Since the inauguration, the Trump administration has moved in a blitz to implement the authoritarian Project 2025 agenda, touching on many aspects of American life. Previous reporting has claimed that this was a part of a “flood-the-zone” strategy to overwhelm opponents with as many radical reforms as possible in order to prevent them from mounting an effective defense. The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) has previously reported (see here) that many of these initial changes are lifted from authoritarian playbooks in countries such as Russia and Hungary. One underappreciated aspect of this strategy has been the outsourcing of decisions, or really targets, to civilian activists in the broader far-right ecosystem. The administration has taken advice from prominent accounts on billionaire Elon Musk’s X/Twitter, including anti-trans activist Chaya Raichik (Libs of TikTok), the unofficial DOGE-affiliate Jennica Pounds (DataRepublican), and anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) activist Chris Rufo, on where to cut and who to target with administrative actions.
Trump has no concerns with relegating critical government decisions affecting Americans to the far-right MAGA movement. As previously reported on by GPAHE, many of the policies being put into place and decisions to hire and fire federal employees originate with the Heritage Foundation (see GPAHE’s reporting here), the organization behind the rights-stripping Project 2025 (see GPAHE’s analysis of Project 2025 here), while the pro-Trump think tank America First Policy Institute (AFPI) was given the opportunity to stack various departments of the administration with their employees (see GPAHE’s reporting here and here). Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Musk, has been another prominent actor in firing thousands of workers and canceling federal contracts.
In order to accelerate this process even further, it appears that the Trump administration has made it an unofficial policy to outsource some of these efforts to the online far right, acting on Twitter suggestions on government workers who should be fired and programs to cut.
DOGE has been the most open to outside suggestions. On February 17, 2025, the public DOGE account on Twitter posted a message asking for “help from the general public.” DOGE asked followers to “please DM [direct message] insight for reducing waste, fraud, and abuse, along with any helpful insights or awesome ideas, to the relevant DOGE affiliates,” a reference to DOGE accounts created for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Social Security Administration (SSA), and other government bodies.
Twitter Post from Musk’s DOGE account asking for help from followers.
While it is unknown how many users sent private messages, some were more public about their collaboration. One such person is software engineer Jennica Pounds, who runs the account “DataRepublican,” along with her team of supporters. With the use of AI, Pounds and her team of data scientists created a database of NGOs and charities allegedly receiving funding from federal sources.
On January 21, 2025, Pounds flagged the DOGE account saying that she had found “a quick billion for you to cut,” pointing out a list of organizations providing aid to refugees and the immigrant community (she did not specify how these organizations were wasteful). From his personal account, Musk responded to the post with “Noted.” Pounds responded to this by saying that she was “ready to uproot and serve in DC at government wages” because she “believes government overspending is an existential threat.” One of the organizations named by Pounds, the Lutheran Immigration & Refugee Service, had already been targeted in a post by QAnon influencer Mike Flynn on February 2, where he baselessly claimed that they were “using religion” as cover for a “money laundering operation.” Later in the day, Musk quote-tweeted the post saying that the DOGE team would be “rapidly shutting down these illegal payments,” without disclosing why they were “illegal.”
Pounds and her team have a complicated relationship with Musk and DOGE. On January 29, 2025, Musk retweeted one of her posts reporting on alleged corruption by United Way chapters, saying that she was someone “worth following.” Pounds has said on several occasions that she was not in direct communication with Musk, and was not an official member of the DOGE team, but that DOGE representatives had messaged her on several occasions in the past, claiming that she had a “working relationship” with them. On February 23, Pounds claimed that a “generous benefactor reached out and has offered to cover AI expenses” and later, on February 26, in a post she made on Twitter after Rolling Stone revealed her identity, Pounds claimed that she had “recently resigned” from her job to “pursue DOGE-adjacent efforts full-time,” that her “background check is still in progress,” and that her “ultimate goal is to work with the Administration to cut waste and improve efficiency.” In a follow-up post, she reiterated that she was “not backing down” and was “looking forward to serving the Administration.” Her actions also gained the support of others in power such as Interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin, who asked Pounds to contact his office after she revealed her identity online on February 26. “We have established contact,” she wrote in response (Martin’s hopes for a permanent position are now threatened due to his close relationship with a neo-Nazi and having defended Jan. 6 insurrectionists, among other things).
Pounds’ posts indicate that her mission is less about simply eliminating “waste” and “corruption,” which she never fully elaborates on, and more about the reduction of government funds to NGOs she finds objectionable. These NGOs are often funded by common far-right scapegoats such as George Soros and Bill Gates, who she considers the “backers of the so-called ‘Uniparty’ network.” On February 25, 2025, she wrote that she considers that “governance is no longer by ‘We The People’” if “the Executive Branch has limited control over the bureaucracy” and “Congress and the Judiciary are compromised by conflicts of interest driven by NGOs.”
Another Twitter account that has been participating in the efforts to strip the United States government of everything “woke” is anti-LGBTQ+ activist Chaya Raichik’s Libs of TikTok. In her activism, Raichik is known for reviving the term “groomer” to refer to LGBTQ+ people and LGBTQ+-affirming educators, and leading online harassment campaigns that have resulted in bomb threats being directed at her targets. Her efforts have concentrated on a number of departments of the executive branch. At Veterans Affairs, Raichik tweeted at VA Secretary Doug Collins on February 10 mocking a video from the VA promoting LGBTQ+ pride on Youtube and the VA website, prompting the administration to remove it. In a post declaring victory, she referred to the Trump administration as the “most efficient admin in history.” Also on February 10, Raichik again tweeted at Collins over an option for gender preferences in an official VA app, saying that “this garbage needs to be removed immediately,” to which Musk replied “noted.” The next day, the official DOGE account replied to Musk’s comment saying that the gender identity section had been “fixed.”
Raichik tweeted at the Department of Commerce on February 2, 2025, that she had received an image of the DEIA initiatives page at the National Weather Service (NWS), claiming it “needs to be removed immediately,” to which Musk again replied that “Doge will fix it.” On February 6, the official DOGE account tweeted that the page had already been removed “thanks to [an] unknown hero.”
At the Department of Defense, Raichik enlisted the help of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who replied to one of her posts that he was “all over it,” regarding what appeared to be medical forms provided to members of the military that still had multiple options for gender identity.
A number of national security employees have also been let go after being targeted by far-right individuals. After anti-trans and anti-CRT activist Chris Rufo tweeted on February 24 that he had “obtained logs” from what he described as the National Security Agency’s (NSA) “secret transgender sex chatroom,” where employees supposedly discussed “genital castration, artificial vaginas, piss fetishes, sex polycules, and gangbangs.” Two days later, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard claimed that more than 100 employees from across the intelligence community had been fired as a result. In his posts, Rufo mischaracterized the chat logs from a group chat intended to be an employee resource group (ERG) for LGBTQ+ employees as evidence of alleged DEI employee misconduct in the workplace.
In a similar vein, four employees of the National Security Council (NSC) were fired on April 2, 2025, including the principal deputy national security adviser, after far-right, anti-Muslim influencer Laura Loomer met with Trump. CNN claims that a source confirmed that Loomer compiled a list of roughly a dozen names of “disloyal” staffers and that the NSC firings were the direct result.
The Department of Education (DOE), run by former employees of the pro-Trump think tank America First Policy Institute (AFPI) (see GPAHE’s earlier reporting here), has also been responsive to many of the requests of allied Twitter users. On February 15, the DOGE account tweeted that they had “fixed” the DOE’s FAFSA application form, which previously included a nonbinary option when asking for students’ demographic information, after Raichik flagged it the day prior. On February 19, the DOE published a press release saying that they would be terminating 18 grants under the Comprehensive Centers Program, which they claimed promoted “race-based discrimination and gender identity ideology.” Every example of the four “uncovered instances” of such “radical agendas” cited tweets from Rufo.
Several instances of Twitter users tweeting at Trump administration officials have led to the opening of investigations. After Raichik and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, a principal advocate of Project 2025 with a long history of bigotry, called attention to a post by a Boston University professor picturing the young members of DOGE alongside the text “Wanted for Treason, Dead or Alive,” Interim U.S. Attorney for DC Ed Martin stated that the individual may have “committed acts that appear to violate the law in targeting DOGE employees” and would be opening an investigation. As a result, both Raichik and Kirk called for Boston University to lose all of their federal grants. Musk responded to Raichik’s post, again, saying “noted.” Boston University is now on a list of 60 schools nationwide that the Department of Education has warned of “potential enforcement actions.”
At the Department of Justice (DOJ), Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon claimed that her office would be “closely examining” the ruling of a federal court they consider “unconstitutional” after anti-trans activist Riley Gaines, an AFPI employee, brought attention to it on Twitter. The ruling in question revolved around a school’s decision to prevent anti-trans protesters from wearing “XX” wristbands at a sports event where a trans student athlete was participating. In response to Attorney General Pamela Bondi announcing that individuals that commit arson against Tesla would be prosecuted for “domestic terrorism,” accounts such as Raichik’s began to search for said individuals. On March 24, after Raichik brought attention to one such alleged case in Philadelphia, Musk responded that alleged perpetrator would be “found and arrested.”
Various Trump officials have also used these far-right figures to publicize their activities. Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the White House’s ‘Border Czar’ Tom Homan, who holds the more formal position of Executive Associate Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations, have been particularly aggressive in a PR offensive related to their mass deportations efforts. Noem took Raichik for a “ride along,” providing her with a vest and an ICE officer’s badge. Raichik later posted “exclusive footage” of arrests of alleged “criminal illegal aliens” to her account on Twitter. Homan deployed a similar technique in late January 2025, bringing along Dr. Phil McGraw, more popularly known from his TV show as “Dr. Phil,” in a highly-publicized ICE operation in Chicago in which an alleged internet predator was arrested. Like Raichik, Dr. Phil then published the footage of the “targeted operation” onto Twitter.
