The federal Department of Government Efficiency, nicknamed DOGE, has been on a tear this week under guidance of Elon Musk, who wriggled his way into a key government role after years of bowing to President Donald Trump with campaign contributions and adulation.
DOGE is not a budgeted part of the U.S. government, but rather a temporary office created through executive order by Trump. Although Musk and Trump have claimed the goal is to eliminate fraud and wasteful spending from the budget, political observers warn that DOGE is being used to wage war against entire agencies, silence opposition from employees, and reduce regulations as part of a broader agenda by the president to consolidate power.
Already, we’ve seen the gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development and all manner of meddling with the U.S. Treasury. To top it all off, a bombshell report from Wired uncovered how a number of DOGE’s key agents are software engineers aged between 19 and 24, with ties to the private businesses of Musk and far-right oligarch Peter Thiel, who worked in Trump’s first administration.
In other words, U.S. government institutions, regulations and norms are being torn asunder by a bunch of college-aged programmers groomed by billionaires — and strangely, they’re being cheered on by a coterie of founders, funders, and influencers in the San Francisco tech world.
One major fan is Garry Tan, the president-CEO of startup accelerator Y Combinator and a prolific donor to campaigns aimed at unseating progressive politics. He spoke out in a slew of messages and reposts on X this week, apparently triggered by a viral online post with photos of young DOGE engineers and a critical headline: “Who are these little boys? And why are they in charge of our money?”
“Whoever made the original graphic doesn’t understand the scale and speed of smart high IQ people who can program,” Tan asserted on Feb. 2, adding that “DOGE haters don’t understand that a small team now has incredible 1000x leverage…You don’t need 10,000 people and years anymore to do an audit.”
Others in the S.F. tech scene also chimed in, often reposted by Tan himself. Ilya Sukhar, general partner at the S.F. venture capital firm Matrix, wrote that “the government must be fiercely protected from the young, smart, and hardworking!” — a winking reference to the DOGE boys.
Austen Allred, co-founder of S.F.-based BloomTech (formerly Lambda School), went further in a post declaring, “There are 16-year-olds out there more capable of doing impressive and difficult work than 99% of government employees.”
(Ironically, Allred got caught using deceptive practices, fraudulent claims, and illegal lending with his coding bootcamp.)
The themes of youth and achievement came up over and over again. “Average age of engineers and scientists in the Manhattan Project was 25. Our current gerontocracy is ahistorical,” Susa Ventures partner Pratyush Buddiga argued in a Feb. 3 post.
Justine Moore, investment partner at Andreessen Horowitz, summed it up succinctly on X that same day: “It actually makes perfect sense to have a team of cracked zoomers on DOGE.”
Taken individually, such comments may be read as support for young talent who landed in an unprecedented position to clean up federal coffers. But as a whole, open praise from a swath of tech leaders and influencers in the Bay Area amounts to a co-signing of Trump and Musk’s campaign to dismantle regulations and oversight, especially of big business, all under the guise of radical pragmatism.
Which makes it all the more concerning to hear people like Michael Gibson, founder of the “anti-establishment educational institution” 1517 Fund in S.F., claim we need a similar vanguard of college-aged, inexperienced techies triggering all manner of security risks while attempting to dismantle governance.
“Imagine DOGE for California and SF. Just the NGOs in SF alone…,” he wrote on X.
Arun Rao, a lead product manager for generative AI at Meta and a professor at UCLA, went further in a post for “SF DOGE please.”
“Shrink the per capita budget to the size of San Jose or San Mateo. Cut and consolidate numerous depts. Increase the police force. This is a great issue for GrowSF to work with the mayor and supervisors on,” Rao wrote, referencing the well-funded political group.
In other words, what DOGE is doing on the federal level is not a singular playbook, but an attractive strategy for disruption in local government, too. And while we do not know how much support there is for DOGE among the Bay Area’s tech rank-and-file, it’s become clear that the industry’s biggest figures are lining up behind Trump.
They’re not just doing it out of a need to cooperate with the administration, but for ideological reasons fueled by dreams of a laissez-faire tech revolution. Otherwise, why the hell would billionaire Marc Andreessen choose to be the “unpaid intern” of DOGE and recruit its staff?
Such actions speak to how tech culture has shifted from the liberal-Democrat alignment of Silicon Valley in the aughts and early 2010s into a reactionary movement that craves deregulation by any means necessary, even if it means cozying up to far-right actors. In fact, tech embracing DOGE and its culture war aligns neatly with its embrace of “effective accelerationism,” a popular theory that posits that human evolution relies on unfettered development of AI in a hyper-capitalized market free of government.
In his manifesto on effective accelerationism, commonly referred to as e/acc, Andreessen criticizes concepts like “collectivism” and “sustainability” as being antithetical to e/acc, blaming “socialism” and “anti-growth” beliefs while championing individual merit and capitalist competition as necessary for humanity’s survival. He lauds personal achievement and superior intelligence, and has railed against the forces of “censorship” and “wokeism” in modern culture.
It should be no surprise, then, that he helped empower a bunch of inexperienced whiz-kids to do things like… scream at senior developers and resign for being extremely racist.
It is not controversial to suggest government bureaucracy and budgets need surgery. It also matters who’s holding the scalpel. Musk and DOGE may be cutting arteries and claiming they’re saving lives — but at least they have a dedicated fanbase in the Bay Area, cheering them on.
