Peninsula-raised athlete now lawyer for Elon Musk’s DOGE: Who is Justin Aimonetti?

A former Bay Area football player is now throwing his weight around — in a “friendly” way — as a lawyer for the controversial Department of Government Efficiency led by Elon Musk.

Justin Aimonetti, 31, is an award-winning legal scholar affiliated with the influential conservative legal group The Federalist Society. He is now drawing scrutiny in the volatile political cauldron surrounding DOGE, an initiative created via executive order by President Donald Trump to slash federal spending and purge programs revolving around diversity, racial inequality, gender and climate change.

“If somebody told you a few months ago that Trump was going to create this entity, you might predict, ‘Yeah, he’s going to need some lawyers,’” said Stanford University law professor Robert Weisberg.

Raised in Redwood City and a multisport athlete at Saint Francis High School in Mountain View, Aimonetti is the son of a former Stanford University football player and comes from a family with deep Bay Area roots. His grandparents, Doreen and Peter “Bill” Aimonetti, met at San Jose High School, according to an obituary in the Mercury News memorializing Peter’s death in 2012.

Aimonetti did not respond to requests for an interview. He is among several Bay Area figures linked to DOGE, including young technology industry prodigies and locally educated veterans of Musk’s other ventures including SpaceX and The Boring Company.

On April 15, Aimonetti was one of two DOGE employees to participate in a video meeting at the Vera Institute for Justice in New York, according to meeting notes taken by the nonprofit. DOGE had requested the meeting to discuss “getting a DOGE team assigned to the organization,” an email to Vera showed.

“They were very friendly, they were very pleasant — so friendly even though what they are doing is so unprecedented and dangerous,” said Insha Rahman, Vera’s vice-president of advocacy and partnerships, who argued the efficiency effort threatens important work across the country. “They said, ‘We’re planning to assign DOGE teams to any agency or institute that receives congressional monies.’ That’s 100,000 nonprofits by our count. There’s so much over-reach, so much danger, so much concern about where this could go.”

Musk has said government-funded nonprofits are “probably the biggest source of fraud” and suggested they function as a “parallel government,” but has not provided evidence for those claims. He did not respond to requests for comment.

Aimonetti and his colleague Nate Cavanaugh left the Vera meeting after being told the federal government had four days earlier canceled $5 million in Vera grants, said Rahman, who believes the funding was cut because Vera’s advocacy for immigrants has drawn right-wing ire. She thinks DOGE targeted the nonprofit because it sent an open letter about Vera’s grant cuts to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, saying the money would have paid to support police and prison staff, and help cities expand access to mental health treatment and counseling.

A month before Aimonetti and Cavanaugh met with Vera, the two got out of a black SUV in Washington, D.C., and with other government officials took control, after a multihour standoff, of the U.S. Institute of Peace, an independent nonprofit created by Congress to find diplomatic solutions to global conflicts, The New York Times reported.

DOGE’s work has led to numerous lawsuits claiming it is violating the Constitution by usurping Congress’s power, is abusing Americans’ privacy, and working in illegal secrecy.

Musk said last month on his social media platform X that DOGE, which claims it has saved taxpayers $160 billion to date, is “literally improving government efficiency.” Nonprofit, nonpartisan news site NOTUS on Monday reported that since President Donald Trump took office Jan. 20, the federal government has spent $171 billion more than in the same period last year and the year before.

Aimonetti, at Saint Francis, played on the Catholic school’s football team for three years and competed in shot put, newspaper reports and sports records show.

After Saint Francis, Aimonetti spent a year at the posh Massachusetts boarding school Phillips Academy Andover outside Boston.

In college at Columbia University in New York City, Aimonetti was a lineman on the Lions football team for four years. The then-260-plus pounder was described by coach Pete Mangurian as having a “tremendous work ethic on the field and in the weight room.”

He enrolled in the University of Virginia School of Law — the nation’s eighth-best law school at the time, according to U.S. News & World Report. In 2020, Aimonetti co-wrote an essay — one of several pieces of his legal scholarship to win awards — critiquing “the systematic use of religious liberty to evade environmental regulations.”

In 2021, Aimonetti co-wrote a Virginia Law Review essay opposing “copious” restrictions on gun rights, arguing that stringent regulations were often based on racist laws restricting Black people’s right to bear arms.

After law school, Aimonetti worked as a judicial clerk for a chief federal appeals court judge — a “very prestigious clerkship,” Stanford’s Weisberg said, that “you’d have to be pretty bright to get.”

He worked from 2022 until February in Washington, D.C., at law firm Dechert, which lists “diversity and inclusion” among its five “key values.”

Since 2023, Aimonetti has been a legal commentator for The Federalist Society, an organization Weisberg described as “extremely conservative” and “very, very powerful,” with ties to each justice in the right-wing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court.

In a biography Aimonetti submitted to the University of Virginia as he started law school, he highlighted the role lawyers play in “shaping American society.” He said he planned a career in litigation. And, he said, “maybe government service down the road.”