The White House has confirmed that Amy Gleason, a healthcare technology executive who served under Presidents Trump and Biden, is the acting administrator of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
Still, it is senior White House adviser and tech billionaire Elon Musk who oversees DOGE, according to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. It's unclear what the distinction between Gleason and Musk's roles is, but Musk has been the public face of the cost-cutting unit created last month.
Musk has appeared publicly with Trump — including at Trump's cabinet meeting on Wednesday — to promote DOGE's actions, and he regularly posts about the group's efforts to his millions of followers on X, the social media site he owns.
DOGE has been at the forefront of the new administration's campaign to shrink the federal workforce. Some 20,000 government employees have been fired so far.
Here are some things to know about Gleason and the confusion around who's in charge of DOGE.
Who is Amy Gleason?
According to Gleason's LinkedIn profile, she is a senior advisor with what used to be called the U.S. Digital Service, a previously existing federal office that was turned into the U.S. DOGE Service and official home of DOGE after Trump was inaugurated. The U.S. Digital Service was created by the Obama administration following the botched rollout of HealthCare.gov to work with federal agencies to modernize the government's digital infrastructure.
NPR reached out to a DOGE spokesperson but did not immediately receive a reply.
Gleason worked for USDS from October 2018 to December 2021, a tenure that included parts of Trump's first administration and the Biden administration, according to her LinkedIn profile. She rejoined the agency in January.
Gleason appears to have spent most of her career working in the private sector. In a 2021 interview on the Tell Me Where It Hurts podcast, she said she began her career as an emergency room nurse, where she was first exposed to the intersection of technology and health care. Gleason went on to work for several healthcare technology companies, including Allscripts, which provided electronic medical records software.
At one point, her young daughter was diagnosed with juvenile myositis, a rare autoimmune disease. "I really learned a lot about what it's like to be a patient and a caregiver," Gleason said on the podcast, "and how navigating the healthcare system is actually a lot harder than even I realized when I was working at it from the provider and the health care side."
During her first stint at USDS, Gleason was a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force's data team that helped inform the federal government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Confusion surrounding who runs DOGE
Musk was brought into the administration as a special government employee, a designation given to people hired on a temporary basis to share their outside expertise, and the administration has faced litigation over Musk's authority to make decisions.
The executive order creating DOGE notes that the office is to be run by an administrator who reports directly to the White House chief of staff. Musk is a senior adviser to the president.
In multiple court cases challenging the role of Musk and DOGE in the federal government, Justice Department lawyers have been unable to answer who the administrator is. The most recent example came Monday, when Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly asked Justice Department attorney Bradley Humphreys during a hearing in a lawsuit brought against the Treasury Department over its sharing of payment information with DOGE.
"I don't know the answer to that," Humphreys said, according to Lawfare.
On Tuesday, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt for the identity of the DOGE administrator. "Elon Musk is overseeing DOGE," Leavitt said. "There are career officials at DOGE. There are political appointees at DOGE. I'm not going to reveal the name of that individual from this podium."
But by Wednesday morning, Leavitt confirmed press reports that Gleason is DOGE's acting administrator. "Amy Gleason has been the DOGE administrator for quite some time — I believe several weeks, maybe a month — I'm not actually sure of the specific timeline," she said.
Copyright 2025 NPR