Wired Politics Senior Editor Leah Feiger joins Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond to talk about the latest at DOGE and the inexperienced engineers holding key positions at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. They discuss how WIRED’s been preparing for this moment since the first assassination attempt on Trump last summer, and how, despite the unprecedented chaos of this moment, the courts will catch up.
You can follow Katie Drummond on Bluesky at @katie-drummond.bsky.social and Leah Feiger on Bluesky at @leahfeiger.bsky.social. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Katie Drummond: Welcome to WIRED’s Uncanny Valley. I’m WIRED’s Global editorial Director, Katie Drummond. We are just four weeks, four weeks, into the Trump administration here in the United States, but there has been so much news, some of which we’ve been breaking here at WIRED, so we wanted to get into that a little bit today on Uncanny Valley. I’m joined by our senior editor, Leah Feiger, who runs our politics coverage. Hi, Leah.
Leah Feiger: Hey, Katie. Thanks for having me.
Katie Drummond: Pretty special couple of weeks.
Leah Feiger: Oh, it’s been a fun one. Just so great.
Katie Drummond: The team has been working relentlessly, very, very hard. I can personally attest to seeing some very late night messages circulating among our staff.
Leah Feiger: Yeah, sorry about that.
Katie Drummond: No problem. All of the snacks that I had in my office have been eaten. I had to go buy more. That should give you a bit of a sense of what’s been happening at WIRED. Leah, so much of our coverage has really centered on DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, spearheaded by, of course, Elon Musk, with the endorsement of President Trump. Catch us up just for starters on this week at DOGE. What’s the latest? Because there’s so much happening, it’s really hard to keep up and keep track.
Leah Feiger: There’s a ton happening right now. Honestly, the last two weeks have felt like two years, just in terms of the news cycle. In the last 48 hours alone, President Trump put out his executive order to make pretty clear that DOGE continued to have his full support and would be able to continue commencing with large scale workforce cuts across the board. Late last night, Makena Kelly, our senior politics reporter, reported that dozens of workers at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the CFPB, were fired in an after hours blitz. These things are happening really, really fast. Those employees, for example, the CFPB, they were notified with an email that addressed them as parentheses, employee first name dot employee last name, job title, division. This is not personal. This is just cutting, cutting, cutting.
Katie Drummond: This is slash and burn.
Leah Feiger: Yeah.
Katie Drummond: This is straight out of the Musk playbook that we’ve seen at other companies.
Leah Feiger: A hundred percent.
Katie Drummond: Twitter being a prime and very recent example. That also brings to mind, to me, one of the stories that we just published, that Makena just published this morning, which was looking at sort of who is being installed in senior level roles across these agencies that might actually give Musk and DOGE more power than they already have. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Leah Feiger: Absolutely. She found that former Palantir and Elon Musk associates are taking over key government IT roles. These are called Chief Information Officers. If you haven’t heard of them before, that’s totally fine, but just know that they’re incredibly important. They manage an agency’s information technology, oversee sensitive databases, including classified ones. These are really important people that now have folks aligned with Musk or with Palantir, which as we know is tied to Peter Thiel, another Musk ally.
Katie Drummond: Right. The concern among experts that Makena spoke to is that if individuals in these CIO roles are aligned with Musk, aligned with the efforts of DOGE, that that could actually make it easier for DOGE workers to gain access to really sensitive material, sensitive information.
Leah Feiger: Sensitive systems.
Katie Drummond: Sensitive systems.
Leah Feiger: Exactly.
Katie Drummond: Within these federal agencies.
Leah Feiger: Absolutely.
Katie Drummond: Very concerning.
Leah Feiger: Yeah.
Katie Drummond: Now, let’s back up a little bit, because we’re talking about what DOGE is doing in the last 24 hours. It sort of feels like there are several news cycles happening around DOGE every 24 hours. We just sort of gave you the last day or so, but let’s back way up and talk about DOGE, how it was created, and what we sort of discovered earlier on in our reporting about this organization, about this group. Sort of who are these people and how did they end up in all of these federal agencies?
Leah Feiger: Absolutely, and you’re going to have to help me fill in all of these stories, too.
Katie Drummond: I would be happy to.
Leah Feiger: Because you have been in the thick of it with us, but this Department of Government Efficiency, we are constantly putting the word so-called right in front of it with all of our reporting, because this isn’t an actual department. That requires Congress. That requires a whole lot more than Trump or Musk going out and declaring on X that they now have a department. However, this so-called department is now within the executive office of the president. They were quite shrewd with its creation. They actually took over the USDS, the US Digital Service, which has led to some very interesting aftershocks here. Makena also reported last week that there has now been a firewall barrier between legacy USDS employees and new DOGE employees. When WIRED first started reporting on this, I think one of the reasons that we’ve really managed to be on top of this story is that we were able to see the forest amongst the trees, that we had to take them seriously and had to figure out where they would be going first and what that would look like.
Katie Drummond: I think it’s important to mention here, too, that last year when DOGE first sort of surfaced or was announced by candidate Trump, now President Trump, and Musk, the idea that was conveyed to the public was that this would be sort of an external consultancy, right?
Leah Feiger: Right.
Katie Drummond: That Musk and DOGE, whomever made up that group, would be consulting with Trump and with the federal government around potential cuts, potential changes.
Leah Feiger: Right.
Katie Drummond: What we’re talking about now is essentially a co-opting, if I may use that term, of an existing agency, sidelining its employees in order to sort of run DOGE under somewhat official pretenses
Leah Feiger: And then taking on more power than that original agency ever had.
Katie Drummond: Exactly.
Leah Feiger: But using that agency’s access to other agencies.
Katie Drummond: Now, we’ve learned a lot, and WIRED has broken a lot of this news, but so have other news organizations, about who actually is a participant in DOGE. Who are these people? Initially, about a week and a half ago, Tori Elliott, one of our fabulous politics reporters, another really dogged WIRED journalist, broke a story identifying six of these individuals. They are young men aged sort of 19 to 24. We named them. We shared any details we were able to glean about their backgrounds and about what they are doing inside of DOGE and across federal agencies. A few things really stood out to me from that reporting. One was that none of these young men have really any government experience at all.
Leah Feiger: Oh God, no. No.
Katie Drummond: The second being that all of them are somehow tied to either Elon Musk or Peter Thiel, who is of course a key Musk ally.
Leah Feiger: These very young men have found themselves with the keys to so many different government agencies right now. We have tracked them through their work at USAID, at the Office of Personnel Management, OPM, at the General Services Administration, and TTS within that. They are all over the place right now, the Department of Education. There are also a lot of grown-ups in the room, too. Don’t want to forget those. At the General Services Administration, we have Nicole Hollander, a former Twitter staffer, married to Steve Davis, who’s very, very involved in DOGE everything right now. The two of them actually slept at the Twitter offices during Musk’s takeover a couple of years ago. These are people who aren’t just affiliated but have intimate knowledge as to how Musk operates.
Katie Drummond: Right.
Leah Feiger: And how he could possibly continue planning to make these cuts and get DOGE everywhere he wants it to be.
Katie Drummond: Not that I can sort of expect that you would be inside the psyche of one of these young men who raised a hand to participate in DOGE, but what do we know about how these people were recruited? What would be the incentive for them? What would inspire someone to raise a hand and say, “Yes, I want to slash and burn my way through the federal government”?
Leah Feiger: Yeah, absolutely. Vittoria Elliott and Tim Marchman our director of politics, security, and science, reported over the weekend about all of this recruitment and how some of this recruitment actually went down, which included Discord chats and alumni groups for Palantir interns and the like. It’s really well planned. These were people that already bought in, at least to a certain extent.
Katie Drummond: Sure.
Leah Feiger: And are finding themselves with the keys to the kingdom. Getting into the psyche is obviously so hard here, but I think something that I just want to make so, so clear is the US is so incredibly divided right now. Even if you’re not consuming news or on social platforms that are celebrating Musk, perhaps you’re talking to your friends right now who are all like, “I can’t believe he’s doing this.” There are so many people out there obsessed with what’s happening, obsessed with him, lionize him. He is an idol to so many.
Katie Drummond: Right, right. Particularly you would imagine young men of a certain background and a certain sort of professional set.
Leah Feiger: Absolutely.
Katie Drummond: Technologists, people who work in the Valley. I think one thing that stood out to me too from that story about the recruiting tactics is in some instances these were former interns or former employees at companies like Palantir dipping back into their networks to ask people to raise a hand. This isn’t exactly Elon Musk going out and hand selecting the best and brightest from his companies.
Leah Feiger: No.
Katie Drummond: This is sort of a spray and pray approach across several online communities where alumni of a handful of companies tend to congregate and tend to spend time.
Leah Feiger: That’s already led to a lot of controversy for them. Is this the moment where I say big balls in front of my boss on a podcast?
Katie Drummond: Let’s say big balls, Leah. Tell us a little bit. This is one particular individual, Edward Coristine, who has attracted I think more scrutiny than many of his peers within DOGE because his background is colorful, to say the least.
Leah Feiger: His background is so colorful. This is a 19-year-old DOGE staffer who experts have told WIRED would probably not have passed a background check, typically required of all these sensitive US government systems that he now has access to. This staffer, Edward Coristine, goes by Big Balls online. He also owned Tesla.sexy LLC and worked at a startup that hired convicted hackers. Again, he’s 19, so he’s been busy. I was not doing nearly this much at age 19. That’s who’s in our government right now. Also, another one I just want to throw in that’s drawn up a lot of controversy that WIRED also identified, Marko Elez.
Katie Drummond: Marko.
Leah Feiger: We got to talk about Marco. We figured out that Marko Elez, as part of DOGE, was given read and write access to really sensitive treasury payment systems. After our reporting, The Wall Street Journal was able to confirm that Elez had actually ended up resigning, according to the White House, due to a flurry of racist social media posts that were discovered that he had links to. We’re talking about the big ball’s controversy. We’re talking about Elez. It’s not that these people are getting found out and then running and hiding away. To a certain extent, right? Elez resigned, but as Elez resigns, and as that reporting comes out, Elon Musk, JD Vance, people from a lot of different corners of the Republican GOP spectrum, are all going online and attaching their names to this, which is so wild, calling for these people to be brought back, saying that these mistakes of childhood shouldn’t be impactful. These mistakes were made several months ago. I am not sure what our timeline is here for this.
Katie Drummond: Speaking of these young men and their online defenders, WIRED published that story naming six of them and sharing what we had learned about the access that they had and their backgrounds. Now, Leah, we got a lot of flack for that. We were not without criticism over that decision, which ultimately I own. It is a decision that we stand behind, but we’re going to take a quick break and then let’s talk about that. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. I’m Katie Drummond, WIRED’s global editorial director, and we are here talking about the latest with DOGE. Now, Leah, let’s get back to that decision that we made, that WIRED made to name six of these young men working at Musk’s behest for DOGE within the federal government. What informed that decision to actually name names in the story?
Leah Feiger: It’s a decision that we didn’t take lightly. These are young people who have been working for DOGE for a limited period of time, who have been in Elon Musk’s orbit by virtue of their age for a limited period of time. Ultimately, it’s actually a really simple answer, and that’s that they’re working in the government right now, and government employees need to be public to the American people.
Katie Drummond: I could not agree more. It’s a simple answer and it’s a clear answer, and absolutely it was not a decision that we made lightly. We’ve been making a lot of decisions, not just going back the last few weeks, but actually the last many, many months. I remember in July of 2024 Donald Trump was shot in the ear. Obviously a massive story, a massive news event, and photos were released of him raising his fist.
Leah Feiger: Saying, “Fight, fight, fight.”
Katie Drummond: Fight, fight. A really iconic moment. I remember sitting there and thinking, “Okay, he is going to win this election. He is going to be the president.”
Leah Feiger: Oh, yeah.
Katie Drummond: Obviously a lot transpired after that with Kamala Harris entering the race, and so on and so forth, but that really felt like a transformational moment for our newsroom in how we were thinking about the election. I remember talking to the newsroom the Monday after that happened, it was over a weekend, and saying, “We need to start getting ready for what this looks like for us across everything that we cover.” Tell us about how you and your team and the newsroom from that moment on sort of started to get ready to cover this moment that we are now in.
Leah Feiger: Well, to give you a little bit more credit first, I have a distinct memory, and not to reveal any private conversations, but I have a distinct memory after that weekend of talking with you and some of the other folks on the team. We were talking about the fact that Elon Musk had endorsed Trump and that was … he’d been gearing up to that for many months, but this was his first big one. This was official. You said, “It’s different now,” and you were right. We have continued to cover it through that lens. The addition of Musk to all of this was not like anything that anyone could have predicted. Our strategy ended up having to cover Musk fully almost as this political entity.
Katie Drummond: Right.
Leah Feiger: With his relationship to Trump, but also his relationship to the campaign. I remember we broke a lot of news in the lead up to the campaign about Elon Musk’s America Pack and the really ridiculous things happening there where he was outsourcing to campaign staffers who ended up getting shoved into U-Haul vans and driven around and given insane quotas and not paid. There was mess from the beginning, and his hands were in all of it.
Katie Drummond: And his money too.
Leah Feiger: And his money too.
Katie Drummond: To the tune of I think $278 million in campaign contributions.
Leah Feiger: And he’s recouped all of that, and then some.
Katie Drummond: Absolutely. This has been very good for Musk-owned entities.
Leah Feiger: Very, very good. When we’re thinking about how our coverage changed and became informed, it was taking him very seriously. I think that the mistake that … How many journalists have relitigated the mistake of covering Trump from his first term in office, which was taking everything that he said at face value.
Katie Drummond: Right.
Leah Feiger: I’m going to deport every single person that I do not like, whatever. No, there’s parts of that that are true and parts of that are not. Figuring out what that looked like. Musk entering this changed the entire game. Everything that he’s saying and everything that he’s talking about, we’re taking incredibly seriously. Not literally, but seriously.
Katie Drummond: I think too what’s so interesting or sort of important for WIRED is that we have a lot of background on Musk, right? We understand how he operates within the companies that he owns. We have a director on staff, Zoë Schiffer, actually one of the hosts of Uncanny Valley, wrote the book Extremely Hardcore, a fantastic book about-
Leah Feiger: Everyone go read it.
Katie Drummond: Everyone go read Extremely Hardcore. It’s such a good book. She really told the definitive story of that takeover.
Leah Feiger: Absolutely.
Katie Drummond: We have this understanding of that playbook, right? His startup playbook, his Silicon Valley playbook, how he goes into companies and reshapes them in very, very drastic and often chaotic and legally dubious ways that we are now seeing play out in the government. I think that that insight and that background, to your point, allowed us to take him seriously and allowed us to contextualize a lot of this chaos that we are now seeing within the government.
Leah Feiger: Right. Something that I always think about from Trump’s first term is that it would be like, okay, we want to do X, Y, and Z, but it was very clear that they had no idea how to accomplish that. There is a clear difference this time around. Musk went into USDS and then immediately went after the General Services Administration, the Office of Personnel Management, basically the government’s HR, and these key agencies that had access to other agencies and had access to just a ton of data and classified information and building records. Just so many things that are really core to how the US government ticks. Figuring out where to even enter the colossal that is the federal system, he figured that out.
Katie Drummond: Right. There was a plan, there was a playbook.
Leah Feiger: There was a plan. There was absolutely a plan. Being able to balance the chaos and planned chaos with also a very clear understanding of where to make the most impact. The treasury is such a good example of that. We’re in this holding pattern right now. After our reporting that DOGE had read and write access, 18 attorneys general from around the country sued the Trump administration. There’s now a temporary hold from a federal judge until Friday to say that not only can DOGE not have this access, they have to destroy anything they’ve taken out of these sensitive treasury payment systems. Musk meanwhile is tweeting away and saying, “We should have access. This is ridiculous. Why are you taking this from us? This is a breach of federal jurisdiction.” Vance is getting in on it, too. Causing this chaos, causing this new cycle, but also knowing exactly what to target and exactly what will get him where he wants to go, it’s wild to watch.
Katie Drummond: It is wild. While all of that chaos plays out in front of the American people and sort of obfuscates and puts up some smoke around what’s going on, I think what’s important to know from WIRED is that we are really committed to just answering some very simple questions. I think that’s what we set out to do with this DOGE reporting in the first place. It’s what is this organization? What is it designed to do? Who works for it? What exactly are they doing inside of these agencies? That’s all we’re trying to figure out.
Leah Feiger: Exactly.
Katie Drummond: Those are the questions that our journalists have been trying to answer for the last several weeks and will continue trying to answer as we push forward with this reporting. We’re going to take a short break and we’ll be back in a minute. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. I’m WIRED’s global editorial director, Katie Drummond. I’m here with Leah Feiger, our politics editor, and we are talking all things DOGE and federal government.
Now, Leah, we talked right before we jumped into the studio. You are working on yet another scoop, and you have a look of panic in your eyes, so we do need to get moving soon. Before we leave the studio and you rush back to your desk, tell me what you and your team are keeping an eye on now. As you look ahead, I mean, it’s hard to look past the next few days, but as you look to the next few days, and maybe the next few weeks, what stands out to you? What should people be paying attention to?
Leah Feiger: A lot of people have been writing this over the last two days, and to echo so many who are much smarter than me, we’re gearing up to a constitutional crisis right now. Musk, Vance, a number of people from the GOP Trump administration have made it very clear that they’re not actually that interested in abiding by these court orders, or even temporary court holds that we have, for example, right now with DOGE’s access to the treasury. What happens next? We’re keeping a very close eye. As these court orders continue to come down, will DOGE’s team be abiding by them? Is it just a lot of bluster saying, “Oh, we don’t think that you should be being able to exercise this power over us.” Are they actually abiding by them? If they don’t abide by them, what happens next? This whole country is built on checks and balances, and not to go entirely Schoolhouse Rock, but we’re about to enter some uncharted territory.
Katie Drummond: It is very surreal. I remember just in the last few weeks talking to people about it’s chaos, DOGE is doing all of these different things in all of these agencies. What’s going to happen? My answer was they’re moving very quickly. The courts move more slowly, but the courts will catch up to this. There are lawsuits being filed. There are individuals petitioning the courts for temporary-
Leah Feiger: And so many have been. Absolutely.
Katie Drummond: So many have been, so my answer has been this will go through court and it will churn through the legal system, and it will be slow and messy and painful, but that is what the legal system is here to protect and is here to safeguard is our democracy and these checks and balances. This is sort of the last stand, right?
Leah Feiger: Absolutely.
Katie Drummond: The courts are the last stand in terms of our democracy and constitutional integrity. What we are now looking at is the possibility that that may not hold. What would that even begin to look like if that came to pass? I know that you’re not a legal expert in addition to being WIRED’s politics editor, but what have you heard? What have experts told you in the course of your reporting?
Leah Feiger: There’s a lot of people that are saying, “Look, these holds are going to come through. Musk and Trump are going to be appealing them, and then eventually this is going to end in the Supreme Court.” A lot of people are actually taking solace with this. They’re saying, “Yes, the court may be leaning quite Republican ideologically, but these are trained professionals who will understand that these legal systems must be upheld and adhered to.” I’m not as confident in that.
Katie Drummond: Right.
Leah Feiger: I’ll be totally honest. In terms of what happens next, I think that because of, in some ways, the slow march of these court systems, although decisions, even temporary ones, have been coming down really fast, there’s a lot of room to move fast and break things from DOGE’s side meanwhile.
Katie Drummond: Yeah.
Leah Feiger: A lot of these eggs can’t get unscrambled. A lot of these layoffs and firings and foreclosures are … It’s going to be really hard to walk those back once a court is able to finally say, “No, no, no, this just can’t hold.” And that’s-
Katie Drummond: If they can say that at all.
Leah Feiger: If they can say that at all.
Katie Drummond: Right.
Leah Feiger: We’re hearing that concern from experts all across the board right now. We’ve never seen anything like this.
Katie Drummond: We certainly haven’t. Not here in the United States. No.
Leah Feiger: Not here in the United States.
Katie Drummond: Well, in the meantime, we hold our breath. We keep doing the work, and we will keep delivering to all of you, WIRED listeners and WIRED readers, our reporting, what we know as we know it. That is our commitment to you. You can read all the reporting that Leah and her team are doing at WIRED.com. Leah, thank you so much for taking the time to be here with me. I know how busy you are.
Leah Feiger: Thank you so much. I love to talk about government takeovers with you, Katie.
Katie Drummond: Well, now go get a granola bar from my office.
Leah Feiger: About to go steal one immediately.
Katie Drummond: That’s our show for today. We will be back tomorrow with an episode from our regular roundtable, all about the state of dating apps, a little bit of lighthearted counter programming for all of you. If you like what you heard today, make sure to follow Uncanny Valley and rate it on your podcast app of choice. If you’d like to get in touch with any of us for questions, comments, or show suggestions, write to us at uncannyvalley@WIRED.com. Amar lal at Macro Sound mixed this episode, with engineering support from Jake Lummus. Jordan Bell is our executive producer. Conde Nast’s Head of Global Audio is Chris Bannon, and I’m Katie Drummond, WIRED’s Global Editorial Director. Thank you so much. Bye.