President Donald Trump Wednesday evening again asserted that he put billionaire Elon Musk “in charge” of his “Department of Government Efficiency,” contradicting his own Department of Justice, which is claiming that Musk is merely a White House adviser with no authority.
“I signed an order creating the Department of Government Efficiency and put a man named Elon Musk in charge,” Trump said at a Saudi Arabian financial conference in Miami Beach, with Musk sitting in the audience. “Thank you, Elon, for doing it. And he’s doing a great job.”
Musk has repeatedly claimed that he and his band of assistants who are currently rampaging through various federal agency computer systems have found “fraud” and “corruption,” and that as a result he has canceled contracts, laid off staff and even eliminated agencies.
Trump’s remarks will likely provide yet more evidence for the Trump critics who have been filing legal challenges against DOGE’s layoffs and cancellations of contracts and grants, on the grounds that Musk’s efforts to cut the government are illegal because Musk has no actual authority to make those decisions. To counter that argument, DOJ lawyers filed an affidavit from a White House official on Monday stating that, to the contrary, Musk is just a White House adviser among many and that he is not in charge of DOGE. DOGE’s actual administrator, who to this point has not been identified, is the person actually making the cuts, the DOJ has argued.
“Mr. Musk has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself,” wrote Joshua Fisher, director of the White House Office of Administration. “Mr. Musk is an employee in the White House office. He is not an employee of the U.S. DOGE Service. … Musk is not the U.S. DOGE Service Administrator.”
Trump has spent most of his Florida trip at his two country clubs, where he’s played golf on four of the last six days. He spoke for about an hour, bragging about his election win in November, claiming he has done more in four weeks than former President Joe Biden did in four years and telling various stories from his first term, before turning to Ukraine and its fight to repel Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion.
Trump called the democratically elected Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “dictator” who had provoked Russia’s attack, just as he had earlier in the day in a social media post.
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“A dictator without elections — Zelenskyy better move faster. He’s not going to have a country left,” Trump told his audience.
The president also repeated various falsehoods about how much support the United States has provided to Ukraine compared to how much has come from European nations.
Trump now for several days has disparaged Ukraine for having been invaded by Russia. He has called on Ukraine to make a number of concessions to end the war, including turning over rights to valuable minerals to the United States and ceding some territory to Russia. Trump has not publicly asked Putin, who actually is a dictator and who he called a “genius” and “savvy” when he began the invasion in 2022, to make any concessions.