Two of Elon Musk’s DOGE minions caught on video in a tense standoff with a small U.S. government aid agency have been identified as a lawyer set to clerk for conservative Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and a 22-year-old software engineer with links to Musk nemesis Sam Altman, according to a report.
Jacob Altik and Ethan Shaotran were among the members of Musk’s cost-cutting task force DOGE who tried to enter the U.S. African Development Foundation on Wednesday to dismantle the agency after President Donald Trump deemed it “unnecessary,” The New York Times reported.
But only Congress has the power to shutter the USADF and lay off its staff, its leaders concluded, so employees blocked the doors and refused to let DOGE in.
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After they were denied entry on Wednesday, Altik and Shaotran returned to the USADF on Thursday with U.S. Marshals, who escorted them inside and ordered security officials to change the locks, the Times reported. Engineer Nate Cavanaugh, 28, also joined them.
None of the DOGE team responded to the paper’s request for comment. The Daily Beast has also reached out to the White House for comment.
A White House spokesperson, Anna Kelly, told the Times: “Entitled, rogue bureaucrats have no authority to defy executive orders by the president of the United States or physically bar his representatives from entering the agencies they run.”
Shaotran studied computer science at Harvard and founded an artificial intelligence company, Energize AI, that received $100,000 in funding from Altman’s OpenAI, as first reported by Wired magazine. In September, he told Business Insider he was a 22-year-old senior at Harvard.
At the time, he claimed to spend 85 hours per week working on his start-up, while also taking four or five classes each semester and traveling between his home base of San Francisco and the Harvard campus in Boston. He later clarified he was taking a break from Harvard, according to Palo Alto Online, and in October, he was the runner-up in a hackathon hosted by Musk’s xAI.
Altik is a lawyer with the Office of Personnel Management who only has about four years of legal experience: two clerkships with appeals court judges and about 18 months of experience in private practice also focused on appeals courts, according to his LinkedIn profile. He’s been tapped to clerk for Justice Gorsuch starting in October.
Barely an hour after their arrival on Thursday, the foundation’s president Ward Brehm filed a lawsuit against Pete Maroccco, the State Department official leading the purge, and against the U.S. DOGE Service.
The suit accuses DOGE of gaining access to the USADF under “the false pretenses of modernizing and streamlining USADF’s computer systems” and then trying to illegally dismantle the agency and fire its board.
Altik has been tasked with interpreting the law governing USADF and determining the agency’s “minimum statutory requirements,” according to the suit, despite his limited legal experience.
The suit also identifies Shaotran and Cavanaugh, who attempted to help Maroccco and Altik lay off the staff, according to the filing.
The USADF was established by Congress in 1980 to funnel investment funds to entrepreneurs and grassroots businesses in the poorest countries in Africa.
