President Donald Trump said Tuesday he was signing an executive order to give tech billionaire Elon Musk more power over the federal workforce, adding to Musk’s swift and sweeping consolidation of political influence.
With Musk standing to his right in the Oval Office, Trump praised the work of his office, known as the Department of Government Efficiency Service (DOGE). And Trump said he wanted Musk to now do more, even as DOGE faces multiple lawsuits from labor unions and Democratic state attorneys general over whether it is acting within the law.
The new executive order directs federal agencies to “coordinate and consult” with DOGE to cut jobs and limit hiring, according to a summary provided by the White House. Each agency will be ordered to “undertake plans for large-scale reductions in force” and limit hiring to only “essential positions,” the summary says.
Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and the wealthiest person in the world, is wielding federal authority without giving up his private-sector jobs while also serving as a “special government employee.” It is a temporary position that bypasses some of the disclosure obligations required of full-time government employees.
He wore an all-black “Make America Great Again” hat and had one of his 11 children underfoot for the briefing.
Trump and Musk took questions from reporters in a freewheeling exchange for more than half an hour, but the two spoke mostly in generalities and did not give details about the alleged fraud they said DOGE had found.
For weeks, Musk has railed against what he says is waste, fraud or abuse that DOGE has identified, although many of the examples he has posted about on social media lack specifics. On Monday, the DOGE account on X said the administration had terminated 89 contracts worth $881 million, but it did not say what they were or why they counted as waste.
In other instances, independent fact-checkers have cast doubt on Musk’s examples of alleged waste. His claim that the United States spent $50 million on condoms for the Gaza Strip was widely criticized for lacking evidence.
Asked by a reporter about the condom fact-checks, Musk acknowledged that some of what he has said about alleged waste in the government has turned out to be false.
“Nobody’s going to bat a thousand,” Musk said. (Earlier in the day, Musk had been posting phallic jokes on X.)
Musk also said he had worked with Secretary of State Marco Rubio to “turn on funding” for Ebola and HIV prevention, making them exceptions to his attempt at an overall spending freeze. He said pausing that funding had been a “mistake.”
“We will make mistakes, but we also fix the mistakes very quickly,” he said.
The two said little to calm concerns that they were violating the Constitution, including by trying to shutter federal agencies without the approval of Congress and refusing to spend money that Congress had appropriated. Among DOGE’s targets for elimination are the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Education Department.
