On Thursday evening, seven of those employees — Tom Krause, Steve Davis, Joe Gebbia, Brad Smith, Aram Moghaddassi, Anthony Armstrong, and Tyler Hassen — introduced themselves during an interview on Bret Baier’s Special Report.

Tom Krause

Krause is the CEO of Cloud Software Group. He has been in the public eye more than most DOGE employees since he was named in a lawsuit targeting DOGE’s access to the Treasury Department’s payment system. DOGE was subsequently blocked from scrutinizing the department, but not before the DOGE team made a series of recommendations to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, which he has implemented, according to Musk. 

“The two main recommendations we suggested, which have now been implemented, was that any payments going out of the Treasury, especially the Treasury’s main payment computer, which is called PAM, like almost $5 trillion a year — that the payments be coded with the congressional appropriation, and that there be an explanation for the payment, very basic stuff. And just doing that, we estimate will save $100 billion a year,” Musk told Kudlow. 

Krause focused his comments Thursday on mass fraud, which he believes has been taking place in the government payment system for years. 

“We’re changing the culture. The culture has been not a lot of caring and not a lot of commitment to doing what’s right relative to financial operations. There’s $500 billion of fraud every year, there’s hundreds of billions of dollars of improper payments, and we can’t pass an audit,” he said. “If I was a public company CFO, I would effectively be removed.”

Brad Smith

Smith is a healthcare entrepreneur, and his work with DOGE is focused on the Department of Health and Human Services. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Monday that he was “very grateful for the partnership with DOGE,” which identified “extraordinary waste” in the health agency. 

“The expenditures, the budget of HHS during the Biden administration went up by 38%, the employees went up by 17%, and healthcare went down,” Kennedy said during a Cabinet meeting attended by Trump and Musk. “We are, with Elon’s help, eliminating the redundancies. We are streamlining our department. … We’re going to get the money to the scientists and to the patients rather than to the administrators and to the bureaucrats.”

During his remarks Thursday, Smith reiterated that there is “a lot of opportunity” to eliminate redundancies and streamline processes at HHS “to make science better, not worse.”

“There are 700 different IT systems today at NIH. They can’t speak to each other. They have 27 different CIOs. And so, when you think about making great medical discoveries, you have to connect the data,” he said.

Steve Davis

Davis is DOGE’s chief operating officer and has worked at various Musk companies, including SpaceX and X. He said Thursday that he used to be a rocket scientist. 

Davis highlighted DOGE’s website, which he said publishes work the team does daily for “maximum transparency.” This includes the discovery of a survey the Department of Interior was set to spend $830 million on that could have been conducted elsewhere for $10,000.  

“There was literally a 10-question survey that you could do with SurveyMonkey for $10,000 that the government was charged almost a billion dollars for,” Musk said. 

Davis commented at length on why he had put his career on hold to work at DOGE. 

“The reason I’m here, which is probably for many, is that I think the goal is incredibly inspiring. I think most of the taxpayers in the country would agree that … to have the country going bankrupt would be a very bad thing, and therefore the country going not bankrupt is a good thing that all of us are willing to kind of put our lives on hold in order to do,” Davis said. “I think the thing right now is we actually believe there’s a chance to succeed, that there’s an administration that’s supportive and a great Cabinet and just a great group that will actually make success a possible outcome.”

Tyler Hassen

Hassen is a former oil company CEO who is scrutinizing the Interior Department for waste and fraud and reviewing his recommendations with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.

He said that under the Biden administration, there had been “no departmental oversight within the Department of Interior whatsoever, none.” 

“We are now reviewing every single contract, every single grant, and when things come to my attention that don’t make sense, I’m bringing them to Secretary Burgum, and he’s been fantastic. He’s a businessman. He’s very supportive of DOGE. It’s been wonderful,” Hassen continued. 

Anthony Armstrong

Armstrong is a Morgan Stanley banker who heads DOGE’s operations in the Office of Personnel Management, the federal agency that oversees and recruits government workers. 

He defended DOGE’s recommendations for workforce cuts as eliminating massive redundancies in federal departments, citing 40 communications departments at HHS as an example. 

“This is not about the employees,” Armstrong said. “There are many, many hardworking, well-meaning people who took these jobs, these jobs were out there. They applied for them, they took them. They took them. They’re doing what’s there. It’s just that they’re duplicating the effort of 40 offices.” 

“You’ve got overstaffing. … The IRS has got 1,400 people who are dedicated to provisioning laptops and cellphones,” he continued. “So, that doesn’t make any sense, and President Trump’s been very clear, scalpel, not hatchet, and that’s the way it’s getting done.”

Armstrong also said most of the federal workers who have lost their jobs have not been fired but have been incentivized to leave their positions “largely through voluntary means.” 

“There’s voluntary early retirement. There are voluntary separation payments. We put in place deferred resignation, the eight-month severance program. … There is a very heavy bias towards programs that are long-dated, that are generous, that allow people to exit and go and get a new job in the private sector,” he said.

Aram Moghaddassi

Moghaddassi is a DOGE software engineer and one of the first employees who digs into various federal bureaucracies “to view computer data sets.”

He focused on DOGE’s investigation into the Social Security Administration, defending the initiative from Democrats’ claims that it is hurting vulnerable retirees. 

“I’ll say the two improvements that we’re trying to make to Social Security are helping people who legitimately get benefits protect them from fraud that they experience every day on a routine basis, and also make the experience better,” he said. “At Social Security, one of the first things we learned is that they get phone calls every day of people trying to change direct deposit information. … We learned 40% of the phone calls that they get are from fraudsters. Forty percent, and they steal people’s Social Security.”

Joe Gebbia

Gebbia is the co-founder of Airbnb, and Musk recruited him to help streamline retirement processes for federal employees. Government employees at an old Pennsylvania mine are responsible for processing all retirement paperwork for every federal worker in a system Gebbia said was outdated and desperately needed digitization. 

The Pennsylvania mine “has 22,000 filing cabinets stacked 10 high to house 400 million pieces of paper,” Gebbia said. “It’s a process that started in the 1950s and largely hasn’t changed in the last 70 years.”

TRACKING WHAT DOGE IS DOING ACROSS THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

The process takes “many months,” but under DOGE’s reforms for an online, digital one, it will just take “a few days at most,” Gebbia continued. 

“I really think, you know, it’s an injustice to civil servants who are subjected to these processes that are older than the age of half the people watching your show tonight,” he said. “So, we really believe that the government can have an Apple Store-like experience: beautifully designed, great user experience, modern systems.”