What is the Department of Government Efficiency?
It’s a question that has come up over and over again in the avalanche of court cases challenging the authority of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, to conduct a full-throttle effort to gut and remake the federal government.
Over two months of litigation playing out across more than 170 lawsuits, the government has offered limited answers but insisted on one thing: that Mr. Musk exercises no authority over the office and is not even an employee.
But that assertion flies in the face of Mr. Musk’s own words and deeds as the ideological leader and public face of the still-secretive office — and President Trump’s praise of his team as an engine of upheaval. Mr. Musk and his associates have been involved in the effective shutdown of an entire agency, had a hand in thousands of federal workers losing their jobs and helped put millions of dollars in government funding and programs on the chopping block, sowing chaos at home and around the globe.
Often, judges have sided with the scores of lawyers demanding clarity about what Mr. Musk and members of his team are doing, showing willingness to expedite the process for groups challenging those actions to demand documents and written answers to questions about the details of the Musk team’s operations.
In a filing on Wednesday, lawyers for the plaintiffs asked a judge to hurry along a case focused on how DOGE, which was first announced by Mr. Trump as a limited private-sector task force shortly after he won the election, came to exercise such dramatic influence over the federal government.
“The entire thrust of this motion has been to get a definitive answer to one question,” they wrote. “What is the Department of Government Efficiency?”
“On the one hand, every public statement made about the leadership of DOGE agrees that Elon Musk is in charge of DOGE,” the lawyers continued. “On the other hand, every time the government is required to file a sworn declaration on the subject, Musk is a simple adviser with no role in DOGE.”
“This case as a whole hinges on the court’s ability to reconcile these two positions,” they added.
Judges have so far tended to agree that the Department of Government Efficiency described in court filings bears little resemblance to the operation whose employees have on occasion physically forced their way into agencies as well as, most recently, the nonprofit Institute of Peace. Mr. Musk has bragged about this no-holds barred approach, and Mr. Trump’s allies in Congress and elsewhere have cheered it. Lawyers for the plaintiffs have seized on that dissonance, quoting the president, Republican lawmakers and the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, all crediting Mr. Musk for significant moves.
In the government’s telling, the group is an amorphous collective with no front office or organizational chart, led by Amy Gleason, a former health care investment executive, and exists only as an evolution of the U.S. Digital Service, a tech troubleshooting office created by former President Barack Obama.
When early lawsuits attempted to stop the group’s operatives, as outsiders, from accessing internal agency databases and looking through sensitive information about private citizens, the unit adjusted by simply having its staff members formally hired.
“Every member of an agency’s DOGE Team is an employee of the agency or a detailee to the agency,” Ms. Gleason wrote in a filing on Wednesday. “The DOGE Team members — whether employees of the agency or detailed to the agency — thus report to the agency heads or their designees, not to me or anyone else at U.S.D.S.”
Ms. Gleason also reiterated a distinction Mr. Trump had made in his executive order establishing the office, hinting at a longer shelf life for its efforts. While the order established DOGE as a “temporary” organization within the former digital service that would dissolve after 18 months, she stated that the office will live on as a permanent fixture within the White House that may continue its efforts after its initial blitz.
“U.S.D.S. is a permanent entity, whereas the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization is, as its name suggests, a temporary entity with an expiration date of July 4, 2026,” she wrote.
Mr. Musk, who the White House has said is serving as a special government employee — a position with a strict 130-day limit — indicated in an interview on Fox this month that he would stay involved with the administration for “another year.”
The conflicting statements and shifting goals have helped mask the real-world influence of Mr. Musk and some of his top deputies, such as Steve Davis. They have also made it exceedingly difficult for lawyers challenging Mr. Musk to nail down in court who was really behind some of the most destructive actions, such as mass firings or spending freezes.
Katie Miller, a spokeswoman for the operation, did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the apparent contradictions.
In other sworn statements, individuals within various agencies have often taken responsibility for implementing the DOGE team’s stated goals on their own.
In one filed on Wednesday, Jeremy Lewin stated that he would be taking over operations at the U.S. Agency for International Development after having helped carry out a review that led to the cancellation of more than 80 percent of the agency’s contracts and planning a mass reduction in force. But he said all of that was done at the behest of Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
“None of Elon Musk, U.S.D.S., or any U.S.D.S. employee has any formal authority over me,” he stated.
Yet extensive reporting about the clash between Mr. Rubio and Mr. Musk over the agency’s future, and Mr. Rubio’s own words, suggested a different series of events.
“Thank you to DOGE and our hardworking staff who worked very long hours to achieve this overdue and historic reform,” Mr. Rubio wrote on X earlier this month after announcing the cancellation of 5,200 U.S.A.I.D. contracts.
Federal judges have grown impatient with the apparently deliberate atmosphere of confusion and have taken steps to force more meaningful disclosures.
Noah Peters, a DOGE staffer stationed at the Office of Personnel Management, has been ordered to be deposed in Washington next week about his team’s role in directing agencies to fire their probationary workers.
In another case focused on DOGE’s efforts to shutter the U.S. African Development Foundation, Judge Richard J. Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered three of Mr. Musk’s lieutenants — Ethan Shaotran, Jacob Altik and Nate Cavanaugh — to prepare to give sworn testimony about their involvement in taking over the agency’s office and changing the building’s locks.
And after a judge ruled this week that DOGE most likely qualifies as an entity subject to transparency laws like the Freedom of Information Act, he ordered the office to begin processing documents a group had sued to obtain on an accelerated timetable, noting the office’s “unusual secrecy.”
Two senior Democrats seized on that ruling, filing their own FOIA request on Monday, focused on the numerous contradictions between Mr. Musk’s comments about his team and the more arcane explanations the government has provided in court.
To comply with the judge’s order about the earlier request, the government responded on Thursday with an estimate of the number of documents it would need to hand over to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the group behind that lawsuit.
By its initial tally, DOGE said it expected to process as many as 105,043 documents, which Judge Christopher R. Cooper said must begin on a rolling basis “as soon as practicable.”
Judge Cooper wrote that his decision to act quickly was based in part on concerns that Mr. Musk’s team had been operating outside the normal constraints on federal workers, communicating on encrypted platforms such as Signal and concealing its projects and goals from all but a handful of collaborators at each agency. While the government said the office would likely struggle to comply with the order, Judge Cooper instructed it to begin retaining documents and making them available.
“The court has faith that the employees of a government organization charged with ‘modernizing federal technology and software,’ who have reportedly gained access to databases and payment systems across federal agencies, are technologically sophisticated enough to perform these basic tasks,” the judge said.
