Leaders and Boosters

Anthony Armstrong comes to DOGE from the world of finance, where he worked on Musk’s acquisition of Twitter as a bank executive at Morgan Stanley. Since joining DOGE at OPM, he has mostly operated quietly in a support role, but in April he was spotted at the FDIC, and I would expect him to be involved with DOGE’s work against other independent financial entities. Although he has a relatively modest title, recently departed DOGE member Sahil Lavingia indicated that he was running operations for teams across government with Baris Akis and Steve Davis.

An longtime personal assistant to Elon Musk – who reportedly once told a Twitter employee that “Elon is special in this world. It is our job to protect him and make sure what he wants to have happen” – Jennifer “Jehn” Balajadia has been linked to the Department of Education and possibly a few other agencies by the New York Times, but actual details of her activity have been scarce.

An obscure and modest businessman, he has served as merely a humble advisor to the administration, just raising his hand meekly during occasional meetings to offer a suggestion or two. Or not. He’s just a humble little advisor working for a non-agency that doesn’t do anything important enough to keep records for.

An associate of Elon Musk from xAI, Amanda Scales has been located at GSA since Day 1.

Baris Akis was a booster for DOGE before it even formally existed, and he has been linked to its activities at the IRS, Treasury and OPM by the New York Times. As a non-US citizen (he has a green card), Mr. Akis is not formally a part of DOGE, but he was identified as leading operations as recently as March alongside fellow Musk loyalists Anthony Armstrong and Steve Davis. He is the president and co-founder of the company Human Capital.

According to early reports, Marc Andreesen’s only direct involvement with DOGE was interviewing potential candidates at Mar-a-Lago in December 2024. However, he continues to be a strident booster of the effort.

Identified recently in a WSJ story as Elon Musk’s longtime “fixer” and the manager of Musk’s family office, Jared Birchall was instrumental in organizing Musk’s donations to the Trump campaign. He was part of the team in place before the Inauguration to interview DOGE staffers and build out the team.

After Anthony Jancso posted his initial recruitment messages for DOGE to a chat group for Palantir alumni, George Cooper chimed in to say he was also recruting for the organization. A Palantir engineer since 2019, it’s unclear if he had any other involvement with DOGE since.

Identified by the New York Times as part of DOGE’s pre-inauguration recruitment push, Vinay reportedly spent a month personally calling hundreds of people to recruit them for DOGE before he dropped out of the project in January.

In late November and early December, Jancso was actively recruiting for DOGE on message boards for Palantir alumni and other similar places he might find likely candidates. It’s unclear what his involvement has been with DOGE since January, but in May he started recruiting for a project to “deploy AI agents across live workflows in federal agencies”. Prior to DOGE, he was a cofounder with Jordan Wick of a project called Accelerate SF which promised to deploy AI across the public sector.

The wife of Stephen Miller, Katie is in some sort of communications role for DOGE, but it’s unclear what her day-to-day responsibilities for his entail. Sharing the virulent anti-immigrant politics of her husband, she likely has been a conduit for coordinating DOGE’s anti-immigration focus. Recently, she notably left DOGE along Elon Musk to go work for him instead.