President Donald Trump in 2020 signed an executive order asking federal agencies to review their use of foreign contractors, part of an effort to help American employment during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
But DOGE is relying on at least three foreign contractors to carry out the president’s ambitious plan to cut federal spending and make the government more efficient, a dynamic that has angered some inside the White House.
Internal agency records reviewed by POLITICO show that a Uruguayan X employee and two Canadians, who had worked at Airbnb, are working inside the federal government on DOGE projects as contractors through the General Services Administration..
Federal hiring laws generally limit full-time government employment to U.S. citizens or nationals, with only narrow exceptions. And while it’s common for the GSA to employ foreign contractors, these three have been given similar access and authority as full-time DOGE employees, a senior GSA official said, calling it “striking.”
Andrew Vilcsak and Yat Choi, both Canadian, are working inside the Office of Personnel Management alongside Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia on the effort to digitize the federal retirement system. Gebbia was recently named U.S. chief design officer to establish the National Design Studio to improve the usability and design of federal government websites.
Vilcsak’s title is senior technologist, while Choi is a scientific technologist.
Both were hired as government contractors through MSI Consulting, a boutique firm in Virginia that works closely with DOGE and has primarily provided consulting and administrative support, agency records show.
Micaela Lopez Ballefin, a Uruguayan citizen who has worked at X since 2020, serves as a senior engineering manager at GSA. She is also a contractor and has been involved in projects that include the effort to reduce unused phone lines, GSA’s OneGov negotiations, and migrating agencies’ IT infrastructure onto the cloud.
She works with DOGE members Matthew Markhurst-Session and Thomas Shedd, head of the Technology Transformation Services at GSA. She also has an email address at the Small Business Administration, similar to other DOGE full-time employees, who have contact points at multiple agencies.
Lopez Ballefin, Vilcsak and Choi did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The use of contractors like Vilcsak, Choi and Ballefin allows DOGE to tap experts from around the world, while adhering to federal employment rules, but the arrangement underscores tensions between the administration’s broader immigration stance and its internal talent needs.
Early this year, Elon Musk wanted to bring DOGE recruiter Baris Akis into the government, but Trump intervened, The Atlantic reported. Akis is Turkish and not a U.S. citizen and played a significant role in staffing up DOGE with engineering talent during the transition.
One administration official who is familiar with the inner workings of DOGE and granted anonymity discuss it told POLITICO that GSA’s Federal Acquisition Head Josh Gruenbaum and deputy acting GSA administrator Stephen Ehikian, both previously senior members of DOGE, are responsible for allowing foreign contractors to work on DOGE projects, and that they are “lacking adult supervision.”
“GSA and OPM follow a robust and well-defined suitability determination process to ensure that all contractors working under a GSA contract are vetted and cleared prior to beginning work on the contract,” spokespeople for GSA and OPM told POLITICO in a joint statement. “At no time has GSA or OPM deviated from these processes.”
Nearly all of the other dozens of DOGE personnel are U.S. citizens, hired into the government as full-time employees even if they initially onboarded at GSA before moving to other agencies.
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