The youngest member of Elon Musk’s team of “expert” evaluators is Edward Coristine whose online moniker is “Big Balls.”
Young Mr, Coristine is a 19-year-old high school graduate. He has key roles at the State Department, DHS, FEMA, and USAID, despite being unvetted.
The Washington Post wrote about the young man’s large portfolio:
He is a “senior adviser at the State Department and at the Department of Homeland Security, raising concerns among some diplomats and others about his potential access to sensitive information and the growing reach of his tech billionaire boss into America’s diplomatic apparatus, said U.S. officials familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue.
Edward Coristine, who briefly worked for Musk’s brain chip start-up Neuralink, was recently posted to the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Technology, a critical hub for data both sensitive and nonsensitive, officials said. Coristine, who also holds positions at the U.S. DOGE Service and the Office of Personnel Management, has attracted significant attention across Washington for his edgy online persona and the relative lack of experience he brings to his new federal roles.
But his new position — and similar roles at DHS and other agencies — could give him visibility into far more than just tech.
Some U.S. officials expressed alarm about Coristine’s new perch at the bureau, which serves as the IT department for Washington’s diplomatic apparatus. All of the department’s IT and data management functions were centralized at the bureau during an overhaul before President Donald Trump returned to office, making it a treasure trove of information.
“This is dangerous,” said one of the U.S. officials, noting Coristine’s age and a report by Bloomberg News that he was fired for leaking a data security firm’s information to a competitor.
A State Department official said Coristine’s position probably would not be confined to the Bureau of Diplomatic Technology.
Eddie is 19. He worked briefly for Musk’s Neuralink. He is a “senior advisor” to multiple departments. He has access to highly confidential at the State Department and the Office of Personnel Management. He was fired for leaking data from a data security firm to a competitor. He apparently was never vetted.
What could possibly go wrong?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Any and everything!
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Musk must have implanted a neurolink chip in Eddie’s under-developed brain.
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Yep… In the Supreme Court we have Clarence “Long Dong Silver” Thomas and Edward “Big Balls” Coristine in DOGE. It seems like they should “hang out” together.
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The conservative love for Victor Orban gives us a preview of coming attractions. A government supported by just less than a third of the electorate, where civil liberties are at the whim of Orban, and the economy is in the tank. This is what conservatives praise with unending adulation.
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Musk is a horror show and so are his stooges.
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Maybe Eddie is a nice person, you know . . . like Musk.
Well . . . you don’t know. CBK
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The fact that the shoddy qualifications of these DOGE hires are not a huge story demonstrates exactly why the so-called liberal media in this country suffers from such extreme implicit racism. If these young guys were hired by Democrats, there would be non-stop stories about how unqualified they were – especially if they happened to be Black.
“Coristine, who also holds positions at the U.S. DOGE Service and the Office of Personnel Management, has attracted significant attention across Washington for his edgy online persona and the relative lack of experience he brings to his new federal roles.“
“relative lack of experience…!” Imagine if this read “…has attracted significant attention across Washington for the fact that he is totally unqualified for a federal job that he got ONLY because of his connections to Musk.”
None of Musk’s hires are “the most qualified” for their job. It’s questionable whether they are even remotely qualified, unless the qualification requires a complete lack of scruples. The “most qualified” standard is only applied by our implicitly racist media when it comes to bashing DEI programs. Any guy a white right wing billionaire says is superior must be deemed very qualified.
Because of the right wing framing the media does even with supposedly “negative” stories like this one, it is very easy for the Republicans to brush it off — “sure this very qualified expert did something wrong in the past, but doesn’t this qualified expert deserve a second chance?”
But what is hard to brush off is “Your tax dollars are being used to pay unqualified Musk lackeys into jobs that are are unable to do properly.”
Where are the calls for meritocracy when unqualified people who are favored by Republicans are given jobs? They suddenly disappear.
Musk and Trump have been seeding the federal government with UNQUALIFIED hires and firing far more qualified federal workers. But since the underlying bias of the liberal media is to accept as “meritorious” all the hires of billionaire Republicans – because the billionaire Republicans says so! — we get stories like this one.
This story is whether a Musk hire whose actual ability to do a federal job is not questioned should be punished for something he did when he was younger.
Like Trump, this young man is “uncouth”. But like Trump, the “negative” articles about him don’t question their ability to do the job.
Biden was too cognitive impaired to do the job – according to the so-called liberal media. Trump is uncouth, but the liberal media assured the public that Trump was cognitively qualified to do the job, unlike Biden.
And according to the so-called liberal media, a Musk teenager is qualified to do the job, but a bit uncouth, or improperly shared information he shouldn’t. But DEI is very bad because unqualified people are hired who have no business doing the job they are doing.
The media tiptoed around Trump’s cognitive decline and continues to do so. They excuse their complicity by claiming “people know Trump” – but somehow that rule didn’t apply to Biden.
If Kamala had won and hired a bunch of unqualified teenagers and young 20 somethings to make decisions about programs they know nothing about, there would be multiple stories a day about why taxpayer dollars were being used to hire unqualified teenagers that a rich donor of Kamala wanted hired. But the complicity of the so-called liberal media in giving credibility to right wing propaganda has been the story of the last 10 years.
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Where are the calls for meritocracy when unqualified people who are favored by Republicans are given jobs? They suddenly disappear.
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And why hasn’t the media identified what is going on correctly? These young men got their jobs because the Republicans have replaced civil service with the spoils system.
The liberal media’s obsession with using positive euphemisms (“Musk’s hires are very smart and at worse have a ‘relative’ (wth?) lack of experience”) to REINFORCE the false right wing narrative). These guys are young computer tech guys with NO knowledge whatsoever about government programs who got a spoils system job that is way beyond their ability. And the media still amplifies their “findings” – with a disclaimer that they haven’t yet produced evidence – when they pull something out of their a**es about how much “waste” they found.
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Trump’s whole job now is to distract us from whatever Musk is up to, which is the massive theft of U.S. resources and the ultimate privatization of the public sphere, without giving up any of its taxpayer funding, of course.
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