On Musk’s Day in Washington, DC: Can You Believe We Are Spending Federal Grants on Nongovernmental Organizations? A Brief History of the Alfalfa Club Banquet
He dressed up for the occasion, but Musk wasn’t a big fan of formality. The annual banquet of the Alfalfa Club was a place where the most important people in government and business could meet one another, and that was all it had been since 1913. Only those who had already been members were allowed newsprouts, and the number of members limited to around 200. Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan joined the likes of Microsoft CEO s and a US senator as members. Musk was attending as a guest.
As Musk sat in the Hilton ballroom, his operatives, working under a trusted lieutenant, had already gained access to systems at the Office of Personnel Management, the federal HR department for 2.2 million or so career civil servants. Many of these operatives would show up later at agencies across the federal government—people like Akash Bobba, a UC Berkeley graduate and former intern at Palantir, the defense contractor cofounded by Peter Thiel; Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old who has gone by the online nickname “Big Balls”; and Nikhil Rajpal, an engineer in his thirties who had worked at Twitter during Musk’s acquisition, where he’d once pitched the idea of auctioning off dormant usernames to the highest bidder. As an undergraduate, also at UC Berkeley, Rajpal had been president of a libertarian student group that was fond of the motto “Futuate cohortem urbanam”—Latin It’s possible for 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. Musk turned to those around the table at the Hilton: Can you believe we were spending taxpayer money on condoms? The people shook their heads. Musk looked back at his phone. Is it possible to cut all federal grants to NGOs?
A few people at the banquet that day in Washington, DC, didn’t know that senior executives and young Musk devotees were planning 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.
As America’s most decorated civil servants sipped cocktails in a presidential ballroom of the Capital Hilton, they were worried about their table assignments and wondered where they ranked among the US senator and the Emirati ambassador.
At least 10 people associated with Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are now working at the Social Security Administration, according to government records reviewed by WIRED; this includes a number of young engineers whose presence at the SSA has not been reported. The ballooning of DOGE’s presence at the federal agency—which Bloomberg, citing sworn statements filed in federal court Wednesday, previously reported—comes as Musk and his cohorts are publicly threatening social security benefits, citing unsubstantiated claims of mass fraud.
These records have a lot of personally identifying and financial information that the government says is necessary to detect fraud.
The DOGE-affiliated personnel in question are currently listed in the agency’s internal organizational chart. Background checks for two are still pending, according to a filing by the SSA in federal court in Maryland opposing a motion for a temporary restraining order filed by unions that would prevent DOGE from accessing SSA records. According to a sworn statement attached to the file, 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 in the agency’s headquarters as “IT Specialists”, except for Bobba, who is in the office of the CIO.
The operatives—whom the government did not name in its filing—are, according to internal documents, Akash Bobba, Scott Coulter, Marko Elez, Luke Farritor, Antonio Gracias, Gautier Cole Killian, Jon Koval, Nikhil Rajpal, Payton Rehling, and Ethan Shaotran. This team appears to be among the largest DOGE units deployed to any government agency.