Corporate Affiliations: Engineer at Databricks
DOGE Deployment: Internal Revenue Service; Office of Personnel Management; General Services Administration; Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; USAID
- Kliger has been described as a “top staffer working with Elon Musk” and DOGE. Kliger’s LinkedIn profile, before he deleted it, described his role as Senior Advisor to the Director for Technology and Delivery at the Office of Personnel Management.
- Reuters said that he was the first member of DOGE to meet with IRS officials, a day before the Washington Post reported that the IRS had discussed laying off nearly 10,000 employees. The Washington Post has also reported that an IRS memo under consideration would have Kliger “set to work at the IRS for 120 days,” with the possibility that his deployment could be renewed for another 120 days.
- Kliger was part of the DOGE team inside the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), helping to illegally gut the agency. He and other DOGE team members obtained access to CFPB data.
- In the case of the illegal dismantling of USAID, Kliger’s email address was copied on a message sent to all USAID employees close to 1:00 a.m. on Monday, February 3, telling them that the headquarters would be closed for the day.
KLIGER IS STILL EMPLOYED BY ANDREESSEN HOROWITZ-BACKED AI COMPANY DATABRICKS
- On February 7, Forbes reported that Kliger “remains a senior software engineer at Databricks,” and that he was only taking a leave of absence to work for DOGE. Databricks currently faces a lawsuit from authors alleging that the company trained its AI models on a massive dataset of pirated books.
- Databricks is backed by Marc Andreessen’s Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z. Andreessen is also involved with DOGE, while several at least three other Andreessen Horowitz employees—Sriram Krishnan (senior policy advisor for artificial intelligence at the Office of Science and Technology Policy), Scott Kupor (director of OPM), and Brian Quintenz (nominee for CFTC chairman)—have roles or have been nominated for roles in the Trump administration.
ON SUBSTACK AND TWITTER, KLIGER HAS PROMOTED RACIST BELIEFS AND FREQUENTLY DEFENDED ALLEGED SEX CRIMINALS
- Before Kliger turned his account to private, Reuters reported that Kliger had retweeted posts from Nick Fuentes—a known white supremacist that even Vice President JD Vance has called a “total loser”—and Andrew Tate, who has referred to himself as a misogynist and is being investigated in Romania for human trafficking, including trafficking minors.
- Kliger has additionally called for the pardoning of Derek Chauvin, the police officer who violently killed George Floyd and was found guilty of second-degree murder by a jury.
- In November, Kliger put out two free posts on his Substack. The first was a strong endorsement of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Kliger published it ten days after the first allegations of sexual assault against Hegseth came to light, and it makes no mention of them. Five days later, on November 30, Kliger put out a second piece, this one a strong defense of Matt Gaetz, where Kliger paints a conspiracy around the credible allegations that Gaetz paid for sex with a minor.
- On February 14, despite his busy schedule gutting congressionally-authorized agencies, Kliger released a paid Substack post (which has since been deleted). In the section before the paywall, Kliger credited his “political awakening” to a 2013 essay by Ron Unz, at the time the publisher of the American Conservative. It was not clear from the free section whether Kliger has kept up with Unz’s work, but in November 2013, Unz founded the Unz Review—described by Reuters as a “white supremacist website.”The Guardian has described Unz as “a Holocaust denier who publishes virulent antisemitic, anti-LGBTQ+ and neo-Nazi screeds.”
As Elon Musk’s DOGE continues to tear through agencies with little oversight or transparency, the Revolving Door Project is publishing profiles of reported DOGE employees: who they are, where they came from, and any conflicts of interest that might make their unfettered access to the federal government dangerous to the public. Read them all here.