DOGE aides, working under Musk, introduced in Fox interview

For the first time Thursday evening, Americans got a peek behind the curtain at some of the Department of Government Efficiency employees who have helped billionaire Elon Musk as he tries to transform the federal government under President Donald Trump.

They talked about leaving behind families and lucrative jobs out of a desire to save the country and make sure more tax dollars end up in the hands of taxpayers. They spoke of patriotism and ensuring that grandma gets her Social Security check.

“I was running five businesses in Houston, and I left that. I left great people to do this… I feel like this is me giving back to the country,” said Tyler Hassen, a former oil executive embedded in the Interior Department.

In an interview with Fox’s Bret Baier, Hassen and six other DOGE workers lamented the state of the government’s records, payment and other systems, assuring viewers they are adopting a tech-savvy, user-friendly approach. And they shrugged off concerns about how DOGE operates and how many federal employees have lost their jobs.

The charm offensive contrasted with DOGE’s murky blitz through the federal government in the last two months, which has resulted in mass layoffs and entire agencies being effectively shuttered.

Tens of thousands of federal employees have lost their jobs nationwide, and that number is expected to increase dramatically in coming weeks as agencies implement layoff plans aimed at streamlining what they do.

“This is a revolution and I think it might be the biggest revolution in the government since the original revolution,” said Musk, who also participated in the Fox interview.

Meeting DOGE

The seven men appeared to be in their 40s and 50s and came from New York, Texas and California. They previously worked in banking, oil and technology companies and many of them have financial ties to Musk as employees or investors in his companies.

They make up a fraction of the team that has been deployed to agencies across government.

Details of who makes up the DOGE staff have been scarce despite the intense media attention on the team’s efforts. Many of the early hires were believed to be young tech engineers with little to no government experience, prompting criticism from Democrats and unions that critical government services and systems would be cut or destroyed. That criticism grew even louder as government employees raised concerns about DOGE efforts to gain access to the personal information of millions of Americans held by the government through agencies like Social Security and the IRS.

In recent weeks, DOGE has brought on additional employees, including several from Musk’s companies or other Silicon Valley tech companies, but the administration has been resistant to releasing any information about them, with Musk going so far as to say on social media that disclosing information about DOGE employees is “possibly criminal.”

Musk also did a separate one-on-one interview with Baier that aired Thursday. Amy Gleason, a former official at the U.S. Digital Service, whom the White House named as the acting DOGE administrator, was not among the participants in either interview.

As Elon Musk remakes Washington, we ask: Who is this guy anyway?

Senior Adviser Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency are remaking federal government at a scale and speed never before seen.

What they do

Anthony Armstrong – a former Morgan Stanley banker and Musk investor working as a senior adviser for DOGE at the Office of Personnel Management – defended how his team has approached reducing a federal workforce of more than 2 million employees, claiming it isn’t as radical as the media reports.

“Once those decisions are made, there’s a very heavy focus on being generous, being caring, being compassionate and treating everyone with dignity and respect,” Armstrong said.

Armstrong said federal workers are leaving “largely through voluntary means.”

More than 100,000 federal employees lost their jobs in the past two months through layoffs of probationary employees, who are new to government work or recently moved between agencies or accepted a promotion, though federal judges have ordered that some must be reinstated until they resolve whether the firings were legal. Another estimated 75,000 federal employees accepted a buyout offer Trump extended shortly after he took office.

Multiple federal agencies have announced a RIF or reduction in force, saying they plan to reduce their workforce by tens of thousands of employees each in the coming weeks.

Removing duplication, glitches

DOGE has inserted employees into many departments and agencies, but what exactly they are doing hasn’t been very clear.

Joe Gebbia, a co-founder of Airbnb, focused on overhauling the retirement system for federal workers, talked about the duplication DOGE staffers are seeing in government systems. He said he has been working to digitize millions of retirement documents housed in a mine in Pennsylvania to speed up the process.

“We really believe that the government can have an Apple Store-like experience: beautifully designed, great user experience, modern systems,” he said.

Gebbia has a net worth of $8 billion, making him one of the 400 wealthiest people in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Tom Krause, CEO of Cloud Software Group, who has previously popped up in lawsuits challenging DOGE’s authority, said Thursday that he wanted to be able to audit all the payments the government makes.

In February, after a lawsuit by labor unions, the Trump administration agreed that Krause’s access to Treasury Department payment systems would be “read only,” without the authority to make changes.

“As an ex-CFO of a big public tech company, really what we’re doing is, we’re applying public company standards to the federal government, and it is alarming how the financial operations and financial management is set up today,” he said.

Baier introduced Steve Davis, who has worked at Musk’s SpaceX and The Boring Co. and was an investor in Musk’s social media app, X, as “chief operating officer” of DOGE.

Davis said in the interview that the country was at risk of “going bankrupt” and that, with the support of Trump and his Cabinet, he believed stopping that was possible.

More: Trump claims ‘shocking levels’ of fraud in Social Security. Here’s what we know.

Aram Moghaddassi, a DOGE software engineer who also worked for X, said he is working on Social Security, trying to help protect people from fraud and improve their experience.

“At Social Security, one of the first things we learned is that they get phone calls every day of people trying to change direct deposit information,” he said. “We learned 40% of the phone calls they get are from fraudsters,” he said.

He said he was inspired to join DOGE to modernize government computer systems.

Brad Smith, who is working for DOGE at the Department of Health and Human Services, said the department is committed to making sure the U.S. have the best biomedical research in the world and “No. 2, making sure, which President Trump has said over and over again, that we 100% protect Medicare and Medicaid.”

He said that DOGE is looking at consolidating offices and technology systems, pointing out that the National Institutes of Health alone has 700 different IT systems and 27 separate chief information officers managing its tech operations.

Smith led an office at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that experiments with payment models for health services during the first Trump administration and became closely involved in the coronavirus pandemic response.

Hassen, the former oil executive assigned to the Interior Department, criticized what he called a lack of oversight under the Biden administration.

“We are now reviewing every single contract, every single grant, and when things come to my attention that don’t make sense, I’m bringing them to Secretary (Doug) Burgum,” Hassen said, naming the secretary of the Interior. 

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