President Donald Trump’s executive order creating the Department of Government Efficiency makes billionaire Elon Musk subject to conflict-of-interest laws, while also granting him access to a vast trove of federal data with immeasurable value.
Trump’s unprecedented use of a rare type of government agency — never before used outside the national security realm — solved one problem for Musk. It allows him to serve on the cost-cutting entity without triggering public disclosure of his considerable financial holdings, raising new questions about the secrecy surrounding the effort.
And by downsizing DOGE’s mission to focus solely on information technology issues within the federal government, Trump eliminated some of the biggest ethical pitfalls for Musk, whose government contracts and wide-ranging regulatory entanglements could have cast doubt on his mandate to vastly shrink the size of the federal bureaucracy.
Musk talks about DOGE as an effort to slash federal spending by as much as $2 trillion. But the entity’s new mission as spelled out in the executive order: “Modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”
To do that, Trump ordered federal agencies to give the DOGE administrator — be it Musk or someone else — “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems.”
In doing so, Trump has handed Musk — the biggest donor to the effort to elect him president — “the keys to the candy store,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University of St. Louis who studies government ethics.
“That gives this government contractor who has billions in federal contracts access to sensitive procurement data” that could include trade secrets and enforcement actions against Musk’s companies and its competitors, she said. “If I were a competitor to Musk in any industry, I’d be really worried about him having this kind of head start.”
Musk owns social media platform X and its artificial intelligence sister company xAI. He also owns or controls car-maker Tesla Inc., rocket-launcher SpaceX, tunnel-driller The Boring Co. and brain-implanter Neuralink.
Temporary Solution
As Trump’s transition team looked for a novel way to create a cost-cutting federal agency at Musk’s behest, they found the template in an unusual place: a 25-year-old national security law.
The entity that Musk dubbed a department will actually be a short-lived government agency with a mysterious pedigree and an innocuous name: a “temporary organization.”
There have been at least 17 temporary organizations — including agencies set up for the reconstruction after the Iraq war — created by law or executive order over the last two decades. Every one has had an explicit national security or foreign policy function — until DOGE.
Using a temporary organization allows top DOGE officials like Musk — the richest man in the world — to be paid the maximum salary of a career employee in the senior executive service — about $212,100. Staffers can be paid as much as $159,950. But DOGE can also accept volunteer labor — something forbidden in other parts of the federal government unless it’s an emergency.
The organization must disband within three years — more than enough time to meet Trump’s July 4, 2026 deadline for DOGE to complete its work.
Neither Musk, the White House nor DOGE responded to questions about how the nature of Musk’s employment. But Clark said he’s clearly a federal employee whether he takes a salary or not, and he’s subject to conflict-of-interest laws either way. Those laws — which carry criminal penalties but would be up to the Trump administration to enforce — prohibit Musk from participating in matters where he or his companies have a financial interest.
Musk’s SpaceX alone has more than $20 billion in contracts with NASA and the Defense Department to launch satellites, and his businesses are regulated from an alphabet soup of agencies ranging from the Food and Drug Administration to the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Temporary organizations like DOGE have fewer restrictions than another more popular form of ad hoc agency under a law called the Federal Advisory Committee Act. Government watchdog groups and federal employee unions had urged Trump to use FACA because it requires public meetings and a broad array of stakeholders to be involved.
On Inauguration Day, Public Citizen, the State Democracy Defenders Fund and the American Federation of Government Employees sued Trump, saying that DOGE is “shrouded in secrecy” and could “benefit a small minority of individuals at the expense of the vast majority of the public.”
Office Space
Officials with DOGE declined to clarify the new agency’s structure and Musk’s precise role in it. DOGE’s lead attorney, Bill McGinley, left the administration just days after the White House said another founding member — former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy — would no longer be a part of it.
Trump’s executive order also renamed the US Digital Service — which currently exists as an in-house technology think tank within the Office of Management and Budget — as the US DOGE Service. That office will staff Musk’s group.
Musk already has a White House email address, and DOGE will have an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in the White House complex. Trump said Musk needed the space “for about 20 people we’re hiring to make sure these get implemented.” The order also set up DOGE teams of at least four people at each federal agency to implement the program.
