President Donald Trump clearly stated that he put Elon Musk in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency, contradicting a claim by his own White House that the billionaire lieutenant is not a part of the federal spending task force.
“On my first day in office... I signed an order creating the Department of Government Efficiency and put a man named Elon Musk in charge,” Trump told an audience at a Saudi-backed investment conference in Miami on Wednesday.
Trump’s statement came just two days after White House Office of Administration Director Joshua Fisher submitted a sworn statement in U.S. District Court claiming Musk does not work for DOGE and is not the task force’s administrator.
Instead, he said, Musk works as a “senior adviser to the president” and has “no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself.”
Trump set up DOGE—charged with recommending $2 trillion in federal spending cuts by the middle of next year—with a mission of “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”
He has repeatedly referred to Musk as the de facto leader of DOGE’s efforts and Musk himself has tweeted about being a part of the task force, using “we” and “our” to refer to its work.
Trump’s DOGE executive said the task force would have an administrator “who shall report to the White House Chief of Staff,” though did not name them.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
A large contingent of DOGE’s ranks are drawn from teen and twenty-something tech workers with ties to Musk and his allies. Most of them have no government experience and have been handed a mandate to hack away at programs in areas where they have no expertise.
With Trump’s blessing, the group has quickly moved to slash federal jobs.
Over the weekend, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said it “accidentally” fired employees working on containing the H5N1 bird-flu outbreak.
At the same time, the Department of Energy’s semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration was left scrambling to rehire employees who worked on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs.
“The DOGE people are coming in with absolutely no knowledge of what these departments are responsible for,” Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, told the Associated Press. “They don’t seem to realize that it’s actually the department of nuclear weapons more than it is the Department of Energy.”
As the cuts of Musk’s task force jeopardized the nation’s nuclear programs, Trump heaped praise on his billionaire lieutenant in Miami on Wednesday before hinting at unspecified shortcomings.
“He’s a seriously high-IQ individual,” Trump said. “Now, he’s got his faults also, I will tell you that.”
