No One Cares When Presidential Advisers Want Bigger Government

Elon Musk's vague White House role is only controversial because he's trying to slash bureaucracy.

Elon Musk's unclear position on the federal government's organization chart continues to generate controversy and legal problems for the Trump administration.

Despite being the seemingly powerful, very public face of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), with the full backing of President Donald Trump, the administration's lawyers claim in various court filings that Musk has no official role in either of the White House units bearing the DOGE label.

Instead, as Reason's Jacob Sullum explained yesterday, they say that Musk is officially just a senior adviser to Trump within the White House office.

Opponents of DOGE have seized on Musk's unclear White House role to file lawsuits challenging DOGE's authority to access government data, shrink federal staff, and reorganize federal departments.

A collection of Democratic attorney generals even filed a lawsuit claiming that Musk's role within the federal government is unconstitutional, as his vast apparent powers show him to be not an adviser but a principal officer who needs Senate confirmation.

DOGE critics in the media have claimed that Musk has appointed himself as a "dictator" and that he's currently staging a coup within the federal government.

Yet, Musk is hardly the first White House adviser to have great influence over government policy. His advisory role is only causing problems because DOGE's mission involves telling government workers what to do instead of bossing around private citizens and companies.

Contrast the uproar about Musk's position within the government to the appointment of Andy Slavitt as a senior White House adviser on President Joe Biden's COVID-19 response task force.

Slavitt, somewhat ironically, initially entered government as part of the Obama administration team fixing the rollout of Healthcare.gov. That effort spawned the U.S. Digital Service, which has since been converted into the U.S. DOGE Service under Trump.

Slavitt's return to government as a non-Senate confirmed adviser proved totally uncontroversial and remained so throughout his six-month tenure.

That's to be expected. Everyone understood then that presidents can appoint advisers who can influence policy and even take the lead on announcing government policy changes to the public.

Slavitt did just that. He frequently led press conferences relaying new Biden policy initiatives like using the Defense Production Act to increase vaccine and test production or increasing the prices Medicare and Medicaid would pay for vaccine doses.

His leading public-facing role on the administration's vaccine drive proved uncontroversial even though that "whole of government effort" dominated the first months of Biden's term and involved spending a lot of taxpayer money, imposing mandatory vaccine data reporting requirements on private providers, and eventually vaccine mandates on private healthcare workers and employees of large companies.  (Those latter mandates were issued after Slavitt left the White House.)

Granted, Slavitt did not generate any intra-agency confusion or anger government employee unions by sending out mass emails asking federal workers what they did that week.

The private companies that received his emails demanding they censor the speech of private citizens were crystal clear about his authority and role in the White House.

As detailed in a Congressional investigation released in May 2024 by House Republicans, Slavitt was one of the primary Biden administration officials responsible for "jawboning" Facebook and Amazon to censor anti-vaccine and COVID-related content.

In emails and "furious" calls to Facebook's Nick Clegg, Slavitt expressed the administration's displeasure that the company hadn't removed anti-vaccine memes and even seemed to threaten policy retaliation if it didn't adopt stricter moderation policies.

Slavitt was also one of the administration officials who pressured Amazon to remove anti-vaccine books from its online store and criticized the company's policy of attaching Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine information to listings of anti-vaccine books as "not a great solution."

Both companies went to great lengths to placate Slavitt's censorship demands.

The Trump administration has certainly been vague about DOGE's precise powers and personnel. This has arguably undermined its drive to slash the federal bureaucracy and root out wasteful spending.

When DOGE teams have demanded access to government record systems or when emails go out offering federal employees severance pay in exchange for resigning, government workers have been able to stymie these efforts by pointing to the unclear authority behind them.

In contrast, the Biden administration was generally a lot better about crossing 't's and dotting 'i's on its various executive initiatives. That made its advisers' job of unconstitutionally censoring the speech of ordinary Americans a lot more effective.

But it's the target of executive actions, and not internal procedure and clarity, that matter.

It's much more concerning when a White House senior adviser demands that individual Facebook posts come down than when another White House senior adviser demands individual emails be sent, even though the latter's adviser's precise role is a little hazier.