A longtime healthcare technology executive who previously worked for the Trump administration is now the acting administrator of the Department of Government Efficiency, multiple outlets reported Tuesday, following weeks of questions over whether Elon Musk was officially in charge, though little remains known about Gleason or her role.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, accompanied by U.S. President Donald Trump (R), and his son X Musk, ... [+]
Unnamed White House officials confirmed Gleason had been named the acting administrator of DOGE to reporters at CBS News, MSNBC, Reuters, Semafor and more.
Gleason previously worked at the U.S. Digital Service—a government agency that Trump turned into DOGE on his first day in office via executive order—from October 2018 to December 2021, according to a LinkedIn page appearing to belong to her.
CBS News said it reached Gleason by phone Tuesday before her name was made public, and it reported she said she was in Mexico and would not comment further.
The LinkedIn profile indicates Gleason returned to USDS in January, and says she most recently worked as a consultant and chief product officer at Russell Street Ventures, a healthcare investment firm.
A speaker description of Gleason from the HLTH conference in 2022 said while at the USDS, she “led the creation of the national COVID database and products that used that data to drive the federal response,” and collaborated with both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.
Gleason’s name had been reported by Wired on Feb. 18 in an article that described her as “a liaison between legacy USDS, DOGE, and other agencies,” but said, “little is known about her official role.”
Gleason also appears on an archived website from the Obama-era White House that lists her as a Champion of Change for her work “as the Chief Operating Officer of CareSync” where she worked to “help patients and their families better coordinate care and improve health outcomes.”
Forbes has reached out to the White House for confirmation that Gleason is serving as DOGE’s administrator.
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The U.S. Digital Service, or USDS, was an agency established in 2014 by then-President Barack Obama “to deliver better government services to the American people through technology and design.” It brought together a team of civil servants, engineers, designers, product managers and digital policy experts who worked to modernize government services and make them more accessible, according to its website. On Jan. 20, when Trump took office, he signed an executive order renaming the U.S. Digital Service as the United States DOGE Service and stating that DOGE had a not-dissimilar goal: “to modernize federal technology and software to maximize efficiency and productivity.”
Questions of who is leading DOGE have increased in recent days after a Department of Justice lawyer was unable to answer when a judge asked Monday if there was an administrator, saying: “I don’t know the answer to that.” The White House had said for weeks Elon Musk was overseeing DOGE as a special government employee but is not the administrator, which was echoed again Tuesday by President Donald Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt. Leavitt told a reporter in Tuesday’s White House briefing she would not “reveal” the name of the employee serving as DOGE’s administrator publicly, but would follow up and provide the name—though the reporter said Monday afternoon Leavitt had not followed up.
$65 billion. That’s how much money DOGE claims it has saved the U.S. government since it began operating last month, according to its government website.
When Trump announced the creation of DOGE before he took office, he said it would be led by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, though Ramaswamy departed the agency before it began. The Trump administration has recently sought to distance Musk from DOGE, though Trump himself has referred to Musk’s work as part of the agency and the two appeared together in a press conference in which Musk took credit for much of DOGE’s work. DOGE has drawn regular controversy, criticism and legal challenges since it began working to reduce government spending and the federal workforce, in part because its employees—many of whom are unknown to the public—are reportedly accessing sensitive government data and information.