Elon Musk likens Doge workers to Spartans fighting bureaucratic evils: 'Not many needed to win battles'

Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Monday likened workers at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to Spartans, citizens of the ancient Greek city-state of Sparta known for their strict discipline, military training, and courage. Musk was responding to a report claiming that six men aged 19 to 24 with "little to no government experience" were playing critical roles in the DOGE project. "Not many Spartans are needed to win battles," Musk wrote on X responding to another post that tagged a portion of a report by Wired that claimed that the engineers working on the DOGE project held "nebulous job titles" and "at east one appeared to be working as a volunteer".

A report in the New York Times reported Sunday that the DOGE, the Musk-led advisory group under President Donald Trump to carry out cuts t0 needless government spending, has got access to the federal payment system. As per the report, Musk allies who have been granted access to the payment system were made Treasury employees, passed government background checks and obtained the necessary security clearances. On Saturday, Musk posted that the DOGE team had discovered that payment approval officers at the US Treasury were instructed always to approve payments, "even to known fraudulent or terrorist groups".



"They literally never denied a payment in their entire career. Not even once," Musk wrote on X. The US President had also tapped billionaire entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy to head DOGE alongside Musk but he decided to step aside and run instead for governor of Ohio.

Since taking office on January 20, Trump has fired and sidelined hundreds of civil servants in his first steps toward downsizing the bureaucracy. A report by Reuters last week claimed that Musk's aides charged with running the US government human resources agency have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the data of millions of federal employees. "We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems," Reuters quoted an official as saying.

"That is creating great concern. There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications.

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