The secret to Washington is that everything is run by twentysomethings—from congressional staffers and judicial clerks to the crowds of advisors arriving with each new administration. A few of these ambitious professionals stick around for long civil-service careers, but most deploy their acumen and execution speed for just a few years before moving on to more lucrative private-sector work.
That’s why it was surprising this week that Wired went viral with two pieces on young men in government. The first, “The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Government Takeover,” drove a tenfold increase in the magazine’s subscription rate. The second, “A 25-Year-Old With Elon Musk Ties Has Direct Access to the Federal Payment System,” has done just as well.
What’s the scoop? As the first article puts it, “WIRED has identified six young men—all apparently between the ages of 19 and 24, according to public databases, their online presences, and other records—who have little to no government experience and are now playing critical roles in Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project.” The second finds that “a 25-year-old engineer” apparently “has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the US government.” (The Trump administration disputes this claim.)
Valid concerns exist about security, privacy, policy process, and Elon Musk’s influence over President Trump. But focus on the central premise of these two stories: Is there something unusual or shocking about people in their twenties running parts of the federal bureaucracy? Hint: there isn’t.
Young workers solve a critical workforce problem for government leaders. These are punishing jobs that feature around-the-clock hours, de minimis pay, domineering and impetuous bosses, essentially no HR support, and the possibility of getting instantly fired as a scapegoat if anything goes wrong. At their best, these jobs offer a rare experience; at their worst, they can entail burnout and disgrace.
It’s no wonder, then, that experienced professionals, parents with children, and anyone who wants a private-sector salary tends to move on. Thus, tens of thousands of twentysomethings run critical functions of the U.S. government today—as they have back to the days of the Founding Fathers themselves.
Musk’s embrace of new talent is also unsurprising given DOGE’s focus on improving government technology. Consider Y Combinator, the prestigious Silicon Valley start-up accelerator. It doesn’t post age data for its biannual cohorts of entrepreneurs, but analyses of public data show that the average age is somewhere around 30. Some successful founders became self-made billionaires in their mid-twenties—Mark Zuckerberg, Snapchat founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, and Austin Russell of LIDAR company Luminar.
In short, young and capable aren’t contradictory. Among the Musk hires that Wired identified, one worked as an algorithmic trader at a notable high-frequency trading firm—among the most stressful engineering jobs in the world. Another was part of the team that deciphered ancient Roman scrolls using frontier machine-learning models as part of a global challenge with more than $1 million in prize money.
What if DOGE has the potential to become this century’s Rhodes Scholarship for a more technically inclined generation? Both share pedigrees with ambitious South African industrial magnates who wanted to transform the world through the brilliance of a new crop of professionals. Both now deliver America’s meritocratic best into the halls of power with “no previous government experience.” At minimum, DOGE feels like a new Thiel Fellowship, launched by venture capitalist Peter Thiel a decade ago and which has identified such winners as Russell of Luminar and ScaleAI’s Alexandr Wang.
Certainly, the deployed DOGE engineers are about to find out what it’s like to work in politics—with Biden-inflated egg on their face thrown from allies and enemies alike. But only political neophytes don’t know the other secret to Washington: no one happily stays, and no one happily leaves.
Photo by Kenny Holston-Pool/Getty Images