Elon Musk declared last month that the federal government was engaged in “utterly insane” activity, claiming without evidence that it had distributed $100 billion to people without Social Security numbers.
Two days after Mr. Musk’s comments, one of his key lieutenants, Steve Davis, began pressing the Social Security Administration for information. Mr. Davis called the agency’s leaders to insist they give a young engineer from Mr. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency access to databases that contained sensitive information about Americans.
Mr. Davis’s demand was “unprecedented,” Tiffany Flick, a former Social Security official, said in a sworn statement this month for a lawsuit filed by federal employees trying to block access to the data. She added that she could feel Mr. Davis grow impatient in the hours before the DOGE engineer was eventually permitted to investigate “the general myth of supposed widespread Social Security fraud.”
Deploying staff into federal agencies is just one task that Mr. Davis has carried out recently for Mr. Musk, as the world’s richest man continues an all-out effort to reshape the U.S. government. At every turn, Mr. Davis has backed his boss, laying the groundwork for cost cutting during the presidential transition, slashing diversity initiatives, meeting lawmakers and helping to send a governmentwide “Fork in the Road” email that urged workers to resign.
Those actions demonstrate how Mr. Davis, 45, has effectively become the day-to-day leader of DOGE. He has more power than Amy Gleason, the Trump administration’s acting DOGE administrator, two people close to the effort said, adding that Ms. Gleason has sometimes been in the dark about Mr. Davis’s decisions.
How Mr. Davis got to this position is hardly a secret. For more than 20 years, the engineer has devoted himself to fulfilling Mr. Musk’s desires, following the billionaire to his various companies, including the rocket maker SpaceX and the social media platform X. Mr. Davis wholeheartedly believes Mr. Musk will bring about humanity’s progress, according to interviews with 22 friends, former colleagues and government officials.