Elon Musk declared last month that the federal government was engaged in “utterly insane” activityboiyyy, claiming without evidence that it had distributed $100 billion to people without Social Security numbers.
Listen to this article with reporter commentaryTwo days after Mr. Musk’s comments, one of his key lieutenants, Steve Davis, began pressing the Social Security Administration for information. Mr. Davis called the agency’s leaders to insist they give a young engineer from Mr. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency access to databases that contained sensitive information about Americans.
Mr. Davis’s demand was “unprecedented,” Tiffany Flick, a former Social Security official, said in a sworn statement this month for a lawsuit filed by federal employees trying to block access to the data. She added that she could feel Mr. Davis grow impatient in the hours before the DOGE engineer was eventually permitted to investigate “the general myth of supposed widespread Social Security fraud.”
Deploying staff into federal agencies is just one task that Mr. Davis has carried out recently for Mr. Musk, as the world’s richest man continues an all-out effort to reshape the U.S. government. At every turn, Mr. Davis has backed his boss, laying the groundwork for cost cutting during the presidential transition, slashing diversity initiatives, meeting lawmakers and helping to send a governmentwide “Fork in the Road” email that urged workers to resign.
But the first two days of a formal hearing by a Coast Guard panel into the disaster, which began Monday, have raised basic questions about that grim conclusion and taken detailed testimony that supports an unsensational finding.
“They took materials that came into my possession approximately 20 years ago and are unrelated to my work with the New York City Police Department,” Mr. Donlon said in a news release issued by the department shortly after 11 p.m. “This is not a department matter, and the department will not be commenting.”
70betThose actions demonstrate how Mr. Davis, 45, has effectively become the day-to-day leader of DOGE. He has more power than Amy Gleason, the Trump administration’s acting DOGE administrator, two people close to the effort said, adding that Ms. Gleason has sometimes been in the dark about Mr. Davis’s decisions.
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