With barely a month in office under his belt, Donald Trump and his administration have already thoroughly muddied the lines of authority and power between the United States government and billionaire Trump jockey Elon Musk’s unelected and highly controversial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in a court filing that was introduced this week — in which the Trump White House argues that Musk is not even an employee of the department’s advisory panel.
In the wake of that unsettling filing, one reporter who has already covered much of DOGE’s inner workings is now pulling back the curtain on what she believes is a shady tactic being employed by the Tesla CEO on his X (formerly known as Twitter) platform in an attempt to cover up the “incredibly illegal” things that he and his DOGE employees are doing.
Musk has infamously filled DOGE with young, immature, and largely uneducated employees, who don’t boast a single ounce of government experience to share between them, and almost instantly giving them access to highly sensitive data on American taxpayers and US government payment systems. The tech billionaire has also used DOGE to make massive cuts to congressionally approved federal funding as well as massive employment slashes across countless government agencies — all while publicly claiming that he holds an outside role in Donald Trump’s presidential administration.
CNN’s Kate Bolduan said while discussing the matter on a recent segment, “It is about transparency [and] by definition, they are not. He is not and DOGE is not being transparent, providing the data or even providing the numbers of people who have been fired, in one regard, or the numbers of dollars that they are freezing up.”
“By definition, they’re not being transparent. Why do you think he keeps saying this?” Bolduan questioned, referencing the promises of “radical transparency” from Musk and the Trump Administration.
Wired reporter Makena Kelly, who was deeply involved in the work that helped to uncover many of the otherwise undisclosed DOGE employees, said that Musk’s agency has been anything but transparent before pointing to a tactic she believes Musk is using on his social media platform to try to cover that up.
You can tell just by the way that DOGE is even set up,” Kelly, a senior political correspondent for the tech publication, said. “They don’t even want to comment on all these things, and why is it so opaque? I think it’s so people don’t ask too many questions. You know, there’s a lot of things that DOGE is doing, and they’re doing things that I think experts will say are incredibly illegal.”
It’s now just a few weeks into the Trump Administration and Musk’s DOGE agency has already been slammed with a barrage of lawsuits over its alleged violation of US privacy laws and the overall legality of what the agency has done and continues to do.
However, Kelly pointed out that Musk appears to believe that he actually is being transparent about his actions and the actions of his agency because he seems to define that word differently than most.
“It’s posting on X,” she explains. “That’s exactly what it is, and that’s what we’ve seen play out this week. Of course, we have the DOGE Twitter account, X account, that was created and then a variety of other X accounts that were created for every federal agency. It looked like the CFPB, the FTC, etc, everything like that, and where they’re crowdfunding, crowdsourcing all of this information from people who are just on X.”
You can watch that CNN segment here:
Featured image via Flickr/Daniel Oberhaus