What Elon Musk and DOGE Are Doing to the Federal Government

Photo: Tom Williams/Roll Call/AP Photo

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is leading an all-out blitz on the federal government, attempting to drastically shrink it and eliminate any spending that might fall under the Trump administration’s broadly defined conception of “fraud” or “waste.” Accompanied by a merry band of longtime Silicon Valley surrogates and some overeager 19- to 25-year-old engineers (one of whom just resigned over past tweets promoting racism and eugenics), Musk has sown chaos across Washington, D.C., ping-ponging from one agency to the next demanding access to their personnel and financial systems and — in the case of the foreign-aid entity USAID — attempting to dissolve entire agencies. In other words, he’s applying the move-fast-and-break-things approach of his 2022 Twitter takeover to the federal government, which should assuage concerns for everyone who witnessed the platform devolve under Musk’s leadership into a porn-addled repository for misinformation and AI slop.

This all raises an obvious question: Is all of this legal? As is often the case with the Trump administration’s “flood the zone” approach to ruling, that legal uncertainty seems intentional. Musk, the world’s richest man and Donald Trump’s biggest campaign donor (and a massive beneficiary of U.S. government subsidies), holds the unelected position of “special government employee.” While his apparent strategy for downsizing the federal government is to attack everything at once, he also seems to be targeting specific choke points in an explicit effort to redefine the limits of executive power under Trump. Here are DOGE’s boldest moves thus far.

.

Attempting to cut off federal payments

In early January, Musk backtracked from DOGE’s stated goal of cutting the federal budget by $2 trillion, presumably after realizing how implausible that was. His solution, it seems, has been to take over federal payment systems to the degree that he can, with the goal of combing through the sensitive data therein to identify potential spending cuts, or simply cut off payments that don’t align with Trump administration directives. After a Musk affiliate demanded the Treasury Department shut off USAID payments four days into the Trump administration, the then-acting secretary, David Lebryk, questioned the legality of that move, only to announce his sudden retirement the following week. Newly confirmed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent then granted the DOGE team full access to the system, which handles everything from Americans’ tax returns to Social Security benefits. The move prompted outcry from Democratic lawmakers and legal action (for now, a federal judge has limited DOGE to “read only” access to the payment system).

While Congress, not the executive branch, holds the power of the purse, Musk has justified his Treasury Department incursion by baselessly claiming that its bureaucrats have illegally approved billions of dollars to “known fraudulent entities.” On Wednesday, he leveraged similar allegations of “big money fraud” in Medicare systems, which DOGE now has an unclear level of access to. (DOGE’s $2 trillion savings target is nigh-impossible without some cuts to health spending.)

.

Ousting federal employees in every way possible

DOGE has broad aspirations for government layoffs, so far targeting a few departments in particular. After a majority of employees were placed on administrative leave at USAID — which has already had disastrous, potentially deadly impacts worldwide — Musk appears to have similar downsizing aims at the Department of Education, which Trump has promised to shutter. (The DOGE crew is already reportedly deploying AI in the department’s financial systems to find cost-cutting opportunities.) Everywhere Musk goes, the fear that he’ll brazenly lay off staff without bothering to understand or care what they do follows. Those efforts have been met with protests and legal action from federal employees’ unions. AFGE Local 12 told its members Thursday that it had received a temporary restraining order blocking the Labor Department from sharing data with DOGE.

In perhaps Trump and Musk’s biggest gambit to shrink the federal workforce, the administration sent out an email last week with the subject line “Fork in the Road FAQs,” imploring government employees to seek work in the private sector and offering them payment through September if they voluntarily resigned. As with many DOGE-adjacent plans, its legality is questionable — the AFL-CIO has filed a lawsuit against it, and a federal judge blocked the government from imposing the email’s Thursday night deadline to respond, which is now delayed. At least 40,000 government employees have already signed.