There are 10 operatives in the Social Security Administration
The Alfalfa Club, Washington, where a young man could get his kicks: When Trump was losing his job, it was going to be a big bad deal
The social chairs of the Alfalfa Club seemed to think that elections and constitutional norms should determine the seating chart in American political life. The head table was reserved for Alfalfas in government. The Department of Government Efficiency is led by Musk, and he sat on the opposite side of the room. If whispers were to be believed, he talked to the president on his phone during the dinner. Musk was very close to Donald Trump. He told friends he was in a government building. He would soon move in next door to the White House, staying in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building’s Secretary of War Suite. He had installed his video-gaming rig there.
2.2 million civil servants, who make up the federal HR department, were already in danger when Musk sat in the Hilton ballroom as his operatives obtained access to the Office of Personnel Management. A young man named Edward Coristine, co-founded by Peter Thiel, is one of many operatives who showed up later at agencies across the federal government. Rajpal was president of a libertarian student group at UC Berkeley and they liked to call it “Futuate cohortem urbanam”. Something like, “Fuck these city dwellers.”
In Musk’s mind, Washington needed to be debugged, hard-forked, sunset. His strike teams of young engineers would burrow into the government’s byzantine bureaucratic systems and delete what they saw fit. They’d help Trump slash the budget to the bone. “Can you believe that we’re spending taxpayer money on condoms?” Musk asked those around the table. They shook their heads. Musk looked back at his phone. What if we reduced federal grants to NGOs?
Few of the guests at the Alfalfa Club banquet in Washington, DC, on January 25 knew what he knew: that a crew of senior executives and young Musk loyalists was preparing to occupy the top offices of a nearby federal building. Under guard, they would sleep on mattresses lined with body temperature and breath rate sensors as they raced to refactor the nation’s code base—or, better yet, scrap it altogether.
When America’s most decorated civil servants drank in the presidential ballroom of the Capital Hilton, they were fretting over their table assignments and wondering where they fell in the pecking order between the US senator and UAE ambassador, and Musk sat staring at his phone.
Many of them have worked or internship at Musk companies such as Space X, and the majority have recently appeared at other government agencies as part of DOGe’s incursion into the government. Musk has made wild claims about the social security system, calling it a “Ponzi scheme” and falsely claiming that millions of 150-year-olds were fraudulently collecting benefits.
The records contain a lot of personally identifying and financial information; the government says it is important to detect fraud by accessing them.
The personnel listed in the internal organizational chart are linked to the DOGE. The SSA is in federal court in Maryland opposing a motion for a temporary restraining order filed by unions that would prevent the DOGE from accessing SSA records. (A sworn statement attached to the filing from the SSA’s deputy commissioner of human resources claims that six of the background checks are still pending.)
Ten of the DOGE-affiliated staffers are listed as part of the same group within Microsoft Teams, which SSA employees use for internal communication, according to a screenshot shared with WIRED. They are listed as “IT Specialists” based at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, DC, except for Bobba, who is listed as “Front Office” in the office of the chief information officer (CIO).
The government did not name the operatives in its filing, but internal documents show they are. This team appears to be among the largest DOGE units deployed to any government agency.