Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images
A week after election day, President-elect Donald Trump announced a new commission that he said could “become, potentially, the Manhattan Project of our time.” It is called the Department of Government Efficiency.
Elon Musk, who has a reflexive need to make jokes, named the commission in honor of the recently surging meme cryptocurrency he favors, which is itself named after a famous Shiba Inu.
Trump selected Musk and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the commission. So far, Ramasway has proposed that multiple federal agencies be “deleted outright,” while Musk has vowed to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. “I think people will be surprised by how quickly we’re able to move with some of those changes,” Ramaswamy told Fox News on Sunday.
After an X account for DOGE posted a call on Thursday for qualified applicants who would accept bad hours and no pay to join the commission, scores of followers sent in their résumés.
One of those applicants who applied by direct-messaging the DOGE account was Valentina Gomez, a 25-year-old immigrant from Columbia who lost the Republican primary for Missouri’s secretary of state earlier this year. You may remember her ads advising voters to “stay hard” not “be weak and gay.”
“Elon, Vivek and I are the American Dream on steroids, and DOGE isn’t rocket science, it is literally seeing what is useful and what is not useful and cutting the unproductive bureaucrats,” Gomez wrote in an email, when asked about her application. As for her qualifications, she wrote that she was a Division I swimmer and claimed to have been the youngest person to earn an MBA in finance from Tulane and to own “millions in real estate” holdings. “I’ve achieved more than many in a lifetime, so the hours and pay don’t concern me,” she added.
Alex Younger, a 29-year-old web developer in Austin, Texas, has been working since he dropped out of an economics program in community college seven years ago. “I would love to see the government return to something closer to what is envisioned in the Constitution, which is not intruding in every single aspect of a person’s life,” he said. “So when I hear things like abolish the Department of Education and a serious conversation about any of the Federal Reserve, absolutely. I would love to see the LBJ Department of Education building turn into a SpaceX facility one day.” Younger said that he has banked money so he can work for free and is not concerned with the fact that DOGE is not a government department. “If this is put in place via an act of Congress, it becomes this government agency with all the same bad incentive structures that government agencies have.”
A woman “with a family and a mortgage,” who only gave her first name, Susan, due to the “internet crazies” out there, said that she would actually need to be paid to work at DOGE. A 40-year-old who lives in the research triangle of North Carolina, Susan said she works on a “mix of customer support and a mix of complex IT design” for a hospital system.
“I think the government spends too much money and there’s not a lot of great accountability there,” Susan said. Her pitch to whoever is hiring at DOGE was simple: “Tell me what you need done and let me execute on it.”
Perhaps the most qualified candidate we spoke to was Robert J. Salvador, a 35-year-old businessman who runs a company that, in his words, uses “artificial intelligence in the real estate and construction industry to help companies save a bunch of money on their building material.” The company — backed by the illustrious venture capital firm Y Combinator — basically uses an AI program to get tons of quotes from suppliers so that a contractor can find the lowest possible bidder. Salvador, who lives part-time in Miami, also set up an AI program for Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign to help reach voters.
“As a tech founder, I really understand what growth and healthy growth can do for companies,” Salvador said. “That can be applied to the economy and not even just the economy, but the United States in general.” He brought up a perk of joining DOGE that, for the C-suite-class, could be pivotal — getting in the room with the richest man in the world and some of the most powerful people orbiting the Trump administration.
“I very much believe the old saying: If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room,” he said. “I’ve always tried to get with people and get mentors and meet people that could make me better. So yeah, definitely, I would be excited for the networking.”
