The acting administrator of the Department of Government Efficiency is a low-profile executive who has expertise in health care technology and worked in the first Trump administration.
The White House on Tuesday afternoon identified Amy Gleason as the acting leader of DOGE, which has been pushing agencies to fire employees, cancel contracts and make other budget cuts.
Although DOGE's cuts have been championed by billionaire Elon Musk and his associates, the White House has insisted that Musk is overseeing the effort as a senior adviser to President Donald Trump, not a DOGE employee.
The identity of who was technically running DOGE had been a mystery, even though an executive order signed by Trump last month called for the appointment of an administrator to report to the White House.
A government lawyer on Monday told a judge that he didn't know who that person was, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt had declined to identify the person earlier Tuesday in a press briefing.
“There are career officials and there are political appointees who are helping run DOGE on a day-to-day basis,” she said.
Gleason, 53, worked from 2018 through 2021 in the United States Digital Service, an agency that has been renamed the US DOGE Service, according to her LinkedIn profile. In that role, she worked with the White House on the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic.
She returned to the agency in January after Trump took office. DOGE and Gleason did not respond to an email seeking comment on Tuesday.
More than 20 members of the former digital service resigned Tuesday with a letter criticizing Musk for working to “dismantle critical public services”.
In the interim, she had been working as “chief product officer” at two small Nashville-based health care startups, Russell Street Ventures and Main Street Health, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Both companies were founded by health care entrepreneur Brad Smith, who worked in the first Trump administration in several key health care roles and has also been working on the DOGE initiative.
Russell Street Ventures' website has recently been deleted, but the company has called itself “an innovative healthcare firm focused on launching and scaling companies that serve some of the nation's most vulnerable and underserved patient populations”.
Main Street Health says it works with primary care physicians in rural areas to provide clinics “with the data and opportunities they need to succeed in value-based care”.
The company's website deleted Gleason's biography. But an archived version shows that it said she “spearheaded technology efforts for the federal COVID-19 response” and worked on projects with the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Gleason also has a consulting firm, Gleason Strategies, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Gleason has long been an advocate to cure a condition called juvenile myositis, a rare autoimmune disease that can cause muscle weakness and a skin rash in children. It affects her now-adult daughter.
Gleason shared her frustrations with how the health care system handles such diseases in a 2020 TED talk and called for technology and data changes that could help patients and doctors.
She worked as vice president for research at the Cure JM Foundation from 2014 to 2018, according to her LinkedIn profile. She was also a co-founder and executive at Care Sync, a telehealth company based in Florida.
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