Bloomberg gift article: “Luke Farritor could have been an artist, or a builder, or someone dedicated to seeing a great historical mystery through. Instead he wound up at the Department of Government Efficiency, slashing, dismantling, undoing. Before he was called a patriot and a traitor for following Elon Musk to Washington to join DOGE; before he was hired by the US government despite a résumé that would have been previously rejected; before he was granted extensive access to sensitive data and invited to brief the country’s vice president; before he met his Twitter heroes in Silicon Valley; before he became a Thiel Fellow, which required him to become a college dropout; …Farritor was named one of 20 Thiel Fellows in March 2024—19 men and one woman. Among their qualifications: They had to give up on college and, as one fellow put it, “be great.” They got $100,000 and access to a Silicon Valley network. Thiel, who started PayPal with Musk and others and is a major shareholder in Palantir Technologies Inc., began the fellowship in 2011 almost as a lark. Even Farritor had trouble describing to a friend exactly what he’d be doing.

One DOGE member, Sahil Lavingia, founder of Gumroad, said the hiring process included “vibe checks” over calls on Signal. Did you vote for Kamala Harris? Are you comfortable working for Donald Trump? Lavingia heard that many other coders had been rejected: They had the wrong vibes.Once Farritor had been vetted by DOGE, he had to be officially hired into the US Digital Service. The group, part of the Executive Office of the President, had been bringing in tech experts to help modernize the government since 2014. It was the gateway for those joining DOGE. In November, Farritor sent his résumé with a one-line note: “Super passionate about serving my country in the U.S.D.S.!”“Luke’s résumé didn’t pass muster,” says a former senior government official who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation for discussing the hiring of Farritor and other DOGE members. “It’s not to say he isn’t smart.” But the USDS required applicants to have a college degree and at least five years of industry experience. “You have to bring some expertise. It’s not just like, ‘Oh, I wrote a Python AI thing.’ Yeah, that’s not gonna cut it.” The official says that many of the younger software engineers who’d been approved by DOGE would have been rejected by USDS: “They actually don’t have the wisdom from having burned your fingers a number of times.” And, the official says, they hadn’t developed an essential skill. “It is as important to be able to influence people in power as it is to write code.”We reached out to the White House about DOGE’s hiring practices. In an email, spokesperson Harrison Fields wrote: “DOGE rigorously evaluated its technical and engineering talent by administering an industry-standard coding exercise, which validated every member of the DOGE team’s capabilities and skill set. Additionally, the recruiting team conducted reference and background checks to confirm each employee’s qualifications. We are proud of the selfless contributions to the country and the American taxpayer from those committed to the President’s mission of ending waste, fraud, and abuse.”On Jan. 2, at 10:49 p.m., Farritor sent a message to the Thiel Fellows’ WhatsApp chat: “Hi all, DOGE is urgently looking for operations and software engineers to help cut 2 trillion from the national spend. Please reach out if interested!” Thirteen of the 19 other fellows responded with heart and dog face emojis.In the weeks ahead of Trump’s inauguration, Farritor went dark. He disappeared from GitHub, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. On LinkedIn, his location is Antarctica. He played online chess as lukeb0i on Jan. 7, his last game for months. On Jan. 11 he reposted a comment from Musk: “Incompetence in the limit is indistinguishable from sabotage.” He hasn’t posted on X since.

Farritor helped assess, slash or dismantle at least nine departments and agencies after USAID— the Offices of Personnel Management and of Management and Budget; the Departments of Education, Energy, Labor, and Health and Human Services; the National Science Foundation; the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—according to interviews with dozens of current and former government employees, and lawsuits and records seen by Businessweek.On Friday, Feb. 7, Farritor and four other young men from DOGE walked onto the fourth-floor executive suite of the CFPB. Erie Meyer, who’d just resigned as the chief technologist and was packing up her office, could identify only one: Farritor. “I recognized him, because I have been a follower of artificial intelligence since the ’90s, and he worked on decoding the scroll, and he just looks extremely distinctive,” she says. Meyer noticed Farritor and others jiggling the handles of locked office doors, trying to get in. There may be workplaces where that would be acceptable, but it’s taboo in a law enforcement agency, she says. “We lock our office doors, because there may be extremely sensitive materials about ongoing investigations against publicly traded firms and victims and all sorts of things like that on our desks.”She approached the five: “Can I help you?” They said they were looking for some sort of document but didn’t elaborate. “I think they were surprised to have been confronted.” Farritor kept quiet. Meyer wanted to think the best of him. “I love historical mysteries. I was kind of like maybe this person cares about learning from our past mistakes or learning from the past to inform our future,” she says. “I was naively hopeful.”A little while later, in her car, waiting to exit the garage, her phone lit up with notifications. Musk had just posted on X: “CFPB RIP.”