Musk Connections: Former Twitter and Tesla Engineer
DOGE Deployments: Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
- According to WIRED and Bloomberg, Rajpal was part of the initial cohort of DOGE representatives given full access to the CFPB’s data systems, including sensitive records regarding bank examinations and enforcement actions.
- WIRED also reported that Rajpal was one of the DOGE representatives deployed to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, where he has “editor access to all NOAA Google sites.”
RAJPAL’S PLACEMENTS AT THE CFPB AND NOAA ARE CONCERNING GIVEN THAT HE SEEMINGLY HAS NO EXPERTISE IN CONSUMER FINANCE OR ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
- Rajpal worked as an engineer at Twitter before Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company. Rajpal also reportedly worked on console design for Tesla, a notably problematic aspect of Musk’s vehicles.
RAJPAL MAY HAVE BEEN INVOLVED WITH KOCH-BACKED STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS AT UC BERKEKLY
- As an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, Rajpal reportedly headed Students for Liberty (SFL), a “non-partisan political student organization at UC Berkeley dedicated to promoting the ideas of minimal government, free markets, sound money, non-intervention, and maximum individual liberty to campus and the surrounding community.”
- The UC Berkeley Students for Liberty chapter was founded in 2009 by Casey Given and Ashok Krishna. In 2017, the chapter made national headlines by supporting attempts to invite right-wing figures like Milo Yiannopoulos onto the campus.
- SFL is an affiliate of State Policy Network and has close ties to conservative dark-money donor organizations. From 2009-2017, SFL received over $700,000 from Koch foundations; other funders include Donors Capital Fund, Donors Trust, and the John Templeton Foundation. SFL’s co-founder Alexander McCobin traces the organization’s origins to his Koch Summer Fellowship at the Reason Foundation.
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.