Musk Connections: Former employee at xAI
Other Corporate Affiliations: Former employee at Uber
DOGE Deployments: Office of Personnel Management (OPM)
- According to the New York Times, Amanda Scales is a DOGE representative working at OPM. As Chief of Staff, Scales is the point of contact for all OPM guidance related to the Trump administration’s purge of federal employees.
- Agencies tasked with identifying potentially fireable workers—such as probationary hires and staff in diversity offices—sent their lists directly to Scales. She is also one of the few individuals with the authority to approve exemptions for Trump’s illegal mass firings and hiring freeze.
JUST BEFORE JOINING DOGE, SCALES WORKED FOR ELON MUSK’S ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE COMPANY, xAI
- According to her Linkedin profile, Scales spent five months “hir[ing] the humans of Human Data” at Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, before joining DOGE.
- While data regulators across Europe have flagged xAI for breaching privacy rules to train Grok (the company’s artificial intelligence program), environmental regulators in the U.S. are investigating Musk’s firm for contributing to pollution in Memphis, Tennessee.
SCALES WORKED AT UBER’S HR DEPARTMENT DURING THE COMPANY’S MOST TUMULTUOUS PERIOD
- According to her Linkedin profile, Scales worked at Uber’s “talent acquisition” department from 2014-2022, where she helped “[grow] Uber’s nascent customer service organization from scratch [and] build the infrastructure for exponential headcount growth.”
- Uber faced a number of HR scandals related to its workplace culture. In 2017, Travis Kalanick and Amit Singhal—Uber’s co-founder and ex-CEO and Senior Vice President of Engineering, respectively—were both forced to resign for failure to appropriately address allegations of sexual harassment.
- In 2018, investigative reporting from Bloomberg and Business Insider revealed that Uber used a “kill switch” to prevent law enforcement from accessing the company’s data systems. That same year, Uber paid $7 million to nearly 500 employees to settle harassment and gender discrimination claims.
- In 2019, Uber paid $4.4 million to victimized employees after an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigation found the company allowed sexual harassment and retaliation within the workplace.
AS A COLLEGE STUDENT, SCALES INTERNED WITH THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE
- As an undergraduate at the University of California, Davis, Scales interned for the American Enterprise Institute.
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.