Who are Akash Bobba & Nikhil Rajpal, Indian-origin engineers on Musk's DOGE team?

Nothing about Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been devoid of controversies so far. The agency has been at the centre of controversies from the moment it was constituted by newly inaugurated President Donald Trump who brought in the billionaire tech entrepreneur to head it. 

Not surprisingly, the DOGE team is shrouded in secrecy. The prominent members of Team DOGE include Cloud Software Group CEO Tom Krause, Amanda Scales, Riccardo Biasini and Thomas Shedd. With the recent turn of events, the role of Marko Elez, a 25-year-old Rutgers University graduate who worked at Musk's SpaceX and X, and who was a temporary appointee at Treasury, also became clear. Although Elez resigned from the Treasury Department Thursday following his now-deleted racist social media posts urging people to “normalise Indian hate”, he might be soon reinstated as Musk and US Vice-President JD Vance have come in his favour.

Apart from these handful of people, the around-40-member strong DOGE team comprises young software engineers -- some as young as 19, investigations and reports by various media agencies reveal. The team consists of former Musk employees, interns, and newcomers with little government experience, operating in secrecy and disrupting bureaucratic processes. Musk and Trump both defend their work as necessary to combat waste and inefficiency, though their methods and lack of transparency are raising eyebrows.

Notwithstanding the racial controversy, two young Indian-origin engineers -- Akash Bobba and Nikhil Rajpal -- are also touted to be in the DOGE team, according to various international media reports.

Akash Bobba 

According to ProPublica, Bobba is appointed as the Senior Adviser to the Director. A 21-year-old coder, Bobba was a student in the Management, Entrepreneurship, and Technology programme at University of California, Berkeley, a highly selective initiative designed to nurture future tech indury leaders. He worked as an intern at Meta, Palantir, and the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, gaining experience in AI, data analytics, and financial modeling. 

Bobba is listed in personnel records as an “expert” at  Office of Personnel Management (OPM), where he has reportedly been able to access internal databases. He graduated from high school in 2021. In his graduation speech, featured in the Spotlight New Jersey newspaper, he told his fellow graduates that, in life, the “answers we deserve demand discomfort.”

According to a viral post on X, a batchmate Charis Zhang recounted a group project where Bobba saved the day by restoring an accidentally deleted codebase.

 

Nikhil Rajpal

As opposed to Bobba, very little is known about Rajpal. The ProPublica report says he is listed as an "expert" at DOGE. The 30-year-old reportedly grew close to Musk when he was employed as an engineer at Twitter, which was bought by Musk and rechristened to X. 

The “expert” is now working for OPM. Rajpal has extensive access to sensitive personnel data used by OPM, according to a source familiar with his role. According to a WIRED  report, Rajpal also sought and was later granted access to data at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Rajpal also appears in the NOAA’s public-facing employee directory.

The report says Rajpal’s online presence appears to have been recently largely wiped. However, according to Rajpal's copies of resumes and information accessed through public databases, he also appears to be from the University of California, Berkeley. It is believed that he studied computer science and history. Prior to Twitter, he did work redesigning a Tesla console.

During his graduation days, Rajpal was the leader of a libertarian-aligned student group advocating for “minimal government, free markets, sound money, non-intervention, and maximum individual liberty”, the report cites.