An engineer named Nikhil Rajpal is representing Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task force at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), according to multiple sources.
Government records reviewed by WIRED show that Rajpal has working email addresses with both DOGE and the NOAA. The DOGE address, like others from the agency, is in a format tying it to the Executive Office of the President. Rajpal also appears in the NOAA’s public-facing employee directory.
According to sources familiar with the situation, on Wednesday, NOAA employees were ordered to grant Rajpal editor access to all NOAA Google sites on instructions of the acting Commerce secretary, Jeremy Pelter, by the close of business.
An NOAA employee with more than 40 years of service who led the agency’s work on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility was, according to these sources, placed on administrative leave Tuesday, three weeks ahead of their scheduled retirement. This person did not respond to a request for comment.
Axios reported on Tuesday that DOGE workers entered NOAA facilities in Maryland on Tuesday seeking “access to IT systems;” a source WIRED spoke to confirmed this.
While Rajpal’s online presence appears to have been recently largely wiped, WIRED was able to obtain copies of resumes and, through public databases, other biographical information. They show Nik, as he refers to himself, to be about 30 and to have studied computer science and history at the University of California, Berkeley. Rajpal worked at Twitter before Elon Musk’s acquisition, and prior to that did work redesigning a Tesla console.
As an undergraduate, Rajpal was the leader of a libertarian-aligned student group advocating for “minimal government, free markets, sound money, non-intervention, and maximum individual liberty.” In 2014, he gave a 10-minute presentation on Bitcoin to Viget, the company at which he was interning. An Instapaper account linked from his personal site under the header “Read the articles I read” shows articles from Richard Hanania, Quillette, and Zero Hedge, as well as publications like the Financial Times and Bloomberg.
Nothing in his background suggests any special expertise relevant to his new role. The NOAA is a nonpartisan scientific agency that monitors and models the oceans and atmosphere for the purpose of predicting changes in climate and weather; its research and technology underlie everything from weather reports to hurricane modeling and fisheries management to granular forecasts of the long-term effects of climate change.
The agency has long been a target of conservatives; the Project 2025 policy tome calls for it to be broken up and downsized, and for the work of the National Weather Service—which sits within NOAA—to be largely privatized.
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