A Nashvillian and Brentwood High School graduate has been revealed as the acting administrator of the newly formed federal Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has been doling out controversial cuts across the federal government.
On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that an unnamed White House official identified Amy Gleason as DOGE's acting administrator, which was then confirmed by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Wednesday.
Leavitt called Gleason a “career official” who has been in the role for “quite some time, several weeks, maybe a month.” But according to reporters questioning Leavitt, Gleason's role was apparently unknown to some DOGE staff until the story broke in the press.
New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman told CNN on Thursday: “I don't think she didn't know she was the DOGE administrator, which some people have been suggesting — I think she did know that. I certainly don't think she expected it to get rolled out yesterday, and announced yesterday.”
Who Is Amy Gleason?
Amy Gleason, as pictured in 2015
Gleason’s now-deleted LinkedIn profile stated she was a senior adviser with the United States Digital Service, which was founded in 2014 to “improve and simplify the digital experience” between citizens and government websites, namely Healthcare.gov, which experienced a problematic launch in 2013.
President Donald Trump reorganized and renamed the agency to the United States DOGE Service on his first day by executive order.
Gleason is a graduate of Brentwood High School and attended the University of Tennessee from 1990 to 1993. She also earned a certificate in gamification through Coursera from University of Pennsylvania in 2013, and attended Pasco-Hernando State College from 2018 to 2019, where she studied health care management.
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Gleason previously served as the CEO of CareSync, a health care technology company, and volunteered as the vice president of research for the Cure JM Foundation, a nonprofit that funds research into juvenile myositis, an autoimmune disease that her daughter suffers from.
In an archived post from the White House website during President Barack Obama's second term, Gleason was named one of the 2015 “Champions of Change,” a program that recognized influential and accomplished people across various fields.
“My challenge to our entire healthcare system, and especially the innovators looking to make it better, put the patient in the center,” Gleason wrote in a 2015 blog post on the White House website. “Break up the silos of information that prevent individualized medicine to take root and grow into something beautiful.
“Combine the data, all of it, including genetics, medical records information, patient-generated data, with the collaborative, innovative minds of Americans who will create amazing discoveries to improve healthcare. It’s the American way, and it is time that we, since we’re all patients, demand it in healthcare.”
That 2015 blog post noted that she was then a resident of Tampa, Fla. While she's listed as a Nashville resident on her LinkedIn profile, she is not listed on any public property records in either Davidson County or Williamson County.
She also previously worked as a nurse and gave a 2020 TED Talk in which she spoke of the challenges of data management in health care and said her work with U.S. Digital Service had been in partnership with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.
She also spoke about her work with USDS in a 2021 podcast.
“One thing that I've learned about joining the government is you get to work on really cool problems that affect all of Americans,” Gleason said during the TED Talk.
DOGE under Musk control
Billionaire Elon Musk, the world's richest man, had initially been named as the head of DOGE, a role he's publicly embraced. The agency has worked with little public oversight and transparency while firing government employees and cutting funding across the federal government, actions that have impacted everything from the Department of Veterans Affairs to the National Parks Service.
A flurry of politicians and lawyers have decried the actions of DOGE as illegal, with numerous lawsuits targeting the new department's actions.
Republican U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee's 2nd Congressional District serves on the new House DOGE subcommittee and recently told the Williamson Scene that DOGE could possibly last only a matter of months because, he said, some Republicans could “lose our courage.”
On Feb. 14, CNN reported that the ongoing federal cuts resulted in the firing of hundreds of staffers from the National Nuclear Security Administration, the agency that manages the nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons — but the officials doing the cuts failed to realize the dangerous impact on national security.
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Some of those staffers had their jobs reinstated, but according to NBC News, the agency has had trouble actually contacting some of those terminated employees because “we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel.”
The Trump-Musk alliance has led to nationwide protests against the Trump administration, including in Nashville, and led some Democrats to tease the president with the phrase “President Musk.” Last week, televisions inside the Department of Housing and Urban Development were hacked and displayed an AI video of Trump kissing the feet and sucking the toes of Musk with the words “long live the real king.”
This article was first published by our sister publication, the Williamson Scene.
