The Acolyte

A profile of one DOGEr tells us much about a broader movement

We know little about the motivations of the young DOGE soldiers. We know so much — maybe too much — about Musk, but not those who obeyed his call. It is perhaps too easy to dismiss them as reactionaries or self-interested. There is value in understanding their motivations and worldview since they are, for better or worse (and so far, for worse) in the driving seat for some of the most fundamental changes in American government.

I previously wrote about Sahil Lavignia, the DOGE employee who was fired after he reported that the government was not, after all, as inefficient as DOGE reported. Now Susan Berfield, Margi Murphy and Jason Leopold at Bloomberg provides an in-depth profile of DOGEr Luke Farritor. I will offer my thoughts based on excerpts below, but urge you read the whole thing.

Image from Bloomberg

Farritor reads an American tragedy: a smart and curious young man raised in a midwestern college town, interested in history and technology. His father, a university professor in mechanical engineering, taught his son the value of building: “Making is a better way of thinking.” The son bought into far right ideas about government, and used his talents to eviscerate it. Rather than building, he destroyed.

Farritor was involved in downsizing or effectively closing a combined nine federal agencies in total. That is an extraordinary level of power for anyone. Handing it to a 23 year old libertarian who has trained himself not to see the value of government work is an indictment of how the GOP no longer cares about governing.

The thing that should haunt Farritor’s conscience, and will haunt his reputation, was his role in gutting USAID, an action that will condemn potentially millions of the most vulnerable people in the world to death. It is almost impossible to overstate how great of a moral monstrosity these actions were.

Indeed, the Washington Post reported that Farritor was involved in manually switching off foreign aid, violating public promises by the Secretary of State that life-saving programs would not be cut.

Several times, USAID managers prepared packages of these payments and got the agency’s interim leaders to sign off on them with support from the White House. But each time, using their new gatekeeping powers and clearly acting on orders from Musk or one of his lieutenants, Farritor and Kliger would veto the payments — a process that required them to manually check boxes in the payment system one at a time, the same tedious way you probably pay your bills online.

It’s like a version of the trolley problem, but on the one hand you choose to turn a switch that will kill countless number of people, and on the other hand you obey the law, and the Senate-approved head of your agency, and not kill people. Not an incredibly challenging moral test for most people, but it was for DOGE and it was for Farritor.

When Farritor was called out online for this role, he expressed no remorse, instead repeating Musk's conspiracy theories about the "corrupt elite" who were using USAID to control the world:

…when a former friend posted an article critical of Farritor and DOGE on Instagram, Farritor replied with a meme of a crying baby and the caption: “When the corrupt elites can’t access USAID anymore.”

How do people get to this point? At college, the home-schooled libertarian sometimes did not work well with others, especially female colleagues. He was already identifying with Silicon Valley titans like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, sharing their ideas in college group chats.

Farritor soon found entry points into their world, interning at SpaceX. He won a series of prizes for using AI to decode the contents of ancient scrolls, and became a Thiel fellow when he dropped out of college. The young man who struggled to relate with classmates in Nebraska now dined with moguls, and libertarian intellectuals like Tyler Cowen, and was showered with more awards and job offers. He described it as “a magical experience.”

Bue he still had not quite found a home in this world. Farritor tagged Musk repeatedly on social media, describing him as his “biggest hero” while hoping for an acknowledgment. His social media posting echoed the anti-government themes that Musk had adopted.

And then Farritor joined DOGE:

One person on the call says he didn’t think Farritor was that excited about cutting government waste, just working with Musk. He asked if Farritor would get to meet Musk and recalls Farritor saying: That’s the dream.

That attitude was common. DOGE appeared to have been a mix of people already in Musk’s orbit, or those hoping to get his attention. Sahil Lavignia recalled a meeting where Musk met with DOGErs offering general criticism of government but not engaging on any sort of practical detail. “It’s almost like this is one of the things you get for working at DOGE. You get to hang out with Elon once in a while.” Farritor achieved his goal, becoming a trusted DOGE aide who joined Musk on Fox News.

As I reported back in March, Farritor had tried and failed to join the US Digital Service before Trump took office. His application, including a one sentence cover letter — “Super passionate about serving my country in the U.S.D.S.!” — failed the first stage of the process, a review of resumes. He did not advance to an interview.

In the Bloomberg profile, a government employee provides a fairly compelling rationale for USDS not hiring someone like Farritor. It had nothing to do with his political beliefs, and everything to do with his limited experience.

“Luke’s résumé didn’t pass muster,” says a former senior government official who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation for discussing the hiring of Farritor and other DOGE members. “It’s not to say he isn’t smart.” But the USDS required applicants to have a college degree and at least five years of industry experience. “You have to bring some expertise. It’s not just like, ‘Oh, I wrote a Python AI thing.’ Yeah, that’s not gonna cut it.” The official says that many of the younger software engineers who’d been approved by DOGE would have been rejected by USDS: “They actually don’t have the wisdom from having burned your fingers a number of times.” And, the official says, they hadn’t developed an essential skill. “It is as important to be able to influence people in power as it is to write code.”

In other words, experience provides humility. Farritor had neither. Experience is especially important in a public settings, since the inevitable arc of technologists in government goes in one of two directions. They start by assuming they know better than the people who are familiar with the statutes and programs they are asked to implement, and treat them condescendingly. Then, they either learn that they are wrong, or they don’t. The ones who learn can become truly useful government officials. Those that don’t end up growing frustrated and leaving, or if given sufficient power, destroy what they don’t understand. Farritor, the brilliant and curious young man, is in the latter category.

Farritor is both shaped by and benefits from a right wing Silicon Valley ecosystem that denigrates government, encourages radical action, and provides a cushion against social opprobrium. Lavingia, the DOGE employee who was fired for defending government, notes the social pressures once in DOGE:

You’re not going to get asked by Steve Davis [Musk’s lieutenant who worked as the day-to-day leader of DOGE] to do this and then in the room be like, ‘I’m not going to do that.’ You’re going to be like, ‘Oh, I can totally pull that off in 15 minutes with some software that gets all these files from their computer so we can see what they’re doing.’

A government official observing the “DOGE kids” described almost a cult-like mode of existence.

They come as a group. That’s the whole DOGE thing. It’s all DOGE all the time. Like they’re literally not given the mental space to go have an independent life experience and perhaps reflect on what they’re doing.

Young DOGE staff bunked together in federal offices. The General Service Administration recently removed DOGE mattresses from their offices, which is not going to do much to challenge the “DOGE as cult” image.

Some images you can smell. Source: Wired

In this cult, there was one leader, and it was not the President. It was Musk. Musk told his troops that empathy is a weakness, and treated government employees as the enemy. Thus drilled, they mimicked his behavior, treating the people who actually understand the laws and programs created by Congress with contempt. A government employee who encountered Farritor said:

The DOGE team wasn’t what I expected. Marketed as tech geniuses, yet they could barely keep up with basic tasks. In reality, they were overconfident, drunk on power and utterly clueless. They giggled and asked me how my day was going—right as they hit the keys to obliterate nearly a decade of my work. There wasn’t even a flicker of understanding or care. It wasn’t just the loss that gutted me. It was the audacity of their casual cruelty.

Farritor, the son of a physician, cancelled public health grants. He was part of a machinery that cancelled $28 million dollars for the already beleaguered University of Nebraska-Lincoln where his father works. Universities and government are two of Musk/Thiel/Andressen’s pet hates. But in many parts of the country that the Silicon Valley set will never visit, they are the engine that offers education and economic innovation.

And it’s worth dwelling on this. Take Andreessen. Recently revealed group chats find him justifying his shift to the right as a proud midwesterner. “My people” he says put up with discrimination.

There are many layers of irony to this. Andreessen went to a public university in the early 1990s where he was able to work on a federally-funded supercomputer, which gave him skills and credentials that he turned into a massively successful career. Good luck to him for that, but the chances that as a white male computer scientist that he faced much discrimination then, or in his journey is Silicon Valley, is hard to take at face value.

And to the best of my knowledge as someone who worked as a professor in Wisconsin for 13 years, Andreessen has returned nothing to “my people.” Once he reached Silicon Valley, he never looked back. Indeed, one dinner guest recalled him saying: “I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet" when referring to the rural Americans. My people, indeed.

Farritor’s and DOGE actions have aligned with Andreesen’s and Musk’s view that universities are a target in the culture war, to be attacked and defunded when possible. In helping to undermine higher education, Farritor also undermined his home community of Lincoln, Nebraska, starting with it’s university.

What was lost or disrupted this spring: A study of agricultural methods to help the poorest farmers around the world. A project to help Indigenous communities adopt traditional and sustainable farming to mitigate food insecurity. A project to “cultivate a diverse engineering workforce.”…A new program to recruit, pay for and otherwise support students from rural areas to return as teachers…What was lost beyond the university: opportunity, says one of Shane Farritor’s childhood friends, Kirk Zeller. He runs two medical device companies and helps others get going. Those kinds of early-stage companies rely on funding from NIH and the Department of Defense. “Companies won’t make it when otherwise they might have,” he says. “All I do is raise money now, and it is brutal.”

Farritor is now a permanent government employee, at the top of the pay scale for regular employees as a GS-15, being paid $167,603. How long he will stay remains to be seen. Musk is gone, and so is his lieutenant Steve Davis. Davis tried to still run DOGE meetings after he left, until the White House told staffers to stop responding to his messages.

More DOGE officials are resigning or have been fired by Cabinet Secretaries finally willing to assert their control now that Musk is gone. DOGE influence appears to be declining in the agencies they once controlled, like the Office of Personnel Management and General Services Administration.

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The tragedy of all of this is that you could see how Farritor at another time or with a different approach to the world could have used his talents to help his community or his government, but the choices he made have damaged both.

We should feel outraged by Farritor but also sorry for him. He is a grown man whose choices have hurt and killed countless people. He gave his talents away so cheaply, for a worldview deliberately drained of empathy, and to gain the approval of men who needed that worldview to reassure themselves that they were better than everyone else. When he bails from government, he will find a position in the cocoon that our new oligarchy has built to protect themselves and their destroyers. We will be left with the mess they have created.