I saw the real DOGE from the inside. Why the media got DOGE and Elon all wrong
My book about my time inside DOGE launched last week, and I've watched friends who privately cheer me on go completely silent in public. That’s how toxic the stigma around DOGE has become. And that stigma is built on a version of events I barely recognize.
My experience inside DOGE was almost nothing like what I read about in the mainstream news. The fairest and most balanced coverage I can remember was our interview on Fox News with Bret Baier in March 2025—but let me tell you what it was actually like.
As the DOGE lead and Acting Assistant Secretary for the U.S. Department of the Interior, I saw the accusations that we cut everything indiscriminately. That could not be further from the truth.
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Along with my DOGE colleagues and the incredible leadership of Secretary Doug Burgum, we went through thousands of contracts and grants ourselves and asked the people who knew them best to help us. Our request was simple: "Defend the spend" and tell us what was "mission critical." If a contract couldn't be defended, or even explained, why were hardworking Americans paying for it? We cut what didn't make sense and made individuals accountable.
Then there's the claim that we didn't respect career civil servants. That wasn't my experience either. I have tremendous respect for the many hardworking, genuine, and intelligent people who serve in government. Many are friends of mine today.
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What shocked me wasn't the people—it was the system around them: the inefficient organizations, the decades-old technology, and the near-total absence of accountability. Many good people were trapped inside a machine built to resist common sense.
Did we get along with everyone? No. We were there to challenge the mindset that "this is how it's always been done" as stewards of the American taxpayer. We intentionally disrupted a culture that had grown comfortable with the status quo—and yes, that made some jobs less comfortable. That was the point. Americans work hard for those dollars and deserve a government that spends them prudently. Some conflict was inevitable. But I left Washington with far more respect for career government workers than I expected to have.
What about the caricature of reckless "DOGE bros" running wild? First, those young engineers are some of the brightest people in this country. They are great Americans who sacrificed enormous private-sector opportunities to put their talents to work for their love of country. Second, the caricature erases the roughly 20 brilliant women on our team, three of them on mine at Interior. Did they want to step into the spotlight amid all the media hostility? Of course not—I feared for my own family's safety, and theirs. They did it anyway and kept working relentlessly to reduce the deficit and help American families.
And our leadership? I keep hearing people ask how anyone could work for someone as volatile as Elon Musk.
I saw the opposite. I saw a man so locked in on the problem that he sometimes slept on the floor in a nearby office. In our meetings, two things struck me that I'll never forget: his ability to be completely present with a problem until it was solved, and a sense of urgency so strong that everyone in the room felt it. It was contagious, and it was relentless. He was respectful, constructive, and sometimes even funny.
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His motivation, as best I could tell, was simple: a genuine belief that an insolvent America can't solve its own problems, let alone the world's. I happen to agree.
The rest of our senior team—patriots including Steve Davis, James Burnham, Anthony Armstrong, Josh Gruenbaum, and Stephen Ehikian, among others—brought that same seriousness. When the criticism got louder, we worked harder. I wish more Americans could have seen the teamwork and the love of country in those rooms.
Despite our best efforts, we didn't accomplish all that we set out to do. But we tried harder than anyone outside those rooms will ever know—and we proved something that matters. We proved that the operations of our government have enormous room for improvement, and that talented people willing to do the work can find problems and fix them.
That's exactly why treating DOGE as a failure to be buried is the wrong lesson. The right lesson is to learn from it and build something better.
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Because our national debt problem still exists. I don't want my daughter growing up in a country carrying $100 trillion in debt and paying trillions every year just in interest—money that could otherwise be used to improve our country—or, better yet, stay in your pocket.
If families think inflation is painful now, imagine 20 more years of compounding debt and unchecked spending. This is the slow-motion crisis we are not talking about and debating enough.
Instead of using the DOGE experience to divide us further, let's build on what it got right.
President Trump’s decision to have Vice President JD Vance lead a task force to eliminate fraud is on the right track—but let’s do the hard part together, across both parties, in a bipartisan way. Having lived it, that's the only way true spending reform will ever actually work. It will take years, but I believe we can do it.
My hand is up to help. What about yours?