Nick Shirley—the right-wing creator whose YouTube investigation sparked the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota—claims that his most recent video about alleged fraud in California was bolstered by data provided by none other than Edward Coristine, one of the first members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) known online as “Big Balls.”
Coristine, who joined DOGE at 19 years old with no prior government experience, was staffed across several agencies including the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Small Business Administration (SBA). Before joining DOGE, Coristine worked at Elon Musk’s Neuralink for several months and founded a startup known for hiring black hat hackers.
In an interview with Coristine published on Shirley’s YouTube channel on Thursday, Shirley claims that Coristine personally pulled data on Medicaid spending for businesses based in California as potential targets. Coristine nodded along, telling Shirley that the government must create more opportunities to crowdsource fraud investigations.
The information Coristine allegedly pulled for Shirley was from a dataset published by the DOGE team at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in February. In a post to X at the time, the HHS DOGE team referred to it as “the largest Medicaid dataset in department history.” The post also claimed that the dataset could be used to “detect” large-scale fraud.
“After that, I went to California based off that dataset you had helped me extract, and these fraudsters also weren’t even trying to hide it,” Shirley told Coristine in Thursday’s interview.
Coristine said that by open-sourcing data on government spending, vigilante investigators like Shirley who are “more well-positioned” could uncover fraudulent payments. “You are someone who actually went to the places where we were spending all this money and confronted the people and got to know the truth. I think we just have to create more opportunities for that to happen. We have to continue to open source data,” Coristine said.
The intersection of the right’s favorite fraud influencer and one of the most notorious DOGE engineers exemplifies the next evolution of DOGE and the Trump administration’s fight against “waste, fraud, and abuse.”
Shirley’s videos have become key pieces of evidence for the Trump administration’s fraud and immigration crackdowns. When Shirley released his December video claiming to have uncovered more than $100 million in Somali-run childcare fraud in Minnesota, figures like vice president JD Vance shared it. A surge of immigration agents were then sent to Minnesota, resulting in mass arrests, detainments, and the deaths of two protesters, Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
Early in their YouTube video, Shirley and Coristine directly tie fraud to immigrant communities and foreigners. “A lot of the money is being stolen and siphoned out of the country,” Coristine says, without providing evidence. “Once that money is in a suitcase to Somalia, that’s never coming back,” Shirley replies.
Later in the video, Shirley and Coristine cite specific examples of “waste and fraud” identified by DOGE, including funding for a “Sesame Street style children’s TV program in Iraq” and “tax policy consulting in Liberia.” Both programs were supported by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which DOGE effectively shut down in the early months of 2025. Coristine also alleged that the SBA “did a terrible job,” particularly with loans during the height of COVID, and that there were “no checks at all on who’s receiving money, not even the most basic checks of like, if [a Social Security number] is real.”
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