Musk after a meeting with India’s prime minister.Andrew Leyden/Zuma
According to Elon Musk’s posts on X, the social media platform he acquired through allegedly illegal tactics, Musk is discovering lawbreaking everywhere as he rampages through government. “Career Treasury officials are breaking the law every hour of every day,” he claimed. USAID, the agency that has saved millions of lives under its mandate from Congress? “A criminal organization.” The federal bureaucracy? “Unconstitutional.”
“There’s probably no person on the planet… less appropriate to have the role he has.”
But as elementary school kids have known for time immemorial, whoever smelt it, dealt it. In this case, the man flinging accusations of illegality is the one breaking the law. Even, as he put it himself, “every hour of every day.” That’s because there is simply no legal architecture that would allow Musk, the richest man in the world, to remake the entire federal government without running afoul of criminal conflict of interest laws.
“There’s probably no person on the planet who has more varied business interests before the US government than Elon Musk,” says Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy nonprofit, “and therefore, no person who would be more conflicted and less appropriate to have the role he has than Elon Musk.”
It’s a reality that underscores the nature of Musk’s enterprise: Not a by-the-book reworking of the government but a hostile takeover. In a lawsuit filed on Thursday, multiple states alleged that Musk’s vast power over the executive branch is inconsistent with our democratic system of government. “Evidence suggests that he has, and continues to, cut billions of dollars from agency budgets, fired agency personnel, and, in his words, ‘delete[d]’ entire agencies,” the complaint recounts. “He has canceled government contracts, announced plans to sell government property, and promised to withdraw a multitude of regulations across different agencies. He has installed his own teams into agencies and given them access to the agencies’ most sensitive data. In other words, an individual accountable only to the President—if he answers to anyone at all—is exercising apparently limitless power within the Executive Branch.”
For nearly a month, Musk has wreaked this havoc, and more, all while benefiting his businesses in ways seen and unseen. But just because he’s doing it doesn’t make it legal, constitutional, or compatible with democratic governance.
Standing in the Oval Office last week, Musk claimed that his so-called Department of Government Efficiency was not only acting transparently, but was the most transparent of any organization. As with his accusations of lawbreaking, the opposite of the boast is true. Musk has revealed nothing, leaving the media and anonymous sources to share with the public what is happening to their own government. He doesn’t even want the public to know the identities of his DOGE bros. When someone posted their names on X after they had already been published by Wired, Musk responded with his familiar refrain: “You have committed a crime.” The user’s X account was suspended.
Musk, as far as we know, doesn’t even have a job title. It took two weeks for the administration to even confirm that he is employed, saying that he has been categorized as a special government employee. This is a category of federal employee, generally a consultant or expert, hired on a temporary basis. They typically have fewer ethical limitations and disclosure requirements than full government employees, but Musk is still subject to criminal laws regarding bribery and gratuities, as well as laws restricting gifts to superiors and from inferior employees.
And while there are also rules and legally-required protocols to become a SGE, there has been zero confirmation that Musk has followed them. There is no evidence, for example, that Musk is following legally-mandated conflict of interest laws. The White House claims that Musk received ethics training and filed a confidential financial disclosure. But it is the director of the Office of Government Ethics who, according to federal regulations, should determine whether Musk, with the power to view the nation’s most closely-held information and impose his will on every agency, must actually file a public financial disclosure. Did the office weigh this issue? The director is also allowed to issue waivers in some circumstances so that Musk can be involved in decisions that impact his businesses. Did he grant any? There’s no evidence that an ethics official reviewed Musk’s conflicts and granted him any waivers. The only known known is that we know nothing. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment on these issues.)
“The way it’s supposed to happen under normal circumstances is a special government employee would provide a list of all his financial interests to an ethics official within the agency, as well as the Office of Government Ethics, and then they could point out and also monitor any potential conflicts of interest,” says Kedric Payne, an expert in government ethics at the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center. “Then you would also expect that special government employee to get pre-approval before there were any meetings or decisions that even gave the appearance that it may be a conflict of interest.”
If that’s the normal course of action, we are in the upside down. Not only does there appear to be no compliance mechanism in effect, but President Donald Trump has removed the ethics officials who could police Musk’s work. Not only did Trump fire the head of the Office of Government Ethics, 17 inspectors general have been axes (plus another who later crossed Musk) along with the head of the Office of Special Counsel, which investigates whistleblower complaints. In their place, Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt has said, Musk will police himself: “If Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with the contracts and the funding that DOGE is overseeing, that Elon will excuse himself from those contracts, and he has again abided by all applicable laws.”
Last Monday, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) sent a letter to Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, as well as the director of the Office of Government Ethics, asking whether and how Musk is complying with applicable criminal conflict of interest laws. The director of the ethics office was fired later that day. Schiff’s office says it has received no update.
Sitting in the Oval Office this week with Musk standing beside him, Trump said that his administration would watch Musk’s interests, and that if he “thought there was a lack of transparency or a conflict of interest,” Trump claimed, “we would not let him do that segment or look in that area… we watch that also.” But it’s not clear who that “we” is, since the ethics offices have all been decapitated.
Regardless of a lying president’s weak assurances, there is the simple truth of what we see with our own eyes: Musk is involved with everything, and he’s not letting up.
“I don’t see a legal way for Musk to lead DOGE in the way that it’s been described and stay in compliance with the ethics rules,” says Payne. If Musk were to follow the law, he would be a distant boss, unable to weigh in on the panoply of agencies investigating him, contracting with him, or regulating him, in addition to any other conflicts that are not currently public. Musk clearly has not taken that route.
“Checks and balances, at the moment, seem to be neutralized.”
Take, for example, USAID, where Musk appears to have directed an illegal dismantling. “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” he wrote on X on February 3. Then, to clarify that he was not using the royal we, he added, “Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.” Before the agency fell victim to DOGE, USAID was investigating Starlink, Musk’s satellite internet company.
As Musk turned his army of red-pilled teenage and 20-something tech bros on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he tweeted gleefully “CFPB RIP” along with a gravestone emoji. Not only is it illegal to halt the operations of an agency founded by Congress, Musk’s involvement is a clear conflict of interest: he has boasted of a plan to add payment features to X, which would be regulated by the CFPB.
The list goes on. As the New York Times has documented, there are at least “32 continuing investigations, pending complaints or enforcement actions into” Musk’s companies. Then there are his financial holdings that likely pose future conflicts the public does not know about. There are the possibilities for new megacontracts, which Musk, with vast power over every agency, could steer his way. Think billions in procurement of Teslas, NASA expanding work with Space X, exclusive internet contracts for Starlink, and the bone-chilling possibility that Musk’s AI company could train on—or essentially take over—the federal bureaucracy.
But beyond what we know, as my colleague Tim Murphy recently explained, Musk’s conflicts of interest are so vast as to be essentially unquantifiable: Musk has business interests or ambitions in virtually every nation on earth, and each have an interest in him. There’s no way to know where his personal interests begin and his political work ends, if there is any line at all.
There certainly is no such line when it comes to his close allyship with Donald Trump. Musk, as his top donor, spent $250 million to elect Trump president. Now, he operates entirely in Trump’s favor, even hosting press conferences of his own in the Oval Office. Whether or not Musk is in the room or on the call at any given time, agencies will feel pressure to make decisions that benefit Musk, because Musk and Trump are essentially one.
The situation makes a mockery of campaign finance laws, particularly the Supreme Court’s decision to allow unlimited outside election spending in Citizens United. Fourteen years after Justice Anthony Kennedy promised that “Independent expenditures do not lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption,” Musk held forth in the Oval Office having essentially bought his way into the White House and was now, for all intents and purposes, corruptly controlling it.
This is all happening because Trump has, in his first month on the job, dismantled the mechanisms of accountability. Normally, government ethics officials direct special governmental employees to recuse or divest when necessary—and people do as they are told. But government ethics officials have been removed. Prosecutors at the Department of Justice are supposed to enforce criminal conflict of interest laws. But Trump is in the process of transforming the DOJ from an independent agency with prosecutorial discretion to an extension of his political will—training its prosecutorial sights on Trump’s so-called enemies, and certainly not his governing partners. Trump himself is unbound by criminal laws, thanks to the Supreme Court’s immunity decision last year, and so, it may be, is his top donor and closest ally.
Congress, with its powers of oversight and the purse, could rein in Musk’s actions, but the Republican majority is too afraid of Trump’s revenge to even oppose his most dangerous nominees. In the courts, there are now two lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of Musk’s amorphous position, one by several states and another by current and former employees and contractors of USAID. They seek to halt much of DOGE’s activities.
Just because Musk has gotten away with disregarding ethical requirements doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
“We have a system of checks and balances,” says Noah Bookbinder, who leads the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “A lot of those checks and balances, at the moment, seem to be neutralized.” CREW filed a lawsuit challenging the legal structure of DOGE on the first day of the Trump administration, but Bookbinder says organizations like his have no legal recourse to challenge Musk’s own conflicts of interest, even if he’s run roughshod over longstanding rules meant to police them. Instead, Bookbinder points to the enforcers of last resort. “People can go out and protest, people can pressure legislators,” he said. “People just elected Donald Trump, and I think it’s going to take some time for them to register that there are what appear to be abuses and illegal actions.”
Just because Musk has, so far, gotten away with what appears to be brazen disregard for the ethical requirements of his job, doesn’t mean those requirements don’t exist. It simply underscores that what is happening to the government of the United States is not a legitimate rearrangement—but an illegal hijacking.
