Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is charged with eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse. But some of its employees are earning hefty taxpayer-funded paychecks.
Wired reports that some engineers and executives who are part of DOGE are drawing six-figure salaries, in some cases from the government agencies they are cutting. For example, Jeremy Lewin, a DOGE staffer assigned to the General Services Administration who helped lead attacks on the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the National Institutes of Health, is pulling in $167,000 per year.
In another instance, Kyle Schutt, a software engineer at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is making a salary of $195,200, the maximum annual salary that a “General Schedule” federal employee can make, including bonuses. And Nate Cavanaugh, 28, whose work for DOGE comprises interviewing GSA employees, makes over $120,500 per year. That’s close to what the average GSA employee, who typically has been with the agency for 13 years, earns per year at $128,565.
When he began recruiting for DOGE in November, Musk described the work as “tedious” and said “compensation is zero,” calling his ideal candidates “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.” So far, the pseudo-agency has tapped into vital government systems and fired thousands of employees.
Now it appears that compensation is far higher than zero for at least a few employees. Despite Musk describing DOGE as “maximum transparent,” spending and salary ranges for the effort have not been made public. A recent report says that DOGE has received about $40 million in funding, and the White House did not respond to Wired’s questions about salary ranges or where DOGE’s funding is coming from in the federal budget.
DOGE’s cuts are ostensibly supposed to be saving taxpayers money, but not only are some of its employees drawing a high salary, government spending has actually gone up since the inauguration. Plus, while DOGE was claiming billions of dollars in savings, it has had to go back and make corrections to many of its claims, showing that its boasts were exaggerated or fraudulent.
The high salaries seem to be part of the many lies coming from Musk and his pet project about how much money DOGE is saving and what it’s actually doing. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise from a greedy welfare billionaire who owes much of his wealth to government funding, and who is enriching himself even more with his and Donald Trump’s government overhaul.
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