After quickly taking over two US government agencies, Elon Musk has gained unprecedented control over the US federal workforce of 2.2 million people, and has begun a dramatic restructuring of the government.
According to a report by the British news agency Reuters, Elon Musk, 53, the world’s richest man and an ally of President Donald Trump, has established a new center of power in Washington in two weeks, as he implements Trump’s spending cuts to reduce the size of the US government.
Musk, the CEO of Tesla and founder of SpaceX, has moved quickly since Trump was sworn in on January 20, deploying teams of current and former employees from his companies as his agents.
Musk’s actions have sparked a wave of panic among civil servants and public protests in Washington, and at times threatened to overshadow Trump’s own agenda.
Musk’s efforts are part of a sweeping government reorganization by Trump, who has fired and sidelined hundreds of civil servants in his first move to reduce bureaucracy and hire more loyalists.
Don Moynihan, a professor at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, says that in an unprecedented concentration of power among Americans, a person who lacks a top-level security clearance and is not subject to any Senate confirmation process has unprecedented and centralized control over the core of government.
When asked who he was most concerned about when it came to the possibility of his removal, a General Services Administration employee said, “Nobody is talking about Trump, Musk, who manages federal property and services. Trump has put Musk in charge of what both men call the Department of Government Performance.”
Despite its name, it is not a department, Musk does not receive a government salary, and the creation of DOGE immediately sparked lawsuits from government unions, watchdogs, and public interest groups. It is unclear who makes up DOGE.
The Trump administration has not released a list of DOGE employees, nor has it said how they are paid, how many have joined each agency, and whether they are government employees.
That raises the question of who they are accountable to. As head of the executive branch, Musk and his DOG lieutenants have taken control of the Office of Personnel Management and General Services Administration, the U.S. government’s human resources department that oversees 2.2 million government employees, along with its computer systems.
Emails were sent from there last week offering financial incentives to federal employees to leave their jobs. The GSA oversees most government contracts and manages federal property.
At least four current and former Musk aides are part of the team that has taken control of OPM, and has locked some senior managers out of their own computer systems, sources say.
Michael Linden, a senior official at the powerful Office of Management and Budget that oversaw the federal budget during former President Joe Biden’s administration, said Musk’s aides’ access to the payment system gives them extraordinary potential power.
Linden said in an interview that he could choose which payments the federal government would make.
