Billionaire founders Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk have excited some tech workers to apply for DOGE as a "reverse 'New Deal.'"

As a two-time startup founder and CEO, Chinmay Singh hadn’t updated his resume in ten years. But when the incoming administration of president-elect Donald Trump announced DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency to be helmed by tech billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, Singh made a new one.

“What I would do at DOGE,” Singh wrote, before proposing work on healthcare projects like patient records interoperability and Medicare fraud. On November 16, he sent his pitch, as instructed, to the official DOGE account on X, the Musk-owned social media site. “Messaging your resume to an X account is unusual, so I took an unusual approach, too,” said Singh. “I haven’t heard back yet.”

It might be a while. The entrepreneur is one of several Silicon Valley founders and investors to be inspired by the organization’s stated mission, which Trump wrote in a transition team statement would “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies,” comparing the effort to The Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bombs.

In its public communications, DOGE has told aspiring applicants to steel themselves for a grueling sprint. Until Trump is inaugurated on January 20, DOGE’s work can’t fully start. But the organization is mandated to complete its work by July 4, 2026 as an Independence Day gift to the American people, the Trump transition team’s announcement wrote. The “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries” that DOGE seeks need to be willing to work “80 hours per week,” DOGE itself posted on its official X account. “This will be tedious work, make lots of enemies & compensation is zero,” Musk personally added.

“This is a chance to work on the reverse ‘New Deal.”

But DOGE hopefuls who spoke to Forbes in November were undeterred by such warnings, expressing interest in volunteering for a hodgepodge of civic, ideological and professional reasons. DOGE isn’t expected to be a large organization, by government or Big Tech standards. It is looking to hire just........

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