Some staffers at Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency are drawing robust taxpayer-funded salaries from the federal agencies they are slashing and burning, WIRED has learned.
Jeremy Lewin, one of the DOGE employees tasked with dismantling USAID, who has also played a role in DOGE’s incursions into the National Institutes of Health and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is listed as making just over $167,000 annually, WIRED has confirmed. Lewin is assigned to the Office of the Administrator within the General Services Administration.
Kyle Schutt, a software engineer at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is listed as drawing a salary of $195,200 through GSA, where he is assigned to the Office of the Deputy Administrator. That is the maximum amount that any “General Schedule” federal employee can make annually, including bonuses. “You cannot be offered more under any circumstances,” the GSA compensation and benefits website reads.
Nate Cavanaugh, a 28-year-old tech entrepreneur who has taken a visible internal role interviewing GSA employees as part of DOGE’s work at the agency, is listed as being paid just over $120,500 per year. According to DOGE’s official website, the average GSA employee makes $128,565 and has worked at the agency for 13 years.
When Elon Musk started recruiting for DOGE back in November, he described the work as “tedious” and noted that “compensation is zero.” WIRED previously reported that the DOGE recruitment effort relied in part on a team of engineers associated with Peter Thiel, and was carried out on platforms like Discord.
Since Trump took office in January, DOGE has overseen aggressive layoffs within the GSA, including the recent elimination of 18F, the agency’s unit dedicated to technology efficiency. It also developed a plan to sell off more than 500 government buildings.
Although Musk has described DOGE as “maximum transparent,” it has not made its spending or salary ranges publicly available. Funding for DOGE had grown to around $40 million as of February 20, according to a recent ProPublica report. The White House did not respond to questions about the salary ranges for DOGE employees, or how the budget is allocated to pay them.
Some DOGE team members, including Musk, are designated as “Special Government Employees,” an advisory role limited to a 130-day work period. These positions can be paid or unpaid; SGEs drawing salaries above a certain grade have to file financial disclosure forms, but the volunteer workers do not. This type of employee is not beholden to the same rules as typical federal workers; they are allowed to keep drawing outside salaries, and in some cases do not need to disclose conflicts of interest. Other prominent SGE staffers associated with DOGE include top aide Katie Miller, who continued her prior public relations work through the transition and more than a month into the current administration. Her firm’s clients had included Apple and a Saudi-funded golf league, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Other prominent DOGE staffers appear to be unpaid volunteers. Edward Coristine, Ethan Shaotran, Luke Farritor, Derek Geissler, and Nicole Hollander draw no salary through their assignments at the General Services Administration. (It is not currently known whether they are drawing salaries elsewhere within the government.) The agency now openly discusses the idea of compensation on its recruitment page, which describes “full-time, salaried positions for software engineers, InfoSec engineers, and other technology professionals.”
In an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News last month, Musk claimed that “the software engineers at DOGE could be earning millions of dollars a year and instead of earning a small fraction of that as federal employees.” In Silicon Valley, the median salary for a software engineer hovers around $184,000, with workers a decade into their careers earning over $220,000, according to Glassdoor.
DOGE honcho Elon Musk is the richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of over $350 billion. Although Musk does not draw a salary for his work with DOGE, his business ventures often enjoy government support. The Washington Post recently reported that his companies have received over $38 billion in government funding over the past two decades.
“It does seem worth understanding what these employees are being paid,” says Don Moynihan, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan. “Especially if they are being paid significantly more than technologists who have been fired, given that many of the DOGE staff have less relevant experience.”