At least one of the techies running Elon Musk’s DOGE operation to slash the size of the US government is an Iranian-American. He is Aram Moghaddassi, a software engineer, who is assigned to the Social Security Administration, where he says he is trying to help protect people from fraud.
Moghaddassi is a young Silicon Valley software engineer who works for Musk’s company Neuralink.
“I thought I’m a software engineer who could maybe make a difference here,” he said of his work with DOGE, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency. It is not an agency of the federal government, but the name for Musk’s band of a few dozen IT specialists working to downsize the federal government.
He is embedded in the Social Security Administration, where the computer systems are over 50 years old. In an interview Musk and seven of his aides, including Moghaddassi, gave to Tucker Carlson, Moghaddasi said he aims to make two improvements for Social Security beneficiaries: “Protect them from fraud … and make the experience better.”
He said 40 percent of the calls to Social Security are from fraudsters trying to steal retirees’ money by changing where their checks are deposited.
He clearly thinks the US government is too big. After Trump’s November election victory, Moghaddassi posted on his X account that there were “too many” federal agencies.
Moghaddessi’s age and birthplace are not known. He is a 2021 graduate of the University of California at Berkeley with a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics.
