💥‘Patriotism, Ego, Access’: Why Elon Musk’s DOGE Is Attracting Young Coders And Tech CEOs Alike💥

The incoming Trump administration’s planned agency for cutting government excess is seeking 100 full-time hires in the nation’s capital, sources tell Forbes — and attracting a mix of college students and execs.

As a two-time startup founder and CEO, Chinmay Singh hadn’t updated his resume in ten years. But when the incoming administration of president-elect Donald Trump announced DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency to be helmed by tech billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, Singh made a new one.

“What I would do at DOGE,” Singh wrote, before proposing work on healthcare projects like patient records interoperability and Medicare fraud. On November 16, he sent his pitch, as instructed, to the official DOGE account on X, the Musk-owned social media site. “Messaging your resume to an X account is unusual, so I took an unusual approach, too,” said Singh. “I haven’t heard back yet.”

It might be a while. The entrepreneur is one of several Silicon Valley founders and investors to be inspired by the organization’s stated mission, which Trump wrote in a transition team statement would “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies,” comparing the effort to The Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bombs.

In its public communications, DOGE has told aspiring applicants to steel themselves for a grueling sprint. Until Trump is inaugurated on January 20, DOGE’s work can’t fully start. But the organization is mandated to complete its work by July 4, 2026 as an Independence Day gift to the American people, the Trump transition team’s announcement wrote. The “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries” that DOGE seeks need to be willing to work “80+ hours per week,” DOGE itself postedon its official X account. “This will be tedious work, make lots of enemies & compensation is zero,” Musk personally added.

This is a chance to work on the reverse ‘New Deal.”

A college-aged DOGE applicant

But DOGE hopefuls who spoke to Forbes in November were undeterred by such warnings, expressing interest in volunteering for a hodgepodge of civic, ideological and professional reasons. DOGE isn’t expected to be a large organization, by government or Big Tech standards. It is looking to hire just 100 people, two sources with knowledge of the process told Forbes, particularly individuals with software engineering and finance backgrounds.

DOGE will expect staffers to relocate to Washington, D.C. for the next 12 to 18 months, working on the job full-time, the sources said. Musk and Ramaswamy already have access to influential billionaires like a16z cofounder and investor Marc Andreessen and former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick to serve as informal advisers, noted one; what DOGE needs are rank-and-file staffers to execute on its goals, working as much as 100 hours per week in a sprint reminiscent of Musk’s product deadlines at his businesses SpaceX, Tesla and X.

Spokespeople for Musk and Ramaswamy did not initially respond to a comment request, and a message to the DOGE X account was not answered.

Those who have applied cited a range of motivations, both professional and civic. “This is a chance to work on the reverse ‘New Deal,’” said one college-aged DOGE applicant. “It’s not the Manhattan Project: these aren’t physicists, but 22-year-old engineers.”

In Los Angeles, DOGE aspirant Tom Dean leads marketing for Rainbow, a startup offering a cryptocurrency wallet app. Growing up in rural England, Dean imagined moving to the U.S. and achieving success. “That American dream was very much alive for me, and it’s felt like it went a bit wayward in recent years,” he said. Working in crypto, Dean said he witnessed government inefficiency and “red tape” first-hand. DOGE could improve access to cryptocurrency for average Americans, Dean hopes, while reinvesting resources into education.

“I am young enough and idealistic enough that I would work very long weeks in service of the people and country that I love, and I would happily move,” Dean said. “What’s 18 months in comparison to the next 80 years? It’s nothing.” (Dean hasn’t yet applied to DOGE but said he would do so in February, when the process was more formalized.)

A college student studying computer science in the Bay Area who applied to DOGE through X said they were motivated by the opportunity to bring a “technologist’s perspective" to government. “This is the type of thing you don’t really get to do too often,” they said. “If you’re not working on a startup, you could take a Big Tech engineering job, really coasting, or you can do this and really work hard on something meaningful. Obviously, it will not be the most glamorous thing.”

At the University of Arizona, computer science and philosophy student Shawki Sukkar said he hoped to apply to assist in dismantling the “administrative state” that has “had a very terrible influence on culture in the U.S.” A Syrian immigrant, Sukkar said he was concerned by the government’s “undermining of the Angle-Saxon tradition of classical virtues,” and hoped that Musk could embody a new era of “natural aristocracy,” an early 19th century political theory developed by Thomas Jefferson in which the most talented and virtuous citizens form a new leadership class.

Sukkar hopes to build a model of spending excesses in Democrat-voting blue states using software from Palantir, the Peter Thiel cofounded analytics company, over his college winter break, then apply to DOGE with the results.

Others hope DOGE takes a more moderate approach. Several applicants said they empathized with government officials who might lose their jobs because of DOGE’s activities and called for reinvestment of resources that DOGE could identify as misused.

Justin Intal, a former cofounder at payments startup Forage, said his experience working there to bring food stamp credits online made him hopeful that DOGE could improve how startups work with government bodies like the Department of Agriculture. Intal is currently participating in a group chat of YC founders, he said, thinking of other possibilities for government-facing innovation.

“Elon has touched on how there will be short-term pain, and a lot of people unemployed in the short-term,” said venture capitalist Brandon Brooks, a former partner at Overlooked Ventures in Pittsburgh. Brooks hopes to work with DOGE on improving the efficiency of the State Small Business Credit Initiative, a program intended to spur nearly $10 billion in financing for such efforts, and which has achieved just under one-third of that target to date. “The answer will be to invigorate the private sector with more small businesses and more startups.”

Bob Greenlee, the chief operating officer at New York-based Tusk Holdings and former Deputy Governor of the state of Illinois, called DOGE a “generational opportunity” to get tech workers more involved in civic affairs. “If you believe, like I do, that tech solutions are the right answers, then a bunch of engineers is great,” said Greenlee, who wrote a blog post calling for DOGE to prioritize government adoption of AI tools. “For a deregulation focus, it’s the worst lineup. You’d want lawyers who can game the process quickly.”

Several DOGE applicants said they had no illusions about the organization’s long odds for achieving its goals. They noted that a previous attempt at eliminating government waste, a survey under the Reagan Administration known as the Grace Commission, proved largely ineffective in the 1980s. Such long odds were worth it for the chance at success, they argued. “A chance to see change is better than not doing anything,” said Dean, the crypto applicant.

Singh, the entrepreneur, said he hoped that DOGE would tap veteran tech leaders like himself to tackle “the deeper problems.” One of the college-aged DOGE applicants noted that many of their peers remained interested in DOGE as more of a summer or part-time role. “A friend said it would be fun if it was a three-month civil service program,” they said. “People in tech don’t always have a high sense of civic duty.”

But for others, one allure of DOGE is the potential career boost — a forged-in-fire experience similar to working under Kalanick at Uber, or after Musk’s takeover of X. One DOGE applicant pointed to a comment made by Figma CEO Dylan Field on X on Monday as “very good, pro-DOGE propaganda”: “I’d wager that in 10-20 years the group that works on DOGE will be the next PayPal Mafia,” Field posted.

“There are three main factors in joining DOGE,” said another techie considering submitting an application. “Patriotism, ego and access.”