President Donald Trump said Tuesday he was signing an executive order to give tech billionaire Elon Musk more power over the federal workforce, adding to Musk's swift and sweeping consolidation of political influence.
With Musk standing to his right in the Oval Office, Trump praised the work of his office, known as the Department of Government Efficiency Service (DOGE). And Trump said he wanted Musk to now do more, even as DOGE faces multiple lawsuits from labor unions and Democratic state attorneys general over whether it is acting within the law.
The new executive order directs federal agencies to "coordinate and consult" with DOGE to cut jobs and limit hiring, according to a summary provided by the White House. Each agency will be ordered to "undertake plans for large-scale reductions in force" and limit hiring to only "essential positions," the summary says.
Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and the wealthiest person in the world, is wielding federal authority without giving up his private-sector jobs while also serving as a "special government employee." It is a temporary position that bypasses some of the disclosure obligations required of full-time government employees.
He wore an all-black "Make America Great Again" hat and had one of his 11 children underfoot for the briefing.
Trump and Musk took questions from reporters in a freewheeling exchange for more than half an hour, but the two spoke mostly in generalities and did not give details about the alleged fraud they said DOGE had found.
For weeks, Musk has railed against what he says is waste, fraud or abuse that DOGE has identified, although many of the examples he has posted about on social media lack specifics. On Monday, the DOGE account on X said the administration had terminated 89 contracts worth $881 million, but it did not say what they were or why they counted as waste.
In other instances, independent fact-checkers have cast doubt on Musk’s examples of alleged waste. His claim that the United States spent $50 million on condoms for the Gaza Strip was widely criticized for lacking evidence.
Asked by a reporter about the condom fact-checks, Musk acknowledged that some of what he has said about alleged waste in the government has turned out to be false.
“Nobody’s going to bat a thousand,” Musk said. (Earlier in the day, Musk had been posting phallic jokes on X.)
Musk also said he had worked with Secretary of State Marco Rubio to “turn on funding” for Ebola and HIV prevention, making them exceptions to his attempt at an overall spending freeze. He said pausing that funding had been a “mistake.”
“We will make mistakes, but we also fix the mistakes very quickly,” he said.
The two said little to calm concerns that they were violating the Constitution, including by trying to shutter federal agencies without the approval of Congress and refusing to spend money that Congress had appropriated. Among DOGE’s targets for elimination are the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Education Department.
In response to a reporter's question, Musk said it was not a conflict of interest for him to intervene in the operations of the Defense Department, for which SpaceX is a major contractor. He said he delegates the relevant work at SpaceX.
“First of all, I’m not the one filing the contract. It’s people at SpaceX,” he said. And he added: “If you see any contract where the where it was awarded to SpaceX and it wasn’t by far the best value for money for the taxpayer, let me know, because every one of them was.”
SpaceX had $3.8 billion in federal contracts last year, according to government data.
Trump brushed aside a reporter’s question about whether he would eventually need congressional approval to cut spending.
"I really don't know," he said. "If I need a vote of Congress to find fraud and abuse, it's fine with me. I think we'll get the vote."
Trump also attacked a federal judge in New York who granted a temporary restraining order Saturday related to DOGE's activity in the Treasury Department. He called the judge an "activist."
But he said in response to a later question that he would abide by any adverse court rulings.
"I always abide by the courts — always abide by them — and will appeal," he said.
In the three weeks since Trump took office, plaintiffs have filed 52 lawsuits over his executive orders and other administrative actions, including DOGE’s activity, according to a database maintained by Just Security, a legal publication based at New York University.
The image of Trump and Musk taking questions side-by-side appeared to put to rest any doubts over whether Musk had Trump’s support for his expansive overhaul proposals. And the latest executive order appeared to be aimed at expanding the scope of Musk's influence.
Trump did not sign the DOGE-related executive order in the presence of reporters, but the White House said later that he had signed it.
There are about 2.4 million federal employees, excluding postal workers, according to the Pew Research Center. The number has grown by a little over 1% per year since 2000, but as a share of all civilian employment it has changed little, Pew said in a report last month.
Even if DOGE succeeds at cutting the federal workforce by a substantial number, their compensation makes up a small percentage of the overall budget — about 6.6%, according to the Brookings Institution. The vast majority of federal spending goes toward Social Security; health care for the elderly, disabled and poor; the military; and interest on the national debt, the Congressional Budget Office says.
Musk and Trump mentioned the words “waste,” “fraud” or “abuse” dozens of times in the 30-plus minutes they spoke with reporters, but details were few and far between. Trump said an unspecified man had been given a federal contract for three months but was paid for 20 years, a story for which he provided no evidence. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for more information.
Several long-standing government offices were already devoted to finding waste, fraud and abuse before DOGE was created. They include the Government Accountability Office and the inspectors general for individual departments.
Musk said that DOGE has been looking into the net worth of some federal employees and that he considered a high net worth a sign of potential fraud for a government worker.
"There are quite a few people in the bureaucracy who have ostensibly a salary of a few hundred thousand dollars but somehow managed to accrue tens of millions of dollars in net worth," he said. "We're just curious as to where it came from."
Musk did not say how DOGE had acquired data about federal employees' net worth, and White House spokespeople did not immediately respond to a request for more information about his comments.
This story first appeared on chof360.com. More from NBC News:
