The world’s richest man and an ally of President Donald Trump, Musk, 53, has in two weeks created a new center of power in Washington as he executes Trump’s cost-cutting initiative to reduce the size of the U.S. government.
Musk’s actions have fostered a wave of panic among government workers and public protests in Washington and at times have threatened to overshadow Trump’s own agenda.
Musk’s efforts are part of a massive government restructuring by Trump, who has fired and sidelined hundreds of civil servants in his first steps toward downsizing the bureaucracy and installing more loyalists.
“Musk has unprecedented and centralized control of the basic plumbing of government,“ he added.
“Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval, and we’ll give him the approval, where appropriate; where not appropriate, we won’t. But he reports in.”
Trump has put Musk in charge of what both men call the Department of Government Efficiency. Despite its name, it is not a department, Musk does not draw a government salary, and DOGE’s creation immediately drew lawsuits from government unions, watchdogs and public interest groups.
Musk and his DOGE lieutenants have taken over the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration along with their computer systems.
At least four current and former Musk aides are part of a team that has taken over OPM, shutting out some senior managers from their own computer systems, sources told Reuters. Musk visited the GSA last Thursday, an official said, while members of his team moved into the agency.
Michael Linden, a senior official during the administration of former President Joe Biden at the Office of Management and Budget, a powerful agency that oversees the federal budget, said the access by Musk’s aides to payment systems gives them extraordinary potential power.
Neither Musk nor the White House immediately responded to a request for comment.
MUSK EXCEEDING HIS AUTHORITY
Governance experts say Musk appears to have already gone beyond the mandate granted by the executive order Trump signed setting up DOGE on Jan. 20.
Musk and his aides appear to be doing much more than simply making recommendations.
Fear is gripping many civil servants, and they have taken to Reddit, Signal and Facebook to report on what is going on inside their agencies and discuss how to respond. They also warn that DOGE personnel are watermarking and otherwise embedding identifiers like additional spacing in emails to track down suspected leakers.
“We don’t have a fourth branch of government called Elon Musk,“ U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, told reporters during a protest outside USAID headquarters.
Echoing language Musk used when he slashed Twitter’s workforce after buying the social media company in 2022, an email was sent to all government employees titled “Fork in the Road” offering them deferred resignation, a scheme to pay workers through September if they offered to resign by Feb. 6.
Unions representing the employees filed a lawsuit on Tuesday to block the administration’s plan to offer buyouts, even as a U.S. official told Reuters that more than 20,000 employees were planning on quitting.
It was also extraordinary that Musk, whose companies have multiple contracts with the U.S. government, had been put in a position that would raise so many questions about conflicts of interest, he said.
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