19-year-old Edward Coristine has been revealed to be the youngest member of Elon Musk’s DOGEbro lackey crew that is staging a coup on the US government. Although he’s just out of high school and is a freshman at Northeastern University, WIRED has reported that he’s listed as an “expert” for the Office of Personnel and Management (OPM) and has been a part of “sneak attack” meetings with employees at the Technology Transformation Services (TTS), which is housed within the General Services Administration (GSA).
Employees at GSA tell WIRED that Coristine has appeared on calls where workers were made to go over code they had written and justify their jobs. WIRED previously reported that Coristine was added to a call with GSA staff members using a nongovernment Gmail address. Employees were not given an explanation as to who he was or why he was on the calls.
And what are Coristine’s qualifications for judging the work of seasoned government and IT professionals, aside from graduating from high school? He spent a whopping three months at Neuralink, Musk’s brain-computer interface company, last summer.
TTS employees’ meetings with Coristine were reportedly confusing, disorienting and disrespectful, to say the least. TTS is charged with servicing much of the US government’s technical infrastructure. Musk ally Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer, was recently appointed as director of TTS.
Early Wednesday morning, rumors began to spread at TTS that employees would be receiving surprise one-on-one meeting notifications from management. During these brief meetings, employees would, according to a staff email that Shedd sent later on Tuesday, be asked to identify their biggest “wins” and the most significant “blockers” preventing them from working as efficiently as possible. The email linked to a Google Form questionnaire for employees to fill out ahead of their scheduled meetings. The invites included people without official GSA email accounts who were using Gmail addresses as well as official government accounts, multiple sources told WIRED.
“These should be items that you completed,” a screenshot of the form obtained by WIRED said. “It is OK to have a mix of big projects and small wins (examples: fixed a critical bug, shipped XYZ feature, saved this amount on a renegotiated contract, ect [sic] … If you are an engineer or designer please include a link to a PR [pull request] or a screenshot of one of your wins from the past 3 months.”
The email is reminiscent of one that Musk sent early in his Twitter days, demanding that employees email a one-page description of what they had accomplished the previous month and how it differed from their goals.
When TTS employees went to the meetings they were expecting to be meeting with Shedd but instead met with two very young-looking people they had never met before and who refused to identify themselves. One TTS source told WIRED that the individuals appeared to be “college students with disturbingly high A-suite clearance” (A-suite clearances tie employees to the GSA administrator’s office). We now know that one of these people was Coristine, who was also one of those people with a gmail address included on the meeting invites.
Coristine and his DOGE colleague had not seen the information the employees were asked to submit prior to the call, which caused even more confusion in the meetings. Some TTS staff shared their experiences in a Slack channel:
“They had not seen the information I submitted in my form, so I was left trying to explain things without the visuals/links I had submitted,” one wrote.
“Also had the same exact experience,” another employee added. “The individual I had met with had no idea about the google form I submitted and when I did reference it, I was met with avoidance.”
Coristine is also leading the DOGE efforts started this week to access all systems of the Small Business Administration.
An email sent to SBA employees revealed that DOGE official Edward Coristine requested access to HR, contract, and payment systems during a call with staff. Employees were told the access was approved but were not informed by whom, and the request required immediate action for Coristine and Donald Park, advisers to DOGE. The SBA, an independent US government agency, supports small businesses and entrepreneurs by providing resources, loans, and disaster recovery assistance.
I don’t know where this all ends. But any sane person should be very concerned and troubled that an inexperienced 19-year-old fresh out of high school is playing a lead role in staging a coup on our government. I have to say that I feel like I’m going insane right now, but while I still can I want to expose the people who are doing this so that perhaps one day we can hold them accountable.
Fun Fact: Coristine appears to have once gone by the moniker “Big Balls” on LinkedIn, the Daily Dot reports. On X, an account in his name had the handle @Edwardbigballer.
Another Fun Fact: Edward Coristine’s father, Charles Coristine, is CEO of the LesserEvil snack company. Too bad his son is a GreaterEvil.
UPDATE
I just want to say that while I think it’s important to shine a light on these Musk henchmen and what they are doing, I’m not supportive of any efforts that involve harassing them or endangering them. I just wanted to put that out there.
UPDATE 2
ICYMI, here’s my diary about another one of Musk’s DOGEbro coup co-conspirators: Marko Elez.
