SALT LAKE CITY — Jennica Pounds has become perhaps the most prominent personality — after its leader — behind an organization to which she has no direct or official ties: Elon Musk’s
Department of Government Efficiency.
And no one even knew her name until about two months ago — by design.
“I’ve always been a recluse, a big introvert,” the 43-year-old mother of two tells The Post from her Utah home. “Being thrust into fame in such a sudden manner, in a polarizing manner, was just shocking.”
Known as DataRepublican on X, Pounds — petite in oversized black sunglasses and a beige cardigan, with a mysterious, slightly intimidating air, icy like a young Joan Didion — doesn’t even work for DOGE. But her volunteer efforts for President Trump’s government-slashing initiative have ruffled feathers anyway.
Pounds has been deaf since contracting spinal meningitis at age 2. She is on the autism spectrum and has expressive dysphasia, a neurological condition characterized by difficulty in producing language while comprehension remains intact. In an interview with The Post, she uses text-to-speech software to communicate in a robotic voice.
Pounds cracks a wry smile when asked if she’d prefer a government run entirely by artificial intelligence.
“That’s accelerationist talk,” she types into her laptop before deleting the line.
But she’s certainly no fan of Washington elites.
“I am converging more and more that the conspiracy theorists were right. That this was a brilliant systems hacking on the part of a very few people. And I feel like if a few people can pull this off, then a few people can stop them, too,” she says.
By Pounds’ estimation, what she calls an “Ouroboros of Interest,” an “infinite money hack,” is “the reason why our deficit spending is so out of control,” and it got a foothold under President Ronald Reagan with US-led initiatives to combat communism globally.
Instead of dissolving after the Soviet Union’s collapse, many of those organizations expanded their power and influence, acting as a revolving door for former congresspeople and Fortune 500 CEOs to siphon taxpayer money in the name of US foreign-policy interests while producing little of value in return, she says.
She points to one such NGO, the States United Democracy Center, with millions in the bank to lobby for foreign aid — but, she says, appears to have done nothing with the cash other than produce a
Muppet video to “promote democracy.”
That’s part of an endemic pattern — “These groups almost always have the words ‘Security’ or ‘Democracy’ in their names,” Pounds says — of nonprofits sitting on taxpayer war chests and doing little but host the occasional conference or YouTube seminar that struggles to get 100 views online.
Prime examples include the US Global Leadership Coalition, today a supergroup of the largest nongovernmental organizations funded by taxpayer money through USAID, and the National Endowment for Democracy, made up of the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute.
nypost.com
