President Trump has empowered Elon Musk, one of the richest men in the world, to fire government employees, eliminate federal agencies and run roughshod over both federal law and the Constitution.
In an unparalleled delegation of executive branch authority, Trump has chosen Musk — who is at once an entrepreneur whose companies have won billions of dollars in federal contracts and an open supporter of far-right political parties in Europe — to conduct a radical reconfiguration of the American government in conformity with the ideological agendas of both Trump and Musk.
The two men have at least one thing in common. Both grew up in white enclaves during periods when racial strife was emerging — Trump was born in 1946 and grew up in the affluent Queens neighborhood of Jamaica Estates in New York City; Musk was born in 1971 and grew up in the suburbs of Johannesburg and Durban, in South Africa, at a time when whites still ruled the country under apartheid.
The elevation of Musk marks a major reversal of Trump ideology from the angry working class, anti-elitism of his first winning campaign, in 2016, under the guidance of Steve Bannon, to the explicit privileging, this time around, of elite tech oligarchs — rich beyond the imagination of ordinary people — to guide government policies.
It is no easy task to grasp the scale and magnitude of Trump’s appointment of Musk to run the Department of Government Efficiency, better known by its acronym, DOGE. Musk’s declared goal is to cut federal spending by $2 trillion. According to the Congressional Budget Office, government expenditures totaled $6.75 trillion in 2024.
“I can think of no precedent in American history of such enormous power being entrusted to a private citizen,” Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, wrote by email in reply to my inquiry:
To say that this delegation of unsupervised authority by President Trump to Elon Musk is an unprecedented violation of the Appointments Clause of Article II of the Constitution, which at a minimum would demand the Senate’s advice and consent to the appointment of anyone exercising the kind of power, would be an understatement.
Our Constitution rebels against the idea of empowering any individual, neither elected nor officially appointed pursuant to law, with the sweeping power to control the expenditure of public funds, the hiring and firing of public officials, the deployment of public force, and the organization of public agencies. This is brute dictatorship of the worst kind.
Musk and others in the Trump administration have a very different view. Musk considers what he is doing to be the embodiment of democracy in action.
At a White House briefing on Feb. 12, Musk argued that “a significant part of this presidency is to restore democracy.”
Musk asked, “What is the goal of DOGE?” and answered himself: “If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected officials in the form of the president and the Senate and the House, then we don’t live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy.”
Without radical intervention, Musk continued, “we have this unelected, fourth unconstitutional branch of government, which is the bureaucracy, which has, in a lot of ways, currently more power than any elected official. This is not something that people want, and it does not match the will of the people.”
How, then, does granting one man, a very rich man, unchecked power to reconfigure the federal government from the ground up get to be described as democratic?
Musk’s answer:
The public voted. We have a majority of the public vote voting for President Trump. We won the House, we won the Senate. The people voted for major government reform. There should be no doubt about that. The president spoke about that at every rally.
The people voted for major government reform, and that’s what people are going to get. They’re going to get what they voted for. And a lot of times people that don’t get what they voted for, but in this presidency, they are going to get what they voted for. And that’s what democracy is all about.
Musk is the latest iteration in a long line of powerful presidential advisers, some in the private sector, others in government jobs. That characterization, however, fails to convey the wide latitude Trump has given Musk to disrupt the executive branch.
The influence of Mark Hanna during the William McKinley administration, Thomas G. “Tommy the Cork” Corcoran and James Farley during the F.D.R. years and Karl Rove, who served as political consigliere to George W. Bush, pales in comparison to Musk’s — so much so that it can be hard to tell whether Trump or Musk or both are calling the shots.
Michael Dorf, a constitutional scholar who is a professor of law at Cornell, noted that the delegation of policy-making roles to unelected officials has provoked sharp controversies in the recent past.
The mandate given to Musk “truly is unprecedented in U.S. history,” Dorf wrote by email:
By way of comparison, opposition parties have occasionally raised substantial objections when even a small amount of power was given to persons who held no official office: think about the Republican reaction to the essentially advisory role that Hillary Clinton had in the formulation of health care reform in her husband’s administration.
Or consider the concerns raised by many Democrats when Dick Cheney (who was the elected VP at the time) was meeting with private industry leaders to help formulate energy policy during the George W. Bush administration. Yet Hillary Clinton and the industry captains with whom Cheney met held only advisory power. By contrast, Musk appears to be formulating and executing policies.
Even apart from the many conflicts of interest, lack of transparency, and Musk’s increasingly far-right authoritarian views, this development is truly extraordinary and alarming.
In the first month of Trump’s second term, Musk and DOGE have created a climate of trepidation among the three million men and women who work for the federal government.
Many of Musk’s attempts to cut back the size of the federal bureaucracy are tied up in court cases, with some already blocked by temporary restraining orders.
His goal is to force budget cuts and reductions in force in virtually every part of the executive branch. Musk has tried, for example, with some initial success, to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, the major source of nonmilitary foreign aid; to gain access to U.S. Treasury expenditure data; he led the charge to close down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, posting on X, which, of course, he owns: “CFPB RIP.” But these examples only touch the surface of Musk’s agenda.
The Supreme Court, which is controlled by a six-member conservative majority, including three justices appointed by Trump, may prove to be the ultimate arbiter of the success or failure of the Trump-Musk assault on the federal work force and on federal spending.
Trump has let it be known that he always abides by the courts, a claim he reiterated on Feb. 11, although other Trump Administration officials have signaled that he may not abide by adverse court rulings.
On Feb. 9, Vice President JD Vance posted on X: “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”
After a series of adverse court rulings, Musk posted on X, on Feb. 12, notably the day after Trump’s latest comment on the subject: “There needs to be an immediate wave of judicial impeachments, not just one.”
Rogers Smith, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania whose research focuses on the Constitution, replied to my inquiries about Trump and Musk by email, describing the mandate Trump has given Musk as “indeed extraordinary, unprecedented in U.S. history.”
Smith continued:
It violates the Appointments clause in Article 2, section 2 of the Constitution, which requires that all principal officers of the United States be appointed with the advice and consent of the Senate. The power over every federal agency and employee that Trump has given to Musk clearly makes Musk a principal officer, without Senate approval.
If Trump tries to pretend Musk is merely a consultant, then Musk is the beneficiary of excessive delegation of government power to a private individual, which is also unconstitutional.
In addition, Smith argued, “the Trump administration is ignoring lower court decisions and taking actions it knows to be illegal under existing doctrines in the hopes that it will be largely sustained by the Supreme Court, relying on unitary executive theory’s incredibly expansive view of presidential power.”
“It is hard to see how the administration could win a challenge to Musk’s appointment without Senate approval,” Smith continued, but if the Court “rules for Trump or stands aside, or if Trump ignores it, constitutional democracy in America will be in serious, perhaps fatal jeopardy.”
There may be other motives behind Trump’s empowerment of Musk.
Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, noted in an email that Trump may be granting such powers to Musk “either in gratitude for the enormous sum of money that Musk spent on Trump’s election or perhaps for future financial assistance with Trump’s legal difficulties.”
Another possibility, Cain suggested, is that
having Musk do the dirty work gives Trump the option to come in at the end and bargain away some of the more drastic cuts when it comes to the upcoming reconciliation negotiations. Trump in his first term tended to play both bad cop and good cop. Now he has some even badder cops in Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance.
This is happening, Cain continued, “in the context of the urgency of cutting government spending to make way for the tax cuts President Trump promised to donors and voters during the election. This explains the ‘cut first and ask questions later approach’ that Musk is taking.”
Even before he was formally appointed to run DOGE, Musk has been at loggerheads with Bannon, formerly Trump’s chief strategist and a leading figure in the powerful populist wing of the MAGA movement.
Bannon views Musk’s support of H-1B visas for skilled immigrants as a fundamental violation of MAGA’s anti-immigrant agenda.
In a Jan. 13 interview with the leading Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera, Bannon described Musk as “a truly evil person. Stopping him has become a personal issue for me.”
Bannon declared, “I will get Elon Musk kicked out by the time Trump is inaugurated,” a boast Bannon could not make good on. “He won’t have a blue pass with full access to the White House. He’ll be like everyone else.”
More recently, on Feb. 13, Bannon warned Musk to be very cautious in planning cuts to Medicaid, a program DOGE is virtually certain to pinpoint for major spending reductions in order to meet Musk’s $2 trillion target.
“You’ve got to be careful because a lot of MAGA is on Medicaid,” Bannon continued on his podcast, “War Room.” “If you don’t think so, you are dead wrong.”
So far, however, Trump has persisted in backing Musk.
Trump has also supported Musk on another front, discounting the glaring conflicts of interest posed by Musk’s work at DOGE and his multibillion dollar companies, including Tesla, SpaceX including its subsidiary Starlink, XAI, an artificial intelligence start-up; the Boring Company, a tunneling venture; and Neuralink, which is seeking to “create a generalized brain interface to restore autonomy to those with unmet medical need,” and X.
On Feb. 11, my Times colleagues Eric Lipton and Kirsten Grind described the scope of these conflicts in detail. In “Elon Musk’s Business Empire Scores Benefits Under Trump Shake-Up,” Lipton and Grind report that there are “at least 11 federal agencies that have been affected by those moves” — meaning the Trump Administration’s attacks on the size and scope of the federal government — and that these agencies have “more than 32 continuing investigations, pending complaints or enforcement actions into Mr. Musk’s six companies.”
In addition, the federal government has awarded contracts with a total value of $13 billion over the past five years to Musk companies, Lipton and Grind found, most of which went to SpaceX, making it “one of the biggest government contractors.”
Musk disputes the claim that his work heading DOGE conflicts with his private holdings, contending at the Feb. 12 White House briefing that “we actually are trying to be as transparent as possible.”
A reporter then asked:
You’ve received billions of dollars in federal contracts when it comes to the Pentagon, for instance, which the president, I know, has directed you to look into. Are you policing yourself on that?
Musk replied:
Well, all of our actions are fully public. So if you see anything, you say, “Wait a second. Hey, that seems like maybe there’s a conflict there.” I don’t feel like people are going to be shy about saying that. They’ll say it immediately.
Then Trump interjected:
We would not let him do that segment or look in that area if we thought there was a lack of transparency or a conflict of interest We watch that also. He’s a big businessman. He’s a successful guy. That’s why we want him doing this. We don’t want an unsuccessful guy doing this.
The exchange is particularly revealing in what is says about Trump’s moral reasoning and its similarity to Musk’s thinking.
The fact is that Musk’s conflicts of interest heading DOGE have been repeatedly pointed out, not only by the reporting in this newspaper but elsewhere, from USA Today to Fortune and by Democrats in the House and Senate.
These claims of transparency, which have also been challenged, are deemed by Trump and Musk to be adequate to protect against abuse, even when the potential for abuse is glaringly obvious.
Brooke Harrington, a sociologist at Dartmouth, has been studying wealth, power and the rise of oligarchs since the turn of the century. In a phone interview, Harrington contended that what she calls a “tech broligarchy has effectively bought the presidency. Trump gets to be chairman of the board, cut the ribbons in day-to-day ceremonies, while control of the structure of government is left to them (the broligarchy) in what amounts to a hostile takeover of the federal government.”
Harrington was even more direct in an appearance with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show the night after Trump was inaugurated, when she compared the relationship between Vladimir Putin and his rich supporters to Trump’s relationship to the wealthy men who backed his 2024 campaign:
At least Putin has a red line with his oligarchs. The grand bargain was that he was going to let them get rich on condition that they kept their noses out of his political business. At most they would be his errand boys.
What Trump has done is so extraordinary. He doesn’t have that bright line with the new oligarchs of America at all. He basically said “you bought it, do what you want.”
Musk, in fact, has begun to spread his wings well beyond American borders and has become a major player in far right, anti-immigrant parties in Europe, including Reform U.K. in England and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
In the case of Reform U.K., Musk has tried to push the party farther to the right, demanding that it support the release from prison of the extremist agitator who goes by the name Tommy Robinson.
Nigel Farage, leader of Reform U.K., has rejected Musk’s demands, saying of Robinson:
I know a lot of Americans see him as a great champion of free speech, but I just don’t see him as suitable for our party. And I’m not someone that budges very easily.
Musk, in a videotaped speech to a Jan. 25 AfD rally in Halle, told party loyalists “I think you really are the best hope for Germany.”
Musk told the crowd, “It’s good to be proud of German culture and German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything,” adding that there has been “too much of a focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that.”
My Times colleague Jim Tankersley wrote on Feb. 15, that the AfD
is sitting second in the polls for next Sunday’s parliamentary elections, with about 20 percent of the public saying they support it. But no other German party is willing to govern with it. That’s because the AfD has at times downplayed Hitler’s atrocities. Some party members have reveled in Nazi slogans.
Musk’s engagement with these parties suggests, in turn, that his agenda at DOGE is as much — or more — partisan and radically conservative than it is about cutting spending or increasing efficiency. His targets, so far, have been liberals in the federal work force, particularly those involved in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs, and such federal programs as consumer protection and foreign aid that draw workers, in the main, with liberal views.
Musk, then, is in charge of a campaign to purge left-leaning or liberal government initiatives, with little or no regard to legal or constitutional constraint.
Musk has the full backing of President Trump and the strongest imaginable ally in Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget.
The three men will inflict severe and lasting damage. The next three years and eleven months — at least — are going to be a living hell for one half of the nation. And perhaps much more than one half.
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