OPINION — “Well, we actually are trying to be as transparent as possible. In fact, we post our actions to the DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency] handle on X and to the DOGE website. So, all of our actions are maximally transparent.”
That was Elon Musk, speaking from the Oval Office on February 11.
In fact, Musk’s DOGE operation may be the least transparent, federal-government-wide activity ever undertaken.
For example, it’s clear last weekend’s Musk-generated email, in the name of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), sent to two million or more federal employees ordering them to list five things they accomplished last week, was not even coordinated ahead of time within the government itself.
Proof of that is shown by the number of cabinet members and agency heads who told their employees not to respond to Musk’s deadline of 11:59 pm Monday. They include, according to media reports, the heads of the Departments of Defense, State, Homeland Security, Energy, Commerce, and Education, as well as the FBI, the entire Intelligence Community, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Internal Revenue Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Musk has not been deterred.
After the Musk email went out on Saturday and questions were raised, Musk on Sunday sent a message on his platform X that said he “believe[s] non-existent people or the identities of dead people are being used to collect paychecks,” but provided no evidence to support that claim.
Also on Sunday, President Trump appeared to show support for Musk by posting on his Truth Social website an edited SpongeBob SquarePants cartoon that poked fun at federal employee responses to Musk’s email.
As more department and agencies held back, Musk yesterday warned federal employees that those who do not send a list of their achievements by 11:59 p.m. would “soon be furthering their career elsewhere.”
Anatomy of a Musk plan
How did all this get started?
Last Wednesday, February 19, during a late-afternoon speech in Miami, Trump said, “I signed an order creating the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and put a man named Elon Musk in charge. Thank you, Elon, for doing it. Thank you very much. And he’s doing a great job.”
Three days later, Trump posted on his Truth Social website at 8:04 am that Musk “IS DOING A GREAT JOB, BUT I WOULD LIKE TO SEE HIM GET MORE AGGRESSIVE.”
Little more than six hours later, Musk tweeted that in “compliance with [President Donald Trump’s] instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week,” adding, “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
In short, Musk developed the request for federal employees reporting on their past week’s accomplishment in response to the President’s request that he “get more aggressive.” The implied threat that they could lose their jobs for not complying was apparently Musk’s idea, although he has no authority to make that threat.
As for being transparent, while this internal flareup within the Trump administration is going on publicly, what Musk and his DOGE team have done and are actually are still doing is somewhat of a mystery.
Start with Musk himself, who seems to be in charge of the DOGE effort – or at least Trump has said so publicly, as he did in Miami last Wednesday.
However, on February 17, in a U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia case involving Musk, Joshua Fisher, director of the White House Office of Administration, said in a sworn statement that Musk is a “non-career Special Government Employee (SGE)” of “the White House Office,” and in that job he is a “senior advisor to the President.”
Fisher’s statement continued, “Like other senior White House advisors, Mr. Musk has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself. Mr. Musk can only advise the President and communicate the President’s directives.”
Fisher’s statement went on to say that DOGE Service was a “component of the Executive Office of the President…separate from the White House Office,” and that Musk “is not an employee of the U.S. DOGE Service or the U.S. DOGE temporary service organization.”
When the U.S. DOGE Service was set up by an Executive Order signed by Trump on January 20, Inauguration Day, it also created “the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization.” Although it was not spelled out at that time, I assume the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization was the Musk group because, under the Executive Order, the temporary DOGE organization was to be “dedicated to advancing the President’s 18-month DOGE agenda…[and] shall terminate on July 4, 2026.”
What Fisher’s sworn statement blurs when it comes to Musk’s role is that it plainly states that the temporary DOGE organization “shall be headed by the USDS [U.S. DOGE Service] Administrator,” and that “Mr. Musk is not the U.S. DOGE Service Administrator.”
False claims
While Musk’s legal role remains unclear, what he has publicized about his group’s accomplishments suggests mixed results.
Along with major media organizations, I have easily found that some of DOGE claims about waste and fraud, as well as spending reductions, are not true.
For example, on February 21, DOGE published on X that General Services Administration (GSA) “sold the old Webster School building in DC for $4,138,000,” adding, “The building was acquired via condemnation in 2003, remained empty and boarded up ever since, and accrued $24M of deferred maintenance and liabilities.”
The implication was that Musk’s group, which just recently had publicized it was working in the GSA, was involved in the sale. In fact, the sale took place at an auction last December during the Biden administration. The sale was finalized on February 5, 2025, but DOGE had nothing to do with that.
More concerning is the fact that Musk and President Trump keep publicizing DOGE claims that have been shown to be untrue.
On February 10, Musk posted on X, “Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security,” and “Having tens of millions of people marked in Social Security as “ALIVE” when they are definitely dead is a HUGE problem.”
Along with that post, Musk added what he described as a Social Security Administration data base that seemed to show more than 3.9 million Americans aged 130-to-139 allegedly were receiving Social Security payments.
The truth is that the Social Security Administration’s inspector general in March 2023 and July 2024 reported that the agency has not established a new system to properly annotate death information in its database, which included roughly 18.9 million Social Security numbers of people born in 1920 or earlier but were not marked as deceased. This does not mean, however, that these individuals were receiving benefits.
Days after Musk first disclosed his “finding,” Acting Social Security Commissioner Lee Dudek, acknowledged publicly, “The reported data are people in our records with a Social Security number who do not have a date of death associated with their record. These individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits.”
Nevertheless, during that Miami speech last week that I referred to above, President Trump said, “We’re also finding tremendous abuse, waste, and fraud in Social Security. Social Security is — what’s happening there is going to be one of the great potential scandals in history. On the program, there are over 4.7 million Social Security numbers from people from 100 years old to 109. Think of that.”
Last Friday, in an interview at the CPAC convention, Musk himself kept the false information going.
He said, “We checked the database on Social Security. How many alive Americans eligible for Social Security are there? According to the database it is over 400 million…We found one person was 306 years old. America did not exist before that time. Maybe it is just me, but I think it is a red flag, I don’t know.” (laughter). Musk did later admit that didn’t know whether all the aged people he talked about were getting checks.
Back in the Oval Office on February 11, Musk spoke about a group “which has in a lot of ways currently more power than any elected representative. And this is not something that people want and it’s not, it does not match the will of the people. So it’s just something we’ve got to, we’ve got to fix.” Musk was talking about the federal bureaucracy. I think he could have said the same about the DOGE team he has put together.
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