EXCLUSIVE – The White House has been at pains to insist Elon Musk is not the administrator of the Department of Government Efficiency – and the mystery of who is said administrator finally appears to have been solved.
Moments after press secretary Karoline Leavitt declined to name the administrator during Tuesday’s press briefing, a White House official told the Washington Examiner that the acting administrator is a woman named Amy Gleason.
According to public records, Gleason has been a senior adviser to the U.S. Digital Service, the organization that the Trump administration transformed into DOGE, since January. According to Gleason’s LinkedIn profile, she also served as a digital services expert for the then USDS during the first Trump administration from 2018 to 2021. Beyond that, little is known about her role and how much authority she has.
By all indications, Musk had been heading DOGE and the Trump administration’s mission to shrink the side of the federal government and cut allegedly wasteful or fraudulent spending.
However, the administration said in court filings that the Tesla and SpaceX billionaire was working as a special government employee and was not the administrator.
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Leavitt faced a number of questions earlier Tuesday about DOGE’s leadership structure, but she repeatedly declined to say who the administrator is.
“The president tasked Elon Musk to oversee the DOGE effort. There are career officials and there are political appointees who are helping run DOGE on a day-to-day basis,” she said in one exchange. “There are also individuals who have onboarded as political appointees at every agency across the board to work alongside President Trump’s cabinet to find and identify waste, fraud, and abuse, and they are working on that effort every day.”
Later in the briefing, Leavitt was asked about a Monday exchange between government lawyers and Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly at a hearing concerning DOGE’s access to Treasury Department facilities. When asked by the judge if DOGE currently has an administrator, Justice Department trial counsel Bradley Humphreys simply responded, “I don’t know the answer to that.”
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Leavitt responded Tuesday by telling reporters she would not “reveal the name of that individual from this podium.”
“I’m happy to follow up and provide that to you, but we’ve been incredibly transparent about the way that DOGE is working,” she continued.
You can watch Tuesday’s briefing in full below.
