The original idea behind the Department of Government Efficiency was relatively straightforward. By Donald Trump’s telling, Elon Musk and his surrogates would lead an advisory panel of sorts, which would be tasked with auditing federal agencies and identifying wasteful spending.
It wasn’t long after Inauguration Day, when an apparent shell game began. Indeed, when the president signed an executive order creating the semi-governmental DOGE initiative, the document said the operation would focus on “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” Musk personally began wearing “Tech Support” T-shirts, as if this were his official role in the administration.
What’s more, Trump’s executive order said that DOGE wouldn’t actually be an advisory panel anymore. Instead, an existing White House office called the U.S. Digital Service would be rebranded. The U.S. DOGE Service was born.
It was odd, but just as notably, it was a departure from what Trump and his team had already presented to the public. Everything we’d been told about the “department” was quietly changed in a document that much of the public would never read.
And then it happened again. Politico reported:
Elon Musk is not the leader of DOGE — the mysterious Trump administration operation overseeing an effort to break and remake the federal bureaucracy. In fact, he’s not even technically part of it at all, the White House said in court papers Monday night. In a three-page declaration, a top White House personnel official revealed that Musk’s title is “senior adviser to the president,” a role in which he has “no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself.”
The claim was brought to a federal court by way of Joshua Fisher, the director of the White House’s Office of Administration. As Politico’s report added, the previously undisclosed shift seemed to “directly contradict the way President Donald Trump and Musk have spoken publicly about the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, widely seen as a Musk-driven project to shrink and dismantle key aspects of the federal government.”
There’s no denying the accuracy of that assessment. As recently as last week, Trump turned to Musk and, while referencing DOGE, the president asked him to talk to reporters about “some of the things your team has found.” Trump said nothing about his biggest campaign donor being wholly detached from the department.
Indeed, around the same time, Musk himself used the word “we” — more than once — when talking about DOGE and its efforts.
Trump himself has told the public, in writing, that his biggest campaign donor would “lead the Department of Government Efficiency.”
Or put another way, the legal filing is, at face value, exceedingly difficult to believe.
As for why, exactly, the White House would make such a curious claim, especially in a formal legal document, there’s plenty of speculation. That said, by all appearances, this looks like a rather clumsy attempt to avoid accountability as Democratic attorneys general challenge the existence of the department in court.
We’ll learn soon enough whether the gambit is effective, but in the meantime, there’s one question I’d love to hear someone at the White House answer: If Musk isn’t leading DOGE, who is?
