Elon Musk at a banquet: When the president of the United States was due to travel to the United Kingdom to spend more money on science and technology

Musk wasn’t big on formalities, but he’d dressed up for the occasion. The most important people in government were invited to a yearly banquet hosted by the Alfalfa Club, which was a place where important people in business could meet. Membership was limited to around 200, and the Alfalfas admitted new “sprouts” only when existing members died. Justice Elena Kagan of the Supreme Court was one of the members that evening. Musk was attending as a guest.

As Musk sat in the Hilton ballroom, his operatives, working under a trusted lieutenant, had already gained access to systems at the Office of Personnel Management, the federal HR department for 2.2 million or so career civil servants. Many of the operatives would show up later at agencies throughout the federal government, like Akash Bobba, a UC Berkeley graduate and former intern at Palantir, the defense contractor co-founded by Peter Thiel. As an undergraduate, also at UC Berkeley, Rajpal had been president of a libertarian student group that was fond of the motto “Futuate cohortem urbanam”—Latin for something like “Fuck these city dwellers.”

In Musk’s mind, Washington needed to be debugged, hard-forked, sunset. He had strike teams of young engineers that would go into the government’s byzantine bureaucratic systems and remove what they saw fit. They’d help Trump slash the budget to the bone. Musk asked those around the table if they were sure they were spending taxpayer money on condoms. They shook their heads. Musk looked back at his phone. Is it possible we would cut all federal grants to NGOs?

Few people at the banquet knew that a group of senior executives and young Musk loyalists were preparing to occupy the top offices of a nearby federal building. Under guard, they would sleep on mattresses lined with body temperature and breath rate sensors as they raced to refactor the nation’s code base—or, better yet, scrap it altogether.

As America’s most decorated civil servants sipped cocktails in the presidential ballroom of the Capital Hilton, worrying about their table assignments and wondering where they fell in the pecking order between US senator and UAE ambassador, Elon Musk sat staring at his phone, laughing.

While it’s been unclear even to well-placed insiders what specifically DOGE is doing inside the Social Security Administration, Musk has repeatedly voiced his desire to “eliminate” large parts of the system in the US, recently claiming that the fact that there are more Social Security numbers than there are US citizens—a well-known quirk of the SSA system—“might be the biggest fraud in history.”

These records contain a great deal of personally identifying and financial information; in filings the government says DOGE accessing them is necessary to “detect fraud.”

According to the SSA court filing and accompanying sworn statements seven of them have only read the Master Beneficiary Record in order to get their benefits. A database of information about every person who’s applied for a Social Security number, as well as data about SSA payments, is contained in the DOGE representatives’ only read-only access. (The Social Security Online Accounting and Reporting System is a set of systems containing “information on the SSA’s financial position and operations,” according to the SSA.)

Ten of the DOGE-affiliated staffers are listed as part of the same group within Microsoft Teams, which SSA employees use for internal communication, according to a screenshot shared with WIRED. They are listed as “IT Specialists” based at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, DC, except for Bobba, who is listed as “Front Office” in the office of the chief information officer (CIO).

The government didn’t name the operatives in its filing, but internal documents showed that Akash Bobba, Scott Coulter, and Jon Koval were among them. The team is among the largest DOGE units in the government.