19-year-old Musk surrogate takes on roles at State Department and DHS
A 19-year-old acolyte of Elon Musk known online as “Big Balls” has taken on new roles as a senior adviser at the State Department and at the Department of Homeland Security, raising concerns among some diplomats and others about his potential access to sensitive information and the growing reach of his tech billionaire boss into America’s diplomatic apparatus, said U.S. officials familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue.
Edward Coristine, who briefly worked for Musk’s brain chip start-up Neuralink, was recently posted to the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Technology, a critical hub for data both sensitive and nonsensitive, officials said. Coristine, who also holds positions at the U.S. DOGE Service and the Office of Personnel Management, has attracted significant attention across Washington for his edgy online persona and the relative lack of experience he brings to his new federal roles.
But his new position - and similar roles at DHS and other agencies - could give him visibility into far more than just tech.
Some U.S. officials expressed alarm about Coristine’s new perch at the bureau, which serves as the IT department for Washington’s diplomatic apparatus. All of the department’s IT and data management functions were centralized at the bureau during an overhaul before President Donald Trump returned to office, making it a treasure trove of information.
“This is dangerous,” said one of the U.S. officials, noting Coristine’s age and a report by Bloomberg News that he was fired for leaking a data security firm’s information to a competitor.
A State Department official said Coristine’s position probably would not be confined to the Bureau of Diplomatic Technology.
The unusual appointment reflects how Musk’s DOGE has deployed some of its personnel to multiple agencies at once, giving young and relatively inexperienced - and largely unvetted - individuals unprecedented visibility into the workings of government. Musk prioritized the hiring of software engineers for the initiative, which aims to cut $1 trillion in federal spending as it works out of the office of the former U.S. Digital Service, which has been renamed the U.S. DOGE Service (the initials stand for Department of Government Efficiency).
Nowhere have the group’s tactics played out more visibly than at the Treasury Department, where 25-year-old DOGE staffer Marko Elez was posted before leaving the administration last week after the Wall Street Journal surfaced racist online posts. Musk, with the support of Trump and Vice President JD Vance, vowed to bring Elez back. When they arrived at the agency as DOGE representatives, Elez and Silicon Valley executive Tom Krause were at the center of a dispute over whether DOGE should have access to a sensitive Treasury payments system; Krause now formally oversees that system as an assistant treasury secretary.
Elsewhere, DOGE staff members have been assigned to the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration, both of which are carrying out work related to key focuses of Musk’s: reducing the federal workforce, shrinking the government’s real estate footprint and modernizing its outdated technology.
In federal directories, DOGE staffers are sometimes listed at multiple different agencies, making the full nature of their roles within the government unclear.
A directory also lists Coristine as having a position at the U.S. Agency for International Development, the world’s largest provider of food assistance, which Musk has boasted of destroying and which the Trump administration plans to drastically downsize from 10,000 employees to roughly 600. Coristine’s job at USAID is listed in the Bureau for Management in the chief information officer’s office.
Many diplomats looked with trepidation at the hollowing out of USAID, hoping the State Department would be spared a similar fate, given its status as the federal government’s first executive department, established in 1789. But the emergence of DOGE personnel in the halls of Foggy Bottom has heightened fears.
Coristine is also a senior adviser at both the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA, which is part of DHS, according to screenshots of an online DHS directory obtained by The Washington Post. He has email addresses associated with both entities, the screenshots show.
A DHS official said DOGE’s apparent inroads into the agency “may have significant national security implications,” given DHS’s mandate over border security, disaster response and counterterrorism, among other areas.
“They’re basically touching and breaking things without knowing what they are,” the official added, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic.
While Coristine’s role at the State Department remains unclear, officials noted that his position at the technology bureau could give him a foothold for obtaining unauthorized access to classified material and to compromising information on other countries and foreign activities.
In addition to Coristine, a 23-year-old colleague of his, former SpaceX intern Luke Farritor, is also listed in the State Department’s directory as working at the Bureau of Diplomatic Technology.
Coristine and Farritor are among a group of six engineers 25 or younger whom The Post has identified as working on behalf of DOGE.
Katie Miller, a spokeswoman for DOGE, did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did the State Department or Coristine or Farritor.
Another person who knows one of the DOGE engineers personally, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect that relationship, said that while the engineers’ technical ability is not in question, the amount of power the DOGE team has amassed in a short span is a concern.
“It’s not like they have a history of informed political opinion,” the person said. “They’re just in it for solving hard problems: It’s like, ‘Oh, a big challenge, it’s a big puzzle.’ I’m sure he just grew up solving puzzles and doing hard problems, and this is just another one and also has the perk of being around the president and billionaires.
“That is such a narrow view of the world,” the person said of the engineer’s tech background. “It’s not at all appropriate, I don’t think, for something with such a broad impact.”
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