Leaders and Boosters

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.

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. Reportedly, he left his OPM position in April but continues to coordinate DOGE from within DHS. More recently, he was named to the position of CFO for Musk’s xAI – just another example of the revolving door for Musk associates to cycle through DOGE and into reward positions in his companies.

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.

Reportedly so loyal to Elon Musk that associates have joked he would jump off a cliff if Musk asked him, Steve Davis has long been besides Musk’s side at various companies, serving in senior executive roles at the Boring Company and Twitter. At Twitter, he was reportedly so dedicated to the work that he moved into the offices with his wife, Nicole Hollander, and their small child. And it is also reported that he was once so distressed by setbacks and failures that he started pulling out his own hair. It’s been a thinly-veiled secret that Steve Davis was running the show at DOGE, well before Amy Gleason was publicly named as the administrator. And recent interviews with Sahil Lavingia and other insiders suggested he had continued to fill that role, until he abruptly departed after Elon Musk left.

Despite no longer being in government, Steve Davis has reportedly stayed in contact with DOGE staffers and has directed their actions through back-channel communications. Reportedly, he has even called for the firing of DOGE staffers who expressed concerns about the legality of his continued involvement.

Amy Gleason was suddenly thrusted into the public spotlight on Feb. 18, 2025 when the White House Press Secretary identified her as the Administrator of DOGE. Conveniently, she was on vacation in Mexico at the time, so the press was unable to clarify if she was also blindsided by the news. Since then, she has gamely testified for a few times as the administrator of DOGE, but since early March she has largely resumed working full-time as an official employee within HHS, where she had started work in January 2025 for the US Digital Service. Nobody in DOGE seems to even be pretending anymore that she is running things.

Antonio Gracias has had a longtime connection with Elon Musk as an early investor in both Tesla and SpaceX, and he has also sat on the boards of both companies. He also was involved with Musk’s purchase of Twitter. He has been stationed as part of the DOGE team within Social Security Administration, since late February. Over the last few months, he has regularly appeared on friendly media outlets to describe alleged instances of fraud within SSA.

Michael Grimes is one of the two members of DOGE who came to the agency from Morgan Stanley, the investment bank that coordinated Musk’s takeover of Twitter. At Commerce, he has kept a relatively low profile, but there were some reports of him subjecting staff in the CHIPS for America program to DOGE-style interviews.

Elon Musk was certainly the face and inspiration of DOGE, but it will likely be some time before we know the exact nature of his activities there. According to the official record, he was merely a humble advisor and DOGE was actually run by Amy Gleason. In actuality, it appears that Musk was setting the high-level direction of DOGE, with the daily operations conducted by deputies like Steve Davis, Anthony Armstrong or even Baris Akis. Musk was particularly preoccupied with finding instances of waste and fraud that he was certain was rampant everywhere in the government, and a lot of DOGE’s early involvement at the Treasury and SSA was in chasing down false alarms and misinformation triggered by DOGE’s poor understanding of data or even how the government worked. After his relationship soured with Trump, Musk left DOGE in late May, followed by multiple resignations of other DOGE allies leaving before the winds shifted. This didn’t mark the end of DOGE however, and the remaining staff are largely still carrying forward the same mission they started with.

An associate of Elon Musk from xAI, Amanda Scales has been located at GSA since Day 1, where she acted as the Chief of Staff until swapping places with James Sullivan at the end of March. She reportedly has left OPM as part of the exodus after Musk’s departure.

A healthcare executive who served in the first administration, Brad Smith kept a relatively low profile running DOGE operations within HHS. There, he mainly was involved in organizing $67 billion in cuts and the large layoffs that eliminated 10,000 positions across the various agencies within HHS. He left HHS and DOGE about a week before Elon Musk’s departure, but he has apparently returned in August to work at the State Department.

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.

Shaun Maguire is a partner at the investment firm Sequoia. In that position, he has been heavily involved with investments in several of Musk’s companies like SpaceX, the Boring Company and xAI. He was heavily involved in setting up DOGE and planning its strategies in the months after the election, but he has not had a formal role in the agency, serving as a vocal booster and recruiter on social media instead.

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 with Elon Musk to go work for him instead.