# Ethan Shaotran Harvard CS dropout, AI startup founder, and [[DOGE Ecosystem]] engineer. Shaotran, 22, left Harvard during his senior year to join Musk's government efficiency initiative. A Palo Alto native (Gunn High School graduate), he bridges the Silicon Valley AI startup world and DOGE's government restructuring project. He was a runner-up at an xAI (Musk's AI company) hackathon and founded Energize AI with a $100,000 OpenAI grant. ## Background & Career Studied computer science at Harvard, where he was known for AI research and had filed four patents. Founded **Energize AI**, an AI scheduling assistant for professionals, which received a $100,000 grant from [[OpenAI]] in 2023. The startup appears to have been shut down when Shaotran joined DOGE. Was runner-up at a hackathon sponsored by xAI ([[Elon Musk]]'s AI company), which likely served as a recruitment vector into the DOGE orbit. After dropping out, Shaotran said publicly that his Harvard classmates "hate me" and that he'd been ostracized for his decision to join DOGE. ## DOGE Deployments ### USPS Shaotran was detailed to the Office of the Postmaster General at USPS as of March 12, 2025. He and fellow DOGE operative Alex Simonpour held meetings with Acting Postmaster General Doug Tulino and postal leadership including Fiona Machado (USPS Director of Pricing and Costing Strategy Support). Both Shaotran and Simonpour hold individual memoranda of understanding (MOUs) with USPS. ### Department of Education Along with [[Akash Bobba]], Shaotran had administrator-level status in the [[Department of Education]]'s email system. He reportedly accessed the back end of the ed.gov website. ### Federal Survey Initiative On May 23, 2025, NPR revealed that Shaotran used his GSA email to send a "2025 Survey of Surveys" to federal agencies — an initiative to catalog and potentially consolidate government survey and data collection operations. ### GSA Part of the initial DOGE engineering cohort formed at GSA. Holds a working GSA email with A-suite level clearance granting access to all physical spaces and IT systems. ## See Also - [[DOGE Ecosystem]] - [[Elon Musk]] - [[Akash Bobba]] - [[Gavin Kliger]] - [[Luke Farritor]]