Elon Musk is barreling into government with DOGE, raising unusual legal questions

This story originally appeared on NPR.

Elon Musk has launched a campaign from inside the federal government to radically upend agencies, exercising a level of control so sweeping that it is stunning former top White House officials, even in a political moment when many things are described as unprecedented.

Musk, the world’s richest man and an advisor to President Trump, is leading a team called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Despite the name, DOGE is part of the White House and not a Cabinet agency. In recent days it has gained access to the Treasury Department’s payment systems, which are responsible for processing trillions of dollars of spending every year.

As part of its work, DOGE workers are helping the Trump administration explore drastic cuts to the Department of Education, including the option of trying to close the entire department, multiple government officials told NPR.

It comes as DOGE begins its shake-up of other swaths of the federal government.

The Associated Press reported DOGE representatives have also gained access to classified information at the U.S. Agency for International Development, a decades-old foreign aid agency Musk says he plans to shut down. And now, Musk’s cut-slashing unit is reported to be eyeing a way to gain access to the systems of the Small Business Administration, which gives loans and support to small firms, according to PBS News Hour.

“President Trump takes improving government efficiency very seriously. Obviously, although it is a humorous name, ironically, I think DOGE will have a very serious and significant impact on government waste and fraud and abuse, which is really astonishing in its scale and scope,” Musk said during a live audio chat on his X platform on Sunday night.

Musk framed his vision of DOGE’s work in ideological terms, disparaging the “tyranny of the bureaucracy” as unaccountable to American voters. Later in the conversation, he called for the “wholesale removal of regulations.” Musk has a long history of sparring with and outright defying federal regulators who oversee his sprawling array of businesses.

As DOGE officials move quickly to get their hands on the inner workings of the federal government, Musk has been posting through it on X, the social media platform he owns, suggesting routine payments of the Treasury are violating the law and asserting that USAID is “a criminal organization” without providing evidence to support these claims. Musk did not return requests for comment.

“Before our very eyes, an unelected shadow government is conducting a hostile takeover of the federal government,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Monday.

Musk, the biggest donor in the 2024 election, has been using X to pounce on his critics, both Democrats and Republicans, who have questioned the reach of Musk’s authority and just how much oversight he is receiving from Trump and senior White House officials.

“In terms of rule of law, we are losing it rapidly,” said Eric Rubin, a retired ambassador who spent nearly 40 years in the foreign service. “Musk and DOGE are intentionally creating hundreds of potential court cases that could take months or years to resolve,” he said. “But who knows what kind of damage they can inflict before that happens.”

Security clearances and employment status

As Musk bores into vast parts of the federal government, his employment status has caused confusion, which the White House clarified on Monday. According to Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Musk is spearheading DOGE as “a special government employee.” That’s a temporary appointment that allows a person to work for no more than 130 days a year to perform “limited” services.

President Trump said Musk can only take action when he has explicit approval from the White House. “Where we think there’s a conflict or a problem, we won’t let him go near it,” Trump said on Monday.

Federal ethics experts say since Musk operates six companies that cross multiple industries, including the rocket company SpaceX and the electric carmaker Tesla, it may be difficult for him to avoid running afoul of strict conflict-of-interest laws.

“He may not participate in any United States government matter that has a direct and predictable effect on his financial holdings,” said Richard Painter, who served as the White House’s top ethics lawyer under George W. Bush. “If he does, he commits a crime,” said Painter, pointing to federal laws governing special government employees.

Something else that has drawn scrutiny: what security clearances Musk and other DOGE staff hold.

Multiple reports indicated DOGE representatives sought access to a “secure compartmented information facility,” or SCIF, at USAID, which is a room containing sensitive documents that only someone with a high-level security clearance is permitted to enter.

“No classified material was accessed without proper security clearances,” Katie Miller, a DOGE official, wrote on X on Sunday. Leavitt said on Monday she did not immediately have information about Musk’s security clearance to share with reporters.

Rubin, the retired foreign service officer, said the possibility of a government employee accessing SCIF material without the proper clearance is concerning, adding that “there are zero exceptions” to the restricted access, given these rooms contain sensitive material.

Some young engineers from Silicon Valley have joined Musk’s effort. That includes Gavin Kliger, whose LinkedIn page describes him as “special advisor to the director” at the federal Office of Personnel Management. Kliger attended the University of California, Berkeley until 2020. He worked as a software engineer at Twitter in 2019 and, most recently, as a senior software engineer at Databricks, a data analytics company, according to his LinkedIn profile.

A USAID.gov email address belonging to Kliger appeared on an email sent early on Monday morning to USAID staff informing them the agency’s Washington headquarters would be closed for the day. Kliger didn’t respond to NPR’s questions about his role at USAID or OPM.

Some of the first legal challenges to DOGE’s activities came on Monday.

The Alliance for Retired Americans and two unions representing federal employees filed a lawsuit seeking to block DOGE’s access to the Treasury payment system, arguing that allowing Musk’s DOGE team to access peoples’ tax refunds, veterans’ benefits and disability checks is an unlawful privacy violation.

“We filed a lawsuit to say, ‘hands off,'” Norm Eisen, a former White House ethics lawyer under former President Barack Obama, said in an interview. “You can’t have my data. You can’t have my spouse’s data. You can’t have my kid’s data. That information is too precious,” said Eisen, who is representing the alliance and the unions. “This is wrong. It’s illegal.”

NPR’s Cory Turner contributed to this report.