From the Ivy League to working for Elon Musk’s DOGE, meet the 28-year-old Mass. native turning the lights out at USAID

And then, just days after Trump was inaugurated this year, Lewin took on the most consequential identity yet: He joined the Department of Government Efficiency, the Elon Musk-led and Trump-blessed project to remake — and shrink — the federal government. In March, Lewin was elevated to deputy administrator of the US Agency for International Development — a neophyte appointed to effectively turn out the lights at an agency that distributed billions of dollars of aid around the world.

Lewin did not travel a straight line from the liberal suburbs of Boston to the tumultuous heart of Trump and Musk’s Washington, but rather ping-ponged from job to job and political belief to political belief in pursuit of greater power and authority.

This story is based on public documents, school records, and a Globe review of comments Lewin has made publicly and privately over the last decade-plus, as well as interviews with more than a dozen people who know him or his family. They include former classmates who spent hours with Lewin on schoolwork and social activities and described him as more of an acquaintance than a close friend; most of those former classmates asked to speak on the condition of anonymity for fear of political retribution from the Trump administration, which has targeted the law firms where many now work.

It’s unclear exactly how Lewin ended up at DOGE. But it was in many ways a natural role for a sharp, restless attorney with elite credentials, an obvious interest in politics, and an ambition that many who know him said loomed larger than any ideological belief. DOGE, several of Lewin’s former classmates said, was simply the next landing spot for someone who never seemed content with the already elite perch he was currently sitting on.

Lewin is “blinded by ambition,” said Tribe, a friend of Lewin’s mother who has known him since birth.

“If I had to bet my life on it, I would say money and celebrity are what are appealing to him, and he’s told himself that he’s doing something that is right and moral,” Tribe said.

Lewin did not respond to interview requests, and, unlike many of his peers, has little social media or other online presence from which to draw out his current views.

For most of his adult life, Lewin has been registered to vote as a Republican, and he sought out conservative spaces as he navigated generally progressive Ivy League campuses. At Harvard Law School, six classmates described him as an inscrutable character with a confusing smattering of political views. One former classmate, Aaron Regunberg, said, “He made me very uncomfortable.”

In 2020, Lewin changed his voter registration from Republican to Democrat and voted in the Democratic primary for Massachusetts state elections. After graduating, he worked at several law firms boasting liberal reputations — including one recently targeted by Trump in an executive order — and even took on pro bono work on behalf of LGBTQ+ advocacy groups fighting an antitransgender Tennessee law.

Lewin’s parents both declined to be interviewed. In a short response, his father, Michael, said he doubted the accounts of his classmates would offer “any real idea about who Jeremy is, or the truths of his story.” Asked about her son’s new role, Lewin’s mother, Dora, responded in a brief email that “he didn’t seek this out” and that Lewin “loves his country and does not want to see it go bankrupt.”

“Boston is a liberal place and many people are upset with his choice to join DOGE and the administration,” she added. “Does anyone ever think maybe this person is a student of history, has had many varied interests and wants to find purpose in helping his country be financially solvent for the future!”

But Tribe, who said he knew his former student as “consistently anti-Trump” while also in favor of Republican policies, called the decision to work for DOGE a complete about-face. Lewin helped Tribe with research as the professor advised members of Congress on their efforts to impeach Trump and other attempts to go after the president in court, such as in the classified documents case.

Tribe said that he has spoken to Lewin since the latter assumed his current post and that the younger man knows Tribe is disappointed he is working for Trump and Musk. Tribe said Lewin countered that he is hoping to make “a positive difference” and made the distinction that he is working for DOGE, not the Trump White House. Tribe said Lewin also told him he had met “Elon” several times and was impressed by the billionaire.

Tribe said he is still hoping to use his influence to persuade Lewin to resign.

Lewin’s path to his current role was peripatetic. In the less than three years since graduating from law school, Lewin has had six jobs in law, banking, and now government, spending just a few months at most of them. He did not hold any one job for more than a year.

By January, he was among a cadre of twentysomethings with elite resumes who were executing Musk’s hostile takeover of the federal bureaucracy. Barely two months into the new administration, Lewin attained power typically reserved for civil servants or leaders with decades of experience.

“It’s pretty unusual for someone to be at this level and to be that young,” said David E. Lewis, a professor at Vanderbilt University who studies the federal bureaucracy.

In a court filing for a lawsuit over USAID, Lewin sought to distance himself from Musk and DOGE, stating he reports “directly and only” to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who technically leads the agency. Lewin’s duties “include overseeing the responsible administration of USAID’s day to day activities,” he wrote in the filing.

As the Trump administration seeks to essentially end USAID’s operations, Lewin’s inexperience may be the point, said Lewis; it is emblematic of a tech disrupter like Musk changing staid old ways by tearing them down.

While Tribe said he was shocked at Lewin’s conversion, others who have known him over the years were not. Classmates described Lewin as moody and somewhat enigmatic, and said he was always focused on climbing the ladder, to the point of embracing a high-profile position that many of his Ivy League peers consider morally repugnant.

“If you told me Jeremy Lewin was going to be a deputy administrator at USAID in 2025, my jaw would drop,” said one Harvard Law classmate, who asked to remain anonymous given the Trump administration’s recent attacks on law firms. “If you told me that Elon Musk had started an agency called DOGE and Jeremy Lewin joined it, I wouldn’t be surprised at all.”

Lewin was born to high-powered parents in the Boston suburbs. His father, Michael Lewin, is an accomplished concert pianist who teaches at Boston Conservatory at Berklee, and his mother, Dora Present Lewin, is a prominent banker now at BNY Mellon in Miami. As Lewin was growing up, his parents were registered to vote as Democrats, and his mother occasionally donated to Democratic politicians. They have since divorced.

Three people who knew Lewin in high school, at the elite Cambridge private school Buckingham Browne & Nichols, said he was known for arguing with fellow students and teachers. They also remembered him telling implausible stories, such as that he worked for the government designing weapons or warships — he showed them blueprints of gun designs on his computer at school, one classmate recalled — or that he had met basketball legend Michael Jordan. When challenged on the details, classmates said, he would double down on those claims.

Lewin thrived academically at BB&N, earning a prestigious National Merit Scholarship and honorable mention at a Model United Nations conference. He was also on the debate team — “an outlet for my natural argumentative side,” Lewin told the student newspaper in February 2013.

When he was 18, Lewin allegedly brandished a knife at another teenager during a party at his home in July 2015, according to a report from Newton police, who were called to the scene.

The teenage girl involved in the altercation, whose name is redacted, told police she felt threatened and feared for her life, according to the police account, which was first reported by Rolling Stone. She told police Lewin waved the knife and said, “Tell me why I shouldn’t gut you and cut you right now.”

Lewin told police at the time that the girl threatened to hit him and threw a notepad at his head. He told police he took out the knife, slammed it on the kitchen countertop, and asked her to leave.

The police officer sought a hearing on an assault by means of a dangerous weapon charge. Police said no criminal complaint was issued in the case.

Many of Lewin’s high school classmates learned he was working for DOGE through an article in The New York Times, which quickly circulated through alumni group texts.

“We were shocked to see somebody that we knew” on the list, one classmate said, but “not one of us has expressed surprise that it’s him.”

Lewin continued his track record of academic success at Dartmouth, where he majored in government and won a departmental prize for academic excellence, graduating magna cum laude in 2019.

Lewin also dabbled in conservative politics. He contributed to several issues of the Dartmouth Review, a tight-knit student-run conservative newspaper that counts right-wing media figures such as Dinesh D’Souza and Laura Ingraham among its alumni. Lewin was quoted as a member of the College Republicans in articles by The Dartmouth, the largest student newspaper on campus, about the 2016 primary in New Hampshire. He commended the performance of Jeb Bush in a report on a campaign stop the former Florida governor made near Hanover. Later, after Trump won the primary, Lewin told the paper it was “obvious” Trump would win but was glad Bush and former Ohio governor John Kasich had done well.

A Dartmouth classmate of Lewin’s recalled a conversation with him shortly after Trump won the presidency. “A lot of people at school were pretty devastated by the result,” the classmate said. “He was visibly energized by it.”

When he headed straight to Harvard Law after Dartmouth, Lewin seemed to be searching for a political identity, according to several members of his section, a group of about 80 students who took all their courses together in their first year.

That first year, he seemed conservative; the next, more liberal, several classmates said. Lewin joined both the conservative Federalist Society and its liberal counterweight, the American Constitution Society, Tribe recalled. During his first year, he ran for the board of the school chapter of the Federalist Society and lost, two classmates said. He was less involved with the organization after that. Lewin was also an editor for the conservative Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. One classmate recalled Lewin arguing that associate attorneys at big law firms should unionize, while other classmates remember him voicing defenses for large corporations in class discussions.

He also said he supported Democrats. When Joe Biden was elected president in 2020, Lewin sent a celebratory message to the section group text.

“So proud to be a part of team Joe since last fall,” Lewin wrote, according to a screenshot shared with the Globe. “We knew Joe would be the guy to do this and evict Donald Trump from 1600 Penn.” (Lewin was registered to vote in Boston in 2020, but did not vote in the presidential primary that year, according to city records.)

Months later, in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Lewin signed a petition asking Harvard to remove Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, a Republican, from Harvard’s Institute of Politics due to her role in undermining trust in the 2020 election results.

And to classmates he also questioned whether Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, the Harvard Law alumnus who had objected to certifying election results after the riot, deserved similar condemnation.

“In light of what transpired and his obvious culpability, is anyone aware of any petitions to strip him of his degree, force HLS to condemn him by name, ban him from campus, etc.?” Lewin asked a group of law school classmates on Jan. 7, according to a screenshot of the message a former classmate shared with the Globe.

Even among this high-powered cohort, Lewin’s ambition stood out, several classmates said. He told several he had secured the enviable role of working with Tribe because of his family connections, and was published alongside the well-known legal scholar in publications including the Guardian and The New York Times. Lewin had a column published in The Wall Street Journal in April 2021 in which he made “the progressive case for libel reform.”

Many of the views Lewin expressed, either in public writing or in conversations with Harvard Law classmates, run directly counter to the positions of the Trump administration. When war broke out in Ukraine, two classmates recalled, he even spoke about wanting to travel there to volunteer for the Ukrainian army. In April 2022, Lewin cowrote a Times op-ed with Tribe urging Biden to liquidate some $100 billion in Russian currency reserves held in the United States and turn it over to Ukraine. Now, Lewin is working for a president who hectored Ukraine’s president in the Oval Office and is striking a conciliatory tone with Vladimir Putin.

“That speaks to his just utter moral bankruptcy, that he could apparently believe that much in that issue . . . and is now supporting the administration that is actively undermining everything on that front that he said he believed in,” said Regunberg, who was a member of Lewin’s section at Harvard Law and later ran for Congress as a Democrat.

After graduating from law school, Lewin bounced among elite law jobs.

After brief stints at two firms and a prestigious clerkship with Judge Judith Rogers, a Bill Clinton-appointed judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, Lewin moved to Los Angeles in 2024 to work at Munger, Tolles & Olson. He quickly took on substantive, high-profile work — which happened to be sharply at odds with the vision of his soon-to-be bosses in Washington. He helped author an amicus brief on behalf of LGBT+ advocacy organizations supporting a Supreme Court lawsuit against a Tennessee law banning gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Lewin left the law firm after a few months. He started in November 2024 at the investment bank Houlihan Lokey, where he worked for just seven weeks.

Within four months of his name appearing on the pro-trans-rights brief, Lewin had started working for the Trump administration and for the virulently transphobic Musk, who has declared his own transgender child is “dead.”

For some who know Lewin, though, the whiplash was hardly a surprise.

“I think the draw is power,” said one law school classmate, “not principle.”

Amanda Gokee of the Globe staff contributed to this report.

Emma Platoff can be reached at emma.platoff@globe.com. Follow her @emmaplatoff. Sam Brodey can be reached at sam.brodey@globe.com. Follow him @sambrodey.