Meet Akash Bobba, Indian-origin techie who interned at meta, is now part of Musk’s DOGE team

Mangalore Today News Network

United States, February 4, 2025: Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has roped in six young engineers aged between 19 and 24, including Akash Bobba, a UC Berkeley graduate and a former intern at Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta.

These six young engineers are playing critical roles in the DOGE despite having little to no government experience. Most of these youngsters have connections to Musk and his longtime associate Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, according to a report by the WIRED.

Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger, and Ethan Shaotran hold vaguely defined jobs within DOGE, which is tasked with “modernising federal technology and software to maximise governmental efficiency and productivity". Their inexperience in handling public affairs has been a cause for many.

Who is Akash Bobba?

Indian-Origin engineer Bobba is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, where he was in the prestigious Management, Entrepreneurship, and Technology programme.

According to a copy of his now-deleted LinkedIn obtained by WIRED, Bobba was an investment engineering intern at the Bridgewater Associates hedge fund as of last spring and was previously also an intern at both Meta and Thiel’s Palantir Technologies.

He was a featured guest on a since-deleted podcast with Aman Manazir, an engineer who interviews engineers about how they landed their dream jobs. He and Coristine are listed as “experts" at the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and report to current Chief of Staff Amanda Scales, according to internal records. Both of them have working emails at the General Services Administration (GSA) emails and A-suite level clearance at the agency with access to all physical spaces at IT systems, sources told WIRED.

As the photo of four engineers went viral on social media, one individuals named Aidan McLaughlin, whose X bio said he worked in model design in OpenAI, wrote, “wait my moot is running the treasury what".

Reply to McLaughlin’s comment, Charis Zhang, who also studied at UC Berkeley, praised Akash Bobba and said he “trusted him with everything I own". Zhang said he accidentally deleted their codebase two days before a deadline in UC Berkeley, but Akash “just stared at the screen, shrugged, and rewrote everything from scratch in one night." Another user said Bobba was “one of the smartest dudes I have met".

wait my moot is running the treasury what pic.twitter.com/VUPm2slb4b

— Aidan McLaughlin (@aidan_mclau) February 3, 2025

Musk’s staff already includes senior staff from xAI, Tesla, and the Boring Company who have taken control of the OPM and GSA and have gained access to the Treasury Department’s payment system, potentially allowing him access to a vast range of sensitive information about tens of millions of citizens, businesses, and more.

Concerns over Musk’s staff

The fact that these six engineers in DOGE have little experience has heightened concerns over their qualifications in the department and potential access to sensitive public information. “What we’re seeing is unprecedented in that you have these actors who are not really public officials gaining access to the most sensitive data in government," said Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan.

“We really have very little eyes on what’s going on. Congress has no ability to really intervene and monitor what’s happening because these aren’t really accountable public officials. So this feels like a hostile takeover of the machinery of governments by the richest man in the world," he added.

A source told WIRED that there were concerns that the new teams could bypass security clearance protocols to access the agency’s sensitive compartmented information facility, as the Trump administration has already granted temporary security clearances to unvetted people.

Bobba and Coristine being “OPM Experts" have also raised fears about “regulatory capture" that they may access highly sensitive government data and may use them for their own personal preferences that don’t serve the American public.

CNN earlier reported that two senior security officials at USAID were put on forced leave after they barred staff from Musk’s DOGE from accessing classified documents as part of their sprawling effort to inspect the government’s books.