An Elon Musk assistant has been accused of “shacking up” in the building of a federal agency, and bringing his wife and young child with him as he works for Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
“One of Musk’s top lieutenants and wife and young child have shacked up on the sixth floor of our agency and are living there,” reported a speaker at a town hall, who did not identify it or himself. He spoke out at the packed meeting hosted Monday night by Democratic Rep. Suhas Subramanyam in Leesburg, Virginia, northwest of Washington, D.C.
He added that the family’s hall of rooms on the sixth floor has allegedly been “blocked off with a special access list,” the worker was quoted in The Daily Beast.
DOGE could not immediately be reached for comment.
Musk’s penchant for having employees sleep in their offices to work or be on call around the clock is well known.
Musk has reportedly told friends that he’s sleeping at the DOGE office in downtown Washington just a few steps from the White House, according to Wired. He has encouraged his employees in the past to sleep at work, Fortune reports. DOGE headquarters has reportedly received a shipment of so-called “sleep pods” to place in the offices.
The town hall meeting, with clips (above) posted on Reddit, was attended by about 300 people, according to the Loudoun Times-Mirror. Those who spoke at the meeting said they were federal government workers, contractors, and retirees.
DOGE is an outside advisory panel intended to advise the government on cost-cutting, but which has taken drastic measures to dismantle agencies such as USAID.
Rather than simply advising, Musk appears to be the powerhouse behind a wholesale operation to push federal workers out of their jobs. A blanket buyout offer has been made in an email to federal employees if they agree to leave by a deadline this month. Now thousands of federal employees look set to lose their jobs.
The town hall speaker said he was made aware that Musk is aiming to cut the budget of his agency by half and slash the number of employees.
“In the last week, we had Elon Musk in our building, and after he visited the building, he called for a 50 percent cut of the entire agency,” the man said, according to the Reddit video. “My colleagues are getting 15-minute one-on-one check-ins with 19, 20, and 21-year-old college graduates asking to justify their existence.”
The individual added that agency supervisors had been given a “justification form” and that they were told not to say “anything” to their staff about what was happening.
Reports indicate that DOGE has recruited mostly men in their mid or early 20s to work with Musk to make radical changes to the government.
Meanwhile, Reuters has reported that DOGE employees have commandeered the headquarters of the Office of Personnel Management, shutting staff out of the computer system, and moving sofas onto the fifth floor. The news agency noted that that’s where the “director’s office” is located. In the past, it has only been accessible to those with a security pass or an escort.
