A group of nearly two dozen anonymous federal workers across multiple agencies sued Elon Musk on Thursday, saying his ongoing “slash-and-burn” cost-cutting efforts are a direct violation of the Constitution.
The lawsuit was filed in a federal court in Maryland and names Musk in his capacity as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency,
Musk’s status, according to a statement last week from White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, is that of a “special government employee.” That designation has let him exercise extraordinary — and allegedly unconstitutional — powers.
The USAID workers in the suit say “defendant Elon Musk has an office in the White House, no supervising official, and a team of individuals with wide-ranging government access whom he directs” and though he is the “de facto DOGE administrator,” Musk was never nominated by Trump nor confirmed by the Senate.
And under Article II of the Constitution, according to attorney Norm Eisen of State Democracy Defenders Fund and Mimi Marziani, a private lawyer representing the workers, the Senate’s OK is a must-have.
Musk has spent the last few weeks installing his DOGE team members into federal agencies and gaining access to core government systems, despite rampant concerns over privacy and security. Eisen and Marziani wrote Thursday that USAID workers believe he is using the information he culls to identify people for termination.
This “crippling” of day-to-day operations has been incessant, they argue, and must end.
Musk has “pulled the rug out from under plaintiffs professionally and financially,” and jeopardized national security by unlawfully disputing contracts at USAID, the lawsuit states.
Musk first proposed the idea of DOGE in mid-August 2024 on a podcast with Lex Fridman. By September, Musk was delivering a speech in New York to an economic club about his plans to form a “government efficiency commission” that would conduct a “performance audit” of the entire federal government.
As of the November election, Musk and his many companies, including SpaceX, had more than $15 billion in federal contracts lined up, the lawsuit notes — despite the fact that Musk’s companies have been probed in at least 20 different investigations led by the government or independent agencies. SpaceX was a major recipient of government contracts before November, as well: For example, in October, the Pentagon gave company more than $733 million to help launch satellites into space, Reuters reported.
It was a week after the election that Trump announced online that “the Great Elon Musk” would lead DOGE with Vivek Ramaswamy. By Jan. 8, with still two weeks to go until Trump’s inauguration, Musk celebrated DOGE in a post online and said it would attempt to cut $2 trillion in government spending. (Ramaswamy ultimately backed out of co-chairing DOGE amid a reported dust-up with Musk and a pivot to running for office.)
Trump created the US DOGE Service in the Executive Office of the President through an executive order as one of his first acts. That order directed DOGE teams to be created within every federal agency and directed the “DOGE Administrator” to “take all necessary steps” to “improve the quality and efficiency of government-wide software, network infrastructure, and information technology (IT) systems.”
Musk reports directly to Trump, the workers say, and Trump has repeatedly praised Musk for his work.
Just recently, Trump lauded him from the Oval Office as he announced the impending dismantling of the Department of Education.
“He’s a very talented guy from the standpoint of management and costs, and we put him in charge of seeing what he can do with certain groups and certain numbers,” Trump said on Feb. 3, before adding that “I told him, do that and the I’m going to tell him very soon — like, maybe in 24 hours — to go check the Department of Education.”
Most of the people that Musk has tasked to do DOGE’s bidding — at agencies like the Office of Personnel Management, the Treasury Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, the FBI, the Social Security Administration, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Assistance and others — are individuals who previously worked for Musk or his companies, according to a ProPublica report released on Feb. 11.
On Feb. 7, DOGE staffers were installed at the Department of Education and obtained administrator-level status, the lawsuit alleges. They were allegedly allowed to access the “back end” of a government website.
It took less than a week for DOGE to announce it would cut $881 million in Department of Education contracts.
The anonymous workers, some of whom are USAID employees, noted in the lawsuit that, during a joint press conference with Trump on Feb. 11, Musk claimed to know the net worth of thousands of federal employees.
“On information and belief, Defendant Musk has used his illegal access to personnel and security clearance files to the detriment of those individuals by disclosing the contents of those files,” the lawsuit claims.
The workers seek a permanent injunction to stop Musk and his DOGE staff from any further action. Musk, they say, has violated the appointments clause of the Constitution and has violated laws around the separation of powers.
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“Our plaintiffs are regular Americans who have faithfully served our country and the public good, but they have had their lives turned upside down just because Musk wants to play master of the universe,” Marziani said in a statement to HuffPost on Thursday. “Our Constitution is designed to guard against these very sorts of abuses, because our nation depends upon a government for all, not for a few.”
The case was randomly assigned to U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang.