Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, a Maine native and graduate of the University of Southern Maine, was one of four panelists testifying last week before the newly constituted House Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Hedtler-Gaudette, who is blind, is an expert on government accountability. Image taken from C-SPAN broadcast

Maine native Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette said Tuesday that he isn’t surprised Elon Musk and others attacked him online following his blunt testimony before a congressional subcommittee last week about how to reduce waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government.

He also isn’t surprised that Musk and other critics tried to demean him because he is blind.

“It underlines the rot at the core of our society, where we can’t talk, debate and have disagreements in a respectful way,” Hedtler-Gaudette said in an interview with the Press Herald. “I wasn’t surprised by it, but it doesn’t make it any less disappointing.”

Hedtler-Gaudette, 38, grew up in Portland and Windham; he graduated from the University of Southern Maine with a political science and economics degree before getting a master’s degree from Northeastern University in Boston. From there, he made his way to the Washington, D.C., region, to where he is now government affairs director for the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight.

He lives in suburban Baltimore with his wife, Addie McIntire, and their 2-year-old son, Desmond.

During the Feb. 12 hearing, Hedtler-Gaudette criticized the “flamethrower” approach that the Trump administration — through Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — is taking to government agencies. He criticized the administration’s firing of numerous inspectors general, whose job is to root out waste, fraud and abuse in federal agencies.

“It seems to me that if an administration were serious about wanting to root out waste, fraud and abuse, they would support and resource inspectors general and whistleblowers,” he said. “They would not demonize them, and they would certainly not fire them en masse in an unlawful midnight purge.”

That critique of how Trump and Musk are slashing government agencies caught Musk’s attention. On X, Musk shared a post with his 200 million followers that said: “blind director of watchdog group funded by George Soros testifies that he does not see widespread evidence of government waste,” followed by two laughing emojis.

After being amplified by Musk, that post garnered millions of views and sparked similar trolling by people who also went after Hedtler-Gaudette’s disability.

“It didn’t have anything to do with the merits of my testimony. It was all focused on my blindness,” he said. “It was really juvenile, petty, ableist and anti-blindness bigotry.”

Hedtler-Gaudette said Musk is “not a responsible, mature person, clearly. We should not be entrusting this amount of power and impact to a person of his kind.”

On Tuesday, Hedtler-Gaudette said that despite being ridiculed online, he’s not intimidated and will continue to speak out against government waste — regardless of whether it’s at the hands of Republicans or Democrats.

“I made the decision I would not be silenced or intimidated by this,” he said. He said the online attacks have so far stayed online and have not escalated into personal threats.

Hedtler-Gaudette said DOGE could do its job in a smart way, by conducting in-depth analysis of government programs to root out government waste. Instead, it’s cutting with a wide swath, he said, and in many cases doing it illegally by eliminating funding that has already been approved by Congress.

The legal way to make cutbacks is to go through Congress, he said, and pass laws that reduce funding or eliminate entire government programs.

The Trump administration is facing numerous lawsuits over the cutbacks, including by USAID, a global humanitarian relief agency established by law in the 1960s that the Trump administration is attempting to terminate.

The administration has also gone after funding for the Department of Education, the Food and Drug Administration, Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and others.

“The compounding effects of doing it this way are creating chaos and destabilizing government,” Hedtler-Gaudette said. “If you slash and burn everything, out of the rubble, you do not get an efficient operation. You get more chaos and more inefficiency, and you create a downward spiral.”