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A former political adviser for President Bill Clinton laid into Elon Musk and one of Musk’s young Department of Government Efficiency staffers the tech billionaire hired to gut federal agencies.
Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist and CNN political contributor, raged Wednesday evening on The Source hosted by Kaitlan Collins about the teenage adviser who is known by a cringe-worthy nickname.
Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old high school grad, college dropout and DOGE worker known online as “Big Balls,” is now listed as a senior adviser at the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Technology.
“Who the hell voted for Mr. Musk?” Begala asked during the heated discussion. “Who the hell voted for – excuse the phrase – a guy who calls himself ‘Big Balls,’ a 19-year-old kid going in there and trying to fire cancer researchers and scientists and teachers and agricultural specialists? It’s appalling.”
Coristine was once fired from an internship after leaking information to a rival firm, according to his former bosses.
Begala, who appeared on CNN alongside Republican strategist Brad Todd, said earlier in the segment that he agreed with DOGE’s mission to cut federal spending, but not the way Musk team is going about it.
“I have a pro tip for President Trump: If you want to reduce the federal workforce, maybe a good idea, try going the constitutional route,” Begala said.
The former adviser said that the Clinton administration reduced the federal workforce by passing the Workforce Restructuring Act of 1994 in the Senate, which he said resulted in the lowest headcount of “any president since Eisenhower.”
And “we still took care of special needs kids and our veterans and created 30 million new jobs,” Begala said. “So you can do this, but you’ve got to follow the Constitution.”
Many of the DOGE staffers have been scrutinized due to their lack of experience or proximity to Musk’s other businesses. It’s unclear any of them have been vetted.
Coristine, who dropped out from Northeastern University to work in Silicon Valley and who once interned at Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink, is one of seven relatively young men identified by Wired as part of Musk’s incursion into the federal government with reported access to millions of Americans’ personal financial and medical information.
Bloomberg reported Coristine was previously fired from a cybersecurity internship after being accused of leaking company secrets to a competitor, though he claimed to have “never exploited it.”
An unidentified federal worker claimed at a recent town hall meeting in Leesburg, Virginia that seasoned federal workers have been forced to justify their jobs in 15- minute sessions with “19-, 20- and 21-year-old” Doge staffers with little or no work experience of their own.
Donald Trump has stood by Musk’s young hires.
“I’m very proud of the job that this group of young people, generally young people, but very smart people, they’re doing,” Trump said last week. “They’re doing it at my insistence. It would be a lot easier not to do it, but we have to take some of these things apart to find the corruption.”
