Politics

Edward Coristine, the 19-year-old given unprecedented access to some of the most private information on Americans, has reportedly quit his role at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency according to Wired. If you don’t remember the name Coristine, you probably remember his nickname, the thing he reportedly told people to call him while he plundered the nation’s data. He went by Big Balls.

Officially, Coristine was an employee of GSA but was working across multiple government agencies, according to Wired. Big Balls was reportedly rooting around in government systems for USAID, the Department of Education, and the Small Business Administration, among others. It’s not clear how much data to which Coristine ultimately got access. Nor do we know what he, or anyone else affiliated with DOGE, has done with it.

Coristine made an infamous appearance on Fox News where he tried to strengthen Musk’s case that the federal government was riddled with waste, fraud, and abuse. But he wound up accidentally revealing that he simply had no idea how anything works. Coristine and Musk seemed to believe that because they didn’t know how various things in the government worked, some kind of nefarious activity had been exposed. But it did nothing of the sort.