From Discord to Diplomat: The Rise of Big Balls in Rubio’s State Department
How a Teenage Troll Dismantled USAID with a Spreadsheet and a Slack Login
America just lost one of its brightest minds—if you believe a résumé written in emojis. Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, a 19-year-old Discord moderator—think Slack, but for online trolls and teenagers—turned senior advisor at the U.S. State Department, has resigned. His legacy? A dismantled aid system, a vanished agency, and a death toll no one is counting.
Appointed for his memes, praised for his vibes, Coristine didn’t just blur the line between parody and policy—he erased it. What began as a joke became doctrine. What should have triggered outrage became protocol.
He was never supposed to be serious. That was the point.
THE STATE DEPARTMENT’S RISING STAR FALLS
Edward Coristine wasn’t a mistake. He was the model.
Plucked from digital obscurity and vaulted into a GS-15 post by Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s “efficiency” experiment, Coristine—better known as “Big Balls”—became the youngest senior official in modern diplomatic history. No credentials. No security clearance. Just a Shopify login, a failed merch drop, and a gift for turning chaos into deliverables.
He resigned on June 24, not with disgrace but with silence. His government accounts were shut off, and the last file he touched—“Which Programs Can We Kill Next?”—remained blank. The purge that began with United States Agency for International Development (USAID) had finally claimed one of its architects.
He didn’t fix broken systems. He eviscerated the ones that still worked. He did it like a teenager livestreaming his own demolition.
This wasn’t just poor vetting. It was the logical end of an ideology: government by punchline, policy by proxy, and authority outsourced to meme fluency.
WHO IS “BIG BALLS”?
He was born Edward Coristine. The rest was branding.
Three months out of high school, he was installed in a federal role that normally required decades of service, a master’s degree, and a security clearance higher than most military officers. But he had Elon Musk’s endorsement, a Discord handle, and a willingness to say yes faster than anyone could say “what?”
His résumé read like a dare: co-founder of Tesla.Sexy LLC, NFT bot builder, amateur meme-lord. On Slack, he signed his emails “Ballsy.” He wrote internal memos proposing USAID be rolled into a Shopify plugin.
“Foreign aid is the real colonialism. Cut the cord.”
— Edward Coristine, Discord
That quote later reappeared in a DOGE policy memo suggesting the closure of humanitarian programs in sub-Saharan Africa.
His brief bio once appeared on the DOGE website, listing him as a “thought leader in public-sector disruption.” His LinkedIn read: “streamlining government clutter through intelligent digital tools.” Asked by WIRED what that meant, he shrugged:
“People on LinkedIn take themselves like super seriously. I didn’t think anyone would notice.”
Washington noticed. Especially after Musk reportedly called him “my little bureaucratic sniper.”
The nickname “Big Balls” began as a joke. Then it showed up on diplomatic itineraries. No one objected. Not because they missed it—but because they’d stopped caring.
He wasn’t tolerated despite his unseriousness. He was hired for it.
DOGE & THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE
DOGE—officially the Department of Government Efficiency—was Musk’s bureaucratic coup: a shadow agency birthed by Executive Order 14169 to “eliminate redundancy.” In practice, it deleted anything tied to expertise, grants, or global coordination. It was chaos with a mission statement.
Big Balls began inside a group chat called “Digital Deployment of Aid Metrics.” Within weeks, he was promoted to GS-15—skipping over careers and vetting—and handed veto power over U.S. aid disbursements. He used Gmail. But he had control.
“Kill the zombie agency.”
“Africa Bureau = sunk-cost scam.”
He proposed replacing refugee coordinators with Fiverr freelancers. One leaked Gmail thread—doge 180b killmap v3.xlsx—ranked aid programs by “cost per American voter impressed.”
Inside the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, his Slack threads pitched “humanitarian gig hubs.” His inspiration? MrBeast videos. His framework? Stellaris mods.
He didn’t operate on the fringe. He authored the framework. And within that system, emojis replaced reviews, Twitter polls supplanted policy assessments, and entire departments were judged by how few flame reactions they earned.
He wasn’t a symptom. He was the point.
USAID: SIXTY YEARS ERASED BY A TEENAGER WITH A SPREADSHEET
USAID was once America’s moral lever—an institution that stabilized fragile states, built peace, and delivered global health infrastructure. Since its founding in 1961, it helped cut global child mortality in half, supported democratic transitions in over 80 countries, and brought lifesaving HIV treatment to more than 25 million people.
In 2025, it was erased—by a 19-year-old with no policy experience and a spreadsheet labeled “$hit to Kill.” The kill order wasn’t developed by a National Security Council, a Hill committee, or even a formal task force. It came from a Slack thread.
Senator Marco Rubio signed the directive. Big Balls coded the automation engine. And the force behind it all? Elon Musk’s inner orbit: a loose cadre of techno-libertarians, “effective accelerationists,” and platform-extremists who see governance as obsolete and social programs as waste.
The final sunset deadline? July 1, 2025.
USAID’s global missions were told to shut down by September 30—but most never made it that far. There were no hearings. No transition plans. Just digital ghosting and bulk contract terminations. At headquarters, the shutdown wasn’t announced. It was posted.
“AID sunset complete. Delete channel?”
“Delete everything.”
By mid-summer, USAID’s Africa Bureau had been gutted. Its Latin America portfolio was handed to a shell company in Florida with no track record, no compliance history, and branding that described itself as “Web3 for Good.” Field staff were locked out of systems overnight. Programs weren’t reviewed. They were deleted.
Maternal health initiatives. HIV outreach. Food security programs. All gone—in one silent batch operation.
Contractors received bounced notices. Payrolls failed in Kenya, Guatemala, and Nepal. Clinics shuttered. Cold chains collapsed. In some regions, civil servants learned of the cuts from WhatsApp rumors. The agency died. Its lifelines were cut. The system didn’t blink.
The vacuum was the design—not a defect.
And behind it stood a man who built his fortune on taxpayer subsidies and now treats governance as a game: Elon Musk—enriched by NASA contracts, propped up by EV subsidies, and now surrounded by tech-bros doing his demolition work. They didn’t just dismantle USAID. They vaporized it—because they could.
BIG BALL’S EXIT — THE END OF NOTHING
Big Balls left government exactly as he entered it: unsupervised and untouched by consequence.
On June 24, his Slack account vanished. No press release. No farewell memo. Just a one-line confirmation buried in a White House dispatch. His name disappeared from directories. His badge was deactivated. By the time reporters noticed, he was already a ghost in the system.
Just a blank cell in the Google Sheet where foreign assistance strategy used to live.
His nickname—juvenile, undignified, and real—made it into memos, calendars, diplomatic cables. No one stopped it. No one stopped him.
He didn’t sneak in. He was ushered—invited not despite his ignorance, but because of it.
He wasn’t fired. That would imply someone hired him properly. He played a critical role in gutting the most powerful development agency in the world—and ghosted the job like a summer internship.
There was no one left to fill the vacuum. The State Department now awaits its own RIFs—because the vacuum was the plan.
He wasn’t a glitch. He was the deletion command: authorized, executed, never reviewed.
The last file he touched—Africa.Health.Logistics.Final—was left open. Unsaved.
This wasn’t a scandal. It was a software update. Invisible. Irreversible.
“He got DOGE’d,” said Rep. Jared Moskowitz. That’s what they called it now—being erased by the very chaos you helped unleash.
This wasn’t exile. It wasn’t even extraction. It was checkout. He left government like a dorm room key on a front desk—forgotten, uninspected, already late for class.
And the most absurd detail? He didn’t even break a rule. The rules were deleted for him. Under DOGE, Senate confirmation was optional. Vetting was obsolete. Experience was a liability.
One federal judge warned that Musk’s hires may have exercised executive power unlawfully. Too late. By the time Coristine disappeared, the agency he helped dismantle—along with thousands of careers and hundreds of thousands of lives—was already gone.
“Feels good to breathe again.”
A punchline delivered as a eulogy—frivolous, final, and fatal.
And yet, the most damning thing wasn’t that he rose. It’s that no one in power thought a teenage government official named Big Balls was a problem.
Spoken in meetings. Whispered through diplomatic channels. Nobody said, “We can’t send Big Balls to brief a foreign minister.”
He wasn’t unserious in spite of the job. He was hired because of it. A child with root access, applauded for unraveling what adults had spent decades building.
When he left, there was no mourning. No tribute. No spin. Just the realization that the joke had gone too far—and had still been let into the room.
When the façade cracked, when watchdogs and judges began asking why a 19-year-old with no degree or clearance was directing global strategy, the administration responded the only way it knew how.
It deleted the file. Because there were no adults left in the room.
A GOVERNMENT THAT CHOSE THIS
Big Balls didn’t hijack the U.S. government. He was installed, handed the keys, and told to break things.
He didn’t fake a résumé. They never asked for one. He didn’t bypass clearance. They disabled it. He didn’t outmaneuver the system. He was the system—running exactly as designed by Donald Trump, authorized by Marco Rubio, and uploaded by Elon Musk.
This wasn’t a prank. It was a blueprint.
Big Balls didn’t dismantle USAID alone. He had help—most notably Peter Marocco, the Trump-appointed Director of Foreign Assistance who oversaw brutal agency cuts before being pushed out amid tensions with Rubio in April 2025. He was backed by Jeremy Lewin, a 28-year-old DOGE operative parachuted in as USAID’s Deputy Administrator for Policy and Programs and COO—an unvetted technocrat with a history of misogyny, violent outbursts, and racist remarks. A federal judge even blocked some of his activities, recognizing his role in the dismantling.
All the clowns, grifters, and chaos merchants Rubio signed off on—and the toxic culture they unleashed—say everything you need to know about his leadership. He wasn’t just incompetent; he was complicit. The State Department’s descent wasn’t an accident; it was his signature.
Big Balls and his allies proved how little resistance there was. No hearings. No oversight. No plan. Just teenagers and political appointees with Slack access, burner domains, and a green light to rewrite foreign assistance because they were online, loyal, and reckless enough to follow orders.
What started as a meme ended in blood.
In less than six months, tens of thousands of civil servants were fired. Humanitarian programs collapsed in over 100 countries. Clinics shuttered. Refugees were stranded. Evacuations failed. Somewhere in the wreckage, Big Balls updated Killmap_v3.xlsx and disappeared from Slack—smirking.
No one corrected course. Rubio doubled down. Musk vanished. Trump blamed bureaucrats. And Big Balls—who never held clearance, never passed a background check, never finished a semester of college—walked away without consequence.
There was no reckoning. No reversal. No audit of how America’s soft power was detonated from the inside by a teenager with a Discord handle and a blank Google Sheet.
His nickname wasn’t the scandal. It was the red flag.
That no one—not one adult in a room full of suits—said, “Maybe we shouldn’t let someone named Big Balls into the Situation Room” is more than absurd. It’s collapse with a conference badge.
He wasn’t an exception. He was the answer to the administration’s real question: What if we chose vibes over policy? Loyalty over skill? Chaos over consequence?
They did.
The damage was real. Measurable. Lethal. It will outlast every official who looked the other way while it happened.
Big Balls leaves behind no programs. No legacy. Just a wrecked agency, a hollowed cabinet, and a State Department that thought satire was strategy.
In the end, he wasn’t a disruptor.
He was the product of a government built by a transnational oligarch and run by a secretary of state more interested in opportunism than conviction—one that knew exactly what it was doing. Donald Trump didn’t disrupt the system. He invited its collapse, dressed it in bravado, and called it genius.
And when it handed him the knife, he didn’t hesitate.
He cut.
They clapped.
And the world bled.
Big balls needs to be in prison along with the rest of them!
Brilliant. And, heart-breakingly sad. If anything defines the phrase “cautionary tale”, it’s this. Chaos and destruction was/both the means, and the end.