Cole Killian
Gautier “Cole” Killian was identified early as one of the initial DOGE employees, and there are reports of him interviewing USDS staff about their roles as early as January 21st. He was also spotted in a few of the early wrecking crew raids, but he has largely fallen off the radar since the end of February, when he was detailed to the Social Security Administration. Perhaps he is one of the still-unidentified aliases there and more details of his involvement will become apparent in future court filings and FOIA releases.
Likely aliases: SSA-05
Positions
| Position | Notes |
|---|---|
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1/20- |
appointed «reported as interviewing USDS staff about jobs, not found in GSA or OPM lists» Wired |
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2/04- |
likely detailed as Federal Detailee «assuming detail from DOGE» E&E News |
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c.2/13- |
likely detailed NBC News |
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2/18- |
[as SSA-05] detail (NTE 2026-07-04) «limited onboarding docs, court docs about them» docs: onboard court doc |
Systems
| System | Details |
|---|---|
|
EAS
2/12-
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EPA Acquisition System
read access System used at the EPA to initiate, award, modify and track acquisition actions. (EPA) E&E News |
|
IRON
3/12-
|
IRON Website
unknown access FIXME (SSA) court doc |
Events
| Agency | Date | Event |
|---|---|---|
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1/21
|
Disruption:
Nikhil Rajpal and Cole Killian start screening all preexisting USDS staff with short interviews, asking them their views of DOGE and to name who they think are underperformers that should be fired.
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2/04
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Sighting:
Cole Killian appears in an EPA internal directory as a "Federal Detailee" with his name Gautier Killian.
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2/11
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Disruption:
Kathryn Armstrong Loving sends the EPA administrator a list of contracts DOGE wants to cut and cc's Cole Killian
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2/13
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Access:
DOGE is granted authorization to use file transfer software at Department of Labor, alarming cybersecurity staff
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2/20
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2/28
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Official:
Via email, "Employee 5" of the DOGE team at SSA requests and receives approval from Leland Dudek to run a program to identify unrealistically old people in the SSA database
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3/12
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3/13
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Directory:
Wired reports that 10 DOGE staffers are visible in the Microsoft Teams directory of all employees at SSA
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3/14
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Access:
Leland Dudek approves for "Employee 5" to run the proposed tool for death data improvement
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3/27
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Access:
In a sworn declaration, Leland Dudek justifies access to PII in SSA records for Employee 1, Employee 5, Employee 8 and Employee 9 on the DOGE team. This access is through the SSA's Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) system. He claims DOGE staff are being granted only the minimum levels of schema access required.
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