The mystery is solved — well, sort of.
On Tuesday, the Trump administration revealed that 55-year-old Amy Gleason is the leader behind the Department of Government Efficiency. She’s now the acting administrator of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting initiative, which has downsized federal agencies and laid off around 20,000 employees. Until now, the White House insisted that Musk didn’t have “actual or formal authority to make government decisions” and was simply a senior adviser at DOGE, but officials had refused to say who was really in charge.
Even with this revelation, questions remain about who’s truly pulling the strings. When CBS News reached out to Gleason for comment, she said she was vacationing in Mexico and declined to comment further. (According to sources who spoke with The New York Times, Gleason didn’t know the White House was planning to announce her role.)
So, who exactly is Gleason, and why did her appointment catch so many by surprise? Let’s take a closer look at her background and what her leadership could mean for DOGE’s future.
How long has Amy Gleason been in charge at DOGE?
Even though she has barely drawn any attention, Gleason has been serving as a senior adviser at the U.S. Digital Service since January 2025, according to her LinkedIn profile. The Washington Post reported that Gleason will be in charge of efforts to modernize IT and data at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
She also has connections to another key DOGE leader, Brad Smith. The two worked together at Smith’s previous healthcare start-ups, Russell Street Ventures and Main Street Health, before he brought Gleason on to advise Elon Musk on cost-cutting strategies for DOGE last year. Interestingly, Russell Street Ventures seems to have taken down its website, and Main Street Health has removed Gleason’s biography.
Gleason is making a bit of a comeback with this new role. She worked at the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) from October 2018 to December 2021, back before it was renamed DOGE. That means she was there during the end of Trump’s first term and the start of Biden’s. During this period, she played a big part in the White House’s Covid response, helping set up a federal database to track cases nationwide and figure out what hospitals needed. She also led a project with the CDC called the Pandemic Ready Interoperability Modernization Effort, which focused on making sure local health agencies had the reliable data they needed to work together more effectively.
But it was her work in the private sector that got her noticed by President Barack Obama. In 2015, he highlighted her as a “Champion of Change” for her work in “precision medicine,” applying technology to health care. (At the time, she worked as a vice president for research at the Cure JM Foundation from 2014 to 2018, according to her LinkedIn profile.)
What do we know about Amy Gleason’s personal life and family?
In a 2021 interview on the podcast Tell Me Where It Hurts, Gleason shared that she started out as an emergency room nurse. That’s where she first got a glimpse of how tech and healthcare intersect.
She also opened up about a personal challenge — her daughter was diagnosed with juvenile myositis, a rare autoimmune disease that causes muscle inflammation and a skin rash. “I really learned a lot about what it’s like to be a patient and a caregiver,” Gleason said on the podcast. “Navigating the healthcare system is actually a lot harder than I realized, even after working in it as a provider.”
Since then, Gleason has been a strong advocate for finding a cure for juvenile myositis, which still affects her now-adult daughter.
Why is there so much confusion around who’s running DOGE?
Even though the White House promised full transparency, officials have been cagey about who’s actually running DOGE. While Musk has been the public face of the initiative and keeps giving orders to government workers via social media, the Trump administration insists he’s just a special government employee, a temporary role meant for outside experts.
But in several court cases challenging Musk’s and DOGE’s involvement in the federal government, Justice Department lawyers haven’t been able to name the department’s administrator.
“Who’s involved? Who’s in charge? Who’s giving them direction?” Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly asked government lawyers during a hearing about DOGE’s access to sensitive Treasury Department data. “I don’t know the answer to that,” DOJ attorney Bradley Humphreys admitted, according to Lawfare.
Even within DOGE, there was confusion about who was calling the shots. During an all-staff meeting in D.C. last week, some employees weren’t sure if Gleason was the acting administrator. According to CNN, she didn’t outright say she was, and no one asked. But she did tell the team, “I’m here to move the organization forward and to reassure you that all your projects are a priority” — that’s according to a federal employee who works with her but wanted to stay anonymous because they weren’t authorized to talk about her new role.
As questions linger about who’s really running the show at DOGE, all eyes are now on Gleason to see how she’ll navigate the spotlight — and the scrutiny that comes with it.
