Elon Musk's DOGE Bros Have Breached the Firewall

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is not a government agency. It is not a think tank. It is not even a collection of competent, well-meaning bureaucrats trying their best to fix a broken system. No, DOGE is a frat party that somehow got approved for a security clearance.

Elon Musk, America’s favorite billionaire toddler, has taken a wrecking ball to the federal government and staffed his destruction crew with a bunch of overcaffeinated tech bros who would get lost trying to fill out a W-4. They have been handed the keys to the Social Security Administration, the IRS, and the U.S. Treasury, despite most of them still having their parents on their health insurance. This is the sort of bold, innovative leadership that makes you wonder if America has finally decided to end things by shooting itself in the face.

Leading the charge is Marko Elez, 25, a Rutgers grad who wasn’t accidentally granted access to the U.S. Treasury’s payment systems—he was put there, on purpose, by people who should never be allowed to make decisions. One minute he was a third-rate shitposter, the next he had admin privileges over trillions of dollars in federal disbursements. If your mother found out you had accidentally misrouted Social Security payments to an offshore account and caused an international banking crisis, she would ground you for a year. But Marko? Marko gets reinstated by Trump and JD Vance like he’s some kind of folk hero.

Then there’s Luke Farritor, 23, a former SpaceX intern best known for using AI to decode ancient Herculaneum scrolls. Elon must have taken one look at that and thought, “If this guy can read old paper, he can definitely run a government agency.” Because now Luke is helping "modernize" the U.S. government, despite the fact that he has probably never seen a fax machine in his life.

And let’s not forget Akash Bobba, 22, a Bridgewater, Meta, and Palantir veteran who looks like he still needs permission to stay out past midnight. Bobba has somehow been labeled an “expert” in Office of Personnel Management (OPM) records, which is fascinating because his entire work experience is in Silicon Valley—an industry where "personnel management" means firing half your staff via email at 2 a.m.

Gavin Kliger, 25, is on a mission to access the IRS’s taxpayer database, which is terrifying because he looks like the kind of guy who has never done his own taxes. If you asked him to explain the difference between a W-2 and a 1099, he would probably just start sweating and log into ChatGPT.

And then we have Edward Coristine, 19, the group's resident Neuralink intern and former operator of a web domain filled with racist slurs. If this is the guy you want managing sensitive government information, you might as well just print out everyone’s Social Security numbers and hand them out at Coachella.

The destruction has been immediate and spectacular. At the U.S. Treasury, Marko was not just given "read-only" access—he was straight-up handed administrative control over trillions of dollars. Giving Marko control over federal disbursements makes about as much sense as letting a drunk guy with a stolen credit card run the Pentagon. The Social Security Administration is in total disarray because Michelle King, the acting commissioner, refused to hand DOGE her agency’s data, so she was removed and replaced with Leland Dudek—a man whose spine is rumored to be made out of wet paper towels. Now Elon Musk is claiming that 20 million centenarians are “milking” Social Security. The truth is they’re just dead, and the system is so old it can’t figure that out. Imagine basing federal policy on a data error from a software program that was built when disco was still popular.

At USAID, DOGE staffers somehow gained access to classified information without security clearances. The actual security officers who tried to stop them got suspended. This is where we’re at now—the people tasked with preventing unauthorized access to government data are being punished for doing their jobs. Somewhere in Washington, an FBI agent is openly weeping into his coffee.

Over at the Department of Education, a judge literally had to rule on whether DOGE could access internal student loan systems, because the idea of handing a bunch of crypto-loving Silicon Valley bros access to federal education funds somehow needed to be debated. Every single person involved in that case should be sent to live in the woods with no internet access for six months, just to reset their brains.

And when cybersecurity experts, career officials, and every single person with a functioning prefrontal cortex scream that this is dangerous, Musk ignores them, Trump calls them the deep state, and Vance acts like letting 20-year-olds run the government is just an exciting new form of venture capitalism.

This isn’t reform. This is a midlife crisis disguised as government policy. This is what happens when a bunch of Stanford dropout failsons get handed control of the country and immediately try to turn it into a Y Combinator pitch deck. They’ve never filed their own taxes, they’ve never waited in line at the DMV, and they think the Department of the Interior is some kind of home decorating agency. Now they’re rewriting federal law like it’s a Terms of Service agreement, except instead of updating privacy policies, they’re accidentally rerouting Medicaid funds to a Stripe account registered in the Cayman Islands.

They think they’re revolutionaries. They think they’re the future. But the future doesn’t belong to a bunch of overconfident tech bros who think “regulations” are just suggestions. The future belongs to people who actually know what they’re doing.

And one day, the adults are going to come back. They’re going to survey the smoking wreckage of everything these guys touched, slap every single one of them upside the head, and put their parents on speed dial to ask what, exactly, went wrong. And when that day comes, Marko, Akash, Luke, and the rest of the DOGE Kids will not be transforming government anymore.

They’ll be back in their hometowns, updating their LinkedIn profiles, desperately trying to spin “briefly dismantled the U.S. government” into a marketable job skill.

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