Members of Elon Musk’s task force, which aims to reduce the size of the United States government, are building a system for the United States to sell special immigration visas, which President Donald Trump called the Gold Cards for $ 5 million each.
Engineers associated with the musk team have worked with state department employees, internal security department and US citizenship and immigration services to create a website and request for visas, according to three people familiar with conversations and documents seen by The New York Times.
The project represents a mission change for the musk team, the government efficiency department, of its initial task of cutting government costs to a new goal of generating revenue.
At the end of February, Trump announced his idea for a Gold Card to give “very high level people” a “Citizenship Route”.
President and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick provided few details at the time about who would qualify for the program, but noted that he would replace the EB-5 visa, which grants permanent residence to foreigners willing to invest in US companies. This program provided Green Cards to individuals who invested $ 800,000 or $ 1.05 million, creating at least 10 jobs for US workers. He raised about $ 4 billion for the federal government last year.
The Gold Card project is being led on the doge side by Marko Elez and Edward Corristine, who have been working on it since at least last month. Elez and Coristine have met with employees from various agencies that supervise aspects of the visa and the immigrant checking process to understand which existing processes can be incorporated into their new system.
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The State Department forwarded requests for commentary to the White House. The White House and the internal security department did not respond to requests for comment.
Lutnick said in a podcast last month that he had sold 1,000 from the visas “yesterday.” But a person close to the project said it had not yet entered money.
“So if you have a Gold Card – which used to be a Green Card – you are a permanent resident of America,” said the secretary of commerce, suggesting that most carriers would not become American citizens. He added: “They pay $ 5 million and have the right to be Americans and the right to be in America, as long as they are good people, are verified and cannot break the law.”
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Musk is building the software “Agora” and the program will be presented in two weeks, Lutnick added.
Earlier this month, Trump showed a laminate card, with his face, the statue of freedom and a bald eagle, reporters aboard the Air Force One and said it would be available in “less than two weeks.”
On Thursday, Lutnick updated the schedule, saying that Gold Card would be ready “within a week and a half.”
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Engineers are still evaluating how to create a gold card system that gets around the normal visa request process, which varies but it can take years. They focused on how to expedite the typical immigrant checking process, which involves interviewed interviews and verifications, and obtain approval of residence for high equity candidates within two weeks after the request.
Elez faced a wave of controversy earlier this year, after the The Wall Street Journal Link it to a pseudonym account on the social platform X, with racist posts and called by an eugenic-based immigration policy. Elez resigned in February after the report, taking Trump and Vice President JD Vance to ask for his reintegration. Since then, Elez has worked for five government agencies, including the Labor Department and the Department of Health and Human Services, according to judicial documents, as well as the Social Security administration.
Before joining the team of Musk, Coristine, a 19 -year -old who publicly presents herself as “Big Balls”, was fired in June 2022 from a Path internship, an Arizona -based data security company after “an internal investigation into the leak of ownership of the company that coincided with its time of service,” the company said in a statement.
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Joe Gebbia, an Airbnb co -founded billionaire, was also involved in the project, according to people close to the conversations. He joined Musk’s team in February, initially to help digitize the retirement process of federal workers.
Elez, Coristine and Gebbia did not respond to requests for comment.
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