Elon Musk’s DOGE whiz kids appear to have the president’s full backing as they controversially comb through Americans’ sensitive data.
Donald Trump said Tuesday the group, mostly men in their mid-to-early 20s with one as young as 19, are “very smart people” who should be working in air traffic control towers nationwide.
“They’re smart people, unlike what they do in the control towers where we need smart people,” he said. “We should use some of them in the control towers where we were putting people that were actually intellectually deficient.”
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The president’s joke comes less than a week after 67 people plunged to their death in the chilly Potomac River after an American Airlines jet collided with a U.S. Army helicopter over the nation’s capital.
That tragedy elicited finger pointing from Trump and others in MAGA who suggested DEI hires at the Federal Aviation Administration were to blame. An official cause for the crash is yet to be released.
Musk’s minions—and their eye-popping ages—have grabbed headlines themselves this week. That started with a WIRED article on Sunday that identified six of them, including the 19-year-old popcorn heir Edward Coristine and Luke Farritor, the 23-year-old who famously deciphered a portion of the Vesuvius scrolls.
Their work in DOGE has many on the left crying foul the agency, created by a Trump executive order on Day 1, appears to have been given unfettered access to sensitive records inside the federal government—particularly within the Treasury Department.
Trump said Tuesday the young engineers—who attended schools like the Harvard, Rutgers, and the University of California, Berkeley—are doing their digging and coding from inside the White House itself.
Despite their supposed proximity to the president, Trump told reporters he is yet to meet any from the group.
Trump did share that he was impressed by their work, however. He gave them credit for finding frivolous spending within the federal government, but used perhaps a poor example to share his praise. He claimed they uncovered the U.S. had spent $100 million on condoms for Hamas, which is not remotely true.
