The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.

In late May, Elon Musk officially exited the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) amid internal feuds over the One Big Beautiful Bill and, importantly, widespread calls from his companies’ investors to focus on his day job(s) as CEO. However, as Will Royce wrote for the Prospect at the time, Musk’s fingerprints and associates remain all over the pseudo-agency. Chief among them is his longtime friend and investor, Antonio Gracias.

Gracias has been at DOGE for some time, first as a purveyor of Social Security misinformation, and now as chief of its immigration task force in coordination with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Similar to Musk, Gracias currently faces questions surrounding his time commitments with DOGE and its effect on his several other private-sector jobs. You see, Gracias remains CEO of Valor Equity Partners, a private equity investment manager handling $17.5 billion in assets, including hundreds of millions of dollars of public employees’ state and local pension funds.

This past June, the AFL-CIO published an informative report on Gracias, highlighting his role at DOGE and proposing due diligence questions regarding its impact on his capacity to appropriately fulfill his fiduciary responsibilities to Valor.

Even excluding his time at DOGE, Gracias’s work portfolio paints a picture of a man stretched thin indeed. He serves as both CEO and chief investment officer at Valor and is a member of each of the firm’s investment committees. According to his Valor biography, Gracias is also director of several companies in Valor’s portfolio, including SpaceX, AI infrastructure company WEKA, and delivery drone manufacturer Zipline. He’s a trustee of the Aspen Institute, board member of World Business Chicago, and a member of the board of visitors for Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and the University of Chicago Law School. Quite a busy schedule.

Read more from the Revolving Door Project

Heading Valor’s investment decisions would seem to be a full-time job by itself. In addition to its investment management services, Valor also has an extensive venture capital portfolio—their incomplete portfolio lists over 350 investments—including investments in defense company Anduril and each of Musk’s companies. Gracias has a fiduciary duty to devote significant time and attention to ensure these investments are well managed and in the best interests of investors.

Musk’s tenure at the agency showed how a role at DOGE can complicate that responsibility. Before Musk’s exit, Tesla stock was down 14 percent for the year, profit was down 71 percent, sales were down 13 percent, and there were nationwide protests at Tesla showrooms. Shareholders took notice, putting the blame on Musk’s political activities and making public calls for Tesla’s board to force him out of the administration or otherwise remove him as CEO. Musk tried to save face, calling his exit the end of his “scheduled time as a Special Government Employee,” but it’s safe to assume that the pressure campaign was a greater factor than a newfound commitment to the rule of law.

With the AFL-CIO’s new report, Antonio Gracias’s time in the federal government could be on a similar trajectory. He has already been a public face of one of DOGE’s worst scandals. Onstage with Musk ahead of the Wisconsin state supreme court election, Gracias helped launder an unfounded conspiracy that millions of undocumented immigrants were collecting Social Security. He and Musk claimed credit for DOGE uncovering the supposed scandal, and he later told the All-In podcast that it was “a move to import voters.” The claims were thoroughly debunked and revealed as either outright dishonesty or a comically stupid misunderstanding of the system. The millions of public employees whose pension funds are managed by Gracias and Valor may not appreciate his attempts to undermine one of the three legs of the retirement stool.

It’s not just Gracias either—he’s joined at DOGE by Jon Koval, a vice president on Valor’s investment team, and Payton Rehling, a Valor senior associate and data engineer. It’s unclear how many hours per week each of them is working at DOGE, but NPR reporting showed that descriptions from partially redacted court filings in AFSCME v. Social Security Administration match the biographies of Gracias, Koval, and Rehling. The filings indicate that all three are serving one-year terms as “experts” and are employed at the Social Security Administration’s headquarters in Woodlawn, Maryland—a far trip from Valor’s Chicago headquarters. Perhaps this is why, according to the AFL-CIO’s analysis, flight records for Valor’s private jet show that 40 percent of its flights from January to April 2025 were to or from Washington, D.C., compared to just 8 percent last year. The records do not specify who is on these flights or why, but it could be indicative of the divided time and attention of Valor’s top brass.

The AFL-CIO’s report provides sample due diligence questions that investors could consider, including how Valor has managed to cover the absences of Gracias, Koval, and Rehling, whether an interim CEO and CIO have taken over Gracias’s duties, and whether they have reduced the compensation—and correspondingly reduced fees—of the employees to reflect the time spent working for DOGE rather than Valor, among others. These questions will only become more pertinent as Gracias continues in his role on DOGE’s immigration task force.

The Republican reconciliation bill ballooned the budget for Trump’s mass deportation plans, allocating $170 billion to the efforts, including $45 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention camps and $30 billion for ICE personnel. It’s unclear thus far what role DOGE will play in this expanded operation, but DOGE has already assisted DHS in revoking parole and terminating visas for immigrants. It’s also been involved in DHS plans to upgrade its current biometric database with the Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART) program, a cloud-based database that a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report described as having “privacy weaknesses,” which risk the identifying information of hundreds of millions of people.

Gracias and DOGE will presumably remain a fixture in implementing the technical aspects of these mass deportation policies that are already underwater with the public. If so, it could also create a conflict of interest for Gracias. According to reporting from The Intercept, the reconciliation bill included $6 billion for border security technology, with such specific requirements on who can be contracted for the tech that Anduril, a Valor-backed defense contractor, is the only company that can qualify. If Gracias assists Anduril with border technology, is he acting in the best financial interest of all of Valor’s fiduciaries, or simply greasing the wheels for a specific firm in his venture capital portfolio?

Although it was initially set to be disbanded in July 2026, Republicans are now looking to institutionalize DOGE with appropriation bills this fall. Even if Gracias only serves the remainder of his one-year term, his involvement in draconian treatment of immigrants and misinformation around Social Security puts a stain on Valor’s reputation that will be hard to clean off. DOGE’s haphazard gutting of the federal government has already had negative downstream effects on state and local government employees, with state health departments and local libraries forced to scale down amid cuts to federal grants. With Republican-led states implementing their own state-level DOGE apparatuses, these public-sector employees may soon be subjected to expanded, chaotic workforce slashings similar to those that Gracias helped pioneer at the federal level.

The AFL-CIO report may get the ball rolling for public employee pension funds and other fiduciaries to pressure Valor to address these concerns. If Musk’s fiasco with Tesla stockholders is any indication, Gracias’s DOGE involvement may be subjected to mounting scrutiny from Valor investors, especially as Trump’s immigration policies become even more horrific and damaging to the economy.