Trump and Elon Musk double down on DOGE and cutting “wasteful spending”

Elon Musk and his now 100 person strong gang of Department of Government Efficiency cost-cutters are stripping the federal government of waste.

While some Americans are up in arms at the sudden upheaval, others express gratitude for Musk and his crew getting under the hood to cut through federal bureaucracy and bring the way it runs into the 21st century.

Solidly in the latter camp: Steve Daines, a Republican senator from Montana, who stated on CNBC, “I thank God everyday for President Trump’s leadership, what Elon Musk is doing and his team.”

Recently announced to be in the DOGE line of fire: a converted former limestone mine where thousands of pages of retirement paperwork are still sorted by hand. Musk trashed it for being a “time warp.”

While Musk functions as the head of the operation – proceeding in a manner that echoes the early days of the tech billionaire’s employee-axing $14 billion Twitter takeover – his right-hand people do much of the heavy lifting in crushing government funded organizations and departments viewed as unnecessary and wasteful.

The DOGE-bros – the first 12 were referred to by President Trump as “geniuses”  – are a corps comprised largely of twentysomething techies, some of whom dropped out of college, who see themselves on a mission to make America’s finances great again – even though federal government mass firing victims wish they would all go back to Silicon Valley. However, Musk shows no interest in leaving or slowing things down.

Here are key members of the Musk posse:

Kendall Lindemann

Though the twentysomething Lindemann did not make the cut as an Olympic swimmer (the University of Tennessee grad competed in Olympic Trials), she did get recruited from a previous job at Russell Street Ventures to join DOGE. She was presumably brought on Brad Smith, head of Russell Street who is also high up in the DOGE echelon and previously worked on Operation Warp Speed, the federal government’s coronavirus vaccine development program under the last Trump government.

Lindemann is public about her religious beliefs and married to University of Texas alumni Reid Lindemann, who works as a software engineer.

Luke Farritor

Wired reported that Farritor, 23, is one of four DOGE staffers operating out of the General Services Administration’s top floor with free run of the place and access to its computer systems.

He has previously worked as a SpaceX intern and snagged a fellowship with billionaire Peter Thiel, who wrote him a $100,000 check to drop out of school and pursue his own studies. Though Farritor did not stay at University of Nebraska-Lincoln long enough to graduate, he is not a garden variety dropout.

While there, he was part of a Grand Prize-winning team in the Vesuvius Challenge, in which they used computer technology to virtually unravel a 2,000 year old ancient Roman scroll. The scroll was a scrap of Herculaneum papyrus which had been frozen in time – burned into lava when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD.

Farritor and two other students were able to scan the scroll, segment it out and then search for ink, uncovering its words.

The team’s prize was $700,000, and Farritor used his portion to buy a vintage Talking Heads concert poster for his brother and wanted to take his mother to Paris, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The biggest financial backer of the Vesuvius Challenge? The Musk Foundation.

Adam Ramada

No stranger to the ways of Elon Musk, Ramada is a 35-year-old venture capitalist from Miami, who put money into a company which invested in Musk’s SpaceX rocket and satellite launching project.

Playing on the President’s side, he made a $1,000-plus donation to Republican entities, public records show.

During his time as a managing partner of Spring Tide Capital, Ramada championed the raising of $12 million to help fund ZBiotics, a company which makes a probiotic drink for partyers to ingest before alcohol, designed to help stem the effects of hangovers.

As Ramada said at the time, speaking to foodbev.com, “We are thrilled to support the team as they continue to expand their revolutionary probiotic platform across many more exciting use cases that address everyday consumer pain points.”

Kyle Schutt

If technology can be used to replace some of the people being sacked by DOGE mandates, Schutt, 37, may come in handy. Believed to be based out of Arlington, Virginia, his past job history had him working as the chief technology officer for a company called Kerplunk (a startup that focuses on interviewing-software, which streamlines the process of screening new hires).

He has a Ph.D. from Virginia Tech and worked on AI for Kerplunk, which may have made him the perfect candidate for gaining access to the core management system of FEMA, where, according to a report, he had “been embedded for days.” According to Newsweek, he helped launch fundraising platform WinRed, which played a role in raising $1.8 billion for the Republican party.