Nick Shirley—the right-wing creator whose YouTube investigation sparked the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota—claims that his most recent video about alleged fraud in California was bolstered by data provided by none other than Edward Coristine, one of the first members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) known online as “Big Balls.”
Coristine, who joined DOGE at 19 years old with no prior government experience, was staffed across several agencies including the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Small Business Administration (SBA). Before joining DOGE, Coristine worked at Elon Musk’s Neuralink for several months and founded a startup known for hiring black hat hackers.
In an interview with Coristine published on Shirley’s YouTube channel on Thursday, Shirley claims that Coristine personally pulled data on Medicaid spending for businesses based in California as potential targets. Coristine nodded along, telling Shirley that the government must create more opportunities to crowdsource fraud investigations.
The information Coristine allegedly pulled for Shirley was from a dataset published by the DOGE team at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in February. In a post to X at the time, the HHS DOGE team referred to it as “the largest Medicaid dataset in department history.” The post also claimed that the dataset could be used to “detect” large-scale fraud.
“After that, I went to California based off that dataset you had helped me extract, and these fraudsters also weren't even trying to hide it,” Shirley told Coristine in Thursday’s interview.
Coristine said that by open-sourcing data on government spending, vigilante investigators like Shirley who are “more well-positioned” could uncover fraudulent payments. “You are someone who actually went to the places where we were spending all this money and confronted the people and got to know the truth. I think we just have to create more opportunities for that to happen. We have to continue to open source data,” Coristine said.
The intersection of the right’s favorite fraud influencer and one of the most notorious DOGE engineers exemplifies the next evolution of DOGE and the Trump administration’s fight against “waste, fraud, and abuse.”
Shirley’s videos have become key pieces of evidence for the Trump administration’s fraud and immigration crackdowns. When Shirley released his December video claiming to have uncovered more than $100 million in Somali-run childcare fraud in Minnesota, figures like vice president JD Vance shared it. A surge of immigration agents were then sent to Minnesota, resulting in mass arrests, detainments, and the deaths of two protesters, Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
Early in their YouTube video, Shirley and Coristine directly tie fraud to immigrant communities and foreigners. “A lot of the money is being stolen and siphoned out of the country,” Coristine says, without providing evidence. “Once that money is in a suitcase to Somalia, that’s never coming back,” Shirley replies.
Later in the video, Shirley and Coristine cite specific examples of “waste and fraud” identified by DOGE, including funding for a “Sesame Street style children’s TV program in Iraq” and “tax policy consulting in Liberia.” Both programs were supported by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which DOGE effectively shut down in the early months of 2025. Coristine also alleged that the SBA “did a terrible job,” particularly with loans during the height of COVID, and that there were “no checks at all on who's receiving money, not even the most basic checks of like, if [a Social Security number] is real.”
“It’s no secret that the Biden administration took an extraordinarily lax approach to underwriting and fraud prevention at the SBA,” says SBA spokesperson Maggie Clemmons. (A 2025 Government Accountability Office report found that the SBA did give out loans before its full system of checks was in place.)
While Coristine is no longer a formal member of DOGE, he’s still working in government as head of engineering for the White House’s National Design Studio (NDS), which is run by Airbnb cofounder and US chief design officer Joe Gebbia. Gebbia previously worked as a member of DOGE at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) tasked with modernizing the government’s retirement system. Coristine didn’t appear to believe DOGE’s mission was over: “I think the cabinet secretaries … are continuing the mission and mantra of DOGE,” Coristine tells Shirley.
Shirley shared a number of conspiracy theories about fraud. In the interview, Shirley alleged that in California specifically, “There's a lot of dead people who are registered to vote. There's a lot of people who are dead who are still receiving Social Security.” During his time in government, Musk made similar false claims around dead people continuing to receive social security benefits. Experts, however, have noted that this was likely due to DOGE members not understanding how the agency’s data systems and code base are structured.
This was not the first time Shirley made allegations about California’s voter registration systems. On February 16, Shirley released a video claiming that he had identified voters who were 125 years old, and that he had identified 30 people who had listed a UPS store as their address. In an X post sharing the video, Shirley called California “the breeding ground for voter fraud in America.” (Researchers overwhelmingly agree that there is no widespread voter fraud in California).
These allegations echo a key focus of the Trump administration and its supporters. Earlier this week, the president signed an executive order mandating the creation of a national list of eligible voters. In February, speaking on the podcast of former FBI deputy director Dan Bongino, Trump asserted that undocumented immigrants were voting illegally and that Republicans “should take over the voting in at least 15 places.” There is no evidence that immigrants voting illegally constitutes any significant threat to US elections. A 2017 analysis from the Brennan Center for Justice found only 30 incidents of possible noncitizen voting in 2016 out of over 23.5 million votes.
Coristine revealed a handful of other strange and unreported details about the ongoing work at NDS. He mentioned that NDS’s current chief creative officer is Nate Brown, who previously collaborated with Ye, formerly Kanye West, on projects like the rapper’s 2021 album “Donda.” Coristine also said that one of NDS’s next big priorities is “freedom” and bringing “free speech to Europe.” Despite failing to provide any details into what that means, Coristine said to expect more information soon.
Shirley and Coristine did not immediately respond to requests for comment from WIRED.
