Meet DataRepublican, the deaf woman CEOs, bureaucrats and Hunter Biden fear Elon Musks DOGE secret weapon

SALT LAKE CITY — Jennica Pounds has become perhaps the most prominent personality — after its leader — behind an organization to which she has no direct or official ties: Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.And no one even knew her name until about two months ago — by design.“I’ve always been a recluse, a big introvert,” the 43-year-old mother of two tells The Post from her Utah home.“Being thrust into fame in such a sudden manner, in a polarizing manner, was just shocking.”Known as DataRepublican on X, Pounds — petite in oversized black sunglasses and a beige cardigan, with a mysterious, slightly intimidating air, icy like a young Joan Didion — doesn’t even work for DOGE.

But her volunteer efforts for President Trump’s government-slashing initiative have ruffled feathers anyway.“I am helping out with this because if we don’t cut spending, nobody has a future,” she says.“The work itself, about discovering waste, should not be partisan.

Cutting spending is not an ideological thing,”Pounds has been deaf since contracting spinal meningitis at age 2.She is on the autism spectrum and has expressive dysphasia, a neurological condition characterized by difficulty in producing language while comprehension remains intact.

In an interview with The Post, she uses text-to-speech software to communicate in a robotic voice.Pounds cracks a wry smile when asked if she’d prefer a government run entirely by artificial intelligence.“That’s accelerationist talk,” she types into her laptop before deleting the line.But she’s certainly no fan of Washington elites.“I am converging more and more that the conspiracy theorists were right.That this was a brilliant systems hacking on the part of a very few people.

And I feel like if a few people can pull this off, then a few people can stop them, too,” she says.By Pounds’ estimation, what she calls an “Ouroboros of Interest,” an “infinite money hack,” is “the re...