A federal judge said on Friday that it seemed “factually inaccurate” for the Trump administration to keep insisting that Elon Musk has no formal position in an operation that has led to mass firings of federal workers and the hobbling of the nation’s foreign aid agency.
The judge, Theodore D. Chuang of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, prodded government lawyers repeatedly for additional clarity on Mr. Musk’s role in a case that directly challenges the constitutionality of the task force known as the Department of Government Efficiency, or the U.S. DOGE Service.
Until this week, government officials had resisted answering inquiries as to who was formally in charge of the task force, except to say that it was not Mr. Musk. (Nor is Mr. Musk among its employees, the government said.) On Tuesday, a White House official said that Amy Gleason, a former health care investment executive, was serving as the acting administrator.
On Friday, Joshua E. Gardner, a lawyer in the Justice Department’s civil division, denied that Mr. Musk had any role with the Department of Government Efficiency. This despite Mr. Musk’s clearly driving its initiatives, including an email blasted out last weekend that attempted to require all federal employees to respond with a list of five accomplishments from the previous week. Although the email was sent by the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s human resources arm, Mr. Musk said on Wednesday that he had suggested it and that the president had approved.
Judge Chuang asked Mr. Gardner who had led the agency before Ms. Gleason was announced as acting administrator. Mr. Gardner said he had not asked, then immediately corrected himself, saying that he had asked but “was not able to get an answer” beyond that it was not Mr. Musk. The judge said he found it “very suspicious” that the government did not have an answer.
The three-hour hearing was the latest in a lawsuit filed in mid-February on behalf of 26 unnamed current and former employees or contractors of the U.S. Agency for International Development. The foreign aid agency, a particular target of Mr. Musk’s, has been rapidly dismantled in the months since Mr. Trump took office. In recent days, Trump administration appointees have fired hundreds of employees who help manage responses to urgent humanitarian crises around the world, leaving the agency’s future in turmoil.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs on Friday argued that Mr. Musk’s operation was inherently unconstitutional because he had not been appointed by the president nor approved by the Senate, as is required for high-level officials by the appointments clause of the Constitution.
Mr. Musk is “the most powerful principal officer currently in the government alongside the president, and one of the most powerful in our country’s history,” Norm Eisen, one of the lawyers, said.
He added that historically, no figure in the executive branch, not even the White House chief of staff who is the president’s top aide, has acted with as much authority as Mr. Musk. That meant that Mr. Musk’s actions in the case of U.S.A.I.D. — dispatching teams to shut down programs, cut off systems access to employees and contractors and comb through sensitive and confidential agency data — amounted to “a grave violation of the separation of powers,” Mr. Eisen said.
Mimi Marziani, Mr. Eisen’s co-counsel, further characterized Mr. Musk’s role as a “made-up position” leading a “made-up super-agency.”
Court filings in a torrent of lawsuits challenging Mr. Musk and his associates’ incursions on federal agencies have offered a crucial, though limited, window into the Department of Government Efficiency. As some of the only firsthand accounts, they have painted a picture of a tightly managed process in which small groups of government employees have swept in and out of agencies, grabbing up data in apparent pursuit of larger political goals.
Mr. Gardner argued that there had been no attempt by the Department of Government Efficiency to shut down U.S.A.I.D., but rather that it was undergoing “a reorganization in consultation with Congress.” He added that he did not believe the president had the power to totally shut down the agency.
Judge Chuang pushed back on that characterization, citing a letter to Congress from Secretary of State Marco Rubio announcing he had taken over as acting administrator of U.S.A.I.D. and saying that the agency “may be abolished consistent with applicable law.”
“The wood chipper isn’t usually reorganization,” Judge Chuang retorted, seeming to reference a post on social media from Mr. Musk in early February in which he said, “We spent the weekend feeding U.S.A.I.D. into the wood chipper.”
“I don’t even know what that means, your honor,” Mr. Gardner replied.
Judge Chuang had granted a motion last week to move ahead with Friday’s hearing in order to consider whether to block Mr. Musk’s team from continuing to drive changes at the agency. The hearing came amid an extreme downsizing at the agency, as it moved to terminate thousands of contracts and grants, eliminating some 90 percent of U.S.A.I.D.’s work.
Earlier this week, a federal judge in Washington gave the agency a midnight deadline on Thursday to release payments to a raft of programs and organizations the agency has long funded. The administration also made an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court, and on Wednesday night, Chief Justice John J. Roberts issued a temporary administrative stay.
On Friday, the plaintiffs asked Judge Chuang to block DOGE representatives from combing through U.S.A.I.D. data and systems, as a method of short-term relief. They said their clients, some of whom were stationed abroad, had suffered “physical and psychological harm,” had missed payments and were cut off from the agency’s systems and other “potentially lifesaving services” while awaiting further direction.
The judge declined to issue an immediate decision.
