President Donald Trump said that Elon Musk is in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), after the White House submitted court papers saying the tech billionaire is only an adviser and isn’t leading the group.
But on Wednesday, Trump told investors at an event in Miami: “I signed an order creating the Department of Government Efficiency and put a man named Elon Musk in charge.”
Trump has often talked about Musk as the functional leader of DOGE, which is not a Cabinet-level department, featuring him in a news conference at the White House this month to answer questions about the program.
The Epoch Times contacted the White House press office for comment on Musk’s role at DOGE, which was created via an executive order by Trump in January.
In the White House statement, the director of the Office of Administration, Joshua Fisher, said that he has “personal knowledge of Mr. Elon Musk’s employment status” within the federal government and said Musk is an employee of the White House Office as a non-career special government employee. Musk is serving as senior adviser to the president in that role, he added, noting that Anita Dunn had been a senior adviser to President Joe Biden as a special government employee.
“Mr. Musk is not an employee of the U.S. DOGE Service or U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization,” and he’s also not the administrator of the U.S. DOGE Service administration, according to Fisher’s declaration.
Several weeks ago, the White House confirmed that Musk, considered the wealthiest man in the world, was a special government employee, meaning he is not subject to the same rules and regulations as other federal workers.
DOGE employees are delving into each agency with the mission of identifying unnecessary programs or spending that is deemed wasteful or fraudulent. A number of lawsuits have been filed against Musk, DOGE, and the Trump administration in light of their activity.
Recently, Democratic lawmakers have been seeking to prevent DOGE from gaining access to Internal Revenue Service (IRS) systems.
Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) sent a letter Feb. 17 to the acting IRS head and demanded information about memos that would allow DOGE to gain access to the IRS.
The groups, in part, claimed that DOGE could gain “access to confidential business information, including profit and loss statements, payroll information, and other sensitive business information.”
They said DOGE would also have “access to information about IRS investigations and reports on suspected tax fraud activity, which could include investigations or reports pertaining to Mr. Musk’s businesses or those of his competitors.”
Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said in an emailed statement to The Epoch Times on Feb. 17 that “waste, fraud, and abuse have been deeply entrenched in our broken system for far too long.”
“[It] takes direct access to the system to identify and fix it.”
