The MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR (MJD) experiment has been operating since Oct 2016 inside a clean room 4850 feet underground in the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, SD. The DEMONSTRATOR is searching for neutrinoless double beta decay in 76Ge using 29.7 kg of detectors made from germanium enriched to 88% in that isotope. If observed, this extremely rare decay will prove that the neutrino and the anti-neutrino are identical particles and therefore that lepton number is not a conserved quantity. This would be evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model. It will also provide hints as to how the Big Bang produced more matter than it did antimatter. The collaboration's analysis of the first data from the DEMONSTRATOR (taken during construction, commissioning, and the start of full operations) yields a lower limit on the half-life of 1.9 +/- 1e25 yr (90% CL). This result constrains the effective Majorana neutrino mass to below 250 to 550 meV, depending on the matrix elements used. In the experimental configuration with the lowest background, the DEMONSTRATOR background is 4.0 +/- 3.1. In the experimental configuration with the lowest background, the DEMONSTRATOR background is 4.0 +/- 3.1 +/- 2.5 counts / (FWHM t yr) at 68% CL. The goal of the MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR is to show that backgrounds can be reduced to a value low enough to justify a large neutrinoless double beta decay experiment using 76Ge. The DEMONSTRATOR goal is to reach a background of 2.5 counts / (FWHM t yr) and, as of this writing, the result is consistent with that goal. A paper reporting these results, to be submitted to Physical Review Letters, is in final stages of preparation.