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.
“I am helping out with this because if we don’t cut spending, nobody has a future,” she says. “The work itself, about discovering waste, should not be partisan. Cutting spending is not an ideological thing,”
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, that received $17 million in taxpayer money through USAID — but, she says, appears to have done little 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.
After Pounds shared a list of USGLC board members — which included executives from Pepsi, Disney, Pfizer, Google, Citigroup and Land O’Lakes butter — the organization deleted the page from its website.
She also uncovered that Hunter Biden was on that board, where he played a pivotal role in allocating $16.5 million in USAID money to Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company whose board he also sat on.
“That right there is why Hunter Biden was worth the $50,000/month,” she says of his Burisma salary.
A self-identified “DOGE volunteer” and “small-r republican,” Pounds comes from the world of Big Tech, where she worked in programming for Amazon, eBay and Snapchat — developing tracking software for sign-language-to-English translation at that last one.
Of Big Tech’s liberal lords recently cozying up to Trump, including her ex-boss Jeff Bezos, she says, “I think these CEOs were always more on the libertarian side. Many of them want to focus on the technical side and don’t want to really do the humanities side. For the lack of a better term, they got bullied into the woke agenda of 2020. I think without a moral core, they can get bullied back into a certain agenda again.”
Her anonymous social-media account, @DataRepublican, gained a modest following after accurately predicting swing-state results in the 2016 and 2020 elections — but exploded this year when she began building AI models to survey government spending on NGOs.
It got the attention of Elon Musk, who has shared her posts on his platform more than 30 times. She went from 10,000 followers to more than 740,000. Her website, datarepublican.com, acts as a whiteboard tracing government grants and the major players involved, creating an index she says wouldn’t have been possible before AI, due to the complexity of information involved.
After Pounds posted in January about a migrant nonprofit called Global Refuge receiving $229 million in taxpayer money, Musk responded, “Noted.” Days later, he announced DOGE was shutting down payments to the group, and in March, Trump announced a freeze on such foreign aid.
All this has placed a target on DataRepublican’s back. Rolling Stone doxed her — Pounds believes a member of the deaf community sussed out her identity and leaked it to the former music magazine. The left-leaning Salt Lake Tribune followed up by doxing her husband, Brent Pounds, a former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officer turned whiskey maker who runs the Utah distillery Spirits of the Wasatch.
That’s when the violent messages and death threats started rolling in. Soon, pizzas were being delivered to their house, a noted precursor to swatting, a vile recent trend of left-wing agitators phoning in fake police reports to send SWAT teams to conservative social-media personalities’ homes.
Fearing for her life, Pounds packed up her two young children and headed to Florida, where she stayed with her mother for six weeks until things calmed down. She was undergoing vetting to become a federal appointee — she declines to say where — but unaware of a tweeting moratorium she decided to withdraw, surmising she could be more influential in her outside role.
“They only come after you when you’re a threat to the system. Keep going — you’re doing incredible work,” Nicole Shanahan, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s 2024 running mate, tweeted after Pounds’ doxing. Interim US Attorney for DC Ed Martin offered legal assistance.
Pounds is equally unnerved by the liberal reaction to Musk and DOGE. Around the time left-wing terrorists were setting Tesla dealerships ablaze in protest, a website popped up with a picture of a Molotov cocktail over her husband’s business.
“Why are you fighting for Pepsi and Coca-Cola and the oligarchs?” Pounds asks of the DOGE backlash. “It’s almost David and Goliath. You have a side that concentrates most of the political, most of the corporations, most of the power. And then you have everyone else who’s just trying to get by.”
Brent and Jennica met in 2008 on Match.com and married shortly after. While less politicly engaged than his wife, Brent is an enthusiastic supporter of her mission.
“She basically won’t let anything stand in her way. If you look at her life, it’s pretty much constant obstacles. She just decides, ‘Well, I’ve got to overcome that,’” he told The Post.
“She won’t back down. If she believes strongly that what she’s doing is right, she’s not going to be bullied or pushed away.”
While Pounds continues to build software to benefit deaf people, running DataRepublican is its own full-time job and has become something of a family affair. Pounds is so beloved in her mission to expose waste, even her mother has gained a popular X following, mirroring Musk’s own mom, Maye.
While Pounds admits she directly communicates with some DOGE workers, she’s never met or privately interacted with Elon Musk — not that she wouldn’t welcome a powwow with the world’s richest man.
“But not for the reason others think,” she says. “I want to make the case for him believing in Christ.”
She can’t be sure where all this is heading but believes we’re in the midst of a second American revolution.
“These people are happy to go full throttle and let the whole country crash. Because they’ll probably be fine no matter what. They hold all the power,” she says of America’s NGO-funded shadow government.
“I can’t predict where it goes. I think this direction, the DOGE direction, is the most peaceful outcome.”
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