Who’s running DOGE?
Not Elon Musk, according to the White House. In an affidavit filed in federal court on Monday, a Trump administration official claimed that the tech billionaire is not in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which has overseen mass layoffs across federal agencies while gaining access to troves of sensitive data.
Department of Justice attorneys filed the document, which seemed to contradict virtually all public evidence about Musk’s role, including some of the White House’s own previous statements, in response to a lawsuit by several state attorneys general seeking to reverse DOGE’s actions so far. The states argue that the Trump administration has violated the Constitution’s appointments clause by giving Musk vast decision-making power without ever having him confirmed for his position by Congress.
The affidavit is aimed at undercutting that argument. It claims that Musk himself is not employed at DOGE and has no official power over other agencies.
Instead, Musk is merely a “senior adviser” to the president with “no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself,” wrote Joshua Fisher, director of the White House Office of Administration. “Mr. Musk can only advise the President and communicate the President’s directives.”
The Trump administration has seemingly taken a different position in the past. When Trump first announced DOGE, he said it would be run by Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who later left the project. As the lawsuit notes, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt previously acknowledged that “President Trump tasked Mr. Musk with starting up DOGE.” The Tesla and SpaceX CEO has also kept up near real-time updates of the initiative’s work on X and dominated an Oval Office press conference with the president.
Under the Constitution, ”principal officers” who wield major authority, such as Cabinet secretaries who run government departments, must be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. The administration says that Musk himself has only been brought on as a “special government employee.”
The legal status of DOGE itself has been something of a moving target too. In court, the Justice Department has argued that the operation counts as an agency for some purposes, like whether its employees should be entitled to access sensitive federal data, but not others, such as being subject to open records laws.
Notably, the affidavit does not say who is running Doge, if not Musk.
Georgetown University law professor David Super told Yahoo Finance that the White House’s position on Musk was “a little rich, given how many times he and others have said he’s running things.”