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It has always seemed as though Donald Trump thinks the presidency comes with an endless font of rewriting reality. Too often, he has been proven right.
He’s trying to do that once again with Elon Musk, as the White House insists the CEO of multiple companies is just hanging out around the Oval and tossing out ideas—and not acting as the man whose lieutenants are hurling tens of thousands of career federal workers out on the street, and working their way through sensitive government data, allowing Musk in some cases to misrepresent what’s in them.
The Trump administration is now claiming Musk is not actually leading the campaign against the federal workforce, but simply operating as a special-skills adviser on a temporary assignment that can last no longer than 130 days. In the Biden White House, communications adviser Anita Dunn did stints on the inside under the program. When Covid-19 hit Trump’s first term, he brought in Dr. Scott Atlas to help him briefly on the pandemic. During the Obama years, Huma Abedin served as a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton using the provision after returning from maternity leave.
“Mr. Musk has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself,” a political appointee said in a filing to U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. “Mr. Musk can only advise the President and communicate the President’s directives.”
The distinction there isn’t about ego but whether Musk’s wrecking ball can continue swinging unabated. For those booted feds, Musk’s exact mandate might actually be what allows them to crowbar their way back into their offices. Because, it may turn out, a presidential pal might not actually be able to pass out pink slips as easily as blue checkmarks on his social media platform.
Musk, who was named the head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, has overseen the staggering shrinking of the footprint of the federal government in short order. Trump publicly directed him to kick the tires of the whole of government looking for places where excesses could be scaled back. In the process, he essentially mothballed the 10,000-person U.S. Agency for International Development, put on notice every employee who has been in their job less than two years, and warned of seismic reductions everywhere from the National Weather Service to the Education Department to the Department of Veterans Affairs. The cuts are so sweeping that agencies seem to be only checking on who they’re firing after the fact. A plan to ditch hundreds of employees at the Department of Energy hit pause when officials suddenly realized those workers handled nuclear security programs. A similar embarrassing story played out with bird flu researchers at the Department of Agriculture.
Put simply, no part of the government can expect to be spared, not even the Pentagon where Musk has billions of dollars in federal contracts for his companies.
(For his part, Trump seemed surprised on Tuesday when a reporter brought up the potential conflicts. Trump said Musk would not touch anything linked to his businesses. “I’m just hearing about it. And if there is, and he told me before, I told him, but obviously I will not let there be any conflict of interest,” Trump said. “So anything to do with possibly even SpaceX. We won’t let Elon partake in that.”)
State attorneys general and federal workers alike have been challenging the rapid reduction in federal workforce. Judges have seemed sympathetic, pushing pause in some cases on summary dismissals while in others sounding alarms even as Musk gets to keep his mittens in the data.
What may end up being Trump’s weakness in his unprecedented empowering of the world’s richest person over the fate of the federal workforce is his own words.
Trump has hardly been shy in cheering on Musk, taking time to give Musk the floor or credit during almost daily gab fests in the Oval Office or around the White House campus. Trump has defended Musk’s slashing and their social media accounts seem to take sincere glee and stripping feds of their livelihoods.
“He’s doing a thankless job, but he’s helping us to save our country,” Trump said alongside Musk in an interview that aired on Fox News Tuesday night. “Our country was in serious trouble, and I had to get the best guy.”
But the case against Musk and his slapdash race through Washington seems to have hit, at least for now, a snag. Typically, someone tasked with running something as powerful as DOGE would require them to submit to a Senate up-or-down vote under the Appointments Clause to the Constitution. That clearly has not happened, and lawsuits are pressing that idea further, leaving the White House desperately trying to downplay weeks of Musk’s spotlight-stealing efforts. Instead, in a court filing that stretches credibility, the head of White House operations told a judge that Musk is not even part of DOGE.
The shift was merely the latest for an ill-defined and constantly changing mandate for Musk and his friends. At first, the DOGE effort was meant to be completely outside of government, an advisory effort meant to make suggestions. But that was during the transition, and starting almost immediately after Inauguration Day, Musk aides started showing up at federal offices, demanding access to H.R. files, personal data, and line-by-line spending reports. As TIME’s latest cover story details, this is Musk’s war on Washington.
The efforts have been slowed in some cases by judges who seem dubious that Trump can create and empower a new agency with zero input or oversight from Congress, but Trump is hinting he may not follow those rulings for much longer, setting up a constitutional crisis that Trump seems to relish. “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” Trump posted on social media, a dark echo from a darker era.
His lawyers are at least aware that it’s tough to justify giving an unaccountable patron powers typically conferred through a Senate confirmation and subject to congressional oversight. Trump has often found a way out of these cul-de-sacs by finding something even more outlandish to distract. It’s how he got through his first four years by never allowing any single norm-breaking outburst to settle. Courts, however, are not as easily distracted, and Trump’s papertrail on Musk might be beyond a mulligan. He might actually have to play this slice where it lies. At least that’s what tens of thousands of out-of-work feds are banking on.
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