As wildfires spread across the United States, the federal government is confronting the consequences of cuts made early in President Donald Trump’s second term. The U.S. Forest Service was among the agencies hit by the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and MS NOW reports that the reductions have hampered the government’s response to the blazes.
DOGE was created to bring private-sector methods into government and dramatically reduce federal spending. Spearheaded by Elon Musk, the project moved quickly across the bureaucracy, cutting staff, canceling contracts and dismantling programs. Critics say it went too far, leaving agencies less prepared to respond to emergencies.
Elon Musk
Musk was widely seen as DOGE’s ideological driving force. As an unpaid special government employee and White House adviser, he pushed sweeping cuts across the federal bureaucracy. Teams drawn largely from his companies entered more than 20 agencies, accessed sensitive systems, canceled contracts and grants, offered buyouts and helped trigger mass layoffs.
Musk claimed the effort could uncover $1 trillion in savings, but DOGE’s published totals were repeatedly challenged over missing evidence and accounting errors. He left government in mid-2025 amid a public rupture with Trump but has remained active in politics. Most recently, his America PAC reportedly plans to spend $100 million to boost Republican turnout in the midterm elections.
Edward Coristine
Edward Coristine, known online as “Big Balls,” became one of the most recognizable symbols of DOGE’s disruption of government. A whistleblower alleged that Coristine planned to upload sensitive Social Security Administration data to an unsecured server. He also helped dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID.
Coristine now appears to work at the National Design Studio, an office created to overhaul federal websites and other public-facing services, making them more usable, visually consistent and less expensive to build.
Jeremy Lewin
Not every DOGE staffer left government for the private sector. Jeremy Lewin helped oversee the dismantling of USAID, drafting plans to wind down the agency before being placed in charge of much of what remained.
Lewin later became the State Department’s senior official for foreign assistance, humanitarian affairs and religious freedom, giving a former DOGE operative authority over the programs his old team had helped slash. The Washington Post reported that Lewin continued to direct America’s foreign-assistance programs, making him perhaps the clearest example of DOGE’s personnel and philosophy becoming embedded in the government it set out to disrupt. He was subsequently reported to be moving to the White House National Security Council.
Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox
Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox helped reshape the U.S. Institute of Peace and implement an LLM-based review of government materials. They have since founded a holding company called Special, which promises to do for private businesses what DOGE did for the federal government.
“To achieve this, Special is building an operating system to transform critical American industries with AI,” the pair wrote in a Substack post announcing the company. “We call it SpecialOS.”
Gavin Kliger, Luke Farritor, Marko Elez and Jack Stein
Special is not the only example of former DOGE staffers joining forces and taking their methods elsewhere. Gavin Kliger, Luke Farritor, Marko Elez and Jack Stein founded Cathedral, a startup that plans to use AI to expand U.S. military cyber capabilities, including defenses against adversaries such as China.
Reuters reported that the company raised $160 million at a $1.4 billion valuation.
Ethan Shaotran
Ethan Shaotran has followed a similar path from DOGE to defense technology. The former DOGE engineer left the government in January 2026 after working at the Social Security Administration, where he helped move thousands of immigrants into the government’s “Master Death File,” effectively deactivating their Social Security numbers.
Shaotran has since founded Blitz Industries, which he described to Wired as “a defense company backed by big names.”
