4 Stocks to Buy during Trump's presidency !

Since the first days of the Trump administration, Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been everywhere in the federal government, moving fast and breaking things.

In a matter of weeks, DOGE operatives have spread across dozens of government agencies as they have attempted to terminate tens of thousands of federal employees.

With so much focus on where DOGE is going, WIRED wanted to take a beat to look at where they’ve come from and hopefully, that might reveal how they’re thinking about reshaping the federal government.

Big takeaway:

• Many on the DOGE team are from Musk’s world.

• If Musk is America’s CEO, then DOGE has become his Silicon Valley executive branch.

Scary isn’t it !

List of DOGE members

Above is mapped out, non-exhaustive list of people affiliated with DOGE, presented in a table with each member, their corporate history, and the agencies they’ve been connected to.

For this post, the focus is on new people brought in under the 2nd Trump administration or directly hired into agencies—as Special Government Employees (SGEs) or regular employees—who are operating as members of DOGE teams.

It is a little tricky because there are technically two DOGEs established under the president’s executive order:

• There’s the US DOGE Service (USDS), formerly the US Digital Service, that’s a permanent organization.

• Then there’s the temporary USDS organization, that will wrap up on 4 Jul 2026, and through which SGEs can be hired.

Fantastic - interactive link diagram

Below is what WIRED has learnt:

The DOGE world, as it stands, seems to break down into roughly 3 categories:

• Former Trump officials.

• Conservative lawyers.

• Imports from the Silicon Valley area (funders, founders, technologists, or people connected to them).

First Category.

Here you find find people like DOGE spokesperson Katie Miller, wife of White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller. The two of them have been Musk’s guides to DC.

Second Category.

Here are people like :

• James Burnham and Austin Raynor - former clerks for conservative Supreme Court justices Neil Gorsuch & Clarence Thomas respectively.

• Jacob Altik, a conservative lawyer on DOGE squad, selected to clerk for Gorsuch. Jeremy Lewin, who was part of DOGE’s dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

• He worked with 2nd Lady Usha Vance’s former law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson, a firm that has also represented $Tesla Motors(TSLA)$ .

Third Category.

The biggest through line of all.

Of those Silicon Valley imports, one of the most clear themes across DOGE’s ranks is fairly obvious: a connection to Elon Musk.

• 49 people on our list have connections to Musk, his companies, or his greater network. This connection is most often through one of his allies or one of his companies.

• Obvious people like Steve Davis, president of Musk’s Boring Company. He followed Musk across his various ventures. Davis previously worked at SpaceX and assisted Musk in his overhaul of X, formerly Twitter.

• Davis spearheaded the DOGE recruitment efforts before inauguration day and has continued to play a pivotal role in the organization.

• SpaceX employee Brian Bjelde, who is now at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), also helped Musk downsize Twitter’s staff in 2022.

• There are many young engineers WIRED first identified who were given the keys to different government agencies, like Marko Elez, Luke Farritor, and Edward Coristine.

• They were interns or employees at one of Musk’s companies: SpaceX, Tesla, xAI, X, and Neuralink.

• Musk has been involved in others, above 3 are the ones he controls.

A number of these DOGE operatives have spread:

• From the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to the General Services Administration (GSA), USAID, Departments of the Treasury, Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Health and Human Services, and the Social Security Administration (SSA), just to name a few.

• More than any other company, SpaceX has significant representation in DOGE, with 16 of the 80 listed DOGE operatives having worked there in some capacity.

• SpaceX employees have appeared at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which could present a worrisome conflict of interest, and have also appeared at SSA, OPM, and the Department of Energy (DOE).

Finance World Affliates.

Then there are the 2nd-degree connections to people in Musk’s network.

Connections to billionaire and PayPal ($PYPL) - Mafia member Peter Thiel and to $Palantir Technologies Inc.(PLTR)$ , the defense-focused tech company he co-founded, pop up frequently.

Farritor, for instance, was a Thiel Fellow.

Several other DOGE members have also worked for Palantir.

Even non-DOGE members who have found their way into the Chief Information Offices of several agencies similarly have these connections to Musk or PLTR.

Thiel was (a) an early Trump supporter and (b) helped bankroll the 2022 Senate campaign of Vice President JD Vance. He has also invested in several of Musk’s companies.

The Musk connection reaches beyond the tech industry. DOGE also contains a cohort of people from the Finance industry:

• Michael Grimes & Anthony Armstrong, both helped Musk structure the deal to buy Twitter while at Morgan Stanley ($MS) (Armstrong has since left the firm).

• Antonio Gracias, CEO of Valor Equity Partners, was an early investor in Tesla (and donor to Musk’s America PAC). He is part of DOGE, along with 2 other people who have been employed there, Jon Koval & Payton Rehling.

Friends With Benefits.

Followings are people with personal connections to the Musk network.

• Stephen Ehikian, DOGE’s lead at GSA, is married to Andrea Conway, who was a designer at X.

• Kathryn Armstrong Loving, part of DOGE at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), is the sister of Brian Armstrong, CEO of listed crypto company $Coinbase Global, Inc.(COIN)$.

• The brother-sister-Musk relationship comes through Marc Andreessen and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, that has invested in COIN, as well as the defense startup Anduril.

• Before inauguration, there were reports that Andreessen was helping to interview DOGE candidates, and he jokingly described himself as an “unpaid intern” for DOGE.

• Ryan Wunderly, slated to be the new DOGE member at the Treasury, according to lawsuits, comes from Anduril.

Unconnected People.

Finally, there are people who don’t neatly fit into any above categories:

• Gavin Kliger, a young engineer who worked at Databricks (privately held company), one of the earliest members of DOGE.

• Scott Langmack, an executive at the AI property tech company Kukun, part of DOGE’s incursion into HUD.

The big takeaway remains the same - Silicon Valley experience is almost mandatory, and connections to Musk and his associates even more so.

Who’s The Boss ?

For many weeks, it was unclear who was even in charge of DOGE.

While Amy Gleason was officially announced as DOGE’s administrator, Trump has indicated that he put Musk in control.

Musk’s own lawyers have also stated in a court filing that because he is in charge of DOGE, it would be an undue burden for him to be deposed in an alleged wage-theft case filed against X Corp.

To make matters murkier, last week, Ehikian, the acting GSA administrator (who is himself heading the DOGE efforts at the agency), told staff in a meeting that “there is no DOGE team at GSA.”

All to say, it’s more important than ever to understand who is actually a part of this strike team ?

Again and again members of the administration have asserted that there is no conflict of interest between members of DOGE or DOGE affiliates and their work in government.

However, that has becomes harder to believe when people like Musk and others in government—who benefit from government contracts— continue to hold positions in the Private sector.

This is why critics by Democratic leader - Elizabeth Warren is valid (see below). However, it has fallen on deaf ears :

Questions about (1) Musk’s access to business competitor information at the Consumer Federal Protection Bureau (CFPB) and (2) Musk’s motivation to dismantle the Consumer Protection Agency as he gears up to launch his own financial services on X are among myriad concerns about DOGE’s continued infiltration of government agencies.

Particularly when those companies, not the government, could be their ultimate return destination.

My viewpoints: (mine only)

I first read this post by WIRED, out of curiosity.

While reading, it dawned on me that the information (in the post) offer a glimpse of possibly what to invest within the next 4 years, while Trump is still ‘in the house’.

FYI - readers do not have to agree. Its only my out-of-the-box guessing.

• Tesla. Tricky choice given mounting negative sentiments towards the EV maker. Maybe wait & see ?

• Palantir.

• Coinbase.

• Space X via funds $Destiny Tech100 Inc(DXYZ)$ or $ERShares Private-Public Crossover ETF(XOVR)$ , that has a stake in the space company.

I have skipped PayPal (PYPL)$ due to its sunset nature and fierce competition in the fintech space. Invest at your perils.

Go through the DOGE members list. It is a wealth of information. In the 21st century - Knowledge is King, right.

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