Elon Musk Says DOGE Aims to Finish $1 Trillion in Cuts by End of May
Dana Hull and Jennifer A. Dlouhy – March 27, 2025
(Bloomberg) — Elon Musk, the billionaire running President Donald Trump’s federal cost cutting effort, said he plans to slash $1 trillion in government spending by the end of May.
Musk, in an interview Thursday with Fox News’ Bret Baier, said he believes that his Department of Government Efficiency can find that level of cost savings within 130 days from the start of Trump’s term, which began on Jan. 20.
That presents an ambitious goal that would require slashing more than half of the $1.8 trillion the US spent on non-defense discretionary programs in 2024.
“I think we will accomplish most of the work required to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars within that time frame,” Musk said on Baier’s show Special Report.
Musk is a special government employee, a classification for temporary federal workers who are only supposed to work 130 days out of the year in their roles.
Musk said he wants to cut 15% of the government’s annual spending — which amounted to $6.75 trillion in fiscal year 2024. That’s a reduction of about $1 trillion. Musk says he is confident he can slash that amount “without affecting any of the critical government services.”
The interview came days after Trump said that he expected to be “satisfied” with DOGE’s cuts in the coming month or two. The president has also said DOGE’s overhauls are not “necessarily a very popular thing to do,” an acknowledgment of the political risk associated with Musk’s plans for wide-ranging cuts.
Much of the federal government’s spending is on mandatory programs, such as Medicare and Social Security, where there is little leeway to make cuts. Musk has said, without citing evidence, that those programs are overrun with fraud and waste.
DOGE has deployed at least 10 staffers to the Social Security Administration to identify waste. But the data does not support claims of widespread fraud: from 2015 through 2022, Social Security estimated that it made almost $72 billion in improper payments — less than 1% of benefits paid, according to an inspector general report last year.
The Fox interview marked the first time that many of the key people working with DOGE have spoken publicly about their work. Steve Davis, a longtime Musk aide, was identified by Baier as the DOGE chief operating officer. Joe Gebbia, the billionaire who co-founded Airbnb and is on Tesla Inc.’s board of directors, also joined the interview.
So far, the accounting from Musk’s own team has shown they are still far from the $1 trillion mark. The DOGE website, which has been plagued with errors and overstatements, lists about $22 billion in contract savings. They claim about $130 billion in overall cost reductions, which aren’t itemized.
Musk’s DOGE has also spearheaded a wave of federal government layoffs that agencies have begun implementing in recent weeks.
Musk sought to downplay the job cuts, saying that “almost no one’s gotten fired.”
Agencies in recent weeks have announced a spate of workforce reductions. Earlier Thursday, the Department of Health and Human Services said it would cut 10,000 jobs. Earlier this month, the Education Department said it was cutting half of its employees and the Small Business Administration is eliminating 43% of its workforce. The Department of Veterans Affairs said it would terminate 80,000 workers and the Treasury Department said in a court filing that large-scale cuts are planned.
DOGE has faced a series of legal setbacks as judges have halted some of their cuts. Musk’s team has also been blocked from accessing some systems and databases, including at the Social Security Administration.
“We’re going after them”: Musk promises Trump admin will target Tesla critics
Griffin Eckstein – March 27, 2025
Elon Musk KENNY HOLSTON/THE NEW YORK TIMES/11276477p/AFP via Getty Images
Tesla CEO and Trump advisor Elon Musk gave Fox News’s Bret Baier a rare look inside his Department of Government Efficiency on Thursday. While the conversation centered around supposed cost-cutting, talk of enemies of MAGA and Musk was never far off.
The X owner doubled down on promises from Attorney General Pam Bondi and President Donald Trump that those caught vandalizing Tesla dealerships would face harsh legal penalties. However, Musk took it a step further, promising punishment for Tesla’s critics.
“People are committing violence. They are firebombing Tesla dealerships. They are shooting guns into stores. They’re threatening people,” Musk said. “Why? What’s happening, it seems to me, is they’re being fed propaganda by the far left, and they believe it.”
“The ones pushing the lies and propaganda, we’re going after them,” Musk continued. “I think there’s some real evil out there. We have to overcome it.”
Musk wasn’t clear about what types of anti-Tesla speech could be subject to prosecution. When it comes to anti-Musk speech, the unelected meddler certainly has his pick. Asked by Baier how he feels when he’s “called a Nazi, a white supremacist, a fascist,” Musk said he and Trump both faced comparisons to far-right authoritarian leaders like Hitler and Mussolini – and said those responsible needed to be stopped.
“They’re pushing these lies. And why do they push these lies? And I think need to hold people responsible for pushing these lies,” Musk said. “Because those lies almost got the president killed.”
Musk defends Doge and cuts on Fox News: ‘Almost no one has gotten fired’
Nick Robins-Early – March 27, 2025
Elon Musk at the inauguration ceremony of Donald Trump.Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/AFP/Getty Images
Elon Musk and seven members of his so-called “department of government efficiency” sat down for a rare interview on Thursday evening on Fox News, defending their efforts amid public backlash and concern over cuts to key government agencies.
Over the course of an hour-long sit-down with host Bret Baier, Musk and team members repeatedly attempted to assuage fears over Doge’s targeting of agencies such as the Social Security Administration. Musk also downplayed the number of government employees his initiative has targeted in cuts, saying it was a small percentage of the overall government workforce and others left voluntarily.
“Basically almost no one has gotten fired,” Musk claimed. His initiative has planned to lay off or offer buyouts to 100,000 federal employees, although courts have ordered thousands of workers to be reinstated after finding they were illegally fired.
Musk and his team at Doge have rapidly accumulated power across federal agencies since inauguration day. They have led the dismantling of USAID, the world’s largest single source of humanitarian aid, as well as fired thousands of government workers. Doge staffers and Musk allies have also gained access to sensitive government data, as well as been placed in key positions at major government agencies.
Doge staffers took turns during the interview framing their efforts as vital to the survival of the government and claiming their overhaul would help Americans. Asked about a Washington Post report that cuts at the Social Security Administration caused the agency’s website to repeatedly crash and resulted in long waits, Musk claimed that he would keep the website online and increase benefits.
“Legitimate recipients of social security will receive more money not less money,” Musk said. “Let the record show that I said this.”
Other members of Doge touted their previous experience working as tech executives, claiming that they could import ideas from Silicon Valley and private enterprises into government.
“We really believe that the government can have an Apple Store-like experience,” said Joe Gebbia, a Doge team member who co-founded Airbnb.
The Fox News interview on Thursday took place as nationwide protests are planned against Musk at Tesla showrooms this coming weekend. Doge is also facing nearly two dozen lawsuits that allege Musk and his team acted without legal authority while violating privacy and transparency laws. He has reacted to the legal pushback and judges’ rulings against the Trump administration by calling on Congress to impeach justices and radically overhaul the judicial system.
Many Doge members have also come under individual public and media scrutiny for their youth and lack of experience in government. Their behavior at agencies has drawn additional criticism from federal employees, who have reported that Doge staffers have siloed themselves off from other workers, hidden their names on video calls and set up Ikea beds to sleep inside federal buildings.
Several Doge workers have already become involved in scandals surrounding their suitability to work with sensitive government systems that affect millions of people. Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old listed as a “senior adviser” at the state department, previously provided tech support to a cybercrime gang, according to a Reuters investigation.
Another Doge staffer who was given access to treasury department systems, 25-year-old Marko Elez, resigned following a Wall Street Journal report that found he was linked to a social media account that made numerous posts that advocated for racism and eugenics. Musk held a poll on X asking if Elez should return, however, and he was reinstated later that month at the Social Security Administration.
Along with Doge’s group of young engineers, several of Musk’s top executives from his private businesses have also shifted over to his government work. Steve Davis, who helped facilitate Musk’s mass layoffs at X and became president of his Boring Company in 2018, is reportedly running Doge’s daily operations. Davis sat beside Musk during the interview on Thursday.
Polling shows that the majority of American voters disapprove of Musk’s initiative, with attitudes to Doge largely divided along partisan lines. Musk’s own favorability among Americans is similar, according to a Pew Research Center survey taken in late January which found Americans overall hold a more negative view of the Tesla CEO.
Musk previously appeared on Fox Business earlier this month to tout Doge’s achievements, as well as claim that he was planning on doubling the team’s staff. He has also been extremely active boasting about Doge’s cost-cutting efforts on X, the social media platform that he owns, although there has been very little public transparency into how the initiative is operating and what savings it is actually making. Analyses of Doge’s public “wall of receipts” website have found it full of errors and the site has deleted billions in claimed savings from its ledger without explanation.
In the same interview, Musk said he was running his slew of businesses, which include X, SpaceX and Tesla, “with great difficulty” because of his work with the Trump administration. Musk has lost some $100bn from his personal fortune due to a slump in Tesla’s stock this year.
Toward the end of the segment, Baier showed part of an additional one-on-one interview with Musk in which he was asked about calling the Arizona senator Mark Kelly a “traitor” for visiting Ukraine. Musk appeared to double down on his attack, saying that Kelly’s credentials as navy combat veteran and former astronaut didn’t matter if he “put the interests of another country above America”.
Musk’s unpopular DOGE piles up legal losses, so Trump targets federal judges
Chris Brennan, USA TODAY – March 24, 2025
To hear President Donald Trump and his unhinged hatchet man Elon Musk tell it, the Department of Government Efficiency is hard at work, successfully rooting out waste, fraud and corruption in federal agencies.
To hear federal judges tell it – DOGE has repeatedly violated the U.S. Constitution and other federal laws and regulations that govern how employees can be fired from their jobs and how their agencies can be dismantled.
Trump and Musk rattle off plenty of claims about DOGE but turn hostile when asked for specifics. The judges go a different route, establishing long legal paper trails with orders and rulings that clearly spell out the law and their logic.
That leaves Trump and Musk looking like grifters in a frenetic con job designed to bewilder us with unprecedented dismemberment of our government. A prime tactic in that grift – melt down in tantrums each time a judge stymies the action.
Trump, long known for explosive outbursts against judges who don’t rule as he likes, popped off again Thursday in a social media post, decrying “Radical Left Judges” blocking DOGE and other administration efforts.
One problem there – judicial data collected and tracked by Adam Bonica, an associate professor of political science at Stanford University, completely debunks that. Using “judicial ideology” measures he helped develop, Bonica found that 76% of the judges who have ruled against Trump were liberals, while 88% were centrists and 50% were conservative.
“The Trump administration portrays judicial opposition as purely partisan, but the data reveals a starkly different reality: judges from across the ideological spectrum are ruling against administration policies at remarkable rates,” Bonica wrote in a post Thursday on his website, On Data and Democracy. “This cross-ideological judicial resistance suggests deeper institutional concerns about executive overreach rather than mere partisan motivations.”
Let’s be honest. Trump and Musk don’t care about our laws.
Trump and Musk couldn’t care less about the constitutional requirement for coequal branches of government, with the president, Congress and the judiciary sharing the power to keep each other in check.
As of March 15, at least 46 judicial rulings have gone against Trump since he took office and sicced DOGE on the government, according to a tracker regularly updated by The New York Times.
Trump thinks Supreme Court will be safe space for his lawlessness
President Donald Trump speaks to reporters before boarding Marine One at the White House on March 21, 2025.
Trump looks to be working from a short-term and long-term plan here.
First, he wants these low-level court challenges to reach the U.S. Supreme Court, where the 6-3 hard-right conservative majority last year issued him a free pass on alleged criminal behavior. Trump always wants more. Now he wants the Supreme Court to say he can abolish government agencies established by Congress and ignore judges who try to stop him.
Second, Trump wants to permanently distort the culture of American public service, to make working for the government an unsustainable economic option, discouraging would-be federal applicants.
New polling shows that’s not so popular. A Fox News poll found that 65% of the people surveyed March 14-17 are extremely or very concerned that DOGE operates with “not enough thought or planning.” Those surveyed are not so impressed with Musk, with 58% disapproving of his DOGE work while 40% approve.
Trump didn’t care for that, lashing out Thursday in a social media post that demanded that Roberts “fix this toxic and unprecedented situation” – which is how an American president sees a coequal branch of government dutifully doing its work.
He wants this fight to reach the Supreme Court. And, as always, this is not just about winning for Trump. He wants to twist and contort the American government so that, going forward, it just looks too scary to dare fight him at all.
67,000 white South Africans have expressed interest in Trump’s plan to give them refugee status
Gerald Imray – March 20, 2025
FILE – White South Africans demonstrate in support of U.S. President Donald Trump in front of the U.S. embassy in Pretoria, South Africa, Feb. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay, File)FILE – White South Africans demonstrate in support of U.S. President Donald Trump in front of the U.S. embassy in Pretoria, South Africa, Feb. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay, File)President Donald Trump waves from the stairs of Air Force One upon his arrival at Joint Base Andrews, Md., Monday, March 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Luis M. Alvarez)
CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — The United States Embassy in South Africa said Thursday it received a list of nearly 70,000 people interested in refugee status in the U.S. under President Donald Trump’s plan to relocate members of a white minority group he claims are victims of racial discrimination by their Black-led government.
The list was given to the embassy by the South African Chamber of Commerce in the U.S., which said it became a point of contact for white South Africans asking about the program announced by the Trump administration last month. The chamber said the list does not constitute official applications.
Trump issued an executive order on Feb. 7 cutting U.S. funding to South Africa and citing “government actions fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.”
Trump’s executive order specifically referred to Afrikaners, a white minority group who are descendants of mainly Dutch and French colonial settlers who first came to South Africa in the 17th century. The order directed Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem to prioritize humanitarian relief to Afrikaners who are victims of “unjust racial discrimination” and resettle them in the U.S. under the refugee program.
There are approximately 2.7 million Afrikaners in South Africa, which has a population of 62 million. Trump’s decision to offer some white South Africans refugee status went against his larger policy to halt the U.S. refugee resettlement program.
The South African government has said that Trump’s allegations that it is targeting Afrikaners through a land expropriation law are inaccurate and largely driven by misinformation. Trump has posted on his Truth Social platform that Afrikaners were having their farmland seized, when no land has been taken under the new law.
The executive order also criticized South Africa’s foreign policy, specifically its decision to accuse Israel of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza in a case at the United Nations’ top court. The Trump administration has accused South Africa of supporting the Palestinian militant group Hamas and Iran and taking an anti-American stance. The U.S. has also expelled the South African ambassador, accusing him of being anti-America and anti-Trump.
An official at the U.S. Embassy in the South African capital, Pretoria, confirmed receipt of the list of names from the South African Chamber of Commerce in the U.S. but gave no more detail.
Neil Diamond, the president of the chamber, said the list contains 67,042 names. Most were people between 25 and 45 years old and have children.
He told the Newzroom Afrika television channel that his organization had been inundated with requests for more information since Trump’s order and had contacted the State Department and the embassy in Pretoria “to indicate that we would like them to make a channel available for South Africans that would like to get more information and register for refugee status.”
“That cannot be the responsibility of the chamber,” he said.
Diamond said only U.S. authorities could officially register applications for resettlement in the U.S. The U.S. Embassy in South Africa said it is awaiting further instructions on the implementation of Trump’s order.
My Old Friend Is Helping Elon Musk Destroy America
Adam Green – March 20, 2025
I once took refuge from my political day job by attending laugh-filled game nights at the home of a person now firing tens of thousands of federal workers.
For Steve Davis, Elon Musk’s right-hand man at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), life has always been a game. A puzzle to be solved regardless of a larger vision or set of values.
But sadly, as I toldThe New York Times, my friend who was once a fun outside-the-box thinker is now a drone — blindly subservient to a corrupt billionaire on a self-enriching power trip.
Even worse for millions of Americans, Steve’s current tunnel vision doesn’t allow him to challenge the obvious flaw in the game handed to him by Musk. This game only gives points for cutting dollars in the federal budget, even if greater financial costs — plus the cost of human pain — are transferred to American families and businesses.
Most Americans have never heard of the guy hurting their lives. Here is what Americans should know about Steve Davis, especially Republican members of Congress caught between the ideal of “government efficiency” and the enormous pushback that their constituents are expressing every day.
Steve is eccentric. His former Washington, D.C. apartment looked like a start-up, with a ping pong table and beverage machine to delight guests. He once threw a dinner party that included a squire announcing people at the door, a magician, and playful Justin Bieber plates.
I passed on the opportunity to invest what Steve described as “fun money” in his bar, called Thomas Foolery. Customers could shoot each other with squirt guns and drink prices were left to a game of chance. Shockingly, the bar failed quickly.
Steve would shun political talk, saying, “I know nothing about politics.”
He was more interested in playing games with friends long into the night. He often created new rules, respecting those who were quick enough to keep up and throwing barbs at those who stumbled.
He was the lone Washington staffer for Elon Musk’s SpaceX for years. In order to get his first engineering job, Musk reportedly required Steve to reduce the cost of a $120,000 item. Steve got it down to $3,900. (Whether that new part ultimately transferred costs to customers is unreported.)
Friends were barely ever reminded of Steve’s employment — an exception being at a yearly scavenger hunt he threw at Mr. Yogato, his yogurt shop where people won discounts by doing dances, knowing song lyrics, and answering Seinfeld trivia. Winning scavenger teams received items that had been launched into space or won Tesla test drives.
I last heard from Steve in 2023 and don’t remember seeing him in person since 2018, when he departed Washington for Texas to be closer to SpaceX’s rocket launch site. The few times I engaged Steve about Musk a decade ago, their relationship seemed distant. But that changed, as did his innocent gamesmanship.
A recent book called Character Limitreports that Musk worked with many sycophants, but Steve “took it even a tad further” and “idolized” Musk.
He eventually became Musk’s loyal fixer. Steve described his relationship with Musk as “Look here, Davis, get this done!”
When Steve ran into regulatory roadblocks, Musk reportedly berated Steve and threatened to fire him — traumatic game rules that Steve would clearly carry with him. When asked about his vision of colonizing space, Steve said that vision question “is for the Elons of the world. I just want to see [the rocket] go up” — a scary automaton attitude when applied to the current Trump administration.
After Musk bought Twitter, Steve reportedly slept in Twitter headquarters with his newborn baby. According to court filings, as Twitter fired thousands of workers and refused to pay them money they were owed, Steve pushed workers to violate rent contracts and demanded they violate local permitting laws — all to meet Musk’s cost-cutting goal.
When Musk turned to investing hundreds of millions in Donald Trump’s candidacy, Davis moved to Pennsylvania. The games quickly began with an arguably illegal million-dollar daily giveaway to swing-state voters and handouts of $47 for signers of a petition.
A tragedy in this moment is that Steve’s loyalty to Musk is blinding him from seeing what’s before his eyes: The rules of the DOGE game are ridiculous. They increase inefficiency, and they make people’s lives worse.
Suppose it costs $10 to fill a giant pothole. This fix could prevent thousands of dollars in damage for family cars and business delivery trucks. That’s the definition of efficiency and a great use of government money for the common good. But in Musk’s DOGE game, the only thing that counts is reducing costs on the government’s balance sheet — not actually saving money for Americans.
Similarly, DOGE is firing thousands of Social Security employees, closing Social Security phone support lines, and shutting down many Social Security offices.
For millions of grandparents, this likely means checks get delayed, new applicants have trouble registering, and seniors with walkers have to physically travel long distances for the chance to get help securing their earned benefits.
Those who depend on their retirement checks to survive will suffer from increased medical bills when they cannot afford to eat or buy their medicine. Taxpayers will pay these bills via Medicare.
Adding further absurdity to the “efficiency” game, DOGE is neutering the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which stops banks and credit card companies from ripping off Americans. The CFPB has already saved Americans over $20 billion, not one iota of which gets counted in the rules of the DOGE game. (This move conveniently shoots the financial watchdog just as Elon Musk enters the financial services industry — certainly efficient for at least one billionaire.)
Add in cuts to aviation safety, food inspection, nutrition assistance for kids, veterans health care, Medicaid, and clean water. As author Ezra Klein said recently, “Efficiency of what?… I want efficiency towards an end. Towards a vision of the future that isn’t terrible.”
But Steve is focused on the game, the puzzle of it all — not the vision.
I’ve received messages of genuine sadness from those who knew Steve during more innocent times. What’s truly heartbreaking to us is that the old Steve Davis — the brilliant, creative Steve Davis — could be doing inspiring work if he had the self-assuredness to question Musk’s rules.
Picture the games that giant corporations and the ultra-wealthy play to avoid taxes, leaving the rest of us paying more. Picture congressional insider stock trading, the bloated military budget, and the corporate welfare that flows when government insiders turn into lobbyists. Picture the price gouging by credit card companies, banks, health insurance companies, and at the grocery store. Heck, even picture the millions of hours Americans lose at red traffic lights with bad timers.
Much of this could be solved by a smart engineer leveraging technology, including artificial intelligence. If solving these problems were the game, Steve’s mind could raise quality of life for millions.
But instead, we have artificial intelligence of the worst kind. Brilliance blinded by loyalty. A game out of control. And every day Donald Trump turns the keys over to Elon Musk, who then hands them to my once friend, Americans are the losers.
Adam Green is Co-Founder of the Progressive Change Institute.
Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly, seen here speaking before the United Nations in 2023, told reporters on Parliament Hill on Wednesday that China has executed four Canadians. File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI
March 20 (UPI) — China has executed four Canadians, according to Ottawa’s foreign affairs minister, who condemned Beijing for not heeding their calls for leniency.
Little is known about the executions. China’s embassy in Ottawa has yet to respond to UPI’s request for comment.
Melanie Joly, Canada’s foreign affairs minister, told reporters on Parliament Hill following a cabinet meeting Wednesday that the four people executed were dual Chinese and Canadian citizens. She said their executions were related to drug charges.
“We strongly condemn the executions that did happen against Canadians in China,” she said.
Joly said she had been following the situation “very, very closely” for months and had personally asked Beijing for leniency, as had former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau when he was still office.
“We made sure to press on China how much we needed to make sure that, ultimately, these Canadians would be safe,” she said.
Teams in Canada and China are supporting the families of those executed, she said, adding, “We will continue to engage with China, as we’ll continue to not only strongly condemn but also ask for leniency for other Canadians that are facing similar situations.”
She would not say how many other Canadians were facing the death penalty in China, citing requests from their families to keep information private.
It was not clear when the executions occurred.
China leads the world in executions, according to Amnesty International, which believes Beijing carries out thousands every year.
In a statement Wednesday, the international human rights organization chastised Beijing for the executions and praised Ottawa for condemning China’s actions while calling on it to do more to protect its citizens abroad
“We are devastated for the families of the victims, and we hold them in our hearts as they try to process the unimaginable,” Ketty Nivyabandi, secretary general of Amnesty International Canada, said in a statement.
“Our thoughts also go to the loved ones of Canadian citizens whom China is holding on death row or whose whereabouts in the Chinese prison system are unknown. They deserve answers and justice, not the sickening worry they have been subjected to because of years of separation and uncertainty.”
The Canada-China relationship has been publicly fraught for years.
In 2018, Canada arrested Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Chinese telecom giant Huawei, at the request of the United States, where she was wanted on a slew of charges, including money laundering.
China, seemingly in retaliation, arrested two Canadians, Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, on espionage charges. However, they were released in September 2021, days after Meng reached a deal with U.S. prosecutors that facilitated her return to China.
DOGE and Musk’s USAID shutdown probably violated the U.S. Constitution
Mashable – March 19, 2025
Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what’s in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience.Generate Key Takeaways
In an 68-page opinion filed in the Maryland District Court on Tuesday, judge Theodore Chuang granted a preliminary injunction preventing DOGE from further dismantling USAID. A vital foreign aid organisation, USAID offered humanitarian assistance to other countries on behalf of the U.S. government, including disaster and poverty relief. Unfortunately, billionaire Musk apparently considered such spending wasteful, shutting down USAID, reportedly reducing a workforce of over 10,000 to 611, and abruptly cutting off billions in foreign aid shortly after President Donald Trump’s inauguration.
The temporary injunction doesn’t restore USAID to what it was prior to DOGE’s intervention. However, it does mean that DOGE cannot fire any more USAID employees, end its contracts or grants, or shut down its offices and IT systems. The court further ordered DOGE to reinstate all current USAID employees’ access to their email, payments, security, and other electronic systems, as well as restore deleted emails.
Why was DOGE shutting down USAID potentially unconstitutional?
Supporters of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAid) rally on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol on February 05, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Credit: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
The case was brought by 26 USAID employees and contractors, some of whom the court noted had been stranded overseas without vital security software or funds for basic living expenses when DOGE shut down USAID’s systems. In his ruling, Chuang agreed with the plaintiffs’ assessment that Musk and DOGE violated the U.S. Constitution on more than one occasion, finding that their case was likely to succeed.
Specifically, the plaintiffs alleged that the Constitution’s Appointments Clause was breached because Musk operated as an Officer of the United States without being appointed as such. The defense refuted this, claiming that Musk was merely acting in an advisory capacity, and wasn’t the one actually calling the shots. Chuang found this unconvincing.
“To deny [this claim] solely on the basis that, on paper, Musk has no formal legal authority relating to the decisions at issue, even if he is actually exercising significant authority on governmental matters, would open the door to an end-run about the Appointments Clause,” wrote Chuang.
“Musk’s public statements and posts on X, in which he has stated on multiple occasions that DOGE will take action, and such action occurred shortly thereafter, demonstrate that he has firm control over DOGE…. [T]he present record supports the conclusion that Musk, without having been duly appointed as an Officer of the United States, exercised significant authority reserved for an Officer…”
The plaintiffs further argued that Musk and DOGE breached the separation of powers because USAID is a federal agency that can only be created or abolished by Congress. As such, DOGE’s shutdown of USAID allegedly exceeded the authority of the executive branch to encroach upon the legislative branch. Chuang also considered this argument strong.
“Congress has made clear through statute its express will that USAID be an independent agency, and that it not be abolished or substantially reorganized without congressional approval,” said Chuang. “[Musk and DOGE’s] present actions to dismantle USAID violate the Separation of Powers because they contravene congressional authority relating to the establishment of an agency.”
Elon Musk, who is leading Donald Trump’s unprecedented purge of the federal workforce, claimed it doesn’t make sense that people dislike him because he’s only ever “done productive things” and has “never done anything harmful.”
Americans — to an ever increasing proportion — disagree. As tens of thousands of federal employees and their families wait in limbo to see if they will retain (or regain) their jobs, the economy takes a downturn, entitlement programs are cut or crippled, and international aid is slashed with devastating consequences, Musk and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are pissing off a lot of people. A slew of recent polling has found that an increasing majority of Americans view the billionaire and his hack-and-slash treatment of the government negatively, even if they support major reforms.
On Tuesday, a federal judge found that Musk and DOGE “likely violated the United States Constitution in multiple ways” when they shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development, America’s foreign aid bureau, and terminated thousands of employees.
Later that day, Musk appeared on Fox News and discussed a recent string of protests as well as attacks and vandalism against Tesla vehicles and dealerships — claiming it’s happening because he and DOGE are uncovering fraud.
“It turns out, when you take away people’s, you know, the money they’re receiving fraudulently, they get very upset, and they basically want to kill me because I’m stopping their fraud, and they want to hurt Tesla because we’re stopping this, this terrible waste and corruption in the government,” Musk said, adding: “Bad people will do bad things.”
At one point in the interview, Musk — who recently threatened to fire every federal worker who ignores his HR emails — demanded more empathy from Democrats amid the attacks on Tesla. “It’s really come as quite a shock to me that there’s this level of hatred and violence from the left,” he told Sean Hannity. “I thought the left Democrats were supposed to be the party of empathy, the party of caring, and yet they’re burning down cars. They’re firebombing dealerships. They’re firing bullets into dealerships.”
He continued: “Tesla is a peaceful company. We’ve never done anything harmful. I’ve never done anything harmful. I’ve only done productive things. So I think we just have a deranged — there’s some kind of mental illness thing going on here, because this doesn’t make any sense.”
Former employees of Musk’s companies, government regulators, several of his ex-partners, his children, and the virtual sea of people being negatively affected by Musk’s work as an unelected shadow-president might disagree with the notion that the billionaire has “never done anything harmful,” and some are making themselves heard.
On Tuesday, Rep. Mike Flood (R-Neb.) was confronted by furious constituents at a town hall in his home district, including with questions about Musk’s conflicts of interests. Musk’s company SpaceX has received billions in contracts from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Trump administration is movingto incorporate Starlink, Musk’s satellite internet business, throughout the federal government.
“What makes you think that [Musk] has no conflict of interest?” one person asked Flood. “Do you think he would cut that before he would cut our Medicare or our Social Security or our jobs?”
Flood responded that he remained in full “support [of] Elon Musk, and the Department of Government Efficiency.” To which the room exploded into a chorus of boos and jeers against the Nebraska representative.
Flood is not the only lawmaker facing furious voters, to the point that earlier this month the National Republican Congressional Committee advised members of the GOP to just stop holding town halls. GOP leaders have — as is routine these days — accused critics of being paid protesters as a way of dismissing their constituents’ concerns. Musk has capitalized on the allegation.
“There are larger forces at work as well,” he told Hannity on Tuesday, speaking about the Tesla attacks and protests. “I don’t know who’s funding it and who’s coordinating it, because this is, this is crazy. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Hannity lamented that the people who worked for Tesla could potentially “lose their jobs.” Yet neither he nor Musk bothered to spare an empathetic thought for the thousands of Americans DOGE rendered unemployed the last two months, and the potentially devastating domestic and international ramifications of his corrupt political project.
Trump’s bluntness powered a White House comeback. Now his words are getting him in trouble in court
Chris Megerian and Lindsay Whitehurst – March 19, 2025
President Donald Trump greets Ireland’s Prime Minister Micheál Martin as he arrives at the West Wing of the White House in Washington, Wednesday, March 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)Elon Musk flashes his t-shirt that reads “DOGE” to the media as he walks on South Lawn of the White House, in Washington, Sunday, March 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)President Donald Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk speak to reporters near a red Model S Tesla vehicle on the South Lawn of the White House Tuesday, March 11, 2025, in Washington. (Pool via AP)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump’s shoot-from-the-lip style kept Americans on the edge of their seats during last year’s campaign. But now that he’s speaking as a president and not as a candidate, his words are being used against him in court in the blizzard of litigation challenging his agenda.
The spontaneity is complicating his administration’s legal positions. Nowhere has this been clearer than in cases involving his adviser Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, the driving force in his efforts to downsize and overhaul the federal government.
The latest example came earlier this week when U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang ruled that Musk had likely violated the Constitution by dismantling the United States Agency for International Development.
The lawsuit turned on the question of whether the billionaire entrepreneur had overstepped his authority. Justice Department lawyers and White House officials insist that Musk is merely a presidential adviser, not the actual leader of DOGE.
But Trump has said otherwise — in speeches, interviews and public remarks — and Chuang quoted him extensively in his decision.
Trump most notably boasted of creating DOGE during his prime-time address to a joint session of Congress and said it was “headed by Elon Musk.” Republicans gave Musk a standing ovation, and he saluted from the gallery above the House chamber.
“Trump’s words were essential, central and indispensable,” said Norm Eisen, one of the lawyers for USAID employees who filed the lawsuit. “His admissions took what would have been a tough case and made it into a straightforward one.”
The looseness with words is a shift from predecessors like Democratic President Barack Obama, who used to say that he was careful because anything he said could send troops marching or markets tumbling.
Trump has no such feeling of restraint, and neither do other members of his Republican administration such as Musk.
Chuang, who is based in Maryland and was nominated by Obama, also cited social media posts from Musk, who writes frequently on X, the platform that he owns.
For example, Musk posted “we spent the weekend feeding USAID to the woodchipper” on Feb. 3. The agency was being brought to a standstill at that time, with staff furloughed, spending halted and headquarters shut down.
“Musk’s public statements and posts … suggest that he has the ability to cause DOGE to act,” Chuang wrote in his ruling.
Harrison Fields, principal deputy press secretary at the White House, said Trump was fulfilling his campaign promise “to make the federal government more efficient and accountable to taxpayers.”
“Rogue bureaucrats and activist judges attempting to undermine this effort are only subverting the will of the American people and their obstructionist efforts will fail,” he said.
Anthony Coley, who led public affairs at the Justice Department during Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration, said statements involving civil litigation were always coordinated between his office and the West Wing.
“The words could be used to support what we’re doing or undermine what we’re doing,” he said. “It’s a carefully choreographed effort to make sure there was no daylight between what was said in the court of public opinion and what could ultimately play out in the court of law.”
In comparison to how things were done in the past, Coley said, Trump has a “ready-fire-aim approach of doing business.”
Trump doesn’t usually let legal disputes force him to turn down the volume. During a criminal investigation over his decision to keep classified records at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida after leaving the White House in 2021, Trump spoke extensively about the case in an interview with Fox News.
Longtime defense lawyers were startled because defendants are usually encouraged to keep mum while facing an indictment. But the situation panned out for Trump. His legal team delayed the case, and the special counsel’s office dropped the charges after Trump won the election last November — presidents can’t be prosecuted while in office.
DOGE has been the focus of nearly two dozen lawsuits. It’s often prevailed so far in cases involving access to government data, where several plaintiffs have struggled to convince judges to block the organization’s actions.
But it’s also run into challenges, such as a lawsuit over whether DOGE must comply with public records requests. The Trump administration asserted in court that DOGE is part of the White House, meaning it’s exempt.
Judge Christopher Cooper, also nominated by Obama, disagreed, siding with a government watchdog group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW.
“Musk and the President’s public statements indicate that USDS” — the original acronym for the organization that was renamed as DOGE — “is in fact exercising substantial independent authority,” wrote Cooper, who is based in Washington.
Cooper concluded that DOGE can “identify and terminate federal employees, federal programs, and federal contracts. Doing any of those three things would appear to require substantial independent authority; to do all three surely does.”
He ordered DOGE to start responding to requests about the team’s role in mass firings and disruptions to federal programs. The administration unsuccessfully asked the judge to reconsider, saying the judge “fundamentally misapprehended” the agency’s structure.
The cases are still in their early stages, and the novel legal questions they’re raising will take time for the courts to consider, said Michael Fragoso, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and former chief counsel to Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
“What Elon does on Twitter is not necessarily what DOGE does,” he said. “My hope would be courts take the time to sift between those two.”
Just because Musk claims credit online for deep agency cuts, that doesn’t necessarily translate to DOGE having authority in the eyes of the law, Stanford Law School professor Michael McConnell argued in a recent debate on the issue.
DOGE is recommending changes, he said, but it’s the agency heads who are actually putting them into effect.
