DOGE Employee ‘Big Balls’ Says Federal Government Is A ‘Huge Vector For Fraud, Waste And Abuse’
White House Senior Advisor Elon Musk walks to the White House after landing in Marine One on the South Lawn with U.S. President Donald Trump (not pictured) on March 9, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
OAN Staff Blake Wolf 4:01 PM – Friday, May 2, 2025
A Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employee dubbed “Big Balls” gave his first interview, detailing the waste, fraud, and abuse found by the department – and explained how he got his nickname.
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“Big Balls,” the DOGE employee whose real name is Edward Coristine, is a 19-year-old software developer and college student who is among the few employees hand selected by DOGE leader Elon Musk.
During an interview with Fox News on Thursday, Coristine revealed that he got the nickname from his LinkedIn social media account.
LinkedIn is a social media networking platform used by individuals who are looking to connect with other professionals in their field. It is also used to find job opportunities.
“I use it as my LinkedIn username,” Coristine told Fox News television host Jesse Watters. “People on LinkedIn take themselves super seriously, and they’re pretty averse to risk, and I was like, ‘Well, I want to be neither of those things.’ So I just, I set it and honestly, I didn’t think anybody would notice.”
Throughout the interview, Coristine discussed some of the findings DOGE has discovered by sifting through documents from the U.S. Treasury Department.
“Right now, I’m working on some payment computer stuff … One of our initiatives is to root out fraud and waste, and to do that we started looking at the payment computers. And, as mentioned earlier, there’s no account of what payments actually go in the payment computer,” he stated. “You look at a specific line item – $20 million. You’re like, ‘OK, what is this money going to?’ And for the majority of the payment systems, it’s like, ‘Well, we don’t really know.’”
Coristine added that the government system of distributing money “literally has no checks and no accountability to the actual American taxpayer. So it’s a huge vector for fraud, waste, and abuse. There’s no incentive to respect taxpayer money, if you work in the government.”
“I think the incentives will always decide the outcomes,” he stated.
Another young DOGE engineer, Ethan Shaotran, stated that he “dropped out of Harvard and came here to serve my country, and it’s been unfortunate to see lost friendships.”
“Most of campus hates me now, but I hope fundamentally that people realize through conversations like this that reform is genuinely needed,” he stated. “There’s one group of people who really have a shot at success, and it’s the people here. They’re up until 2 a.m., Monday to Sunday. DOGE does not recognize weekends.”
Prior to the interview, DOGE found $334 million in improper payment requests following the introduction of the automated payment system, which began last week.
The requests were flagged due to missing or invalid budget codes, as well as budget codes without authorization.
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