A former member of Brown’s class of 2027, Alex Shieh became the center of intense debate on campus after launching Bloat@Brown, a DOGE-inspired website that rated Brown staff to identify administrative bloat. Alex began the project amid an effort to revive the Spectator, Brown’s conservative publication that has sporadically reappeared since its first publication in 1984. The ordeal—which attracted national attention—ultimately resulted in University-led proceedings that cleared Alex and his colleagues of any wrongdoing. In June 2025, Alex testified before Congress on issues such as antitrust violations and bloat within the Ivy League. After dropping out earlier this year, he had a brief stint at Palantir Technologies before leaving to launch a startup focused on eliminating government-related fraud, The Antifraud Company, which has raised upwards of $5 million to date.
Arjun Ray: So what are you up to right now?
Alex Shieh: I’m fighting fraud. We’re operating a business called The Antifraud Company, and we’re unusual because our model doesn’t revolve around customers. We don’t have customers. Instead, we monetize via government whistleblower reward programs, which are written into statute, which say that if you find a form of fraud against the United States government committed by a company, individual, or anybody who’s committing fraud against the government, you can file a lawsuit against them privately. It’s called a Qui Tam lawsuit under the False Claims Act. When you bring this private action against them, you’re serving as the alter ego of the United States government, and so it’s a unique piece of law. But essentially, it just means that you’re suing them on behalf of the United States, even though you’re a private entity. For doing that work, you’re entitled to 15 to 30 percent of the proceeds if you win or settle.
AR: Fascinating. We will come back to The Antifraud Company, but I first want to jump back to your roots right now with Bloat@Brown. I think everyone’s encountered the basics: One day, out of the blue, you see this website mysteriously appear that analyzes and ranks thousands of Brown staff on the basis of “efficiency.” A few months later, you’re no longer a student at Brown. What isn’t as clear to most people is the in-between: What happened between you, The Spectator, and the University? It’s like something straight out of The Social Network, as you’ve referenced in parody videos. In your own words, what was the chain of events that preceded and then followed Bloat@Brown?
AS: Let me start farther back than that for context, and I can speak to my motivation as well. Growing up, I went to Andover for high school…we both know what I’m talking about when I say that I’m always surrounded by rich people, wondering if they are qualified. But the point of places like Andover, Groton, Brown, or the Ivy League—prestigious institutions in general—is several-fold.
When asked what the best college is, people will say something like Harvard or Princeton. But an infinitesimally small percentage of people go to Harvard. Why is that? If everybody went to Harvard, it wouldn’t be prestigious anymore. It’s like Gucci or Louis Vuitton, where there’s artificial scarcity that drives up prices because people want it, because it makes them seem like “Oh, I’m so fancy.”
The part, though, that makes it nefarious is that if you have Gucci or Louis Vuitton, that doesn’t really say anything about your intellect or character. It just means that you have a lot of money. To a lot of people, if you go around flaunting it, it’s actually a negative symbol because it seems out of touch and a bit gaudy, right? The issue with the Ivy League is that it’s a positive signal. If you’re able to pay 90K per year to go to Brown or Harvard, it means you’re going to get a better job.
The Brown professor who runs Opportunity Insights—John Friedman—showed that attending the Ivy League, for whatever reason, means you get a better job.
You don’t want people who are stupid going to Brown, who can’t do the work. Fine. That sounds reasonable. But if you were to, say, hold the requirement of admission to accept people who are equally qualified as people who got admitted in the 1990s, then you would have three times as many students. So, obviously, it’s an artificial scarcity.
I think the other aspect of it is that they’ll say, “We’re not like Louis Vuitton because we offer financial aid.” That’s their big selling point. This is very sneaky because it’s a way for them to sort of act as if they care about everybody, and that the 90K price tag is like only some people pay…I think it’s just a way to cover their [expletive]. If you look at the makeup of the student body, you’ll see that it disproportionately skews wealthy. If you look at some of these studies, you’ll find that among those who go to these schools, even when you’re normalizing by the academic qualifications, people are disproportionately wealthy and disproportionately poor. But if you’re middle-class, you’ll have a harder chance of getting in. To me, this indicates multiple things.
First, that they don’t actually care about poor people, but they’re taking the poorest of the Americans, using them sort of as tokens. That’s why the middle class is the most underrepresented: They’re not rich enough to pay a lot of money, and they’re not poor enough to be the token poor person, and so the middle class really gets screwed. They have the worst chance of getting into Brown or Harvard or whatever, just looking at the statistics.
Second: This is very corrosive to our American culture because the American culture has been characterized by egalitarianism and meritocracy. It’s never really lived up to that, but, ideally, it should. People from wherever should have a chance to be successful, and we’re seeing that people are not. That’s causing political polarization. I think that a large part of this is that we have these Ivy League institutions that are about producing an elite class. People are like, “How come Trump beat Kamala?” It’s because there’s a lot of resentment towards this elite class of people who seem to control everything and are elite because they went to these places that are intended to stratify them from society, not to produce knowledge.
If the goal was to spread as much knowledge as possible, they would take as many people as they could.
But if the goal is to stratify them, then they’ll limit the number of people that they’re going to take because that is effective at stratifying people socially, which is the actual aim.
So, now my story. I’m lucky. My parents are physicians. They were able to pay for me to go to Andover and Brown. I’m a legacy at Brown. I don’t think that’s fair. I also think affirmative action is unfair. At Andover, I started the Andover Poll. That was my actual first experience with sending mass questionnaires to large amounts of people. It was sent to even larger numbers of people than Bloat@Brown. We were emailing tens of thousands—maybe even more—of voters in swing states to understand their opinions about the 2022 Midterm Elections. By doing this data-powered analysis, I’ve always viewed myself as somebody who’s like Nate Silver. Someone who is trying to tell the story through data and data journalism.
This [The Andover Poll] took off; it got a lot of traction. Before I knew it, I was a contributing opinion writer for the Boston Globe, doing more of this data-driven journalism style stuff. I also did political advocacy about meritocracy, an issue relevant at the time I graduated in 2023. A few months later, Students for Fair Admissions vs. Harvard comes out, and I did interviews and op-eds about why I think this is the correct decision—why it’s a step closer to, again, fixing this American culture to make it more egalitarian and more meritocratic.
Those are the two main threads there: I want to make America more meritocratic, and I do it through data-driven journalism.
During the summer between my freshman and sophomore years at Brown, the good folks at the Fund for American Studies reached out to me. They run these conservative-leaning student newspapers at, at that time, seven of the eight Ivy League schools. The only school that they didn’t run was Brown.
Brown has historically had the Brown Spectator. But since 2014, it hasn’t existed, and they wanted me, because they’d seen my work with the Boston Globe (and they reached out to others), to bring it back to life. We were having difficulty recruiting people, but eventually had a good team of people who wanted to do the Brown Spectator. We had this writer’s meeting where we’re pitching around ideas. I was interested in this issue of administrative bloat because Brown is deep in financial [expletive]. They’re running like a $46 million budget deficit fund, and they’re raising tuition by 5 percent, so it’s a crazy amount. I believe at that time it was the second highest in the country, behind only the University of Spoiled Children, USC. [Brown’s] response is “we’re going to address this by reducing administrative hiring such that the administration of about 4,000 people only grows by 1 percent.”
This to me just seems absurd. It should be growing by negative percentages because obviously, that’s way too many people—at least cap it. In the 80s, 90s, college was more affordable than now. Part of it is because of the administrators. The number of administrators has grown precipitously since then, even as student and faculty growth has been far less. It’s pretty clear that it’s causal, or at least there’s a high degree of correlation that increasing the number of administrators is driving up prices. To be very clear, there’s faculty, and there’s staff. We’re not talking about faculty, the people who teach classes and do research. We’re talking about staff. We’re talking about provosts of DEI and deans and all these people, and it’s unclear what they do. There are a lot of them, and there didn’t used to be as many. That begs a really important question: What do they do?
We sent out a survey to understand what these people do and why tuition is so expensive. I think it was the week before spring break. Instead of studying for midterms, I was doing this because I think it’s an interesting question. Then everybody seemed to freak out about what I think is a legitimate question, and I think it shows that Brown is successful in their social stratification that people are freaking out, and they’re thinking that this is an uncalled-for question. And this is what people literally say on Sidechat: “If you can’t afford the Brown tuition, then you should go be with the peasants.” Again, it’s not surprising, but it is what it is.
Then somebody quits the board of the Brown Spectator because they don’t want to be associated with it, and it’s unclear what’s going to happen. But we pulled together, TFAS convinces people to stick around, and we publish more stuff. But about two days after this email gets sent out, I get called in and by the Office of Student Conduct and am told that I’m under investigation for ridiculous stuff, like violating the technology policy, causing emotional harm, whatever, whatever, yada, yada. It’s surprising because you would think that Brown at least has some level of respect for free speech when they’re talking all about “free speech and academic freedom and, oh, Trump’s trying to steal our academic freedom.” But they don’t, which, again, is also not particularly surprising because, again, [Bloat@Brown] is a critique of the administration and Office of Community Standards is part of the administration, and so maybe they don’t like that we think their jobs are bull-[expletive]. Essentially, I think it’s clearly retaliatory. And so I reach out to FIRE [Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression]. I reach out to reporters because at this point it’s about self-preservation…the best disinfectant is sunlight at this point. That’s the way to put the pressure on Brown to get them to knock it off.
FIRE agrees to help out and sends letters to Brown, and we start doing media appearances, which go viral on Twitter. It’s interesting because it resonates with regular Americans, even though it doesn’t resonate with people who go to Brown, that tuition is too expensive. Why is it so expensive? It’s because of all these administrators. This snowballs into Elon [Musk] eventually posting about it, and that makes it go even bigger; the whole country is talking about this. Then it dies down for a bit, and that could have just been the end of it.
But they decide to end the investigation and institute actual disciplinary charges. And so the way this works is that now you have to have an administrative review hearing. We set a date in May to have this hearing about what malfeasance has been committed, and, to their credit, they’re not pursuing charges for all of the stupid [expletive] like emotional harm. It’s only violating the technology policy and misrepresenting myself as a journalist for the Brown Spectator because the Spectator is not real. It’s ridiculous because the Spectator is real and has been incorporated since February, before the email went out, with the Secretary of State of Rhode Island. We got more press off the fact that we’ve been formally charged and summoned to a disciplinary hearing. The next development is that 48 hours before my hearing, they decided that they’re changing the misrepresentation charge…they dropped it at FIRE’s urging, I guess. They bring another charge against me for trademark violation. They say that we’re in violation of Brown’s trademark because I’m on the board of directors of [an organization] that has the word “Brown” in its name. In particular, it’s not allowed that we have a web domain, brownspectator.com, that has the word “brown” in it.
At first, it’s just me. This is just really shocking because, assuming that they’ve acquired these public records from the state of Rhode Island, they’d also see that other Brown students are on it and supposedly in violation of the same crime. While they’re at it, they could have also charged the “Brown” Daily Herald then because that obviously is in the same boat. But they don’t. It’s clearly retaliation. A student writes an op-ed arguing that this is clearly retaliation, and they charge the author of that editorial and another Spectator member who was involved. Around this time, I ran an advertisement on YouTube about how they infringed on the free press or something, and that might have been a part of it. I think this is clearly the biggest attack on student journalism that there’s been in a while in the country. Essentially, they’re saying that this entire independent media arm is illegitimate and that it should shut down because it covers Brown and it has the word “Brown” in the name.
We have all our hearings, and then we’re all cleared because we didn’t do anything wrong. Brown has some egg on their face because they clearly retaliated against us for pointing out that they were too expensive, but we were right. Around the same time, I’m invited to testify at a congressional hearing of the House Judiciary Committee, which is chaired by Jim Jordan. Some of Jordan’s staff reached out to me about the antitrust violations in the Ivy League, and they’re concerned about limiting a sort of collusion. Remember, Henry v. Brown University was a class action lawsuit against a number of schools, including Brown, which Brown settled for like $20 million because they were price fixing their financial aid formulas. But if Brown wasn’t doing anything wrong, then clearly they wouldn’t have paid 20 million dollars.
Going back now chronologically to April before my hearing is, I’m sort of in somewhat of a perilous position. At this point, I started applying for jobs in case they kick me out. Palantir is known for hiring people without a college degree, which I think more companies should do. Because I think we’ve seen that a lot of people who go to Brown are just rich idiots, I applied for this and whatever, and it takes a few months, but they give an offer to hire me full-time—supposedly on the first full-time dropout that they’ve ever hired, because usually they have you do an internship first. At this point, I’m already cleared. I can go back to Brown, but I’m like, why would I pay 90K when I can earn six figures instead? What’s the value prop for paying an extra 90K for two years to get the job that I would get anyway when I would graduate? People were laughing at me, at the Brown Republicans, when I said this, but I think a Palantir degree means more than a Brown degree.
I moved to New York and quickly got acquainted with another guy, Sahar Sharda, who is the author of a book called The College Cartel, which lays out something similar to my theory. He knew about me, and we had this idea that we might work on a startup together about ways that the American people are defrauded by seemingly benevolent institutions. We run with the ideas. I leave Palantir after three months, we raise funding from VCs, and we start this company. We hire people—some of them who don’t have college degrees— to implement this philosophy. There’s nothing that we can share publicly at the moment, but we’re finding stuff. We think this is going to be a very valuable company and a better opportunity for me than staying at Brown. The other interesting thing to note here is that Brown eventually did fire or end 103 positions. It’s clear that maybe I was right: They had too many staff.
AR: I think it is undeniable that whatever conversation you started with Bloat@Brown is much more prevalent now than it would have been had you not. A few weeks after Bloat@Brown launched, over 100 professors at Yale University signed onto a letter saying they were concerned about administrative bloat and wanted to institute a hiring freeze. At Brown earlier this week, the Brown Daily Herald did a profile that scrutinized record salaries for high-level administrators.
AS: I might add: people are always saying like, I’m some right-wing mega hack, even though I’m a libertarian. I’m probably the farthest right thing that they’ve ever seen… But this is not even a nominally right-wing thing.
AR: So is this an apolitical matter for you?
AS: The person who familiarized me with all this is their hero, Andrew Yang—Brown Class of ‘96, as we know. When he ran for president…I read his book, The War on Normal People. But that’s what familiarized me with the concept of administrative bloat: A guy who ran for president as a Democrat. It’s not even a right-wing issue at all. But that’s their way of trying to discredit it: making it out to be a right-wing issue.
AR: When reviewing the national media coverage of the incident, one viewpoint that caught my eye was the top comment on that reasonably sympathetic New York Times article, from a self-identified Brown administrator who wrote, “Not all free speech is protected or consistent with the institution’s policy. I received that email. It was worded in a way that hurt people, caused anxiety and was threatening. It was correct for the university to investigate the email…” What’s your response to that? Do you think it’s an unfair characterization of your investigative journalism?
AS: Obviously, it was not threatening, right? It’s not a threat to ask somebody what their job is like. There’s no threat implied or otherwise. That’s just false…One thing that I want to make a point of: Who benefits from this system of unmeritocratic higher education? The people who benefit are the administrators who get their paycheck and then saddle their students with debt and with useless degrees that aren’t able to get jobs that pay off the debt, right? Clearly, there are some winners, and it’s these administrators. Maybe their interests as a collective aren’t necessarily aligned with ours.
I think the other thing that people sort of get wrong is, “Oh, [Brown] was investigating him and nothing happened.” This sort of also misses the key fact that not only was I charged, but the entire board of the Brown Spectator was charged, even people who were not directly involved, which I think goes to show that they were really just trying to shut it down and retaliate. Sure, these are not criminal proceedings, but they’re analogous to criminal proceedings within this private institution.
AR: Pivoting to some earlier points you raised: In your ideal world, do you see a future for a possible reformed Ivy League or university model? Or has the necessity of them been replaced in this new era, where people can self-educate, and it really is just a self-fulfilling prophecy that is upholding these institutions right now?
AS: Well, I think there are multiple ways that this issue can be solved. The first way I thought it could have been solved is that you reform these institutions from within. But the reason, frankly, why Brown is so preeminent is extremely stupid. It’s an old college, and it plays football against Harvard. Harvard is the oldest college, and so it’s the most famous. Because we play football against them, we’re in the Ivy League, and so some of Harvard’s prestige rubs off on us. This is a very stupid but, for whatever reason, enduring cultural ideal. Insofar as that’s true, maybe you want to work within that and make places like Brown more meritocratic. But they’re resistant to that. Maybe the more effective way is just to discredit them and prove that you don’t need to have a college degree to be successful. I am open to either.
AR: When it comes to The Antifraud Company, what do you think the future holds for you?
While you view the issue itself as apolitical, do you think its success is dependent on the way the political winds blow?
AS: I think it’s like the affordability of college education and meritocracy. Dislike of people who defraud the federal government is bipartisan. For example, Lina Khan has retweeted this because very lefty people hate fraud. People on the right hate fraud. Who likes fraud? Nobody likes fraud, so I don’t think it is particularly dependent on the political winds. The current administration, I hear, does like our company, but it’s not exclusive to them. We have a bunch of former Biden folks who are employees of the company. We’re of all political stripes, and we’re finding stuff—some that you might hear about shortly.
I don’t know exactly the timeline on this, but I think that this is interesting stuff.
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.