The 26-Year-Old Who Fired the Ethics Lawyers Is Now Running Pentagon AI

Corruption of Power GriftMatrix The AI Files By
Who fires the ethics lawyers?

So, the guy who got caught using his government job to boost his own stock portfolio, fired the lawyers who flagged it, and spent several months reposting Nick Fuentes content online just got handed the keys to Pentagon AI.

His name is Gavin Kliger. He’s 26. He graduated from UC Berkeley in 2020, spent a few years at a software company called Databricks, and then decided to “save America” by joining DOGE – which he actually wrote in a newsletter post on the night of February 2nd, 2025, the same night he was sending emails to USAID employees from an USAID address he had no business having.

SMDH

Here’s the story. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is the agency created after the 2008 financial crash to watch over banks and financial companies – basically to keep them from doing what they did in 2008. CFPB employees are banned from owning stock in the companies they regulate. That rule exists so someone can’t use their government power to make their personal portfolio go up.

Kliger showed up at the CFPB in early 2025 as a DOGE operative. The ethics lawyers told him twice that he had to identify any stock on the CFPB’s banned list and warned him he held stock employees are forbidden from owning – up to $365,000 in Apple, Tesla, Bitcoin, and Solana, all of which are prohibited holdings at the CFPB. He was told to recuse himself from anything that could benefit those companies. He ignored it. Then he proceeded to help orchestrate the firing of over 1,400 CFPB employees – and a worker on the layoff team said in a sworn statement that he was screaming at staff and calling people incompetent while keeping them up for 36 hours to get the layoff notices out. Among the people who got layoff notices: the entire ethics team. The lawyers who warned him. Gone – until a court froze the layoffs less than two weeks later and the notices were pulled.

A government ethics expert named Kathleen Clark at Washington University in St. Louis told ProPublica that destroying the CFPB is “likely to have, I believe, a direct and predictable effect on his financial stock.” This isn’t a gray area. Three U.S. senators – Reed, Warren, and Wyden – asked for a criminal investigation in May 2025. The Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the CFPB’s Inspector General. Watchdog groups piled on. Nothing happened. Nobody was held accountable.

So naturally, he got a promotion.

On March 6th, the Pentagon announced Kliger as its new Chief Data Officer. The announcement didn’t come with a press conference. It was a post on X from the Pentagon’s research and engineering office on a Friday morning. His job now is to oversee all of the Defense Department’s AI efforts and work directly with “frontier AI labs” – meaning the biggest, most powerful AI companies in the country – to deploy AI tools for military operations. During an active war with Iran. That’s the role. That’s the person they picked.

And wait until you hear about his social media history. Between October 2024 and January 2025, Kliger was reposting content from Nick Fuentes – a Holocaust denier and white supremacist – and Andrew Tate, who has described himself as a misogynist and is currently facing rape and human trafficking charges in Romania.

When this was reported, Kliger said the suggestion that he supports extremists is “categorically untrue.” Cool, but reposts are documented.

The person now overseeing the U.S. military’s AI projects – and working directly with the biggest AI labs – has a documented history of ignoring ethics warnings when they inconvenienced him personally, and of amplifying content from people who think women are property and the Holocaust is a myth. And his response to getting caught was to eliminate the people doing the catching.

Remember, it’s not that he made a mistake and moved on. He got warned twice, broke the rules anyway, and then used his government access to fire the lawyers who wrote the warnings. He learned that accountability is something that happens to other people, and now he’s running the Pentagon’s most sensitive technology program with that exact lesson fully internalized.

The Pentagon’s previous fight with Anthropic is worth mentioning here, because it’s the context Kliger is walking into. Anthropic declined to give the Defense Department unrestricted access to its AI models and asked for assurances that the technology wouldn’t be used for fully autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance. The Pentagon labeled them a “supply chain risk” – a designation normally reserved for foreign adversaries – and started moving toward OpenAI instead.

So the climate Kliger is entering is one where an AI company got blacklisted after it asked for limits on how the military could use its tools. That’s the environment where a 26-year-old with Kliger’s track record now oversees the Pentagon’s AI adoption strategy.

The DOGE-to-Pentagon pipeline isn’t subtle. Young guys with no government experience, high risk tolerance, and financial interests that benefit from deregulation get deployed to dismantle oversight agencies, and the ones who prove themselves willing to break rules and fire anyone who objects get moved up. Kliger didn’t get this job despite what happened at the CFPB. He got it because of it.

Sources

Correction, September 27th, 2026: This essay first said the ethics lawyers told Kliger twice, in writing, that he was in violation – they told him twice to identify any banned stock and warned him he held stock employees are forbidden from owning. It also gave Kathleen Clark reasoning that isn’t in her quote, said the Pentagon’s announcement skipped formal channels on a Friday afternoon – it was an official Pentagon post on X on a Friday morning – and put his newsletter post at 1am on February 3rd, when it went up the night of February 2nd.

Update, September 27th, 2026: A few lines now say who says so and match the sources more closely, and one source label now matches its link. Three more lines now match the sources – the ethics team’s layoff notices were pulled after a court froze the layoffs, his Pentagon job is described the way the Pentagon described it, and Anthropic asked for limits on how its tools could be used.

Everything I have written about AI is in one place at rachelandthecity.com/the-ai-files.