White House says Musk is not DOGE employee, has no authority to make decisions
Elon Musk listens to US President Donald Trump speak in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on February 11, 2025.
Billionaire Elon Musk's role in the Trump administration is as a White House employee and senior adviser to the president, and is not an employee of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and has no decision-making authority, the White House said in a court filing on Monday.
According to a filing signed by Joshua Fisher, director of the Office of Administration at the White House, Musk can only advise the president and communicate the president's directives.
"Like other senior White House advisors, Mr Musk has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself," it said.
Fisher's filing, made in a case brought against Musk by the State of New Mexico, said that Musk was not an employee of the US DOGE Service, or the US DOGE Service Temporary Organization, and added: "Mr Musk is not the US DOGE Service Administrator."
DOGE has swept through federal agencies since Donald Trump began his second term as president last month and put Musk, the chief executive of carmaker Tesla, in charge of rooting out wasteful spending as part a dramatic overhaul of government that has included thousands of job cuts.
Acting Social Security head quits
The acting commissioner of the US Social Security Administration Michelle King has left her job after clashing with Musk's DOGE over its bid to access sensitive records, The Washington Post reported on Sunday, citing three people familiar the departure.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended Musk's efforts on Sunday, saying President Donald Trump had directed him and DOGE to identify fraud at the Social Security Administration.
"They haven't dug into the books yet, but they suspect that there are tens of millions of deceased people who are receiving fraudulent Social Security payments," she told Fox News.
Leavitt said DOGE was aiming to identify duplicate payments and to end them, identify payments going to dead people and to protect the integrity of the system.