In Musk, an unprecedented blend of political and financial power
When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi held his first official meeting in Washington last week, he brought his foreign minister and security adviser. The U.S. official he was meeting with, Elon Musk, brought three of his children and the mother of two of them. At the end, the two men exchanged gifts; Mr. Modi distributed books to the children.
The family-style sit-down with Mr. Musk, the owner of SpaceX and chief executive of Tesla, preceded Mr. Modi’s bilateral meetings with President Donald Trump and senior Cabinet members. Asked by reporters whether Mr. Musk had been acting in a private or official capacity, Mr. Trump said he didn’t know. “They met, and I assume he wants to do business in India.”
Blurred lines and proximity to power have become hallmarks of Mr. Musk’s virtual takeover of Washington. Over the past month, the tech billionaire who leveraged his wealth and fame to help reelect Mr. Trump has become perhaps the most prominent, prolific, and feared figure in his administration. His self-styled Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) within the White House has taken an axe to a swath of federal agencies and to the government’s professional workforce.
Why We Wrote This
President Trump credits Elon Musk with leading efforts to disrupt, shrink, and overhaul the federal bureacuracy. Mr. Musk has major business interests intertwined with the very government he is remaking.
Mr. Musk’s precise role is amorphous. On paper, he’s an unpaid adviser to Mr. Trump and has no legal authority over DOGE, which was originally billed as an outside commission providing recommendations. In reality, he’s emerged as the president’s indefatigable attack dog, propagandist, and auditing specialist. Analysts say there’s no precedent for such an unelected individual to sit at the nexus of power and politics with a mandate to orchestrate a sweeping makeover of how government works. Some Democrats have chided Mr. Musk for acting as “co-president,” a calculated jibe at the elected president he serves.
In an unusual joint appearance on Fox News that aired Tuesday, the two men rebutted this criticism. Mr. Musk began by telling host Sean Hannity that he loved the president and that he is “a good man.” Mr. Trump thanked him and called him a “brilliant guy.” Both laughed at jokes made by the other; Mr. Hannity likened them to brothers. When the host brought up criticism of “President Musk” imagery used by Time magazine, Mr. Trump jumped in. “Elon called me. He said, ‘You know they’re trying to drive us apart.’ I said ‘absolutely.’”
“He adds a manic energy”
Mr. Musk insists that his role is simply to ensure the elected president’s orders are fully implemented by the federal bureaucracy. “So what we’re doing here, one of the biggest functions of the DOGE team, is just making sure that the presidential executive orders are actually carried out,” he told Mr. Hannity.
Mr. Musk has taken to his mission with gusto, sleeping at work and hiring young workers with a Silicon Valley startup mindset to disrupt the slow-moving, deliberative process in public institutions. On the disruption front, supporters and critics alike agree, he’s succeeding.
“The extra sauce that he brings is the optics of doing things very, very quickly, and shockingly. He’s clearly uninterested … about the legal consequences of doing things” that may violate norms or even the Constitution, says Thomas Pepinsky, a professor of government at Cornell University who studies political economies.
Mr. Musk also eschews any fear of failure or political blowback that would typically constrain politicians in his position, says Gary Gerstle, an emeritus professor of American History at the University of Cambridge. This clashes with a culture of public administration that discourages risk-taking. Mr. Musk himself has said he and his team are likely to “make mistakes” but that when they do, they will try to correct them.
“He adds a manic energy and a single-mindedness that has been characteristic of all his endeavors, and also his deep belief that you’ve got to break things in order to fix them. That’s his business model … never being afraid to blow up rockets in search for the right rocket,” Professor Gerstle says.
Some misleading claims of uncovering fraud
Much of DOGE’s agenda maps onto Project 2025, a plan of action drawn up by conservative groups allied with Mr. Trump to shrink the federal bureaucracy and greatly enhance presidential authority. During the campaign, Mr. Trump publicly distanced himself from the document.
Acting alone and with other White House staff, DOGE has dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development and forced the Treasury Department, Internal Revenue Service, and other major agencies to allow access to closely guarded databases, while pushing for personnel restructuring and layoffs. It claims to have already uncovered $55 billion in fraud, waste, and abuse, though documents posted by DOGE suggest this amount may be greatly exaggerated. Mr. Musk has said that layoffs and artificial-intelligence-based fraud audits will help close the federal deficit, currently $1.8 trillion a year.
Many of Mr. Musk’s misleading or outright incorrect claims have become talking points for Mr. Trump. Last week, Mr. Musk claimed that his team had uncovered millions of Social Security recipients more than 100 years old, including some as old as 150, which “might be the biggest fraud in history.” Experts quickly countered that this appeared to be a misreading of a database that didn’t have certified death information for people born before 1920, something auditors already knew about, and not evidence of claims being processed for deceased recipients.
But Mr. Trump has continued to repeat these claims, telling a Saudi-backed investment summit in Miami on Wednesday night about millions of purported Americans over the age of 100 receiving government checks.
Firing ... and hiring workers back
DOGE has drawn considerable criticism for its haphazard dismissals of federal employees to meet reduction targets without apparent consideration of impacts. Nuclear inspectors were laid off, then called back to work. This week the Department of Agriculture had to backtrack on DOGE-instigated layoffs of employees working on the federal response to bird flu.
Mr. Musk’s lightning strikes have also triggered numerous lawsuits. One, filed by 14 Democratic state attorneys general, argues that he lacks the constitutional authority to resize the government since he isn’t a Senate-confirmed officeholder. On Tuesday, a federal judge in Washington, Tanya Chutkan, rejected their immediate request to block DOGE from firing workers at federal agencies, saying they couldn’t prove irreparable harm.
But Judge Chutkan wrote that the plaintiffs were right to question “what appears to be the unchecked authority of an unelected individual and an entity that was not created by Congress and over which it has no oversight.” In a filing to the court, a White House official stated that, contrary to plaintiffs’ assertions, Mr. Musk doesn’t run DOGE and doesn’t even work there but was simply a “senior advisor” to the president.
“Like other senior White House advisors, Mr. Musk has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself. Mr. Musk can only advise the President and communicate the President’s directives,” the White House wrote.
Analysts say the legal ambiguity around Mr. Musk, whom Mr. Trump repeatedly praises for his leadership of DOGE, adds to the confusion over its secretive work inside agencies. Pushback by Congress has been noticeably lacking, because Republican lawmakers both mostly support DOGE’s cost-cutting goals and are reluctant to cross Mr. Trump and risk a primary-election challenge.
The passivity of Congress is striking when DOGE is dismantling agencies whose budgets have been appropriated by lawmakers, says Andrew Rudalevige, a professor of government at Bowdoin College who studies executive orders. “If they wanted to cut spending on foreign aid, if they wanted to reorganize the executive branch, if they wanted to slash government employment, those are things you do in law,” he says.
This controversy has shone a spotlight on Mr. Musk and DOGE, whose team was given expanded powers by Mr. Trump last week to oversee hiring and firing at key agencies. Legal scholars say DOGE’s access to government databases that had been walled off to political appointees appears to violate the 1974 Privacy Act passed after Watergate. Most of the lawsuits filed against DOGE have cited the act’s protections.
Multiple conflicts of interest for Musk
As a federal contractor and businessman whose companies are regulated by government agencies, Mr. Musk has multiple conflicts of interest when it comes to DOGE’s cost-cutting agenda, as well as the White House’s domestic and foreign policies. For example, his company SpaceX is a major contractor to the Defense Department and NASA, whose budgets and personnel Mr. Musk is slashing. SpaceX is also under multiple investigations for its labor practices.
Mr. Trump has waved away these concerns. Last week he told reporters in the Oval Office, in front of Mr. Musk, that “we would not let him do that segment or look in that area if we thought there was a lack of transparency or a conflict of interest.”
Sources: The New York Times, Reuters, The Associated Press, and federal agencies
It’s a criminal offense for federal employees to participate in any government decisions that could have a direct impact on their personal finances, such as a business deal or contract, says Richard Painter, the former chief ethics officer for President George W. Bush. Advisers to the president must also file a disclosure statement about their holdings.
The White House says Mr. Musk is a “special government employee,” a temporary position that applies to those who work for 130 days or less during a year. This designation means that Mr. Musk’s disclosure statement isn’t required to be made public until eight years after the president leaves office, unlike full-time government officials.
Special government employees typically serve on advisory commissions and bring specialist knowledge, says Professor Painter, who now teaches law at the University of Minnesota. “I never saw someone like Musk do what Musk does,” he says, calling the situation “inappropriate.”
In its filing, the White House compared Mr. Musk to Anita Dunn, a political consultant hired by President Joe Biden as a special employee. Ms. Dunn eventually joined the White House as a full-time strategist and was required to disclose her assets and recuse herself from related decisions.
Another point of comparison, says Professor Rudalevige, is Jack Smith, the special prosecutor appointed by the Department of Justice to handle Mr. Trump’s criminal cases. Mr. Trump’s lawyers persuaded one judge that Mr. Smith’s actions were illegitimate because he hadn’t been confirmed by the Senate. “And yet here we have Mr. Musk, who is apparently just a temporary White House employee, bragging about feeding agencies into wood-chippers,” he says.
Will courts be a check on DOGE?
Like the president he serves, Mr. Musk is often dismissive of courts that rule against him. “A corrupt judge protecting corruption. He needs to be impeached NOW!” he wrote on X, the social media platform he owns, after a court temporarily blocked DOGE’s access to Treasury databases.
On Saturday, Mr. Trump posted on his own social-media platform that “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” He later pinned the tweet at the top of his page.
Given the uncertainty over how courts interpret the Constitution, coupled with the possibility that the president defies their rulings, Democrats and others who oppose what DOGE is doing shouldn’t put too much stock in the courts stopping Mr. Musk, says Daniel Farbman, professor of constitutional law at Boston College. Instead, they need to bring the public along by exposing the risks posed by Mr. Musk’s unfettered power. Judges are also aware of the risk of ruling actions unconstitutional after they have already happened, such as DOGE’s examination of tax databases, without obvious means of redress.
“I don’t think Elon Musk feels constrained by anything,” Professor Farbman says. “The question is whether you can build a politics that makes it necessary” for Mr. Musk and the administration to obey the courts.
