Less than two weeks after Donald Park and Edward Coristine, two members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), entered the Small Business Administration (SBA), a new account appeared on X: @DOGE_SBA.
The SBA has had an official X account since 2010. It frequently posts updates and reshares posts from the agency’s administrator, former Republican senator Kelly Loeffler.
But according to documents obtained under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and shared exclusively with WIRED, it was a member of DOGE itself that started and ran the new X account. Not only did DOGE seemingly do so without involving the government workers who normally manage an agency’s external communications, but in at least one case, they appeared to accept a complaint from a potential whistleblower over direct message. It is yet another example of how DOGE has operated as a seemingly separate and unaccountable body within government agencies.
According to sources familiar with government operations, social media accounts, as well as other public-facing channels, have typically been managed by an agency’s communications staff. An SBA social media manager, though, appeared to be completely unaware of the account. In an email on March 6, he emailed his colleagues with a link to the @DOGE_SBA X account, writing, “How did I not see this before?”
According to an email dated February 16, Park, one of the two DOGE operatives at SBA, appears to have set up the @DOGE_SBA account, receiving an email confirmation from X for adding a phone number, which was redacted, to their account. (After Musk purchased the company, he changed its policies to allow only premium subscribers to use two-factor identification via SMS.)
On that same day, the account pinned a repost of one shared by the DOGE X account, asking the public for help identifying instances of waste, fraud, abuse. “Please DM insight for reducing waste, fraud, and abuse, along with any helpful insights or awesome ideas, to the relevant DOGE affiliates,” the post read. A tab labeled “Affiliates” on the DOGE X page lists 32 X accounts for the DOGE missions at various agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the SBA, among others.
“Help us fight fraud, waste, and abuse to benefit US taxpayers and small businesses across America. DMs are open!” the DOGE_SBA account wrote in its first and only post, echoing DOGE’s X account, which still regularly posts about how the so-called agency has been saving the government money by canceling contracts and services.
Park, Coristine, the SBA, and its communications team did not respond to requests for comment.
A former US government public affairs official, who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity to protect their identity, says that it would be highly unusual for a government employee to be running any kind of front-facing social media account without the knowledge of the public affairs staff.
“Social media has always been sort of highly contested territory in government agencies. As it was becoming a bigger and bigger thing, more and more people wanted to use it, other people within a department would see it as a means of control,” they say. “In terms of DOGE, we all saw DOGE come in and do things that they had no right to do.”
There is also already an established way to report federal waste, fraud, and abuse within the SBA. Like nearly every government agency, the SBA has an Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which has the authority to investigate and audit SBA programs. But X direct messages contained in the documents obtained through the FOIA request show that at least one person did report possible instances of waste, fraud, and abuse to the @DOGE_SBA X account. In one message, a user reached out asking how they could report a former employer, claiming they had “misused a PPP loan,” referring to the Paycheck Protection Program, which was offered to businesses at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Instead of referring the user to the OIG, the @DOGE_SBA account told the user to “report it here.”
“Imagine you have a crazy uncle and he says, ‘I’m going to be the cops, send me your tips,’” says a government auditor who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the press.” That’s essentially what’s going on here. The fact that they're getting these OIG complaints, there's no long-term accountability, there's no long- term vested interest in the success of whatever agency they're at.”
Nikhel Sus, deputy chief counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the nonprofit that submitted the FOIA request for the documents, claims that this behavior shows that “DOGE is a freestanding entity within the government. It is completely unchecked. It's not subject to any oversight, including from within the agencies that reportedly are employing them or that they are detailed to.”
CREW has submitted FOIA requests for correspondence on the X accounts created by DOGE for the Department of Education, the Environmental Protection Agency, the General Services Administration, Housing and Urban Development, the Internal Revenue Service, the Office of Personnel Management, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Social Security Administration, the State Department, and the Department of Agriculture. Only the SBA has responded with documents, and the SEC responded saying that there were no documents associated with the accounts to produce.
“Communications to and from the DOGE Team X accounts, the DOGE agency accounts, are federal records,” says Sus. “They have to be preserved under the Federal Records Act, and they have to be made available to the public on FOIA.”
