If Elon Musk wants to get to work with his Department of Government Efficiency, he will have to be a lot more transparent and inclusive, a slew of lawsuits filed on Monday demand.
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Within moments of Donald Trump taking office, various government ethics, transparency, and public interest groups paired up with national unions to sue the incoming administration over its poorly named Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
It is poorly named because DOGE is not a department at all, but rather the pet project of Trump super-donor and anti-government advocate Elon Musk. Ostensibly, its goal is to slash government spending. However, it seems just as likely that it will not (just) propose ways to reduce waste but also get rid of burdensome regulations and agencies that interfere with the ability of Musk and other Trump donors (as well as the president himself) to make even more money without federal oversight.
That’s not just a massive conflict of interest, but also the kind of undertaking that should not be conducted in secret.
And yet, that is exactly what is happening, according to the lawsuits, which stipulate that DOGE is a federal advisory committee and therefore subject to the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA).
“This advisory committee led by Musk and [Vivek Ramaswamy], who hold financial interests that will be directly affected by federal budgetary and regulatory policies, is beset both by conflicts of interest and the biased and extremist views of the libertarian billionaire class,” said Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, which spearheaded one of the lawsuits.
Ramaswamy, a fellow rich person, was supposed to co-chair DOGE but has fallen out of favor with the MAGA movement after saying that Americans should like nerds more than prom queens.
Either way, the fact that the two of them were on the same page ideologically, and want to work exclusively with like-minded individuals, runs counter to FACA, which requires advisory committees to have a balanced membership involving different stakeholders.
In this case, that not only includes government employees, as represented in the Public Citizen lawsuit by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), but also the public, which will have to live with these cuts.
“AFGE will not stand idly by as a secretive group of ultra-wealthy individuals with major conflicts of interest attempt to deregulate themselves and give their own companies sweetheart government contracts while firing civil servants and dismantling the institutions designed to serve the American people,” stated AFGE President Everett Kelley. “This fight is about fairness, accountability, and the integrity of our government.
That raises another concern with how DOGE is run, which is away from the public eye. However, advisory committees have to meet various transparency and recordkeeping requirements. According to the lawsuits, DOGE does not.
“Of particular note, DOGE’s members communicate using the ephemeral messaging application Signal, which is widely used for its auto-delete functionality,” assert the plaintiffs in another lawsuit, this one filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington as well as other public interest groups and unions.
A third lawsuit includes as plaintiffs individuals who applied to be part of DOGE but do not share Musk’s ideology. Their rejection, and “DOGE’s stacked membership, far from being fairly balanced, reveals that only one viewpoint is represented: that of ‘small-government crusaders’ with backgrounds in either the tech industry or Republican politics.”
It will be tough to argue with that in light of Musk’s many public statements on what he hopes to accomplish.
If DOGE is put on hold, Public Citizen’s co-president Lisa Gilbert had a suggestion for Musk and other captains of industry on what they could do in the meantime to improve the lives of Americans.
“[DOGE] fails to consider how to more efficiently regulate companies to better protect consumers, how to eliminate wasteful and inefficient corporate subsidies and efficient public investments to make America stronger,” said Gilbert.
Maybe Musk can start there.
