It’s real. That is Edward Coristine (born December 2005), also known by the online alias “Big Balls“, is an American college student and software engineer appointed to the Department of Government Efficiency.

Wikipedia sez:

Coristine is among a group of 19 to 24 year olds without prior experience in government appointed to the Department of Government Efficiency Coristine is the youngest member of the group He works within the Office of Personnel Management, reporting directly to Amanda Scales, a former xAI employee appointed as OPM chief of staff. OPM records list his role as an “expert”. According to Wired, Coristine has sat in on calls using a non-government email address where workers were made to “go over code they had written and justify their jobs.”

On February 3, 2025, Coristine held a call with federal Small Business Administration staff detailing the level of access wanted by DOGE, including human resources, contract and payment systems. He reportedly signed into the call from a non-government email address. His ability to pass a federal background check has been questioned.

On February 7, 2025, Bloomberg News reported that Coristine had been fired from his internship at cybersecurity firm Path Network in 2022 for allegedly leaking internal company information to a competitor. Following his dismissal, Coristine wrote that he had retained access to Path Network’s servers, but claimed he did not exploit it. Path Network confirmed that Coristine had been fired following a security incident.

Coristine used the moniker “bigballs” on LinkedIn and @Edwardbigballer on Twitter, according to The Daily Dot.

On February 7, 2025, security journalist Brian Krebs reported that Coristine had previously been active in online communities known as “The Com,” a network of Discord and Telegram channels associated with cybercrime activities. According to Krebs’ article, The Com members have questioned Coristine’s technical abilities, with one member asserting that he is “not a good dev” and he “couldn’t print ‘hello world’ if his life depended on it.”

On February 10, 2025, The Washington Post reported Coristine became a senior advisor in the Bureau of Diplomatic Technology of the United States Department of State. The Post also reported that Coristine is a senior adviser at the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency and had a position in the United States Agency for International Development.

As of February 19, Coristine was a staff member at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. More information about the context around Coristine’s time at Path Network came out in late February with CNN reviewing internal text and voice messages.

In March 2025 Reuters published a story alleging that Coristine’s online content delivery network DiamondCDN had facilitated the work of the cybercriminal group EGodly.[35][36][37]In 2023 Egodly thanked Coristine saying “We extend our gratitude to our valued partners DiamondCDN for generously providing us with their amazing DDoS protection

and caching systems, which allow us to securely host and safeguard our website,” Egodly has claimed involvement in a number of crimes including email hacking, theft of cryptocurrency, and the harassment of a former FBI agent.

I feel like crying.