BB&N students surprised to discover classmate worked for Doge before appointment at USAid

Jeremy Lewin, a 2015 graduate of the Buckingham Browne & Nichols private school in Cambridge, worked for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency before being appointed to lead and dismantle USAid, America’s global humanitarian aid agency.

Lewin, 28, who also graduated from Harvard Law School, is the second person with local connections to Doge after Cambridge Rindge and Latin School graduate Cole Killian. 

Lewin was appointed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio last month to lead USAid as chief operating officer and subsequently wrote memos explaining how the agency would be decommissioned and its “operations will be transferred to State or otherwise wound down,” including one memo titled “USAID’s Final Mission.” Soon after, firing emails known as Rifs (for “reduction in force”) were sent to remaining employees.

Two former Lewin classmates, both granted anonymity due to the sensitive nature of this article, agreed he was a memorable figure in their close-knit and elite school. Lewin stood out as politically conservative in an overwhelmingly liberal student body. He joined the Young Republicans Club, made statements approving of white superiority and “had a hyperfixation with guns,” according to one of the classmates.

But he was also highly intelligent and driven.

He was one of two National Merit scholars, seen wearing a navy V-neck sweater over a white collared shirt and grinning broadly alongside the school’s assistant director and another student in the 2015 edition of the school’s Summer Bulletin.

After high school he attended Dartmouth, where he graduated with high honors and a degree in government. He is listed as one of two 2019 winners of the Fowler Family Prize, awarded to Dartmouth government majors.

At Harvard Law, he assisted and co-wrote articles with the liberal constitutional law scholar and professor (now emeritus) Laurence Tribe. In a 2022 New York Times guest opinion essay, the two argued that the United States should seize the assets of Russian leader Vladimir Putin and use them against him.

Lewin later joined the conservative and libertarian Federalist Society.

From Harvard, Lewin went on to clerk on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals before joining the firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson in 2024 – where Usha Vance was employed as a trial lawyer until leaving to join husband JD Vance on the presidential campaign trail.

Joining the administration

Until recently, Lewin was listed as an employee and details of his biography were available on the firm’s site. “Then suddenly, the page was removed and all his social media went dark,” noted one of his BB&N classmates, who was shocked to learn that Lewin, “an attorney with just a few years of experience” was tapped to lead USAid.

The Federalist Society-written Project 2025 plan to cut government “waste and abuse,” now being implemented by Doge, claimed that USAid had become an “institution marred by bureaucratic inertia: programmatic incoherence; wasteful spending; and dependence on huge awards to a self-serving and politicized aid industrial complex.”

Defenders instead argued that the United States and the world get good value from a USAid’s budget of $58.4 billion – amounting to less than 1 percent of the overall federal budget, according to the Pew Research Center. USAid’s global humanitarian work included treating and preventing the spread of deadly diseases, promoting democratic reforms and providing humanitarian aid for victims of famine, disaster and war, all aimed at promoting U.S. security, health and safety.

Dismantling USAid

By late last week, termination letters had been issued to almost all of the 10,000 people employed by USAid. Lewin began finalizing the dissolution of the agency while integrating select humanitarian and global health programs into the State Department.

The chaotic and punitive manner with which Doge dismantled USAid has left tens of millions of people without medical care, medicines, vaccines and food and weakened pandemic preparedness globally. The sudden dismissals left U.S. and international staff with little or no time to get their affairs in order, according to reporting on the changes, and the government stills owes companies and contractors millions of dollars.

Last week The Guardian published a Laurence Tribe essay titled “Donald Trump is seeking to erase the United States as we know it.” Although Tribe doesn’t name Lewin, he says Doge staffers “raided congressional-created independent federal agencies and foundations” and “slashed entire programs without thought.”

The young Lewin

At BB&N, Lewin was known by his classmates as someone who threw big, crazy parties at the large Newton home of his parents, a Grammy-winning pianist and a wealth manager.

He was also “pretty self-advancing,” said the anonymous sources, who described how they and others suspected Lewin of making up stories, such as saying he knew basketball star Michael Jordan or had the expertise to build advanced military weaponry. “It was always about his own proximity to power or his own intelligence,” the sources said.

He would say that he thought white people were inherently better than other people, one student recalled.

Lewin had a history of angry outbursts, victims of which were referred to in a tweet from 2013: “I’d like to welcome [redacted] to the club of having @[redacted] throwing stuff at him. #chair #bowl #angrylewin.”

But the memory that stood out for the two anonymous BB&N students who knew Lewin was a 2013 incident in which “Lewin took one of the cafeteria’s porcelain bowls and smashed it against a kid’s head.” One of the sources dated the incident to Sept. 4, 2013, based on a text message from another student which read, “Bye Jeremy Lewin.” Lewin was suspended, “but not for too long,” the sources said.

Maintaining an ideology

In general, “BB&N is academically rigorous and tries to produce critical thinkers in a highly liberal state,” said the classmate. The kind of kids who attend the school are generally pretty thoughtful, he said, and “not a lot of them end up working for Doge.”

“They literally picked the worst person I know,” the other student said. “Can you imagine the worst person you went to school with running part of the government?”

Cambridge Day reached out to the school but was told that it was not its policy to comment on students or graduates’ time there.

Upon learning that Lewin was working for Doge, the source said “It made me angry – and still makes me angry. He comes from incredible privilege, is associated with elite institutions and has decided to align himself with the quasi-populist Doge thing and fundamentally to be destructive, culling jobs and cutting off aid to important humanitarian causes around the world.”

“Lots of people have [certain] ideas in high school, but they often change,” whereas Lewin seems to have maintained the same ideology and perhaps become even more extreme, one of the classmates said.

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