White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt berated reporters on Wednesday for seeking more information about the acting administrator of Elon Musk’s meme-based government efficiency agency, calling the journalists “hounds” in the process.
The White House have insisted that the world’s richest man isn’t actually running DOGE and is merely serving as a presidential adviser. However, Leavitt refused to name the agency’s head when asked on Tuesday.
“There are career officials at DOGE. There are political appointees at DOGE. I’m not going to reveal the name of that individual from this podium,” she declared during the White House press briefing. “We’ve been incredibly transparent about the way that DOGE is working.”
It was soon reported that Amy Gleason, who was previously a senior adviser for the U.S. Digital Service, had been tapped to be the “acting” administrator of DOGE.
Considering that the courts and lawyers had been trying for weeks to find out the actual name of the agency’s head while legally challenging Musk’s efforts to dismantle the federal government, the revelation was something of a bombshell. Especially when it was reported that Gleason was in Mexico when she was publicly announced as the acting administrator.
During a press gaggle outside of the White House on Wednesday, Leavitt was pressed by reporters to provide more details about Gleason, such as when she took on the role of DOGE head and how many people were aware she was in charge. Rather than answer these questions, the Trump spokesperson decided to attack the media instead.
Asked “when exactly” Gleason started her job as the DOGE administrator, Leavitt claimed she’d been there “for quite some time” and was a “career official” before turning the question back around on the gathered press. At the same time, amid the administration’s capricious mass terminations of federal workers, Leavitt defended Gleason as a hard-working bureaucrat who deserves privacy.
“I know everybody’s very interested in her name and who she is and what she does. There’s a lot of people who work for the federal government,” Leavitt groused. “They’re just trying to do their jobs. And, you know, that’s what she’s doing.”
As for the fact that multiple DOGE staffers said they’d only found out she was the administrator through press reports on Tuesday, the press secretary said “you’d have to ask them,” prompting a reporter to wonder if she’d announced Gleason’s position to the entire agency staff.
“Everybody knew, and we said who she was to all of you,” Leavitt snapped back. “Because you are hounds in the media who are so obsessed with this for some reason!”
She continued: “So in the effort of transparency, we told you who that person is. There are so many bigger things in the world than who the DOGE administrator is! But for some reason, everybody in the press corps is so obsessed with this that you were incessantly asking! So we thought, okay, we will be transparent. So now you know who it is!”
This latest broadside against the media comes after Leavitt announced on Tuesday that the White House was seizing power from the White House Correspondents’ Association and would choose which news outlets were allowed to participate in the presidential press pool. The precedent-defying move prompted Fox News White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich to condemn the decision as the administration giving itself power over the media.
