One of the nagging questions about the DOGE fiasco is why. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was established to cut $2 trillion from the $7 trillion federal budget. But in fiscal year 2026, which ended two weeks ago, the federal budget was $7.4 trillion, a 6 percent increase. The budget deficit, whose size was the reason to cut government spending, increased by 12 percent to $2 trillion.
Some of that increased spending is the result of DOGE cuts. As I explained four months after DOGE closed its doors last year, even if we were to take at face value DOGE’s claim to have saved the taxpayer $215 billion, you’d have to subtract from that the $135 billion that Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, said DOGE cost the government in lost productivity, paid leave, and the rehiring of fired workers. You’d also have to figure in the $597 billion in lost revenue that the Yale Budget Lab now projects for the next ten years due to DOGE cuts at the Internal Revenue Service. That puts DOGE about $517 million in the hole (more than twice the estimate I reported last year).
So why did about 200 people, more than two dozen of them “special employees” drawn from the tech world, flock to DOGE? As Michael Lewis observes in his wonderful new book, Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State, the typical special employee “was a twenty-five-year-old tech guy trying to breathe the same air as Elon Musk and only just now grokking the fact that the United States government had three branches.” DOGE had the feel of a startup, with Musk hosting a six-month slumber party on the fifth floor of the Office of Personnel Management, from which most OPM personnel, even very high-ranking ones, were excluded. The Muskrats had carte blanche to show up at any federal agency and secure access to computer data that they didn’t even try to understand. Not understanding made it easier to score points with Musk.
But Lewis’s answer is incomplete; it turns out there’s also a simpler and more cynical answer. Like so many self-styled crusaders against government spending—indeed, like Musk himself, whose companies, pre-DOGE, extracted somewhere north of $38 billion from the federal government—the Muskrats wanted to suck on the government teat.
Read all about it in a Washington Post story published Monday:
[R]oughly two dozen former DOGE staffers have parlayed their government experience into relevant private-sector jobs or investments—becoming founders, securing CEO positions or senior executive roles, amassing large stakes in start-ups looking to win government contracts or approvals, or taking the skills developed at DOGE to the private sector. Though several of the businesses are only months old, with little public activity, at least six DOGE alumni have registered on Sam.gov, a government contracting portal examined by The Post.
DOGE-founded and DOGE-funded startups have raised at least $1 billion in funding, the Post reports. “They have built a cottage industry of ambitious but largely untested businesses, often helmed by inexperienced founders, sometimes drawing initial valuations in the billions of dollars.” This is Gilded Age-level squalor.
One of the teat-suckers is Gavin Kliger, a MAGA true believer who boasted on Substack that he “gave up a seven-figure salary to save America.” Kliger shows up on page 62 of Lewis’s book, demanding entry to the Internal Revenue Service:
He offered not even the faintest smile or the most glancing eye contract. Dressed in black from hoodie to sneaker, he was brusque to the point of rudeness. He looked and was just a few years out of college. Eyes on the floor, he explained to [an IRS personnel officer] that he’d come to sort out the problems inside the IRS and to root out the fraud…. He also demanded—and it really did sound more like an order than a request—his own IRS email address [and] access to computer systems with all taxpayer information,…. She explained to Gavin the IRS rules: before anyone was allowed to work inside the building, he needed to pass a tax audit.
I don’t need to do that, he said.
Yes, you do, she replied.
No, I don’t, he said.
Yes, you do, she replied.
Eventually Kliger gets set up in a conference room with an assistant and acquires some computer access, but none to any taxpayer information. “People started getting these calls,” the IRS’s chief privacy officer, Kathleen Walters, tells Lewis. “It was like getting the call from the principal’s office. ‘Gavin wants to see you.’”
I don’t think I’m giving much away when I inform you that Kliger eventually drives Walters to quit. Subsequently Kliger is himself fired by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, but only after Bessent nearly gets into a fistfight with Musk in the Oval Office. (“Fuck you!” “Say it louder!”) No matter; Kliger simply moves over to the Defense Department, where Pete Hegseth makes him chief data officer. Because what do you do when some white-nationalist-retweeting lowlife wants to get his mitts all over sensitive data? You set him loose in the Pentagon!
In April, Kliger left the Pentagon to co-found, with three other former Muskrats, a startup, Cathedral, that according to Reuters “aims to use AI to expand U.S. military cyber capabilities.” Before he left the Pentagon, Kliger was “involved in the department’s highly publicized legal fight with Anthropic over how its AI technology would be used by the military.” Which would seem to pose a conflict of interest with his new company, no? The rules say senior Pentagon employees may not seek government contracts for up to two years after their departure. But the nonprofit Revolving Door Project Executive Director Jeff Hauser breaks the bad news to the Post that “fundraising for start-ups intending to seek government work” is a probable gray area.
Cathedral is valued by investors at $1.4 billion. These investors include Andreesen Horowitz, the richest venture capital firm on Sand Hill Road, and also the one Bloomberg has identified as “the first outside call that top White House officials and senior Republican congressional aides make when considering moves that could affect tech companies’ AI plans.” It’s almost as though the thing for which Kliger gave up his seven-figure salary when he joined DOGE was an eight- or nine-figure salary.
Andreesen Horowitz is also sprinkling its fairy dust on a startup called Special, which “is building an operating system to transform critical American industries with AI,” whatever that means. Special’s founders, DOGE alumni Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox, pledge to run the company in “the spirit of DOGE.” They’re starting with health care, which is kind of alarming when you remember that “the spirit of DOGE” killed an estimated 781,343 people, of which 518,428 were children, when it shut down USAID.
Cavanaugh shows up on page two of Lewis’s book. “He was expecting me to jump to,” recalls Colin O’Brien, chief security officer at the United States Institute of Peace. O’Brien does not. “He had this air of superiority,” O’Brien tells Lewis. “You could feel him looking down on you.” Eventually Cavanaugh shows up with some D.C. cops who for some reason have decided that it’s legal for the federal government so make forced entry into the building of a private nonprofit that’s only partially funded by Congress. A district court judge disagrees with the cops’ conclusion, only to be overturned on appeal.
Cavanaugh reappears at the end of this chapter being interviewed on Fox News with Elon Musk. At Musk’s prompting, Cavanaugh cites as one of DOGE’s more scandalous findings that the Institute of Peace “had a $130,000 contract with a former member of the Taliban.” This is one of the more enraging passages in Lewis’s book. The former Talib, Mohammed Qasem Halimi, quit the Taliban after 9/11 (which happened when Cavanaugh was 5 years old) and became a United States ally—not a spy, exactly, per Lewis, but someone on whom the U.S. relied for important information. The Taliban, Lewis reports, tried to kill Halimi three times. He was evacuated when United States troops left Afghanistan. At the time of the Fox interview, Musk had identified Halimi by name in a tweet, essentially exposing, Lewis writes, “a U.S. asset to enemies of America.”
After the tweet, the Taliban rounded up Halimi’s relatives in Afghanistan to imprison and beat them. Is it conceivable Cavanaugh and Musk don’t know this? It is not. They just don’t care. Pro Publica reported in August 2025 that four weeks before Cavanaugh shot off his mouth on Fox News he was “sent dozens of pages of internal records from USIP outlining Halimi’s work in detail.” The Taliban’s beatings of Hallimi’s family, for which Cavanaugh and Musk are directly responsible, attest further to “the spirit of DOGE” in the health care field. They also indicate an indifference to detail that should worry any Special investor.
This is the part of my column where usually I wrap things up by writing something darkly witty and sardonic. But this time I can only say: God damn these people. God damn them to hell.
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