses either co-founded or receiving investment from ex-DOGE personnel have raised at least half a billion dollars in funding, according to the Post’s analysis, which it explains was compiled by examining government data, investor research platforms and venture capital funding disclosures and comparing that information with lists of former members of Musk’s team it compiled alongside The New York Times and ProPublica.
The tech industry sub-sectors the DOGE veterans have gone into cover everything from cyberwarfare to AI and data centers. One of the largest cited is Cathedral, a cybersecurity business utilising AI, which was co-founded by Gavin Kliger and Luke Farritor.
Special, another AI business, explicitly states in a company announcement quoted that its founders were “motivated to extend the ethos of our work at DOGE back into the private sector.”
Jeff Hauser, executive director of the nonprofit Revolving Door Project, told the Post that DOGE’s alumni had little influence when they first applied to work with Musk but now find themselves with “enormous juice.”
“The student has become the master,” he said, before suggesting the phenomenon exposed the need for “a serial reconsideration of ethics laws,” which he said were largely drafted in the 1970s and are no longer fit for purpose.
Former Obama-era White House ethics lawyer Norm Eisen agreed that the group appear to have “found a new way to monetize government service that is far beyond anything lobbyists ever dreamed of.”
DOGE only operated from January 20 until July 4 last year but claimed to have saved U.S. taxpayers $215 billion, or $1,335.40 per person. These figures have since been hotly disputed and which are well short of the $2 trillion in “waste, fraud and abuse” Musk promised to eradicate.
Shortly before the department’s dissolution, Musk left the Trump administration in explosively acrimonious style after falling out with the president over his One Big, Beautiful Bill, a spat that saw the two billionaires exchange highly personal insults over their respective social media platforms, X and Truth Social.
The Tesla and SpaceX boss has since managed to return to the president’s good graces and to political fundraising, pouring $276 million into Republican coffers to boost the electoral prospects of the party’s ailing midterms candidates, brought low by Trump’s deep unpopularity.
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