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On March 7, Business Insider published an article with the headline “We found a DOGE guy at NASA because his Google Calendar was public.”
The article reported that a twenty-six-year-old was listed in one of NASA’s internal directories as a “senior advisor,” and that “an image shared with BI shows his name is followed by the letters ‘GSA,’ an apparent reference to the General Services Administration.”
The article was mostly accurate, but the claim in the headline—that he is a “DOGE guy”—is a conflation that skips over the fact that the General Services Administration is not the same as Elon Musk’s self-proclaimed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
Why do I know this, and why does this distinction matter to me? Because the Government Services Administration employee in question is Riley Sennott, and he is my son.
Riley came to the GSA from his job at Tesla. But the path really started in Ukraine. In 2022, as the war was heating up, he volunteered to deliver aid with an NGO based in Kyiv and helped an extraction team that rescued civilians who needed medical care, including an NPR reporter who was wounded while on assignment. He also developed a mapping application of the war zone that improved safety and efficiency for drivers on his team.
That app caught the eye of the recruiters at Tesla, and soon he had a job he had always wanted—working for a green energy company was a goal after college. Last fall, Riley asked his team at Tesla for the chance to lead a relief effort in North Carolina that would deliver Tesla “mobile power units” to help rural communities ravaged by Hurricane Helene. They got it done by forging a partnership with a local military unit at a nearby National Guard base, which provided a Chinook helicopter. That allowed the team to drop the power units, which are essentially refrigerator-size batteries, along with some pallets of Starlink networks into what had become largely unreachable places in North Carolina’s High Country. That spirit of service in Ukraine and North Carolina, and his focus on efficiency and efficacy in his aid efforts, led to Riley’s being recommended for a role in DC.
My son works at GSA because of a genuine dedication to public service, not politics or ideology. The GSA describes its purpose as “Delivering effective and efficient government services for the American people.” It is fair to say that Riley’s current work is part of a broad effort that the public has come to know as DOGE, but that acronym and the scorn heaped upon it overlooks the long history of presidents seeking efficiency in government. The GSA was launched seventy-five years ago under President Truman, with the goal of streamlining government operations; its work is part of the same continuum of history that includes successful efforts by Bill Clinton and Al Gore to balance the budget.
I’m sharing all this because Riley’s situation poses a unique challenge to me, as a journalist and editor who has regularly—and quite critically—reported on the Trump administration and DOGE. Journalists have an obligation to be transparent about any potential conflicts of interest, or even any perceptions of one. I’ve lived by that expectation for forty years. In my own shop at GroundTruth, I disclosed Riley’s position at Tesla and, later, in DC; our trusted managing editor saw no need for me to publicly disclose anything more. Riley is an adult, and my coverage was clearly not pulling any punches to help my son. At the large nonprofit news organization where I serve on the board, I informed the executive director of Riley’s role as a courtesy, and she had a similar take. Riley has never once asked me to change what I write or to pull back on my views. And I respectfully do not ask him for any specific information about what he is working on. (Riley has refused to speak to reporters who have tried to reach him. For me, there was no special exception. He provided no public comment for this story, although it is fair to say I have developed some solid “background” material as his father.)
The Business Insider article triggered a wider reckoning—for my colleagues and for me. At GBH’s Boston Public Radio, where I have been a news analyst for more than a decade, the hosts were more adamant that I should acknowledge Riley’s work at Tesla and the GSA publicly if I was going to continue to offer commentary on Tesla or DOGE. They were focused specifically on a segment on February 3 when I mentioned a visit to the Tesla plant in Austin that Riley had helped me arrange but which I took on my own; my description may have been a bit gushing, but I was indeed genuinely blown away by the enormous plant. That segment also included my own sharp criticism of the threat by DOGE to dismantle USAID, which would be announced just a few days later. Technically, when I was on air, Riley had left Tesla and not yet been hired at GSA—that would not happen until nine days later. I informed the producers of his situation immediately after the appearance. My presumption was we would have an opportunity to provide context on air at some point, but I have not been on the program since that date. In retrospect, even amid all the uncertainty, it would have probably just been easier for me to let the on-air listeners know at the time that my son was a former Tesla employee.
That said, I have found the spirit of the pushback from longtime colleagues a little perplexing. The GBH producers canceled the on-air segment we had planned last week to talk about Riley’s former job at Tesla and current role at GSA, and we ended up missing a chance to frame the full story and its complexity. They said they preferred to just read a “clarification” instead. Hey, it’s their show, and of course I respect their choice and understand the desire not to spend too much time on this. But it seemed like a topic for the kind of nuanced discussion that is precisely why I have loved being part of the show for so many years, and why I consider GBH, where I launched the nonprofit journalism organization the GroundTruth Project more than a decade ago, my journalistic family.
Compare this reaction with the story of our youngest son, Jack, and how it has been received by colleagues across the media and at GBH. Jack, who is twenty-two, is the one who first encouraged Riley to join him in doing volunteer work in Ukraine. Later, he worked as a 2024 summer intern in the Biden White House, and then took a leave from his junior year in college to work as a full-time field organizer for Kamala Harris in Michigan.
Many of my colleagues at GBH and elsewhere knew about Jack’s internship and campaigning, although it is fair to say some did not. But there was no attempt on my part to conceal that information, and I would have invited any discussion at GBH about how it might have compromised my reporting on Biden.
The emotion, when people hear about Riley, is very different. Some turn cold. Other friends and colleagues have been open-minded and tried to embrace the idea that he genuinely wants to make a difference through public service. We have also experienced utter contempt—even among a few who really know him. Riley has received direct threats. The messages are too raw and in some cases too vile to share here. I have suggested to my colleagues at GBH that we should include both Riley’s experience at GSA and Jack’s time as a White House intern and on the Harris campaign if we want to give listeners a genuinely full disclosure, and perhaps have a discussion about a complex and layered reality within our family.
The experience has left me wondering if all of us in the press corps, myself included, need to think about how we are going to handle ourselves as each side of the national divide seems to have dissolved into a blind rage about the other. Do we have a double standard that may be eroding our objectivity and weakening our journalism? Should journalists whose spouses or adult children serve in the military or in political office or in corporations, for example, always be required to disclose any appearance of conflict? I can see why some would say yes, but it can also get impractical and intrusive. I am not saying there are easy answers here, and it is certainly not easy to keep your balance when you feel like your democracy is under attack. But I do think journalists, myself included, too often find ourselves in silos, and we may be losing that connection to, and affinity with, those who think profoundly differently. We should do everything we can to change that.
As a father, I have shared with my son the very serious risks that I believe Musk’s DOGE poses to our democracy by breaking the constitutional guardrails that separate the branches of government. I told him that I believe the very first initiative they took, gutting USAID, was not just clumsy but morally reprehensible. He knows I have dedicated many years of my professional life to sounding the alarm about the rising peril for a free press in so many corners of the world, including the United States.
But I have also listened. And I hear Riley’s deep concerns about the existential threat posed by a $36 trillion national debt and a government so laden with bureaucracy that it can no longer solve its problems. And I don’t know how to answer his questions about why Democratic leaders had so little to say about this issue. He, like so many young people, feels a mounting urgency about the trajectory of the country, and will not sit around idly and let others figure it out. He is just not wired that way. I think all of us, no matter where our political compass is set, should be trying to listen to these concerns, and be part of the solution to solving a looming crisis—a point made brilliantly by two progressives, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, on a recent CNN appearance.
My observation as both a writer and a father is that Riley and Jack’s shared desire to do public service, and the respect they have for each other, is something that we can all learn from. Their other two brothers have their own points of view as well. One is a reporter who has been radicalized by watching private equity soak up the profits in the fishing industry, which he both works in and writes about. Another is studying historical preservation and restoring a large dairy barn and is by far the best listener of the four. The brothers’ conversations at our dinner table or out fishing together have always been intense, but also humorous and loving. When Jack and Riley argue, they argue with each other—because they still believe that the other is worth debating.
It often feels like we live in a country that is “a house divided,” to borrow from Lincoln’s famous words, but Jack and Riley are not divided, and our house still stands. Through Riley and Jack’s example, my wife and I both see a sliver of optimism for the ability to effect change by actually getting out there and being part of something. We’re proud of them for trying.
As Jack put it recently, “Maybe we’ll just keep arguing. Maybe the fight never ends. Maybe that’s what keeps a house standing.”
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