Elon Musk works with the White House, not for it, according to an administration official.
While Musk has of late been linked to the newly-created “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), he doesn’t work for the department and is rather an advisor to President Donald Trump, Joshua Fisher, the director of the White House Office of Administration, said Monday (Feb. 17), per a Bloomberg News report.
Fisher said that Musk “has no greater authority than other senior White House advisers,” and that the multi-billionaire’s role is separate from DOGE, though he was initially named as its head soon after Trump won re-election but before he took office.
As Bloomberg noted, there are practical and legal implications to this distinction. For example, Musk’s advice to Trump would likely be shielded by executive privilege. And while the Office of Management and Budget – home to DOGE – is subject to Freedom of Information Act requests, the White House Office is not.
According to the report, Fisher’s comments on Musk come from a sworn statement in a lawsuit filed by the state of New Mexico and 13 other Democratic attorneys general, claiming that Musk has outstripped his authority as he’s not a government officer confirmed by the Senate.
“Musk has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself. Mr. Musk can only advise the President and communicate the President’s directives,” Fisher wrote.
The Justice Department submitted the information on Musk’s role in a court filing informing the judge that government workers were unaware of any plans for mass firings by federal agencies in the coming weeks.
Those decisions are down to the agencies themselves, the lawyers wrote, and attorneys weren’t in a position to provide the court with a “programmatic representation” about “personnel decisions at individual agencies.”
The news comes as DOGE continues to seek access to sensitive government data in its stated quest to root out fraud and waste.
Most recently, that’s meant getting into the systems of the Social Security Administration, where a clash involving DOGE led the agency’s acting director to resign.
Speaking with PYMNTS earlier this month, Amias Gerety, a Treasury official for the Obama administration, said that there would be broad economic consequences if DOGE’s efforts to get into the U.S. payment systems were to introduce uncertainty.
“If there’s one phrase that dominates discussions about the Treasury’s role in the nation’s finances, it’s ‘full faith and credit,’” Gerety told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster..
“The full faith and credit of the U.S. government should not be impeached. It’s literally in the [Constitution]. If you’re a bank, if you’re an investor, if you’re a government contractor, if you’re a retiree receiving Social Security — you have to ask, will my payments go through? That uncertainty should be felt around the world.”
