The Free Press
Meet the lads who will help decide the fate of America’s administrative state. Many of them are barely old enough to order a drink. And yet these engineers staffing Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, appear to be running the current Hunger Games for the federal bureaucracy.
Or so it would seem from recent profiles of the young engineers selected by Musk to cut the fat out of such bureaucracies as the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The DOGE lads include 22-year-old Luke Farritor, who won a $250,000 prize for using AI to help decode one of the ancient scrolls found near the ruins of Pompeii. (We profiled him in February 2024.) There is also 21-year-old Akash Bobba, a Berkeley student and former intern at the Bridgewater Associates investment firm. And Ethan Shaotran, a 22-year-old senior at Harvard University, who launched his own AI start-up with a $100,000 grant from OpenAI. And let’s not forget Gavin Kleger, 25, who lists his title as “Special Adviser to the Director” of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. His paywalled Substack, with one post titled “Why I Gave Up a Seven-Figure Salary to Save America” can be read for $1,000 a month or $10,000 a year.
While these whippersnappers have impressive accomplishments and look primed for long and prosperous careers in tech and business, many of Washington’s middle-aged pundits and journalists are shocked and horrified that the fate of the federal government appears to be in the hands of kids who were in grade school when Donald Trump was first elected president in 2016.
“It is very unlikely they have the expertise to understand either the law or the administrative needs that surround these agencies,” huffed University of Minnesota law professor Nick Bednar to Wired magazine.
The Democrats agree. “The American people will not stand for an unelected secret group to run rampant through the executive branch,” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said on Tuesday. “Being innovative is good, but Mr. Musk, this isn’t a tech startup. These are public institutions.”
Admittedly, like so much in the new Trump era, there is a strong possibility that all of this disruption will end in catastrophe. But before you reach for the Valium, it’s worth considering that this is by no means the first time twentysomethings have helped lead a revolution inside the nation’s capital.
Peter Robinson, who led his own conservative revolution in Washington 45 years ago, was a twentysomething speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan. He told The Free Press that sometimes the young and inexperienced bring a certain fearlessness in taking on encrusted bureaucracies.
Robinson helped write Reagan’s famous speech where he implored Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” referring to the barrier that divided East and West Berlin. Robinson said that this iconic section of the speech was opposed by Reagan’s secretary of state, George Shultz, and his brilliant aide, Peter Rodman.
“Schultz had served in the Nixon administration and Rodman was a protégé of Henry Kissinger,” he said. “They had learned in their youth that in the Cold War, we would not win and they would not lose.” In this respect, Robinson said, they were shaped by the realities of their youth. He had the advantage of being a very young man who hadn’t learned those hard lessons, and that allowed him to better align with the president for whom he was writing speeches.
The point is that sometimes being young is an advantage because you haven’t learned you can’t do the things that your president insists must be done.
Then there was President Harry Truman’s decision to recognize the state of Israel. He brought in a young lawyer named Clark Clifford to argue the case for recognizing the Jewish state, which was fiercely opposed by his secretary of state, George Marshall, who had been the top general in World War II. All his experience had taught Marshall to be attuned to the long-standing opposition of Saudi Arabia and other Arab states to the creation of Israel. Clifford had the advantage of lacking precisely that experience.
Robinson finds the critique of the young lads of DOGE to be absurd for another reason—namely, the federal government has always relied on talented and ambitious young people; as they get older and start families, working for the government becomes financially difficult.
“Not only should Washington be open to young people, but young people are the only people in Washington to get things done that you can rely on,” Robinson said. “People in the middle of their careers cannot afford to stay in government because government salaries are not that great. High-flyers go to Wall Street or Silicon Valley; they don’t stay in Washington for their peak earning years.”
Finally, it’s a bit unfair to say that the young kids like Farritor, Bobba, Shaotran, and Kleger are making billion-dollar decisions on what programs will be cut. They are still working on behalf of President Donald Trump. “The president has the right to send his people to look under the hood of any agency,” Yuval Levin, the director of social, cultural, and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute, told The Free Press.
The problem, Levin said, is that the Trump administration has not made clear what the “end goal of DOGE is at this point.” Indeed, it has not. If DOGE is an instrument aimed at reducing the federal budget deficit, then even dramatic moves like eliminating the Department of Education or USAID will hardly make a difference, if government entitlements and defense spending are not addressed. If DOGE is just a way to cut the waste, fraud, and abuse from government, then perhaps it would be wiser to operate as a scalpel within government programs instead of as a sledgehammer eliminating whole programs altogether.
Whatever happens with DOGE, though, it’s important to remember that the young lads working for Musk are not really the deciders. It’s the middle-aged billionaire advising the senior citizen president who makes the call of what government programs live or die.
