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Officials in at least a half-dozen federal agencies and departments are raising alarms about whether Elon Musk's assault on government is breaking the law.

Over the past two weeks, Musk’s team has moved to dismantle some U.S. agencies,
push out hundreds of thousands of civil servants
and gain access to some of the federal government’s most sensitive payment systems.

Musk has said these changes are necessary to overhaul what he’s characterized as a sclerotic federal bureaucracy and to stop payments that he says are bankrupting the country and driving inflation.

But many of these moves appear to violate federal law, according to more than two dozen current and former officials,
one audio recording, and several internal messages obtained by The Washington Post.

Internal legal objections have been raised at the Treasury Department,
the Education Department,
the U.S. Agency for International Development,
the General Services Administration,
the Office of Personnel Management,
the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
and the White House budget office, among others.

“So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they’re playing a quantity game
and assuming the system can’t react to all this illegality at once,”
said David Super,
an administrative law professor at Georgetown Law School.

Specific concerns include the terms of the “deferred resignation” Musk’s team is offering to purge the civil service
— which experts say runs afoul of federal spending law
— and whether Musk’s staffers will use Treasury’s payment system to reverse spending that has already been approved.

(Two federal employee unions sued Monday to block DOGE from accessing that system.
Late Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote to Congress that DOGE associates have only “read-only” access to it.)

Several federal officials said they were worried about DOGE’s taking control of government systems that hold Americans’ personal information,
including student loan data,
and others have raised privacy concerns about the agency’s vow to use artificial intelligence on government databases.

In other instances, officials have raised concerns that DOGE associates appeared to violate security protocols by using private email addresses or not disclosing their identities on government calls.

At a more fundamental level, several legal experts and government officials expressed alarm over how Musk’s team appears to operate as a strike team,
outside typical agency rules and constitutional checks on executive power.

“The big-picture constitutional worry is that there is a kind of shadow executive branch that is existing and operating
and exercising power outside of the channels the Constitution and the statutes that Congress authorized,”
said Blake Emerson,
a professor of constitutional law at the UCLA School of Law.

On Monday, the White House confirmed that Musk has been designated a
“special government employee,”
a status typically conferred on outside advisers from the private sector.

Under a Trump executive order, the U.S. Digital Service,
a White House office established during the Obama administration to consult on federal technology,
has transformed itself into the U.S. DOGE Service.

Democrats in Congress have raised objections to some of DOGE’s actions,
but Republicans, who control both chambers, have not moved to rein in its activities.

In a sign of potential unease over how DOGE’s early moves are being perceived,
President Donald Trump and Musk have defended the billionaire’s influence and the legality of their actions.

Musk has alleged that much of the government is already violating federal law
and that his efforts are a needed corrective,
for instance asserting over the weekend, without offering evidence,
that USAID is a “criminal organization” that should be shut down
and that Treasury’s career staffers routinely commit federal crimes.

Trump has also denied that Musk will be able to use his government influence to expand his personal fortune,
though he did not point to specific guardrails against that.

“Those leading this mission with Elon Musk are doing so in full compliance with federal law,
appropriate security clearances, and as employees of the relevant agencies,
not as outside advisors or entities,”
a White House spokesperson said.

“If there’s a conflict, then we won’t let him get near it,” Trump told reporters Monday.

“We’re trying to shrink government, and he can probably shrink it as well as anybody else, if not better.
Where we think there’s a conflict or there’s a problem, we won’t let him go near it.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/02/04/elon-musk-government-legal-doge/