The demand arrived at 4:28 p.m. Eastern time on Valentine’s Day.
“The US government only recognizes two sexes: Male and Female. This needs to be changed immediately,” the popular right-wing account Libs of TikTok posted on X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk.
The missive, blasted to the account’s 4.2 million followers, was accompanied by screenshots of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, the government form that determines eligibility for financial assistance in paying for college or trade school. It allowed students to identify as “nonbinary” or select “prefer not to answer” when asked to select their gender.
The account for Mr. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency replied five hours later with screenshots of the updated form: “Fixed.”
As his operation targets spending considered unaligned with President Trump’s agenda, Mr. Musk has personally appealed to users of his social media platform to help root out what he has termed “waste, fraud and abuse.” He has been responsive to complaints from accounts that go viral, with his team trumpeting the apparent changes pushed through as a result. And for at least two prominent conservative activists, a Trump administration so carefully attuned to right-wing social media has created the opportunity to build an extraordinary pipeline of influence and access.
In multiple instances, viral posts by Chaya Raichik, who is the creator of the Libs of TikTok account and regularly attacks transgender people online, and Christopher Rufo, a writer who has worked to push conservatives further right on education issues, have prompted quick adjustments to public-facing government documents and even policy. Most of their efforts have centered on the Education Department, which Mr. Trump has said he wants to eliminate, though other agencies have become targets, too.
In the case of the FAFSA form, the Education Department had already planned to make those changes to comply with Mr. Trump’s executive order requiring that the government only recognize two genders, according to two people involved with the change. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the internal process.
The updates had been approved and were scheduled, according to the two people. But the Libs of TikTok post set off an evening scramble inside the department to make the change immediately so it could be advertised to the public, with multiple contractors being called back from vacation to hastily push through the change, the people said. Ms. Raichik declined to comment for this article.
The process, as laid out by Mr. Rufo, is straightforward.
“We expose corruption on X. DOGE eliminates it in DC. Rinse and repeat,” Mr. Rufo posted on Feb. 19.
Days earlier, he had posted a video highlighting an educational training he found objectionable. He said it was produced by the Education Department’s little-known Comprehensive Centers program, which helps states address systemic problems in schools.
The video, which Mr. Rufo called “taxpayer-funded witchcraft,” consisted of a compilation of clips featuring an instructor speaking about how to discuss Native American history with sensitivity.
“Hey @DOGE_ED, let’s terminate the contracts for the ‘comprehensive centers,’” Mr. Rufo posted, tagging a DOGE sub-account created to share actions related to Mr. Musk’s efforts at the Education Department. “What do you think?”
The next day, the department announced that it would, in fact, terminate grants totaling $226 million to the network of 18 regional and national Comprehensive Centers. The official announcement cited Mr. Rufo’s posts.
In emailed answers to questions about his relationship with the Musk operation, Mr. Rufo said he had a “good relationship with the professionals in the Department of Education,” and was offering recommendations to officials in a “scholarly and nonpartisan manner.”
“When people truly see what their government is doing with their money, they see that it is not about ‘cutting education,’ but cutting left-wing ideological activism which masks itself with the word ‘education,’” he said.
The Comprehensive Centers serve a variety of functions, but were established by statute in 2002 to help states and school districts triage thorny issues facing school districts — such as problems retaining teachers or improving math scores — that they would otherwise be forced to pay to work out themselves.
Several people and groups associated with the Comprehensive Centers, including the American Institutes for Research, a social sciences research organization, said that defunding them meant that schools wouldn’t receive badly needed assistance.
The research organization was selected through a competitive process to operate four of the centers for the next five years, having worked with states on problems like addressing teacher shortages, and applying research to inform literacy interventions in elementary schools.
“The work of the Comprehensive Centers has always been driven by the priorities and needs of the states and districts,” Dana Tofig, a spokesman for the American Institutes for Research, said in a statement. “Eliminating the Centers will make it harder for state and local educators and policymakers to find evidence-based solutions to the challenges they face and improve outcomes for all students.”
The Comprehensive Centers weren’t the first program Mr. Rufo targeted on social media. On Feb. 13, Mr. Rufo criticized Equity Assistance Centers, a similar support program originally created under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to help desegregate schools.
Hours later, the Education Department announced it would wipe out $350 million in contracts, including $33 million in funding for those centers.
Appearing on “The Ben Shapiro Show” the day after those cuts were made public, Mr. Rufo took credit for galvanizing the department to act, all by appealing to Mr. Musk’s team on social media.
“My job is to try to expose it, to bring it to public attention and then to bring it to the attention of the DOGE boys, who are in the Department of Education building right now looking for contracts to terminate,” he told Ben Shapiro, a prominent conservative podcaster.
Over the last month, the Education Department has announced a host of budget cuts, eliminating contracts that help fund research into difficult questions about what teaching methods are most effective in early childhood education and beyond.
In lawsuits challenging the authority and legality of Mr. Musk’s team, lawyers for the government have often described the Musk operation as advisory, helping guide the heads of federal agencies with recommendations about programs they can theoretically, through their own authority, cancel. The process through which the Education Department decided to cut its contracts was not immediately clear, nor was the amount of input from Mr. Musk’s team.
But the swiftness with which proposals have jumped from prominent conservative figures online to Mr. Musk’s team and the various departments has suggested a more or less direct pipeline through which outside activists can lobby for nearly instant changes, all through a handful of keystrokes.
That has allowed activists to translate longstanding hostilities into concrete action.
Mr. Rufo has skyrocketed into a position of influence through years of campaigning against education policy that includes teaching on institutional racism and other ideas about the role of race in American society now commonly generalized as part of “critical race theory.” Ms. Raichik, who built a substantial following by sharing clips mocking members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community and supporters of L.G.B.T.Q. rights, has worked to stamp out any references to transgender people in government paperwork.
In that pursuit, her Libs of TikTok account has received responses on X from not only Mr. Musk’s team but also Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary. “All over it,” he replied Monday night, just hours after the account posted what it said were medical forms given to servicemembers that still offered multiple options when it came to “gender identity” and preferred pronouns.
Both Mr. Rufo and Ms. Raichik have responded by praising Mr. Musk’s team to their substantial lists of followers, taking advantage of the public exchanges to elevate their causes. “The other week DOGE responded to me in less than an hour,” Ms. Raichik gushed in a post on Tuesday.
In some cases, the information pipeline has appeared to flow through Mr. Musk himself.
After Kyle Becker, who is a conservative influencer and former Fox News producer, echoed misleading claims about government agencies supporting media companies through subscriptions this month, Mr. Musk picked up on his post, calling for action. Nine hours later, the DOGE account announced that the State Department had canceled the subscriptions raised by Mr. Becker.
Weeks later, the State Department said it had gotten rid of most news subscriptions, including to The New York Times. In a statement, a Times spokesperson said the government was “obviously free to cancel any subscriptions it likes,” but added that as a result agencies and offices would “know far less about what’s happening in the world.”
Mr. Musk also appeared to seize on a Libs of TikTok post on his own this month. The account shared a screenshot of what it described as an application for health care benefits through the Department of Veterans Affairs. The image included options such as “non-binary” or “a gender not listed here” in a list of answers to a prompt titled “gender identity.”
Though Mr. Musk was not tagged directly, he found it and passed it along to his team with his own equally public directive: “Noted @DOGE.”
The next morning, the DOGE account replied with before-and-after pictures showing that it had removed the prompt from the application form entirely.
“Fixed,” it said. “The Gender Identity section has been deleted.”