My dear readers, I come to you today with a correction and an apology: In the past I have referred to billionaire Elon Musk as the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency. As it turns out, however, that’s not the case — at least not on paper. In fact, as near as I can tell, there’s no official head of the Department of Government Efficiency, and Musk has no official authority to direct it.
The problem, though, is that Musk clearly been acting as though he’s running it. His name has been used as a threat against federal workers who refuse to comply with DOGE staffers’ orders. He’s appeared next to President Donald Trump in interviews, including in the Oval Office, to highlight its work. His X platform has become the main announcement board for the changes that he’s overseeing, potentially boosting its value enormously. And yet, there’s no real grounding for Musk’s power in the law — nor any clear opportunity for oversight of him or the project he’s running.
The problem, though, is that Musk clearly been acting as though he’s running it.
Speaking from Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday, Trump highlighted how nebulous Musk’s role is. “Elon is to me a patriot,” he told reporters. “So, you know, you could call him an employee, you could call him a consultant, you could call him whatever you want.” This, as a rule, is not the sort of lax terminology the federal government allows when it comes to serving in a presidential administration.
DOGE itself was born in an executive order issued on Trump’s first day in office, crafted from the gutted remains of the United States Digital Service, which has now been renamed the United States DOGE Service. During the campaign, DOGE was pitched to sound something like a blue-ribbon commission focused on saving money and eliminating wasteful spending. The order Trump signed made it sound more like a glorified IT project, tasked with “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”
As a baseline mission, the executive order was an innocuous cover allowing DOGE teams, which are now set up inside every federal agency, full access to the entirety of the government’s digital infrastructure. But from the beginning it was clear that DOGE was to have a more expansive role in reshaping the federal government more broadly, as seen in a pair of orders from that same day related to a freeze on federal hiring and a subsequent revision of the hiring process.
The original executive order also established the “USDS Administrator,” who reports to the White House chief of staff. It also names that role as head of the “U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization” that was set up within the USDS. While that may sound redundant, it serves a purpose. Temporary organizations, often advisory boards and the like, have different rules when it comes to whom they can employ, and this one was specifically exempted from the federal hiring freeze. In this case, the DOGE Service Temporary Organization is scheduled to end on July 4, 2026, after theoretically completing its task of “advancing the President’s 18-month DOGE agenda.”
It’s through this vehicle that DOGE’s troublingly inexperienced staffers have gained access to some of the most sensitive and critical networks in the world. But rather than merely updating the software, DOGE staffers are acting as a combination of White House-appointed political commissars, ensuring loyalty to the MAGA agenda and Trump himself, and the vanguard for decimating the federal workforce. The latter role became more formalized in an executive order Trump signed last week launching the DOGE “Workforce Optimization Initiative,” which orders federal agencies to consult with DOGE staffers about any new hire, which they can then veto for even the vaguest of reasons.
In that most recent order, the USDS administrator was also tasked with receiving a monthly hiring report from the staffers distributed throughout the government. It would be reasonable to assume that Musk is the one who’ll be receiving those memos. But that’s not the case, according to a document the White House filed with a federal court Monday.
In the filing, Joshua Fisher, head of the White House Office of Administration, wrote point blank that Musk is “not the U.S. DOGE Service Administrator.” Instead, Fisher wrote, Musk is a “special government employee,” serving as a senior adviser to the president within the White House Office. As such, he “has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself. Mr. Musk can only advise the president and communicate the president’s directives.”
Musk’s position as a special government employee was made official earlier this month. The designation allows him to skirt some federal ethics rules, like releasing a financial disclosure form, and (theoretically at least) limits him to working for “130 days or less in a 365-day period.” It’s likely that some of the allies whom Musk has installed, many of whom have worked for his companies, received similar designations to leapfrog the hiring process. But there’s no history of anyone in that position having anywhere near the sort of influence that Musk has wielded within the federal government.
The question, then, of who is really running DOGE on paper is still left as a mystery. Trump also managed to contradict the claim that Musk isn’t at the wheel of DOGE in a speech on Wednesday. “I signed an order creating the Department of Government Efficiency and put a man named Elon Musk in charge,” he said at an investors conference in Miami Beach, Florida. (I somehow doubt that Trump is familiar with the exact details of Musk’s position or the potential legal issues surrounding it.) The question, then, of who is really running DOGE on paper is still left as a mystery. Fisher’s declaration is attached to a case in which a federal judge rejected a request for a temporary restraining order on DOGE’s data grab and firing spree but acknowledged that there’s something weird going on here. “Plaintiffs legitimately call into question what appears to be the unchecked authority of an unelected individual and an entity that was not created by Congress and over which it has no oversight,” U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan wrote Tuesday. Tellingly, as Wired reported on Wednesday, there’s apparently confusion about even inside USDS about who the current administrator is, especially among those legacy staffers who have been retained from the organization’s previous life. The most worrying thing, then, is that the White House might be telling the truth and Musk has no operational control over DOGE. It could be that Musk’s role really is a sinecure and the administration is simply letting the world’s richest man and Trump’s biggest campaign donor feel like he’s making a difference. But someone is running the show at DOGE, receiving reports and directing staffers to fire federal workers who, in the main, have done nothing but serve their country. Anybody trying to prove who that person is faces a mountain of obstacles. DOGE was moved to be part of the Executive Office of the President, which is exempt from Freedom of Information Act requests. Any hopes of congressional oversight are laughable when the House Oversight Committee’s DOGE subcommittee is chaired by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who has made clear her job is to support DOGE’s mission, not question it. The inspectors general who would investigate it have been fired, and the Government Accountability Office, which is legally tasked with doing all the things Musk claims DOGE is doing, has been defanged. We are only a month into the administration, and answers may take many more months to uncover. In the meantime, DOGE will continue to burrow its way deeper into our government, becoming exactly the “deep state” that Trump supporters have long professed to fear. And Musk, whatever role he truly holds, will continue to reap the benefits of being seen as its architect and enabler.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House. 
