https://www.wired.com/story/doge-government-salaries-elon-musk/
Engineers and executives at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency are drawing healthy taxpayer-funded salaries—sometimes from the very agencies they are cutting.
[...] Jeremy Lewin, one of the DOGE employees tasked with dismantling USAID, who has also played a role in DOGE's incursions into the National Institutes of Health and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is listed as making just over $167,000 annually, WIRED has confirmed. Lewin is assigned to the Office of the Administrator within the General Services Administration.
Kyle Schutt, a software engineer at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is listed as drawing a salary of $195,200 through GSA, where he is assigned to the Office of the Deputy Administrator. That is the maximum amount that any "General Schedule" federal employee can make annually, including bonuses. "You cannot be offered more under any circumstances," the GSA compensation and benefits website reads.
Nate Cavanaugh, a 28-year-old tech entrepreneur who has taken a visible internal role interviewing GSA employees as part of DOGE's work at the agency, is listed as being paid just over $120,500 per year. According to DOGE's official website, the average GSA employee makes $128,565 and has worked at the agency for 13 years.
When Elon Musk started recruiting for DOGE in November, he described the work as "tedious" and noted that "compensation is zero." WIRED previously reported that the DOGE recruitment effort relied in part on a team of engineers associated with Peter Thiel and was carried out on platforms like Discord.
Since Trump took office in January, DOGE has overseen aggressive layoffs within the GSA, including the recent elimination of 18F, the agency's unit dedicated to technology efficiency. It also developed a plan to sell off more than 500 government buildings.
Although Musk has described DOGE as "maximum transparent," it has not made its spending or salary ranges publicly available. Funding for DOGE had grown to around $40 million as of February 20, according to a recent ProPublica report. The White House did not respond to questions about the salary ranges for DOGE employees or how the budget is allocated to pay them.
Some DOGE team members, including Musk, are designated as "Special Government Employees," an advisory role limited to a 130-day work period. These positions can be paid or unpaid; SGEs drawing salaries above a certain grade have to file financial disclosure forms, but the volunteer workers do not. This type of employee is not beholden to the same rules as typical federal workers; they are allowed to keep drawing outside salaries and in some cases do not need to disclose conflicts of interest. Other prominent SGE staffers associated with DOGE include top aide Katie Miller, who continued her prior public relations work through the transition and more than a month into the current administration. Her firm's clients had included Apple and a Saudi-funded golf league, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Other prominent DOGE staffers appear to be unpaid volunteers. Edward Coristine, Ethan Shaotran, Luke Farritor, Derek Geissler, and Nicole Hollander draw no salary through their assignments at the General Services Administration. (It is not currently known whether they are drawing salaries elsewhere within the government.) The agency now openly discusses the idea of compensation on its recruitment page, which describes "full-time, salaried positions for software engineers, InfoSec engineers, and other technology professionals."
In an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News last month, Musk claimed that "the software engineers at DOGE could be earning millions of dollars a year and instead of earning a small fraction of that as federal employees." In Silicon Valley, the median salary for a software engineer hovers around $184,000, with workers a decade into their careers earning over $220,000, according to Glassdoor.
DOGE honcho Elon Musk is the richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of over $350 billion. Although Musk does not draw a salary for his work with DOGE, his business ventures often enjoy government support. The Washington Post recently reported that his companies have received more than $38 billion in government funding over the past two decades.
"It does seem worth understanding what these employees are being paid," says Don Moynihan, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan. "Especially if they are being paid significantly more than technologists who have been fired, given that many of the DOGE staff have less relevant experience."
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 09, @01:54AM
Plus twice as many paid holidays, pension, public health coverage, ...
(Score: 4, Funny) by Gaaark on Sunday March 09, @02:33AM
So they should be fired and hired back too?
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 5, Insightful) by c0lo on Sunday March 09, @03:54AM (2 children)
Lemme guess, six stick figures with a pen on paper, 2 parents, 3 kids and a dog.
One way or another, I wonder how is this FA relevant? Should I focus my righteous anger on the effects of the wrecking ball or the fact that the wrecking ball is gilded?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 09, @04:10AM
> Should I focus my righteous anger ...
You've got to multitask! Plenty of anger to go around.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Tork on Sunday March 09, @07:03PM
Nah, it's just that an agency focused on efficiency should have been able to do the same amount damage at a fraction of the cost!
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mrpg on Sunday March 09, @04:26AM (1 child)
The White House did not respond to questions.
Nice, so they demand transparency from the others but if you ask something then the answer is no comment, sweet.
(Score: 2) by DadaDoofy on Sunday March 09, @05:44PM
Kind of funny. You can find all kinds of articles claiming he said everyone would work for free, but it's looking like that was more wishful thinking on the Trump-hating media's part than actual fact. Musk's initial X post on Nov 14 said:
"We are very grateful to the thousands of Americans who have expressed interest in helping us at DOGE. We don’t need more part-time idea generators. We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting. If that’s you, DM this account with your CV. Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants."
No mention of working without compensation. The notion that they would not be paid seems to have been based on taking a Musk comment out of context. In all those articles, the only direct quote I could find was this, from the NBC News website:
“Indeed, this will be tedious work, make lots of enemies & compensation is zero,” he wrote. “What a great deal!”
It sounds very much like he's referring his own compensation.
In any case, it's certainly no secret people are getting paid for their work with DOGE. It says so right on the website. All you have to do is look.
https://doge.gov/join [doge.gov]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 09, @04:36AM
(Score: 4, Funny) by EEMac on Sunday March 09, @05:12AM (2 children)
Maybe one million spent, hundreds of billions saved.
(Score: 5, Funny) by VanessaE on Sunday March 09, @09:33AM
from the claims I last saw, it's looking closer to $2 spent per $1 saved. 😛
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 09, @12:58PM
> Maybe one million spent, hundreds of billions saved.
It looks like you are commenting on the IRS:
Maybe one million spent on audits, hundreds of billions collected from rich tax cheats.
ftfy
(Score: 5, Insightful) by edinlinux on Sunday March 09, @05:41AM (9 children)
These salaries are not exorbitant for this type of work (forensic cybersecurity), private sector pays more actually..
Especially considering cases like this (guy in US govt making $10M annually ?!?!) , that DOGE is trying to get rid of..
https://nypost.com/2025/01/31/us-news/top-paid-federal-employee-leaving-10-5m-job-after-first-term-trump-said-were-getting-rid-of-him/ [nypost.com]
The wired TFA sounds a bit wokey, and not really logical. Getting rid of waste in government is a good thing. The country has huge deficits and cannot afford the costs of government as it is now.
(Score: 5, Touché) by weirsbaski on Sunday March 09, @05:53AM
How much did it cost taxpayers when DT invited himself to the superbowl?
(Score: 5, Funny) by bussdriver on Sunday March 09, @09:06AM (2 children)
NYPost isn't a credible source. You exposed yourself.
As far as a public utility getting paid too much; it's not as bad as some other private corps... including energy companies... but like say, Musk getting a stupid level of pay only to ignore his company who argued they needed that high pay to keep their CEO around to personally design more failures like the CyberTruck. (the previous stuff had less of his input.)
The Government employees are not the waste. It's the pork projects and mostly welfare to rural and red states that suck up all the money! Plus the military is tied into all that but it's the biggest pig of all.
You can get your way and trash up the place; it'll be hard to repair the damage and even so, the permanent harm it going to move the USA to 3rd world status unless the liberals save the place so it can become weak like the UK. at best. the USA is done being great. permanently. and you can't compete with better systems out there. China is outsmarting and out performing with not much time before they catch up on the few things they are behind on. A democracy can compete with them but not this failing one which has been coasting on the greatness of previous generations led by the greatest leader of the century, FDR.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 10, @03:27PM (1 child)
Not only that but the adoption of corporate-style funding mechanisms in science has created the bloat of management and PR to capture funding, which is then spent on capital investment and management instead of ya know, people who do science. Then - no shit - all this bloat is slashed by another round of management paradigms which itself will 100% insist of far more bloat in the name of efficiency.
It's a management cult. The only problem is (mis)management only cure is more management.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 11, @12:30PM
Corporate style funding mechanisms resulted in things like the Edison Labs or Bell Labs. The idea that one throws spaghetti at blue sky, and expects some of it to stick just doesn't show up.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by pTamok on Monday March 10, @08:06AM (4 children)
So's motherhood and apple pie. Nobody sane disputes it.
However, identifying waste is not so easy; and spending less identifying it that the dollar-value of the waste identified is less easy. There's also Chesterton's Fence to consider, and the possibility that one person's 'waste' is another person's 'essential service' - distinguishing between those becomes political, and subjective, rather than objective - for example, I can save the waste of firearms licensing by banning private ownership of firearms.
For efficiency, it is well-known that the best return on audit expenses is auditing the tax returns of high-value individuals - many dollars recovered per dollar of expenditure on audit. Oddly enough, the department for doing so is underfunded, both in the UK and the USA. Conversely, far more is sent on identifying and preventing social security/government benefit fraud that is recovered from people actually doing fraud. It is also well-known that means-testing benefits risk spending more on means testing than providing benefits. There are strong arguments for making some benefits universal, and not means-tested, as it is more cost-effective that, say, rich people get 'winter fuel benefit' as part of an automatic payment to all rather than requiring people to apply, and performing a bureaucratic means test to the applications.
Some people, ideologically, regard all government expenditure as waste. In their view, government should be vanishingly small. There is no agreed upon definition of government expenditure that is waste. It's a bit like 'art' - 'I know it when I see it'. For them, cutting any expenditure is 'cutting waste'.
Other people, ideologically, would regard taxing anyone with an income above median income at less than 100% of the amount above the median to be waste ("From each according to their abilities, to each according to their need."). I don't agree with them, either.
Certainly, the method used by DOGE to identify things that fit their definition of waste (anyone know what that is, but the way?) appear crude, and much different to the historical method of arguing budgets in the legislature. The amount of the budgets was set by the legislature, the administration of those budgets was performed by the executive. Things appear to have changed - the fiction being that DOGE is an independent non-governmental advice service providing advice to the executive, which the executive can choose to act upon within the executive's authority. Currently, the legislature is not using its powers to limit the executive's action to being within the historical constitutional bounds.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 11, @02:17PM (3 children)
The thing to keep in mind about Chesterton's Fence is it's just another excuse not to do something about blatant problems. Every bit of spending benefits someone - it's always someone's essential service even in the many cases where it works against the public interest. The fence builders won't stop building so how do you keep up? You change the game by doing a lot of political and subjective fence destruction.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Tuesday March 11, @02:54PM (2 children)
The point is to make the case for destruction of particular fences.
If you have 11 fences, and the money for upkeep of 10 fences, do you destroy all 11 on the basis you have a mandate for fence destruction? Especially if it costs more than the maintenance of a fence to rebuild a fence, so you might only be able to rebuild 8 with the budget?
When presented with the clear consequences of destroying each fence, some people might be minded to pay more taxes to maintain all 11.
Being told that destroying fences removes waste is all well and good, until you destroy a fence that someone was dependent on. People are all for destruction when it doesn't affect them.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 11, @03:00PM
Then you can't keep up. It's that simple.
Uh huh. So let's deliberate on those fences instead. And when we've found that one worst fence and destroyed, they've created five more. Now it's 15 fences with money for 10. In the real world, they destroy a bunch of fences haphazardly all the time to make room for the new fences. So you'd never see a case that bad.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 12, @12:56PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 09, @05:33PM
Did anyone see the announcement on USAJOBS website where they advertised these positions?
Or were these just NeopHires?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mcgrew on Sunday March 09, @06:25PM (19 children)
You knew Trump was a liar, fraudster, and convicted criminal when you stupidly voted for him. Now you dumbasses have to live with your decisions. The trouble is, so do I, who voted against him, as do Canadians, Mexicans, Europeans (especially Ukrainians and Gazans), and anybody starving, none of whom had no vote for the man who is harming and killing them.
I apologize to the world for the sheer idiocy of my countrymen who voted for that criminal, and the idiots who stayed home rather than voting against him. My only hope is a Democratic landslide next year, followed by impeachment and conviction, because it appears all of the Republicans have also become Fascists, or are too cowardly to stand up to him.
I was always a swing voter. Where are all the REAL Republicans??
It is a disgrace that the richest nation in the world has hunger and homelessness.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday March 09, @07:35PM (18 children)
The MAGA crowd *is* the "real Republicans." Sorry, but that's how they are now. They hitched their collective wagon to this sputtering, greasy orange dwarf star and we're *all* stuck along for the ride.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 10, @07:54AM (17 children)
No, just like every other voter these days, the swing voters looked at all the politicians and chose, what was for them, the least bad option.
The simple answer is to ignore the minority of rabid idiots (left and right) and put up better candidates with better policies.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday March 10, @02:06PM (12 children)
There was a better candidate. With better policies. They did not choose the least bad option or we wouldn't now have the orange malodorous stink emitting illiterate know nothing.
The other candidate actually would have been better for the maga voters, they just don't know it. Now they complain that the odoriferous one they now have is doing bad things to them. Oh, so sad.
The amount of rust code in Linux has grown.
The amount of rust code in Linux has groan.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 10, @03:31PM (11 children)
wOmeN aRe saFe From TRanS iN thEiR batHrooMs
(Score: 2, Disagree) by DannyB on Monday March 10, @05:04PM
Yet kids are not safe from right wing church leaders.
I hate to say this, but the US rightly deserves to be the world wide laughing stock for at least one hundred years.
The amount of rust code in Linux has grown.
The amount of rust code in Linux has groan.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 11, @03:58AM (5 children)
And if you look at the polls, that was rated as a very important issue for 78% of republican voters, and 56% of democrat voters. Forcing venues to allow men dressed as women into toilets and changing rooms for women was probably enough to cost them the election on its own.
People with testicles and a penis are not women they are men, and if they cut them off they are still not women, they are men with their bits cut off.
Why the insistence on denying reality anyway? Are we not all equal? Men can wear makeup and dresses if they want to, just like women can wear overalls, hardhat, and steelcaps, or wingtips and a three-piece suit and tie. Nobody cares until you try to force other people to submit to your fantasy.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by pTamok on Tuesday March 11, @03:41PM (4 children)
A body with testicles and a penis is likely/highly correlated with being biologically male, and someone who is biologically male is likely/highly correlated with being male gender: but there are exceptions. Gender identity is complicated.
It's a bit like handedness - we have left hands and right hands, but you can't tell just by looking at someone whether they are left-handed or right-handed, or even ambidextrous. It's not a function of the hand - we all (mostly) have the equipment to be either - but a function of the brain, and it still remains a mystery why some people are left-handed or ambidextrous. Despite having the equipment to look male, or female, it is actually (mostly) a function of the brain, and while you can guess that most people will be right-handed, sometimes you will be wrong; and the same is true of gender identity - most of the time you can guess and get it correct, but sometimes you will be wrong.
Sexual preferences are also a function of the brain. You can look at a person and guess that they are attracted exclusively to members of the opposite sex, and be right quite frequently, but it is well known that some people are attracted to members of their own sex; or even to both sexes. Some people make their sexuality clear: by the clothing they choose to wear, possibly make-up, and by mannerisms and social behaviour: others do not, so it is not possible to tell just by looking.
What physical equipment people have does not tell you what it going on in their brains. Brains are complicated, and don't always do the most likely thing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 11, @08:51PM
No, gender identity is a myth. No-one knows what is in some-one else's head. Biologically I am a man. I have no idea what is inside another man's head, no-one knows what is in mine. Stating I have a male gender identity is nonsense until you can point at a gender identity and say "here it is". You can't because it is imaginary. Some guy wants to wear makeup and a dress? fine, don't care. Some woman wants to wear jeans and be a lumberjack? I don't have a problem with that, why do you?
Here, I'll break the rules and say the quiet part out loud. The whole "gender in your head" thing is based on sexual stereotypes.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday March 15, @12:11AM (2 children)
We are MAN kind. We are all men. Most are womb men, or wo'men, as we say, "women". Those born without wombs are just men.
You are what you are regardless of what you think you are. And it shouldn't matter what sex you are or what sex you think you are, you are you.
It is a disgrace that the richest nation in the world has hunger and homelessness.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 15, @01:38AM (1 child)
Actually, all men are trans. Everybody starts out female. You can thank, or blame, the why? chromosome for the switch, which may cut off anywhere during the process, leading to the various conditions described in the medical journals.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 15, @05:47AM
Those are not what has the republicans panties in a twist. People with a medical condition are a very small percentage of the population that "trendy trans" hide behind. It is fully intact males putting on a dress and saying "Now you have to pretend I'm a woman and let me into women's changing rooms and toilets and sports."
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday March 11, @03:54PM (3 children)
So this is what you consider to be government's top #1 issue.
Let's burn everything down over an issue that concerns a very small number of trans people.
I'm not saying that's not an issue. Or one that deserves debate and discussion. But really? Let's just burn everything down over it.
The amount of rust code in Linux has grown.
The amount of rust code in Linux has groan.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday March 15, @12:13AM
They're not burning, they have a CHAINSAW! I never knew Elon the muskrat played DOOM!
It is a disgrace that the richest nation in the world has hunger and homelessness.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 15, @05:50AM (1 child)
No, it is an important issue to 51% of the population. Men are not threatened by women invading their spaces, but women are threatened by men invading their spaces.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Sunday March 16, @05:04PM
You're not hearing me. I'm not arguing what you just said. I'm asking, so this is worth burning down everything over this one issue?
The amount of rust code in Linux has grown.
The amount of rust code in Linux has groan.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Monday March 10, @04:08PM (3 children)
The voters looked at the information easily available to them, and voted for the candidate that they believed, with their level of education and knowledge about the issues, would, on balance, be better for them, in the terms they measure in, than the other candidates.
-> Make personally credible information available to the voters, tailored to their preferences, that leads them to the conclusion that you are the best candidate.
--> In other words, control the information flow towards the voters, and make sure that both you, personally, and your party's policies are understood as positive by the potential voters.
---> Having substantive influence on the media that is accessible to the population of voters is advantageous.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 11, @03:47AM (2 children)
Well, yes. But that doesn't change what the democrats did. Put up a very old man who was clearly losing faculties if not outright senile, then when that was forcefully rejected by their own rank and file, substituted in the weakest candidate they reasonably could.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday March 11, @03:57PM (1 child)
Complain about Biden all you want. Trump is similarly old. Biden stutters. But he seems to be sound of mind. Listen to the wacko things Trump says. Trump has lost it. Biden didn't and wouldn't tank the economy. Trump is doing so and doubling down, and its not even two months since his coronation.
The amount of rust code in Linux has grown.
The amount of rust code in Linux has groan.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 12, @04:32AM
A stutter doesn't make you forget what you are doing and wander off. Biden had full time baby-sitters.