Role: Senior Advisor at the Office of Personnel Management, 2025; previously Vice President of Human Resources at SpaceX, where he spent 21 years and was one of the first employees (“a Musk insider”).

Basis for Inclusion

Subject classification: Public Official (senior advisor at the agency that functioned as DOGE’s federal-workforce control point).

Anchor met: Public Official acting in formal federal capacity.

Background

Bjelde joined SpaceX in its earliest years and spent 21 years there, ultimately as Vice President of Human Resources. Reporting (Time; CNN) characterized OPM under his and other DOGE-affiliated personnel’s direction as “the shadow OPM” — the agency used as ground zero for DOGE’s plans to shrink government.

DOGE Role

• January 31, 2025 — 70% target memo: Bjelde told OPM career supervisors that the “target” was to cut 70% of OPM’s own staff. He further instructed agency leaders across government to draft plans for a 70% cut in their respective workforces, telling them: “OPM is leading all agencies doing this exercise” (Time, “Why Musk’s DOGE Began its Government Shake-Up at OPM,” 2025).
• Federal database access: Bjelde and other DOGE members focused on gaining access to federal databases held at OPM — notably the Enterprise Human Resources Integration (EHRI) system, which contains Social Security Numbers and sensitive personnel records for every federal employee (CNN, “It’s the shadow OPM,” March 3, 2025).
• Sexual harassment lawsuit context: Bjelde was named in a sexual harassment lawsuit during the period — referenced in congressional ethics correspondence as a vetting concern (Revolving Door Project, “DOGE Agent: Brian Bjelde,” 2025).

Documented Actions

• Issued the 70% workforce-reduction target memorandum to OPM career staff and to other federal agencies.
• Sought broad access to OPM-held federal personnel databases including EHRI.
• Operated at OPM alongside DOGE-network engineers including Edward Coristine (“Big Balls”) and Akash Bobba.

Real-World Impacts

Federal Employees

• The 70% staffing-reduction directive cascaded across the federal workforce and was a principal lever for the 217,177 cumulative federal-position reductions (OpenFeds, November 2025).
• A 70% workforce target — applied to OPM’s own staff — would cripple the agency responsible for federal hiring, benefits, retirement, and personnel records administration.

American Citizens (Public Services)

• OPM administers federal-employee health insurance enrollment and retirement processing. A 70% staffing cut at OPM would directly delay retirement claims and benefits adjudications affecting millions.

Vulnerable Populations

• SSA beneficiaries — including elderly, disabled, and survivors — particularly vulnerable to SSA service degradation that flowed from the workforce reductions Bjelde directed.

Privacy and Data Security

• The EHRI database Bjelde sought to access contains Social Security Numbers, security-clearance flags, and personnel histories for every federal employee.
• Reporting documented broader DOGE attempts at OPM to obtain access to PII for nearly every American through cross-agency database linkages (CNN, Time, ProPublica, 2025).

Other Documented Harms

• Sexual harassment lawsuit reference in congressional oversight correspondence (2025) raised vetting-failure concerns for a senior OPM appointee.

Conflicts of Interest

• 21-year SpaceX tenure: Direct prior Musk-company employment, including as VP of Human Resources — the position Bjelde used to redesign the federal HR function during DOGE.

Sources

• Time, “Why Musk’s DOGE Began its Government Shake-Up at OPM,” 2025
• CNN, “It’s the shadow OPM: How DOGE is using a once-obscure federal agency as ground zero for its plans to shrink government,” March 3, 2025
• Revolving Door Project, “DOGE Agent: Brian Bjelde,” 2025
• ProPublica, “The Key Figures Working Alongside Elon Musk at DOGE and in the Trump Administration,” 2025
• NYT, WIRED DOGE/OPM coverage, 2025
• Washington Post, “DOGE at SSA,” 2025
• Congressional oversight correspondence
• OpenFeds DOGE Impact Dashboard, November 2025