The DOGE Acting Administrator Isn’t New to the Trump World

Amy Gleason was a data cruncher and efficiency aficionado in the early Covid response.

An illustration that layers two images. At the center is Amy Gleason's smiling, tightly cropped government photo in a green-and-black gradient. Behind her image in the background is an out-of-focus black-and-white photo of Donald Trump in the White House garden.

Mother Jones illustration; National Archives; Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty

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The White House today announced the name of the acting administrator of the Department of Government Efficiency: Amy Gleason, the US government’s problem solver in the early days of the data-starved response to the Covid pandemic and a seasoned worker in the health space. The White House named Gleason after it argued in court that Elon Musk is not really the head of DOGE and faced pressure from a federal judge to say who is. How long Gleason has been the acting administrator, and whether Musk was an unofficial one before today’s announcement, is unclear.

This is Gleason’s second time working in the US Digital Service, now turned DOGE. In her first tour, which started in 2018 and carried through the frenzied and chaotic pandemic response, she pushed the bounds of existing bureaucracy to meet the crisis’ demand. Gleason was interviewed on Reveal’s 2023 Covid Tracking Project series, in which she described long hours and the frequent hurdles she encountered in an effort to create an effective emergency response.

“We would leave at 4 in the morning from the White House,” Gleason recalled. “You could take a shower, maybe you got a 30-minute nap, and you had to be right back there. So everybody was kind of running on fumes.”

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But Gleason was creative in battling bureaucratic hurdles. She described an early, maddening challenge: In the midst of lockdowns, she couldn’t get access to needed federal data without finding a notary.

“You walk in DC, it looks like an apocalypse, exponential growth of cases and deaths,” she said. “And so then the shock of somebody saying, ‘I’m sorry. I can’t give you access until you get this form notarized.’ Well, where am I supposed to get a notary to sign this? It’s like the horror of this situation and then to constantly face these walls of, ‘Oh, we can’t do that because we can’t do that, because we can’t do that because,’ starts to get you to be really frustrated.”

The issue led her to create HHS Protect, a data system that eventually became a comprehensive hospital data tracker, though it first generated outcry from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the public over delays in information. Like Musk, Gleason very much sees data as an efficient way to get work done. “We put hundreds of people into that system in the first two weeks, hundreds of federal users so that they could start to be able to see the data,” she said about her work with HHS Protect.

Gleason was undoubtedly affected by her work in the early, chaotic months of the Covid pandemic. “You hear about people coming back from battles or major catastrophes, an earthquake or a tsunami or something, and they have that kind of haunting thing, and I have that,” Gleason told Reveal. “I would try to go to sleep, and that’s all you could think about is how many people are dying right now of this thing and what could I do to stop that?…I felt the weight.”

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Fast forward to 2025, and Gleason is now at the helm of one of the most controversial and constitutionally questionable initiatives in recent memory, administering an agency that’s leading mass firings, gutting health agencies, and issuing return-to-office orders.

The New York Times reported that Gleason “was scheduled to be on vacation in Mexico on Tuesday and told associates that she was not aware ahead of time that the White House planned to make public her role.” Gleason did not return a request for comment.

Among the agencies threatened by DOGE is the National Institutes of Health. Its research into rare diseases is particularly at risk because the relatively small numbers of people with each condition may not seem as “efficient.” AI models embraced by Musk don’t exactly understand the nuances of the importance of health research. But Gleason is familiar with all this as founder of a company called CareSync, which helped patients get all their health information into one place. It was inspired by her experience trying to solve the medical record issues that arose from her daughter’s diagnosis of a rare autoimmune disease, juvenile myositis.

This company’s success resulted in her receiving a “Champions of Change” award from then-President Barack Obama in 2015. In a blog for the Obama White House, Gleason said, “My challenge to our entire health care system, and especially the innovators looking to make it better: Put the patient in the center.” DOGE, ironically, in comparison seems to be antithetical to this framework, as it puts so-called productivity over people.

In a February 2019 blog post, which has since been made private, Gleason wrote positively about Rare Disease Day, emphasizing that “many families and charity organizations are the only way that rare disease research happens.” But these organizations, including the Cure JM Foundation that advocates for the disease her daughter was diagnosed with, push for research to be done through NIH grants. Gleason also volunteered as the foundation’s vice president for research.

Now, fellow parents fighting for their kids with rare diseases to have better treatment options may be hit with even more barriers.

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The DOGE Acting Administrator Isn’t New to the Trump World