Luke Farritor, DOGE Boy
By Bloomberg has made this long-form article available to all. It’s a profile of Luke Farritor, up until his entrance into DOGE.
Homeschooled, extremely bright, the child of academic parents, sucked into Silicon Valley. At 23, apparently running large chunks of what is left of the government he helped to take apart.
I can see in his story many similarities to my own: the impatience with school, the conviction that one knows a better way. The difference is that all that was reinforced for Farritor by his association with Silicon Valley. And few 22 year olds are able to recognize how very much they don’t understand about the world.
So he’s ripped up at least 9 government organizations. He’s employed by the government as a GS-15, the highest civil service classification, with a salary of $167,603. He has met Elon Musk, one of his ambitions. The reporters couldn’t penetrate the DOGE secrecy to learn much about what he is doing or how DOGE works.
His father, a professor at the University of Nebraska and entrepreneur, will not speak to the press. His family and town are divided over his actions. His father’s work and a film about his role in deciphering scrolls from Herculaneum have been defunded by DOGE.
What was lost or disrupted this spring: A study of agricultural methods to help the poorest farmers around the world. A project to help Indigenous communities adopt traditional and sustainable farming to mitigate food insecurity. A project to “cultivate a diverse engineering workforce.” (The dean of Farritor’s department, who was overseeing that effort, didn’t respond to requests for comment.) A new program to recruit, pay for and otherwise support students from rural areas to return as teachers. “It’s a profound undermining of our future when we don’t invest in our young. That’s what our program is designed to do,” says one of its leaders, Amanda Morales.
What was lost beyond the university: opportunity, says one of Shane Farritor’s childhood friends, Kirk Zeller. He runs two medical device companies and helps others get going. Those kinds of early-stage companies rely on funding from NIH and the Department of Defense. “Companies won’t make it when otherwise they might have,” he says. “All I do is raise money now, and it is brutal.” He, like many in Nebraska, believes the government should be more efficient and accountable. “But I think we’re all a little surprised by the execution,” he says of DOGE. “They could come out of this as villains or heroes. It’s a great concept and could be beneficial to every taxpayer, and if they get it on a good course, Luke could have a lot of opportunities afterward. If it continues in the way it is now, it’s going to be hard for him.” That, says Zeller, would be a shame.