Elon Musk is not the head of DOGE, the federal spending task force President Donald Trump charged to take a chainsaw to the bureaucracy by finding $2 trillion in spending cuts, the White House said in a Monday court filing.
In fact, the billionaire Republican benefactor is not a part of it at all, the administration claimed.
This is despite Trump saying three months ago, when he first announced the Department of Government Efficiency during the transition period, that Musk would “lead” it.
The head-scratching revelation was made in a three-page declaration by a White House administrator who said Musk works as a “senior adviser to the president” and has “no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself.”
“He is not an employee of the U.S. DOGE Service or U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization,” reads the sworn statement by White House Office of Administration Director Joshua Fisher. “Mr. Musk is not the U.S. DOGE Service Administrator.”
The court filing appears to directly contradict Trump’s own words, as he’s repeatedly characterized Musk as the leader of DOGE.
“Elon is doing a great job. He’s finding tremendous fraud and corruption and waste,” Trump said on Feb. 7. “I’ll tell him to go here or there and he does it.”
Trump added, referring to the DOGE team staffed by Musk loyalists: “He’s got a very capable group of people.”
Three days later, on Feb. 10, Trump explained in an interview with Fox News how he was going to send Musk from department to department leading DOGE’s efforts to find spending cuts.
“I’m going to tell him very soon, like maybe in 24 hours, to go check the Department of Education,” Trump said at the time. “Then I’m going to go, go to the military. Let’s check the military... We’re going to find billions, hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud and abuse.”
Musk has also appeared to refer to himself as a part of the DOGE team multiple times in recent weeks.
“Doge has not looked at, nor is there any interest in, private financial data. What would we even do with it?” he tweeted on Feb 4, in response to a post by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who objected to the task force accessing Treasury payment systems.
“DOGE is working 120 hour a week,” he tweeted on Feb. 2. “Our bureaucratic opponents optimistically work 40 hours a week.”
Fisher’s filing raises the question of just who is accountable for DOGE, which has set off alarm bells across the federal bureaucracy.
A gaggle of Musk-affiliated teens and twenty-somethings, under the auspice of the newly formed task force, has been dispatched to access the systems at multiple departments in recent weeks, some containing confidential and classified information.
Multiple lawsuits have been filed alleging the DOGE team has risked catastrophic data breaches in doing so.
But Fisher’s filing likens Musk’s job to that of Anita Dunn, a senior adviser to former President Joe Biden who held a similar title.
His claim that Musk has no role with DOGE came in response to a lawsuit, filed by several state attorneys general, that seeks to block Musk and his allies from accessing federal data or firing staff by arguing Musk and DOGE are in violation of the constitution’s “Appointments Clause,” which mandates that senior officials in the executive branch should receive Senate confirmation.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan is expected to rule imminently on an emergency motion that would bar Musk, but she indicated Monday that she was unlikely to side against the Trump administration.
