01 August 25
What is the moral weight of responsibility for the men who carried out DOGE’s work?
You probably have not heard Farritor’s name before. He is one of Elon Musk’s 23-year-old DOGE bros who helped dismantle key parts of the federal government, including USAID.
The particulars of Farritor’s story are idiosyncratic—he is in almost every way an outlier. Yet the moral component is universal because it presents a simple question: What is the nature of accountability?
Luke Farritor grew up in Nebraska and what struck me most reading the account of his life is the extent of his privilege.
His father is a university professor. His mother is a physician. Farritor seems to have been a child prodigy whose talents were recognized, encouraged, and incubated almost from the moment he hit puberty. He was supported by both his well-to-do family, his community, and a number of institutions that exist to identify and elevate gifted children.
In other words: Farritor’s story is not one of a misunderstood genius who had to fight through an uncaring system. Quite the opposite.
Farritor was homeschooled and by age 15 he was lauded for the art installations he created. He was recruited into the University of Nebraska’s celebrated Raikes School, which is the engineering equivalent of being given a golden ticket. He got an internship at SpaceX and a $100,000 fellowship from Peter Thiel. He won part of the Vesuvius Prize for contributing to the team that decoded a burnt, ancient scroll using AI routines. According the Bloomberg, he had job offers from more or less all of Silicon Valley by the age of 21.
So like I said: privilege. This is a kid who worked hard, but never had to hustle. Who was never told “no.” Even in settings where authority figures expected certain things from him, Farritor was allowed to go his own way:
“School was never a priority for Luke, and that was well understood,” one classmate says. Unlike them, Farritor challenged professors about assignments and skipped classes (to work on the music project, to work on the scrolls). “It’s what kind of set him apart, because he would just grind on side projects and learn,” says another classmate. . . .Farritor didn’t always invest himself in group projects, some classmates say. Raikes is supposed to be all about collaboration. The program culminates in a project meant to solve a real problem for a company or organization. In November of his senior year, Farritor told his group that he would likely drop out before theirs was complete, according to one of them.
I want to be clear here: I think it’s good that Farritor was allowed to follow his own path rather than have professors hold him to a rigid program. But the point is that this was privilege stacked on top of privilege. It wasn’t like Real Genius where Farritor had to fight his way past blinkered professors. Even in the rarefied air of an elite, publicly-funded school, Farritor was encouraged to march to his own drummer.
In a certain way, when you look at Luke Farritor’s life you’d say: The system worked. This is everything we hope that our society will do for gifted kids. In a world where we often lament institutional failures in education, Luke Farritor got the best of everything.
And then he decided to burn it all to the ground. Because in December 2024 he joined DOGE.
I want to quote liberally from the Bloomberg piece so you can get a sense of what DOGE was like:
The White House’s executive order creating DOGE said it would modernize technology and maximize productivity. “It took a couple of weeks to realize that, despite the stated mission, their main focus would be destruction,” says a current government employee who, like others we interviewed, requested anonymity because they’re not authorized to speak with the media. “That it was less about evolving and improving than tearing down to the floorboards. I think part of what confused everybody was that you had these foot soldiers you were seeing and you assumed that they were there just to support the generals, but they weren’t. The generals had delegated everything to the foot soldiers.”
Deleting USAID seems to have been Farritor’s most important task:
On Friday, Jan. 31, Farritor was invited to an “urgent meeting” about the US Agency for International Development. Over the weekend, Musk called the agency, which provides humanitarian assistance to millions of the world’s poorest people, a criminal organization and a viper’s nest full of radical-left Marxists who hate America. After midnight on that Sunday, he wrote on X: “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.” . . .[W]hen a former friend posted an article critical of Farritor and DOGE on Instagram, Farritor replied with a meme of a crying baby and the caption: “When the corrupt elites can’t access USAID anymore.”
And:
DOGE members didn’t identify themselves when they came into an agency, government employees told us, and demanded access to sensitive data but wouldn’t explain why. They communicated on Signal, where they could make their messages disappear. They shielded their work from public-records review. . . .They were busy—and Farritor may have been among the busiest. “Good God. You’d see him and think that he must be harmless,” says a current government employee. “And I guess he would be if other people weren’t giving him an obscene amount of power and access and telling him to move fast and break things.”
Farritor helped assess, slash or dismantle at least nine departments and agencies after USAID— the Offices of Personnel Management and of Management and Budget; the Departments of Education, Energy, Labor, and Health and Human Services; the National Science Foundation; the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—according to interviews with dozens of current and former government employees, and lawsuits and records seen by Businessweek.
The irony in all of this is that while no one denies Farritor’s genius as an engineer, it’s not clear that destroying the federal government required any special gift. Building requires skill; any monkey can do the demolition work.
Look at DOGE and you don’t see an elite strike force that was needed to figure out how to execute an intricate, novel task. You see a bunch of privileged elites who were granted the honor of unthinkingly mashing the delete button as part of the reward system in their clique.
I’m pretty sure that I could have figured out how to destroy USAID.
But then again, maybe that’s the key: Maybe the point of bringing in geniuses like Luke Farritor is that they’d be so smart that they couldn’t understand what they were actually doing?
When you get down to it, DOGE was a failure. A complete and total failure. Musk and Farritor began by promising that DOGE would cut $2 trillion; by the time Musk walked out DOGE claimed said: It was all bullshit.
There were only two ways to see DOGE as having succeeded. The first is that it transformed large swaths of the civil service into expressly political operations that could be used as tools of the president, increasing executive power.
The second is that it executed a controlled demolition of two of America’s most important modes of exercising soft power—foreign aid and scientific research.
We’ll leave the research for another time and focus on the foreign aid.
USAID provided life-saving food and medicine for poor people across the globe. Before January 2025 there had been no—zero, zilch—interest in killing off the agency. It wasn’t something Trump ran on. It wasn’t envisioned in Project 2025. It was only once Elon Musk decided that USAID was evil that destroying the agency became a policy goal for the Republican party.
Now that USAID is gone, people are dying who otherwise would not have. This is a simple fact. How many? Who knows. One epidemiologist says that 300,000 people have already died because USAID cut off services. And maybe that’s right. But maybe the number is only—can you believe we would say “only”?—100,000 or 50,000.
Fifty-thousand, by the way, is the total enrollment at the University of Nebraska. So in one of our optimistic scenarios, Farritor only helped kill the entire population of his alma mater.
Other researchers have tried to get their arms around how many people will die in the coming years because USAID is gone, but this is an exercise in futility, too. Maybe the number is 14 million, as the Lancet suggests. But even if that figure is wildly off the mark and only—that word again—a million people die needlessly, what does it even mean to say such a thing?
Please remember that when Farritor was confronted with a gentle criticism of his actions, he responded with a meme about a crying baby.
So what are we supposed to do with a man like Luke Farritor?
He is not the product of a broken home or an uncaring system. He is not one of MAGA’s Forgotten Men. He was not discriminated against by DEI.1 He is young, but he is not that young. In the Army 23-year-old junior officers will lead their platoons into battle.
On TNL I said that Farritor’s actions are within shouting distance of war crimes and maybe that’s going too far. But if so, how would you describe the moral culpability of a man who casually destroys a program that will result in the deaths of millions without even achieving his stated aims of saving money?
Because that seems like more than just a “mistake,” or a “youthful indiscretion,” or a bad choice.
Especially because the final piece of the puzzle is that it is almost certain that Farritor will never face any consequences for his actions. Hell, his professional prospects will probably be improved by his association with Musk and DOGE. The spigots of the red-pilled tech world will be running full-blast for him.2
The only form of accountability Luke Farritor will ever face is the moral judgments of his fellow man. And such verdicts are nonbinding, to say the least.
So with that in mind, you tell me: What is his level of responsibility? What is a fair moral comparison? What consequences should a liberal society impose—if any—on someone like him? Is public shame enough? (Is public shame even possible at this late date?)
Please don’t be hyperbolic. I want well-considered answers.
And if the answer is that there are always men like Luke Farritor and I’m making too much of nothing, that’s okay. I want to hear that case, too.
