- DOGE members said they've found evidence of waste and fraud at a variety of smaller agencies and nonprofits.
- They said agencies are filled with 'exceptional' employees, and that some federal employees support DOGE's mission to reduce waste and inefficiency and believe the team will empower them in their tasks.
- DOGE members say they face personal risks, with one person noting he dropped out of Harvard to serve at DOGE where team members work seven days a week.
Every Wednesday night at 10 p.m., Elon Musk and his team at the Department of Government Efficiency sit down and report what they’ve found in the past week.
After the meeting, they go right back to work.
On Wednesday this week, Fox News host Jesse Watters joined the team for their meeting in Washington, D.C.
The attendees included both older members with established careers, including Antonio Gracias, the founder of the growth equity firm, Valor, and younger members. These younger members include Akash Bobba, 22; Edward Coristine, 19; Luke Farritor, 24; Gautier Cole Killian, 24; Gavin Kliger, 25; Ethan Shaotran, 22; and Nate Cavanaugh, 28.
DOGE say they’ve found questionable spending at the Institute of Peace
DOGE members were sent to the Institute of Peace after President Donald Trump signed two executive orders aimed to reduce the total number of government agencies.
The Institute of Peace is a nonprofit entirely funded by the federal government that is meant to promote peace and prevent conflict around the world.
On their first day at the agency, Cavanaugh and his team say they had to recover deleted files.
“Just a few hours after we got into their headquarters, we found that their chief accountant had actually deleted over a terabyte of accounting records from several years,” Cavanaugh said.
The DOGE team recovered the data with the help of agency members. “The most troubling thing was that they received $55 million a year from Congress, and any money that went unspent, instead of returning that to Congress, they would sweep it into a private bank account, which had no congressional oversight,” Cavanaugh said.
The institute spent some of this excess money on “private jets” and had a $130,000 contract with a former Taliban member, Cavanaugh told Watters. “This is real; we don’t encounter that with most agencies,” he said, adding that there was no clear description on the Taliban member contract as to what the services were for.
“In this case, we did refer the evidence in the accounting example to the FBI and the DOJ,” he said.
Some federal employees love DOGE
One DOGE member, Donald P, told Watters that “troves of government employees” support what DOGE is doing in their departments.
These employees “are actually here serving because they believe in what they’re doing and they want to do things well. We’re trying to empower them and they feel empowered now to ask ‘Why?’ ‘Why are we doing things this way?’ ‘What else can we be doing?’” Donald said.
He continued, “Agencies are filled with exceptional government employees, and when we leave behind systems to help them do their jobs better, that’s the permanent change.”
Musk added that a hostility between DOGE and the government agencies it investigates is relatively rare.
DOGE member says only 58% of grant money makes it to recipients
Shaotran, 22, explained how non-accountability for spending is more common at smaller government agencies, and he used the Inter-American Foundation as an example.
“They get $50 million a year of congressional money to give grants,” Shaotran said. “These are things like alpaca farming in Peru,” to which Musk cut in, adding, “That’s a real example.”
In the private sector, Shaotran said nonprofits typically give 80%-90% of their money to grantees, and he compared this to IAF, which gave 58%. “The other half goes to management, travel,” he said.
A study from Syracuse University showed big, well-established nonprofits typically spend between 70%-90% of their funds on programs.
Musk added, “Even if you agree with supporting alpaca farmers in Peru, well actually, most of the money never made it out of D.C. It’s going to the pockets of people in the neighborhood, and it doesn’t get to Peru.”
Musk said the “layers” of contractors means even less money sometimes gets to the recipient. “Contractor, subcontractor, subcontractor, it’s like peeling an onion, and then maybe, sometimes it’s zero. You get to the bottom of the onion, and there’s nothing there.”
Musk talks about the risk of being a DOGE member
“I‘ve been hanged and effigied many times,” Musk said, “And there have been people who have advocated at these violent protests for my death and also advocated for the death of the people at DOGE.”
Shaotran added that the younger members of DOGE, himself included, “have gotten hate mail, threats, from reporters and the public alike.”
“Speaking for myself, I dropped out of Harvard and came here to serve my country, and it’s been unfortunate to see lost friendships. Most of campus hates me now,” he said.
However, Shaotran said he is hopeful that people realize eventually that “reform is genuinely needed.” He added, “If there’s one group of people who have a shot at success, it’s the people here. You know, they’re up until 2 a.m., Monday through Sunday, DOGE does not recognize weekends. We’re working all the time.”
When asked why Shaotran chose to forego his Harvard enrollment to work at DOGE, he said, “The value and impact here is so much more vast than anything you could learn in a classroom doing computer science.”
Will DOGE be around long term?
Musk told Watters that DOGE is “a long-term enterprise, because if we take our eye off the ball, the waste and fraud will come roaring back.”
“We’re trying to have it be such that the funding is removed, the grants are gone, so that there’s a lot of work required to restart the waste and fraud. And that will at least slow it down,” Musk added.
However, while DOGE may be a long term addition to the government, Musk will not be. He announced at the end of April that his “time allocation to DOGE will drop significantly,” starting in May.