Edward “Big Balls” Coristine is back in government, less than a week after reportedly resigning from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, Wired reports.
The 19-year-old employee, who became a meme-worthy symbol of Musk’s government overhaul, has now resurfaced at the Social Security Administration as a special government employee. But the timeline of his exit from DOGE and his entry into SSA is, at best, a bureaucratic tangle.
“His work will be focused on improving the functionality of the Social Security website and advancing our mission of delivering more efficient service to the American people,” SSA spokesperson Stephen McGraw told Wired.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, multiple outlets, including Daily Kos, reported that Coristine had stepped down. That reporting was based on a White House official’s claim that Coristine had left both DOGE and federal service entirely.
But by Thursday, a Trump administration official told The New York Times that Coristine had, in fact, only resigned from the General Services Administration—the agency through which DOGE operates—not the government altogether. The SSA gig came later.
The conflicting reports, a White House official said, were due to internal miscommunication.
SSA confirmed Coristine’s new role as a special government employee—a designation that allows him to “perform important, but limited, services to the government, with or without compensation, for a period not to exceed 130 days” in a one-year period, according to McGraw and the White House official. It’s the same classification Musk used during his stint at DOGE.
Sources tell Wired that Coristine was spotted this week at SSA headquarters in Woodlawn, Maryland, alongside Aram Moghaddassi, a DOGE operative who also works at Neuralink—Musk’s brain-implant startup, where Coristine previously interned.
His return to government is ironic. After all, Social Security was one of the agencies DOGE hit hardest. In April, SSA staff described the situation as a “death spiral,” citing office closures, broken websites, and equipment shortages. The Washington Post reported that several DOGE initiatives had already been quietly rolled back after proving more harmful than helpful.
Social Security is the largest government program in the country, distributing more than $1.5 trillion annually to over 72 million Americans. Musk has repeatedly attacked it as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time” and “the big one to eliminate,” even as Trump insists he won’t touch the program.
In February, Michelle King, SSA’s commissioner, retired after 30 years rather than grant a DOGE request for access to sensitive records. DOGE also pushed to shut down field offices and cut call center staffing. And just this month, the Supreme Court allowed DOGE staffers to access Social Security data, overriding objections from labor unions and retiree groups.
Coristine, who graduated from high school last year and briefly attended Northeastern University, became something of an internet antihero in Muskworld thanks to his rapid rise in government and the irreverent “Big Balls” moniker on social media.
“People on LinkedIn take themselves, like, super seriously and are pretty averse to risk, and I was like, I want to be neither of those things,” Coristine said on Fox News last month. “Honestly, I didn’t think anyone would notice.”
People noticed—but that didn’t stop Coristine from working across key agencies, including the State Department, Department of Education, Health and Human Services, and Homeland Security.
Now, he’s landed in an agency Musk once tried to dismantle. For Big Balls, the chaos continues.
Campaign Action
