White House Clarifies Elon Musk's Role in DOGE Operations

Elon Musk is not the leader of DOGE -- the mysterious Trump administration operation overseeing an effort to break and remake the federal bureaucracy. In fact, he's not even technically part of it at all, the White House said in court papers Monday night.

In a three-page declaration, a top White House personnel official revealed that Musk's title is "senior adviser to the president," a role in which he has "no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself."

That explanation, provided to a federal court by Joshua Fisher, the director of the White House's Office of Administration, seems to directly contradict the way President Donald Trump and Musk have spoken publicly about the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, widely seen as a Musk-driven project to shrink and dismantle key aspects of the federal government.

The sworn statement instead deepens the questions surrounding DOGE. Fisher confirmed that Musk is not the official administrator of the office, which was established by Trump as an office in the Executive Office of the President. But Fisher did not indicate who the administrator actually is.

The technical designation does not mean Musk is not, for all practical purposes, the key decision-maker for DOGE, which has been staffed full of his allies and may still ultimately be fueled by his influence in the White House. Musk has eagerly touted DOGE's work, described his influence over its operations and appeared alongside Trump to talk about its mission.

Trump himself has credited Musk with leading DOGE.

"I'm going to tell [Elon Musk] very soon, like maybe in 24 hours, to go check the Department of Education," Trump said in a Super Bowl interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier. "He's going to find the same thing ... Then I'm going to go, go to the military. Let's check the military."

But the Fisher filing suggests a technical degree of separation that raises new questions about accountability for DOGE's operations -- a breakneck effort that has alarmed federal employees and raised fears about data breaches in some of the federal government's most closely guarded databases. He compared Musk's role to Anita Dunn, a senior adviser to President Joe Biden who occupied a similar title and employment designation in the White House.

Fisher's filing was delivered to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is weighing a legal effort by Democratic attorneys general to bar Musk and his DOGE allies from continuing to exert influence on the federal government. The states say Musk has amassed so much power that he's violating the constitution's "Appointments Clause," which requires senior executive branch officials to be confirmed by the Senate.

Chutkan indicated Monday that a ruling on the state's emergency motion to sideline Musk will come within a day. She seemed unlikely to grant that motion but asked the Trump administration for more details about the mass firings it appears DOGE has been directing across the government.

A Justice Department attorney, Joshua Gardner, declined to detail the job cuts DOGE has been involved in so far, despite Chutkan's request for specifics. He said the administration was not prepared to make a "programmatic representation" about what other job cuts may be imminent.

At a hearing Chutkan held earlier Monday, Gardner emphasized that all of the cuts so far have been carried out by personnel within federal agencies, not by DOGE officials themselves.