WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Thursday seemed to knock billionaire Elon Musk back a notch, with adverse federal court rulings, anxious GOP lawmakers and the unpopularity of Musk’s move-fast-and-break-stuff efforts to gut the government seemingly convincing him to put DOGE on a leash.
Musk’s meme-inspired Department of Government Efficiency has directed mass layoffs of federal workers and the wholesale dismantling of federal agencies. But in a social media post on Thursday afternoon, Trump suggested DOGE would have less autonomy and need to be less reckless in its cuts in the future.
“DOGE has been an incredible success, and now that we have my Cabinet in place, I have instructed the Secretaries and Leadership to work with DOGE on Cost Cutting measures and Staffing,” Trump wrote on TruthSocial. “As the Secretaries learn about, and understand, the people working for the various Departments, they can be very precise as to who will remain, and who will go. We say the ‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet.’”
Trump’s sudden focus on the work ahead for agency heads — and away from what DOGE has been doing — comes after a federal judge last week ruled that it was likely illegal for the Office of Personnel Management, where Musk acolytes have taken control, to direct agencies to fire thousands of employees.
The judge said OPM had no authority to do something only individual agencies can do. In what appeared to be an effort to stave off more lawsuits, days later, OPM abruptly changed its guidance to say it was actually up to agencies all along, not OPM, to fire people.
The shift by OPM is one of the clearest signs yet that the Trump administration knows that what it’s been doing is likely illegal. Musk, meanwhile, faces numerous further lawsuits challenging his appointment and DOGE’s actions as unconstitutional and unlawful.
In remarks from the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump said he had convened a meeting with Musk and several of his department heads. He suggested he would prefer his department heads to handle budget cuts but that Musk would still loom over them.
The comments signal that Musk is likely to still wield significant power, and that DOGE-led efforts — like potential mass layoffs at the Department of Veterans Affairs — are unlikely to cease anytime soon.
“So I had a meeting, and I said, I want the Cabinet members to go first, keep all the people you want, everybody that you need,” Trump said. “And so we’re going to be watching them, and Elon and the group are going to be watching them, and if they can cut, it’s better. And if they don’t cut, then Elon will do the cutting.”
Norm Eisen of State Democracy Defenders Fund, a nonprofit legal group that’s been challenging Musk’s and DOGE’s actions in court, said the president’s latest comments on Musk show that he’s “feeling the heat” to stop saying his billionaire buddy is in charge.
“He made clear that Musk and DOGE have been calling the shots. That’s unconstitutional,” Eisen said in a statement. “Unfortunately, closing the barn door after the horse has bolted does no good. In fact, this attempted backtrack is an admission that the vast chaos that Musk and DOGE have wrought without proper approval and documentation is illegal – and so must be completely unwound.”
On Capitol Hill, Republicans have grown increasingly anxious about DOGE’s doings, though only a handful of GOP lawmakers have outright criticized Musk or suggested there might be better ways of implementing the president’s agenda.
Musk met with Republicans in the House and Senate on Wednesday, acknowledged DOGE had made occasional mistakes and handed out his cell phone number. Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) said senators pressed Musk to work with Congress on the cost savings he’s trying to achieve.
“What they said is, ‘How do we work with you to codify and get into statute some of these things that you’re actually doing?’ … so that we can do more of it and make it permanent and be more successful,” Hoeven told HuffPost.
Helping to drive the GOP fretting: The public largely has a negative opinion of Musk’s role as head of DOGE and fears the world’s richest man has been given too much power over the federal government, even if people in theory support DOGE’s stated mission of increasing efficiency and rooting out waste in the government.
So far, however, DOGE’s efforts on those fronts have been inconsistent at best. Its publicly posted lists of cuts have been riddled with errors, and agencies have repeatedly had to call back workers who were dismissed after realizing they were too politically precious or critically important.
Democrats, while still struggling with their own anti-Musk and anti-Trump messaging, seem to be growing slightly more confident about their ability to defeat the administration in court.
“It’s not within the President’s prerogative at all to be dismantling federal programs, whether we’re talking about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or the Agency for International Development or Department of Education,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) told reporters. “The President’s job in Article II is ‘to take care that the laws are faithfully executed,’ not that the laws are mangled and destroyed and undone, and that that holds equally true for the spending of money.”
All along, the DOGE mission has been in tension with lawmakers’ constitutional power to control federal spending, and federal courts have been pushing back on Capitol Hill’s behalf.
The OPM case unwound one of DOGE’s signature actions — the firing of probationary workers across the government. And there are six separate lawsuits challenging Musk’s appointment as unconstitutional under the Appointments Clause. These cases allege that Musk is exercising the powers of a principal officer under the Constitution and, thus, must be confirmed by the Senate. Since he’s exercising these powers without appointment, all actions of DOGE must be unlawful, they argue.
So far, these lawsuits have not led to an order blocking Musk’s actions, but they could in the coming months.
In denying a temporary restraining order on Feb. 18 in a case 14 states brought against Musk and DOGE, District Judge Tanya Chutkan hinted that the plaintiff states’ argument may succeed in arguments for a preliminary injunction.
“Plaintiffs legitimately call into question what appears to be the unchecked authority of an unelected individual and an entity that was not created by Congress and over which it has no oversight,” Chutkan wrote.
Public Citizen and the American Federal of Government Employees are pressing another district court judge to allow discovery of documents to show Musk’s control over DOGE and his direction of the organization’s actions in another lawsuit that has been consolidated with two other similar cases.
On Wednesday, Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit watchdog, brought a new suit on behalf of a group of nonprofits similarly challenging Musk’s appointment.
“Defendant Elon Musk is not, legally, the President of the United States, nor is he a federal elected official of any kind,” the complaint states. “And Mr. Musk is not a Senate-confirmed officer of the United States. But he and his so-called ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (DOGE)—not, in fact, a federal executive department—are lawlessly and unconstitutionally wielding sweeping power across the executive branch.”
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Trump administration lawyers have sought to deflect these cases by claiming that Musk does not lead DOGE, that Trump did not appoint him to lead it and that Musk and DOGE’s actions are really just recommendations.
This is all rebutted by the voluminous public statements made by Musk and Trump prior to and since Trump took office on Jan. 20.
Perhaps the most public of these statements came on Tuesday when Trump declared that DOGE is “headed by Elon Musk” during his televised speech to a joint session of Congress. That statement has since been introduced into the court records in each case against Musk as evidence that Musk indeed leads DOGE.