Top officials at the Treasury Department and the US Agency for International Development who objected to the actions of his representatives were swiftly pushed aside. And Musk’s efforts to shut down USAID, a key source of foreign assistance, have reverberated around the globe.
Musk, the world’s richest man, is sweeping through the federal government as a singular force, creating major upheaval as he looks to put an ideological stamp on the bureaucracy and rid the system of those who he and the President deride as “the deep state”.
The rapid moves by Musk, who has a multitude of financial interests before the Government, have represented an extraordinary flexing of power by a private individual.
The speed and scale have shocked civil servants, who have been frantically exchanging information on encrypted chats, trying to discern what is unfolding.
Senior White House staff members have at times also found themselves in the dark, according to two officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions. One Trump official, who was not authorised to speak publicly, said Musk was widely seen as operating with a level of autonomy that almost no one can control.
Musk, the leader of SpaceX, Tesla and X, is working with a frantic, around-the-clock energy familiar to the employees at his various companies, flanked by a cadre of young engineers, drawn in part from Silicon Valley. He has moved beds into the headquarters of the federal personnel office a few blocks from the White House, according to a person familiar with the situation, so he and his staff, working late into the night, could sleep there, reprising a tactic he has deployed at Twitter and Tesla.
This time, however, he carries the authority of the President, who has bristled at some of Musk’s ready-fire-aim impulses but has praised him publicly.
“He’s a big cost-cutter,” Trump told reporters on Sunday. “Sometimes we won’t agree with it and we’ll not go where he wants to go. But I think he’s doing a great job. He’s a smart guy.”
There is no precedent for a government official to have Musk’s scale of conflicts of interest, which include domestic holdings and foreign connections such as business relationships in China. And there is no precedent for someone who is not a full-time employee to have such ability to reshape the federal workforce.
Historian Douglas Brinkley described Musk as a “lone ranger” with limitless running room. He noted that the billionaire was operating “beyond scrutiny,” saying: “There is not one single entity holding Musk accountable. It’s a harbinger of the destruction of our basic institutions.”
Several former and current senior government officials – even those who like what he is doing – expressed a sense of helplessness about how to handle Musk’s level of unaccountability. Some hoped Congress would choose to reassert itself.
Trump himself sounded a notably cautionary note on Monday, telling reporters: “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval. And we’ll give him the approval where appropriate, where not appropriate, we won’t.”
“If there’s a conflict,” he added, “then we won’t let him get near it.”
However, the President has given Musk vast power over the bureaucracy that regulates his companies and awards them contracts. He is shaping not just policy but personnel decisions, including successfully pushing for Trump to pick Troy Meink as the Air Force Secretary, according to three people with direct knowledge of his role.
Meink previously ran the Pentagon’s National Reconnaissance Office, which helped Musk secure a multibillion-dollar contract for SpaceX to help build and deploy a spy satellite network for the federal government.
Since Trump’s inauguration, Musk and his allies have taken over the United States Digital Service, now renamed United States DOGE Service, which was established in 2014 to fix the federal Government’s online services.
They have commandeered the federal Government’s human resources department, the Office of Personnel Management.
They have gained access to the Treasury’s payment system – a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending.
Musk has also taken a keen interest in the federal government’s real estate portfolio, managed by the General Services Administration, moving to terminate leases. Internally, GSA leaders have started to discuss eliminating as much as 50% of the agency’s budget, according to people familiar with the conversations.
Perhaps most significant, Musk has sought to dismantle USAID, the government’s lead agency for humanitarian aid and development assistance. Trump has already frozen foreign aid spending, but Musk has gone further.
Musk’s actions have astounded and alarmed Democrats and government watchdog groups. They question if Musk is breaching federal laws that give Congress the final power to create or eliminate federal agencies and set their budgets, require public disclosure of government actions and prohibit individuals from taking actions that might benefit them personally.
At least four lawsuits have been filed in federal court to challenge his authority and the moves by the new administration, but it remains to be seen if judicial review can keep up with Musk.
Officially, Musk is serving as a special Government employee, according to the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt. This is a status typically given to part-time, outside advisers to the federal Government who offer advice based on private sector expertise.
In a statement, Leavitt said that “Elon Musk is selflessly serving President Trump’s administration as a special Government employee, and he has abided by all applicable federal laws”.
Musk has told Trump administration officials that to fulfil their mission of radically reducing the size of the federal Government, they need to gain access to the computers – the systems that house the data and the details of government personnel, and the pipes that distribute money on behalf of the federal Government.
Musk has been thinking radically about ways to sharply reduce federal spending for the entire presidential transition. After canvassing budget experts, he eventually became fixated on a critical part of the country’s infrastructure: the Treasury Department payment system that disburses trillions of dollars a year on behalf of the federal Government.
Musk has told administration officials that he thinks they could balance the Budget if they eliminate the fraudulent payments leaving the system, according to an official who discussed the matter with him. It is unclear what he is basing that statement on. The federal deficit for 2024 was US$1.8 trillion ($3.1 trillion). The Government Accountability Office estimated in a report that the government made US$236 billion in improper payments – three-quarters of which were overpayments – across 71 federal programmes during the 2023 fiscal year.
The Treasury Department’s proprietary system for paying the nation’s financial obligations is an operation traditionally run by a small group of career civil servants with deep technical expertise. The prospect of an intrusion into that system by outsiders such as Musk and his team has raised alarm among current and former Treasury officials that a mishap could lead to critical government obligations going unpaid, with consequences ranging from missed benefits payments to a federal default.
Leavitt said the access they were granted so far was “read only,” meaning the staff members could not alter payments.
Democrats on Monday said they would introduce legislation to try to bar Musk’s deputies from entering the Treasury system. “The Treasury Secretary must revoke DOGE’s access to the Treasury payment system at once,” said Senator Chuck Schumer, D-New York, the minority leader. “If he does not, Congress must act immediately.”
In private conversations, Musk has told friends that he considers the ultimate metric for his success to be the number of dollars saved per day, and he is sorting ideas based on that ranking.
“The more I have gotten to know President Trump, the more I like him. Frankly, I love the guy,” Musk said in a live audio conversation on X early Monday morning. “This is our shot. This is the best hand of cards we’re ever going to have.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Jonathan Swan, Theodore Schleifer, Maggie Haberman, Kate Conger, Ryan Mac and Madeleine Ngo
Photographs by: Kenny Holston, Jim Huylebroek and Haiyun Jiang
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