Elon Musk‘s most infamous Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) foot soldier revealed himself to the public Thursday for the first time, sitting down with his colleagues for a wide-ranging roundtable discussion on Fox News.
The 19-year-old DOGE staff member Edward Coristine, known by his online moniker “Big Balls,” is just one of a number of Gen Z employees ripping up the federal government on behalf of his billionaire boss.
Coristine, who works in the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Technology, told Fox host Jesse Watters about the origin of his nickname during a special edition of Watters’ World Thursday night.
“I just set it as my LinkedIn username,” Coristine said, drawing laughs from Watters and others at the table.
“People on LinkedIn take themselves like super seriously and are pretty averse to risk, and I was like, I want to be neither of those things,” he continued. “Honestly I didn’t think anyone would notice.”
Coristine, who was absent during a March gathering of DOGE members on Fox News, explained what his job “working on computer stuff” entailed.
“One of our initiatives is to root out fraud and waste, and to do that we started looking at computers, and as mentioned earlier, there’s no accounting of what payments go to where,” he claimed. “You look at a specific line item, $20 million. OK, what is it going to? For the majority of payment systems it’s like, we don’t really know.”
Earlier in the show, Musk and his clan claimed once more that the Social Security Administration (SSA) is rife with fraud due to people over 120 years old receiving benefits. Yet similar claims have been debunked.
“Is the small business administration giving loans to dead people, people over the age of 120?” one DOGE member said. “The answer was yes and it was around $330 million in total.”
Musk joined in: “A birthday that could not possibly be real, meaning they were over 115 years old… Safe to say if anybody is in the system as 115 years or older, that is fake.”
Yet, as a former SSA commissioner said when Musk first went public alleging that 150-year-olds were claiming benefits, the reason for this is the coding system in place, which commonly uses May 20, 1875, as a date when a birthdate is missing or invalid.
The DOGE crew also discussed their experiences at other government agencies— including one man who visited the federal “retirement cave,” a facility in Boyers, Pennsylvania where the entire federal government’s retirement paperwork is apparently done by hand.
The existence of the facility shows the need for widespread IT upgrades across government, he said.
Musk also offered specific examples of government waste, arguing that only a fraction of taxpayer funds reach their designated recipients.
“One of the extreme examples of non-accountability in some cases is what has occurred with small entities. The Inter-American Foundation is one of the agencies we visited where, you know, they get $50 million a year, congressional money, for things like farming in Peru,” he said.
“That’s a real example. Improving the marketability of peas in Guatemala. Fruit jam. You might expect in the private sector, nonprofit, 80 or 90 percent of their money to grantees. In the case of IAF, that was 58 percent,” he claimed.
“So the other half goes towards management, travel. An example is that even if you agree with supporting alpaca farmers in Peru, actually most of the money never made it out of D.C. It’s going into the pockets of people in the neighborhood.”
Musk and company’s primetime interview Thursday seems to be a bookend to the billionaire’s controversial stint in the Trump administration, which saw him slash the federal government at nearly all levels—though he admitted to making a few mistakes along the way.
Musk will be leaving his role at DOGE soon to attend to his businesses.
Tesla, for instance, has seen a lackluster first quarter due to Musk’s unpopularity and the effect of Donald Trump’s tariffs, which Musk himself opposed.
“Starting next month, May, my time allocation to DOGE will drop significantly,” Musk said on an earnings call for the electric vehicle manufacturer last week.
Trump addressed Musk’s impending departure during a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, while praising DOGE’s efforts.
“We all want to thank you for your help,” Trump told Musk at a Cabinet meeting Wednesday. “You really have sacrificed a lot.”
