Gavin Kliger, a 25-year-old DOGE staffer, was coming off a whirlwind few weeks when he went to the U.S. Department of Agriculture in February.
To join President Donald Trump’s new government-cutting team, he went on “unpaid indefinite leave” from the Andreessen Horowitz-supported artificial intelligence firm Databricks, according to his public financial disclosure report.
He had posted a Substack titled “Why DOGE” with the subhead “Why I gave up a seven-figure salary to save America.” It cost $1,000 a month, or $10,000 a year, to unlock — those who paid found that the rest of the post was blank.
Kliger initially joined the DOGE team that oversaw the demise of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Reuters at the time reported that his now-private X account was filled with reposts from Holocaust denier and white supremacist Nick Fuentes. He reportedly met with top Internal Revenue Service officials at their headquarters to probe the agency.
This was all a prelude to his work at USDA, where he worked directly with the agency’s secretary to carry out the DOGE agenda. He pushed USDA officials to write new agency-wide guidance directing them to review climate-related awards and to finish cutting another $120 million within just a few days of that order, according to a series of previously unreported emails.
The emails were made public in April in little-noticed court documents from a lawsuit against Trump, Elon Musk and several Cabinet officials, including USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins, over the termination of some federal grants.
Those communications and others reviewed by NOTUS show the sweeping latitude afforded to some DOGE staffers in the early weeks of the second Trump administration: crafting agency-wide policy, setting deadlines for senior officials and preparing AI tools with the goal of helping agencies slash federal awards quicker.
Kliger did not respond to a request for comment. A USDA spokesperson declined to answer a series of questions about Kliger’s mandate at the agency and the climate guidance he worked on. “All associated with the USDA Efficiency Team are USDA employees, working at the direction of Secretary Rollins,” the spokesperson said in an email.
USDA officials had Kliger’s requests in mind when they drafted agency-wide guidance on climate-related awards, one email suggests.
“Does the following blurb encapsulate what Gavin is looking for?” a USDA policy lead wrote in a Feb. 19 email to Lynn Moaney, the agency’s longtime deputy chief financial officer, along with a draft guidance.
The draft guidelines instructed USDA officials to find and report grants and other agreements that “fund climate-related activities which do not demonstrably directly or indirectly benefit farmers or producers.”
It gave examples of the types of funding that would likely be disallowed: “Climate consulting services,” “Climate modeling and other similar technology platforms or solutions,” and “The authoring of a report not anticipated to benefit farmers and producers.” The guidance also advises employees to report “Climate-friendly facilities/construction,” along with “Any other kinds of analysis, evaluation, or reporting” related to the climate.
A few hours later, Moaney, who had been with the agency for over a decade at that point, passed along the guidance to Kliger for his approval.
She also addressed the tight timeline for making $120 million in cuts, telling Kliger that her team “thought Monday is not doable.” Having USDA staff manually review each grant before terminating them was a time sink Moaney hoped they could fix by implementing artificial intelligence.
“It actually requires opening up every single grant and reading the language,” she wrote of the current process to determine programs to terminate.
Moaney said that if the team had more time, they might be able to deliver a “win.”
“We have identified a potential program in the Forest Service that we think can be a ‘win’ due to its size,” she wrote. “We will work on that for Monday COB and would ask for consideration of an extension on the larger Climate-related analysis with a due date of next Friday.”
Kliger approved the guidance, with some tweaks. He OK’d an extension, but suggested he’d want more cuts, too.
“With respect to timing - if we extend to next Friday, could we ask mission areas to complete a review of all climate grants in the specified window (and hopefully therefore exceed our 120m goal significantly)?” Kliger asked.
He also indicated AI help could be on the way: “we have been working on tools to assist with grant reviews in other agencies and I am planning to bring them here at some point to help out.” He was still employed by an AI firm at the time.
“Still a ways away however,” he added. Around the same time, Musk told reporters, “We’re not using much AI right now, honestly.”
Kliger and DOGE appeared to have full buy-in from Rollins. The secretary told USDA staffers in her first address that she would “welcome DOGE’s efforts at USDA because we know that its work makes us better, stronger, faster, and more efficient.”
She met with Kliger, DOGE staffer Michael Cole other members of the team to discuss their cost-cutting efforts. During the meeting, Rollins told Kliger that she supported the $120 million goal and the review of climate grants, he recounted to Moaney in an email later that night. He was also “working on getting a memo formalized for her signature in parallel,” he wrote.
That day and throughout the following week, Kliger and Cole were involved in discussions with lawyers — two from USDA and one from the DOGE team — about the development of the “Agency Priority Memo on Climate Grants.”
The group prepped for possible future litigation stemming from the memo, according to a description of their work submitted to a district judge by Rollins’ chief of staff, Kailee Tkacz Buller.
Tkacz Buller argued in the court filing that records of the discussions ought to remain sealed because disclosing them “would inhibit the agency’s decision-making process by exposing the candid thoughts and opinions of agency employees regarding their subjective views about the meaning of facts and the legal theories possibly applicable to this case.” None of those pages were made available for public viewing.
By March, the DOGE USDA team had made significant progress.
USDA had terminated over $1.2 billion worth of federal awards, and as much as $1.18 billion had been deobligated and returned to the agency since Trump returned to office, according to internal estimates. USDA still had active awards with a face value of $57.48 billion, with the unspent value of the awards estimated to be over $37 billion, according to a March 24 email included in court documents.
By April, Kliger moved on to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where he pushed for further cuts. One former member of the reductions-in-force team would later write in a sworn declaration that, during the dismantling of CFPB, Kliger was “screaming at people he did not believe were working fast enough to ensure they could go out on this compressed timeline, calling them incompetent.”
Kliger was included on an email to DOGE staffers from Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, as previously reported by ProPublica.
Vought’s email was entirely redacted, save for the subject line “CFPB RIF Work” — referencing reductions in force. But Christopher Chilbert, CFPB’s chief information officer, sent a follow-up to Kliger and another DOGE staffer shortly after. “Just wanted to follow-up on Russ’s note below,” Chilbert wrote.
“Gavin — you should be set with the access you need,” Chilbert continued. “As we discussed yesterday, there isn’t something called full global administrative access that lets you do the things you requested, but the rules we provided should allow you to do what you need to do.”