Elon Musk, Who Supposedly Is Running DOGE, Is Not Officially in Charge of Anything
The presidential adviser's lack of formal authority complicates his cost-cutting mission.
By now, you have heard a lot about the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Trump administration's cost-cutting initiative. You also know about billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk's work in connection with DOGE, including his attempts to correct sloppy payment practices, cancellation of dubious federal contracts, and efforts to reduce the federal work force by laying off recent hires and paying employees to quit. But what, exactly, is DOGE, and what role, exactly, does Musk play within that entity?
More than a month after President Donald Trump purported to create DOGE, the answers to both questions remain maddeningly vague. Technically, DOGE does not even exist, and the Trump administration says Musk is not in charge of the entity that is colloquially known by that name. These organizational mysteries have legal and practical implications for DOGE's laudable mission, which Trump has defined as "driv[ing] out the massive waste and fraud which exists throughout" the federal budget, resulting in "a smaller Government, with more efficiency and less bureaucracy."
On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order "Establishing and Implementing the President's 'Department of Government Efficiency.'" The scare quotes were appropriate. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as the "Department of Government Efficiency," even though it has a website and an X account.
Creating a new cabinet-level department would require congressional authorization. So Trump instead shoehorned DOGE into what was previously known as the United States Digital Service, a "small team" that President Barack Obama created in 2014 to make government websites "more consumer friendly" and "help upgrade the government's technology infrastructure." That previously obscure unit within the Executive Office of the President, Trump declared, would henceforth be known as the United States DOGE Service (USDS), although the name change is not reflected on the USDS website.
Trump's order also established "the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization" within the USDS. That organization, he said, "shall be headed by the USDS Administrator and shall be dedicated to advancing the President's 18-month DOGE agenda," terminating on July 4, 2026.
The "DOGE Agenda," we can surmise from the president's public comments, entails wide-ranging efforts to cut federal spending. Musk originally imagined the Trump administration could easily find "at least 2 trillion" in annual savings, equivalent to the federal budget deficit in FY 2024. More recently, he has predicted that DOGE will "cut the budget deficit in half" by insisting on "competence and caring," meaning it can save $1 trillion a year by attacking "waste, fraud, and abuse."
Trump seems to think that target is realistic. "We've already found billions of dollars of abuse, incompetence, and corruption," he said at a press conference this month. "It could be close to a trillion dollars that we're gonna find."
Probably not, judging from previous estimates of "waste, fraud, and abuse." In the best-case scenario, Manhattan Institute budget expert Jessica Riedl thinks, "DOGE can potentially save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars by reducing government waste and improving program efficiency."
While that would certainly be a meaningful accomplishment, it would fall short of Musk's avowed target as well as his original aspiration. It is nevertheless more ambitious than DOGE's mission as defined in Trump's executive order, which makes the reinvented USDS sound much like the old USDS. The only specific function described in the order is "modernizing federal technology and software to maximize efficiency and productivity."
Toward that end, the order says, "the USDS Administrator shall commence a Software Modernization Initiative to improve the quality and efficiency of government-wide software, network infrastructure, and information technology (IT) systems." The administrator is supposed to "work with Agency Heads to promote inter-operability between agency networks and systems, ensure data integrity, and facilitate responsible data collection and synchronization." The agency heads "shall take all necessary steps, in coordination with the USDS Administrator and to the maximum extent consistent with law, to ensure USDS has full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems."
That mission is consistent with much of what Musk has been trying to do, including "common-sense controls" that require basic information about the purpose of federal expenditures and compliance with the government's "do not pay" list. But it is not obviously related to other efforts associated with Musk, such as layoffs, beefed-up job performance standards, the "deferred resignation" initiative, the rescinded memo that paused federal grants, or the attempted dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
If it's not clear how much of this can be attributed to DOGE itself, at least we know who is in charge of DOGE. Musk conceived the project and has always been presented as its leader. As president-elect last November, Trump announced that Musk "will lead the Department of Government Efficiency" along with another businessman, Vivek Ramaswamy, who has since stepped away from the project. Surely that means Musk must be "the USDS Administrator," who is also the head of "the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization."
Not according to the Trump administration. "Mr. Musk is an employee of the White House Office" who is classified as "a special government employee" and serves as "a Senior Advisor to the President," Joshua Fisher, who directs the White House Office of Administration, explained last week in a declaration filed with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. "He is not an employee of the U.S. DOGE Service or U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization. Mr. Musk is not the U.S. DOGE Service Administrator."
Who is? U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wondered the same thing. At a hearing on Monday in a case involving the Musk team's access to Treasury Department records, she repeatedly asked the government's lawyer, Bradley Humphreys, to identify the "U.S. DOGE Service Administrator." He was unable to do so. But on Tuesday, after repeated inquiries from reporters, the White House said Amy Gleason, a former official of the old USDS, had been named acting administrator of the new USDS.
Musk's connection to the USDS, or lack thereof, is obviously relevant to the case Kollar-Kotelly is considering. Trump's order instructed agency heads to make sure that the USDS "has full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems." But according to Fisher, Musk not only is not in charge of the USDS; he does not even work for it. As an adviser to the president, he has no special authority, even under the terms of Trump's order, to seek those records.
When Kollar-Kotelly asked Humphreys to clarify Musk's position, the hapless lawyer responded that "I don't have any information beyond he's a close adviser to the president." WTF, the judge replied, but more politely. "It does seem to me if you have people that are not authorized to carry out some of these functions that they're carrying out, that does raise an issue," she said. "I would hope that by now we would know who is the administrator, who is the acting administrator and what authority do they have?" Kollar-Kotelly also expressed "concerns about the constitutionality of USDS's structure and operations."
To sum up, DOGE does not exist, but the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization does, and Musk is not running it. Its specific mission, as described in Trump's order, is much more modest than the ambitious attack on "waste, fraud, and abuse" that the president and Musk describe. The latter project supposedly is led by Musk, a "special adviser" to Trump who has no formal connection to the temporary organization "dedicated to advancing the President's 18-month DOGE agenda."
The confusion about DOGE's status and Musk's authority may have legal implications, as Kollar-Kotelly suggested. It adds a new wrinkle to questions about what the Trump administration can independently do to cut spending, since the president does not have the authority even to abolish a minor agency like USAID (which accounts for less than 1 percent of the federal budget), let alone tackle big-ticket items such as entitlements and military spending.
The Musk mystery also has practical implications, as illustrated by what happened after he told federal employees to submit a brief description of what they had done at work during the previous week. "Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump's instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week," Musk said in an X post on Saturday. "Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation."
The email did not mention that threat, but it did ask workers to "please reply" by midnight on Monday with "approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager." It added that employees should not "send any classified information, links, or attachments."
As Musk emphasized, this was not a tall order. In fact, notwithstanding his invocation of presidential authority and threat of termination, it was not an order at all.
"As the directive ricocheted across the federal government," The New York Times reports, "officials at some agencies, including the F.B.I., the office coordinating America's intelligence agencies and the Departments of Defense, State, Energy, Health and Human Services and Homeland Security, told their employees not to respond." Although Musk thought he had the authority to demand those bullet points, the Trump appointees who actually run those agencies clearly disagreed.
Musk noted that "the bar is very low here," since "an email with some bullet points that make any sense at all," which "should take less than 5 mins to write," would be "acceptable." That minimal requirement suggests his demand was not really aimed at collecting information; it was more a matter of reminding federal employees that they were expected to do something in exchange for their paychecks. The fact that their supervisors nevertheless bridled at Musk's presumption underlines the difficulty of getting things done as a "special government employee" who is not officially in charge of anything.
After the election last November, Trump said DOGE would "provide advice and guidance from outside of government," which made it sound like yet another in a long series of advisory panels charged with proposing fiscal reforms. In the end, Trump brought Musk into the government but gave him no formal authority, meaning his power is still entirely dependent on Trump's willingness to take (and enforce) his advice. Given that reality, the bureaucratic shuffle that gave birth to the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization seems beside the point.
