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There is an alarming set of paragraphs here, in a new report in the Washington Post by longtime D.C. reporter Matt Bai!
Let me set it up for you: “Rubio” is congressionally confirmed Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who occupies a position that is traditionally considered one of the most powerful in the world. “Farritor” and “Kliger” are Luke Farritor and Gavin Kliger, computer programmers in their mid-20s who work for DOGE, a so-called temporary organization created by executive order. “Musk” is Elon Musk.
Rubio had decreed that certain critical programs—such as aid to Ukraine and Syria and costs related to the PEPFAR program to combat HIV in Africa—would continue to be funded. Several times, USAID managers prepared packages of these payments and got the agency’s interim leaders to sign off on them with support from the White House.
But each time, using their new gatekeeping powers and clearly acting on orders from Musk or one of his lieutenants, Farritor and Kliger would veto the payments—a process that required them to manually check boxes in the payment system one at a time, the same tedious way you probably pay your bills online. Meanwhile, AIDS clinics shuttered and staff found themselves stranded in unstable countries such as Congo.
According to the administration, the Department of Government Efficiency is merely an advisory group that Musk oversees but does not formally direct. But according to Bai, Musk—via his staff—canceled payments that had been approved by both the secretary of state and the “White House.”
Did President Donald Trump communicate with Musk about this? It seems unlikely. A week ago, in the Oval Office, Trump told a group of reporters that he was “just hearing”—like, from the reporters—about work that DOGE was doing with the Department of Defense and Federal Aviation Administration. If Trump didn’t know that DOGE staff was even in contact with the Department of Defense, it seems like the odds are not good that he’s assiduously keeping tabs on which individual U.S. Agency for International Development payments DOGE is disbursing.
And that would suggest that, in this case, Musk and his young deputies acted on their own initiative to shut down AIDS clinics in defiance of the president’s staff and the secretary of state.
Here’s some other information about Kliger and Farritor that Bai doesn’t mention:
• A Twitter/X account that appears to belong to Kliger recently retweeted a post by Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist streamer, belittling another user for posting a photo of his adopted Black child. The same Kliger account also follows a user named CremieuxRecueil, whose proprietor writes about the purported links between race and IQ and has contributed to a newsletter affiliated with a race-science group whose reported leaders include a German political operative who wants to establish a whites-only ethnostate.
• In a now-deleted Substack post, Kliger wrote that he owed his “political awakening” to a 2013 article by Ron Unz, a U.S. far-right figure, that described the mainstream media as systematically dishonest. In other pieces, Unz has complained that the KKK is treated unfairly, asserted that “Jews have generally enjoyed a reputation for producing many of the world’s greatest swindlers,” and said that he believes the Holocaust likely did not take place. (In an email to Mother Jones, Kliger acknowledged writing the Substack post, but said he did not endorse Unz’s other work and had not read specific controversial Unz pieces the magazine asked him to comment on.)
• A Twitter account that appears to belong to Farritor follows CremieuxRecueil as well as an account called AnimeBibleVerse which has posted pro-Nazi material (e.g., images that say “Adolf Hitler was right about Jews” and referred to Black individuals using the N-word).
A different DOGE engineer appears to follow an account which has written that white people contribute more to society than other races and that Black people are better suited to playing basketball; a fourth appears to follow an account that was complaining, on Tuesday, that the National Security Agency employs “transgender Jews.” There’s much more down the DOGE–white supremacist internet rabbit hole here, should you care to explore it.
Is it crazy to say that final word on certain U.S. government activities might fall not to the president or secretary of state, but to near-teenagers who believe they are part of a sort of holy cause of restoring white men to their proper place of dominion over the world? Sure, it is crazy, isn’t it?
