Elon Musk’s efforts to disrupt and dismantle the federal government at the behest of Donald Trump have already sparked a legion of lawsuits. Now the legal challengers are setting their sights on a new target: Musk himself.
Two new cases accuse the ultra-wealthy CEO of illegally amassing too much government power without the accountability typically required of high-level executive branch officials. They are seeking court orders that would force Musk to halt the cost-cutting and information-gathering activities he has been spearheading through his U.S. DOGE Service.
The lawsuits rest on a provision of the Constitution that says powerful federal officers must be “established by law,” must be formally appointed by the president and must be confirmed by the Senate. Musk, of course, has not been confirmed by the Senate, and his role is amorphous and ill-defined. He has been operating out of the White House as the head of the newly created DOGE enterprise, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency but is not a formal government department. It was established by a Trump executive order, not by Congress.
Many lawsuits have challenged DOGE’s early initiatives. But the two suits filed Thursday — one brought by state governments and the other by federal employees — are the first to take on Musk personally.
“His power includes, at least, the authority to cease the payment of congressionally approved funds, access sensitive and confidential data across government agencies, cut off systems access to federal employees and contractors at will, and take over and dismantle entire independent federal agencies,” the government employees argue in a lawsuit filed by longtime Trump nemesis Norm Eisen.
Similarly, the states say Musk’s little-understood role has stoked “mass chaos and confusion for state and local governments, federal employees, and the American people.”
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan held a hearing on the states’ case Friday and agreed the states showed legitimate reasons for concern about the prospect that Musk and DOGE officials are improperly accessing or compromising federal databases.
But Chutkan stopped short of ordering an emergency halt to DOGE’s access to those systems, saying that would be an extraordinary remedy that could only be deployed with specific evidence that improper action against another federal agency was imminent.
A lawyer for the states lamented, “We’re playing Whac-A-Mole here,” and said it was hard to pinpoint where Musk would train his DOGE allies next. Chutkan acknowledged that DOGE has been rampaging through the federal government swiftly and unpredictably, but she said “bad things could happen” was not enough to justify an emergency restraining order.
Musk — who is the CEO of X, SpaceX and Tesla, and is estimated to be the world’s richest person — has done little to illuminate his precise role in the Trump administration. His job appears to entail Oval Office meetings with Trump, trolling critics on X and assailing judges who have clipped both his and Trump’s early ambitions over questions about their constitutionality.
Musk has attacked reporters for identifying the employees he has helped embed in many federal agencies. And he agreed to reinstate a DOGE employee who abruptly resigned last week after reporters surfaced racist social media posts he made under a pseudonym. (Court documents suggest, however, that the employee, Marko Elez, has not resumed his previous duties.)
Trump has made clear he endorses what Musk and his DOGE team are doing, setting out in executive orders that the group’s mission is to modernize systems and databases across the federal government.
The direct legal attack on Musk’s unappointed position will play out in courtrooms in Washington, D.C., and Maryland, where the two suits have been filed. But the issue could escalate as far as the Supreme Court and determine just how much power a president has to designate a roving budget-cutter to access the government’s most sensitive systems and databases.
At the heart of the fight is the Constitution’s “appointments clause,” which requires most powerful executive branch officials to be confirmed by the Senate. Though department leaders can hire employees who don’t need Senate approval, anyone wielding executive power must face vetting by Congress.
That principle was at the heart of a ruling last year by a Florida federal judge — Aileen Cannon — that derailed special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump for storing classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Smith’s role as a special prosecutor, Cannon concluded, violated the appointments clause — a ruling that contradicted a long line of judicial decisions upholding the authority of the Justice Department to name special counsels without getting Senate confirmation.
Trump, at the time, celebrated the ruling and praised Cannon as a “brilliant” judge. Now, Trump’s detractors — who railed against Cannon’s decision in the context of special counsels — want to apply the same reasoning to Musk.
But Musk’s role has no historical comparison. Never before has a president empowered a private CEO to come into the government and take a hacksaw to systems governed by intricate laws and policies meant to insulate them from political manipulation.
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