Corporate Connections: Intern at Meta, intern at Palantir, engineering intern at Bridgewater Associates Hedge Fund
DOGE Deployments: OPM, GSA, Education
- Bobba is listed as an “expert” on internal OPM records
- Bobba has A-suite level clearance and an email address at GSA. He is able to “work out of the agency’s top floor and have access to all physical spaces and IT systems, according to a source with knowledge of the GSA’s clearance protocols.”
- Bobba also has an email address at the Department of Education.
AKASH BOBBA IS A RECENT COLLEGE GRADUATE, ONLY 22 YEARS OLD
- Bobba was one of the young engineers named by WIRED to be part of Musk’s DOGE team. He is reportedly only in his early twenties, and he just graduated from UC Berkeley.
BOBBA WORKED AT PALANTIR, A MAJOR DEFENSE CONTRACTOR CO-FOUNDED BY FAR-RIGHT IDEOLOGUE PETER THIEL
- Palantir is a major defense contractor, having been awarded almost $2.5 billion in federal contracts since 2009. The company led an effort to create a consortium of other tech firms which would jointly bid on government contracts.
- Palantir was co-founded by Peter Thiel. Thiel is a former “mentor”, employer, and congressional campaign financier of Vice President JD Vance.
- Thiel is a far-right ideologue. In one 2009 essay, he wrote “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” More recently, Thiel has been a big booster of the far-right figure Curtis Yarvin, who wrote at the end of last year that “everything rots when it has no owner—human beings included.” Yarvin has long advocated for a plan he calls “RAGE,” which stands for “Retire All Government Employees.”
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.