Musk’s efficiency department is seeking volunteers for ‘tedious’ work with no compensation

Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency is calling for volunteers to send in their résumés — via X direct message.

DOGE, which uses the same acronym as its X handle, wants to recruit “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting,” according to its post on X.

Musk then added, with a post from his personal X account, that this work will be unpaid.

“Indeed, this will be tedious work, make lots of enemies & compensation is zero,” Musk wrote. “What a great deal!” The post also included a laughing emoji.

Neither post detailed what specific jobs this new agency, which will actually operate more like former President Ronald Reagan’s Grace Commission, is hiring for.

This recruitment pitch is similar to what Musk reportedly told employees of X soon after he bought the company, then called Twitter. In 2022, Musk sent an email to the staff asking them to commit to being “hardcore” and work “long hours at high intensity” or leave the company with a severance package. Musk estimated that about 80 percent of staff left the company in early 2023.

Donald Trump announced that DOGE will be run by both Musk, the tech entrepreneur whose space technology company, Space X, is also a government contractor, and Vivek Ramaswamy, a former GOP primary candidate and pharmaceutical entrepreneur. Both men were active surrogates for Trump during his general election campaign.

The mission of this new department is to cut government spending costs by eliminating fraud and waste as part of a larger effort to disrupt Washington’s status quo. It is not clear yet how this will differ from or potentially work with from an existing agency that audits the government, the Government Accountability Office.