TOI Correspondent from Washington: A 22-year-old Indian-American whiz is among half dozen young tech nerds deployed by Elon Musk in his purported effort to deflate a bloated US government amid fear and alarm in the Washington establishment that minnows, including Musk himself, will play havoc with long-established covenants.
Hundreds of government officials at the Department of Treasury, General Services Administration (GSA), Office of Personnel Management (OPM), USAID, and FBI who have been summarily fired or locked out are gathering in front of their offices in panic as Elon’s back-pack bearing “nerd army” — or Musk’s apparatchiks, according to critics — are said to be summoning senior officials for questioning, seeking access to government systems and explanations about government programs.
Among them is Akash Bobba, a graduate of UC Berkeley, whose resume includes experience in AI, data analytics, and financial modeling after internships at Meta, Palantir, and the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates. Other members, all between 21 and 24 and handpicked by the Trump’s major domo, are similarly accomplished with degrees from top US universities and work experience at firms such as Google, Tesla, SpaceX, and OpenAI. One member, Edward Coristine, at 19 the youngest, is still said to be in college.
The “Muskrats” as some critics have dubbed them, are said to be camping out in the government offices, working through nights and weekends, a feat Musk himself celebrated by mocking a bureaucracy that took time off on weekends. “Very few in the bureaucracy actually work the weekend, so it’s like the opposing team just leaves the field for 2 days!” he wrote on X, taunting federal workers who are being encouraged to resign.
Musk initially seemed to take offense about the names of his nerd army being revealed on social media, warning that such “doxxing” was illegal, but later appeared to take pride when some supporters invoked the Apollo era moonshot — when the average age of the NASA’s mission control team was said to be 27 — to argue that “young people bring a force of curiosity and creativity that can disrupt the status quo.”
But alarm continued to course through the old establishment about a “hostile government takeover” by an unelected South Africa-born billionaire who plowed in $ 290 million to back Donald Trump in the presidential election. The White House though backed Musk and his effort to cull the government work force and its spending, confirming that he is a “special government employee” with top secret clearance.
“Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval, and we’ll give him the approval, where appropriate; where not appropriate, we won’t. But he reports in,” Trump told reporters as agitated Democratic lawmakers planned to lead protests outside the Department of Treasury, which is next to the White House, on Tuesday evening.
“He does have a good, natural instinct. He’s got a team of very talented people. We’re trying to shrink government, and he can probably shrink it as well as anybody else, if not better,” Trump added about Musk and his work heading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which the Tesla/SpaceX honcho described as the “wood chipper for bureaucracy.”
Musk and his minnows are essentially dismantling storied US institutions, channeling the anger of the MAGA base, akin to how street mobs in the middle-east brought down the statues of Saddam Hussain, Moammar Gaddafi and the likes. Many foreign aid programs of the USAID are mocked and shredded by Musk and other Trump surrogates, with the agency being dubbed a front for the CIA. “USAID should’ve been disbanded years ago. It’s not foreign aid—it’s a foreign slush fund,” raged Fox commentator Laura Ingraham.
While Musk’s DOGEs of war against bloated government are dismantling USAID adn scrutinizing billions of dollars in what they see as wasteful government expenditure, action is also moving to the Department of Education, which Trump wants to be rolled up and returned to the states.