Inside the DOGE Recruitment Drive

For decades, the path toward federal government employment has involved a long and winding journey for full-timers and contractors alike. The Department of Government Efficiency, the pseudo-governmental entity run by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, is doing things differently.

Recruitment to join DOGE, as the Musk-Ramaswamy group has styled itself, often starts with a message like this one sent by Shahed Khan, a co-founder of video-messaging startup Loom who is part of an informal network of techies lending a hand in the headhunting process: “I’m basically helping the DOGE team bring on insanely talented people ahead of the transition. Can you commit to 80+ hrs a week in DC for 6 months?”

Similar calls to arms circulated this holiday season across Silicon Valley’s most exclusive WhatsApp groups and Signal channels. Here’s another that went around last week in a WhatsApp group for Thiel Fellowship alumni: “DOGE is urgently looking for operations and software engineers to help cut 2 trillion from the national spend. Please reach out if interested!” That one came from Luke Farritor, a 22-year-old Thiel Fellow who received the grant for his work on cracking the Vesuvius scrolls.