To avoid FACA lawsuits, Musk to head Digital Service, renamed to DOGE. A feud over AI still simmers.
Musk Trashes Trump’s Pet AI Project
Politico reports Trump Staff ‘Furious’ after Musk trashes AI project.
Some of President Donald Trump’s key aides and allies are furious with Elon Musk for publicly trashing his $500 billion artificial intelligence mega-deal.
A White House official said Musk “very much” got over his skis when the tech tycoon launched a daylong screed against the AI project. One Trump ally said Musk abused his closeness to the president. Another Republican close to the White House went further, saying Trump’s staff is “furious” over Musk using his massive social media platform to pour cold water on the infrastructure deal that Trump called “tremendous” and “monumental” just a day prior.
“It’s clear he has abused the proximity to the president,” said the Trump ally. “The problem is the president doesn’t have any leverage over him and Elon gives zero f*cks.”
It is highly unusual for a senior adviser — Musk — to criticize a president’s initiatives in public, and his broadsides renewed speculation within GOP circles about whether he and Trump will eventually have a falling-out.
Musk, who owns his own AI startup, was not at Trump’s unveiling of “Stargate,” an effort to supercharge the country’s AI infrastructure featuring the tech giants OpenAI, Softbank and Oracle. Musk, who co-founded OpenAI, has long been critical of its CEO Sam Altman and spent much of Wednesday trolling him online. “They don’t actually have the money,” he said. Softbank, meanwhile, “has well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority.”
Musk even reposted a joke that suggested Altman and his team smoked crack “to come up with their $500 billion number for Stargate.”
United States Digital Service Renamed to DOGE
The New York Times comments Musk Plan for Retooling Government Takes Shape, but Big Questions Loom
The initial plan for retooling the federal government under President Trump started with three loyal billionaires: the banker Howard Lutnick, the tech leader Elon Musk and the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.
Now, it’s down to one.
The Musk-led project debuted this week with a bit of bureaucratic jujitsu: the takeover of an existing arm of the White House that, for the past decade, had focused on improving government technology. The office, the United States Digital Service, now renamed United States DOGE Service, was created in 2014 to fix failing computer systems that threatened the success of President Barack Obama’s health insurance overhaul.
Mr. Musk, who cut 80 percent of the jobs at Twitter after he bought the social media company two years ago, aims to conduct a review of at least some of the roughly 200 employees who work in the office before deciding whether to keep them in their jobs, according to two people familiar with his plan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal plans.
But the decision to rebrand the former digital office into DOGE also signals the potential limits of the endeavor, budget experts said.
Mr. Trump initially said his government overhaul would “cut wasteful expenditures” and “slash excess regulations,” but those goals were not explicitly laid out in the order on Monday that created the new group.
In a post on X on Friday, DOGE said that hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of current or impending federal contracts had been canceled. “Initial focus is mainly on DEI contracts and unoccupied buildings,” the post said, referring to diversity, equity and inclusion-related efforts. A spokeswoman for the office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the particular programs that were affected.
Romina Boccia, the director of budget and entitlement policy at the libertarian Cato Institute, said focusing on modernizing government technology could help address issues like improper payments. But she said that would be likely to save only a couple hundred billion dollars at most, far less than Mr. Musk had promised.
“The cynic in me says that DOGE realized that they were perhaps too ambitious and it would be much more difficult to accomplish their initial goals of reducing spending by $2 trillion,” Ms. Boccia said. “They’re narrowing their scope to something more manageable.”
“If they choose to work on the everyday problems that impact all Americans, they could accomplish a lot,” said Ms. Hsiang, who was appointed to the role during the Biden administration. “If they work on programs that put them in a deeply adversarial position with agencies, I think they will be less likely to get important things done.”
The full extent of how DOGE works and what it does may end up shielded from the public. Mr. Musk hopes to join the administration as a special government employee, according to a person familiar with his plan, a designation intended to avoid triggering a transparency law requiring government panels that include private citizens to conduct their meetings in public and make their documents available. It remains to be seen whether many other DOGE staffers will also have that designation.
Two Lawsuits Against DOGE
DOGE has no power to do anything. It is operating as a federal advisory committee. That puts the initiative in violation of a law called the Federal Advisory Committee Act, or FACA, which regulates the functions and transparency of federal advisory committees, according to the group.
On January 20, I noted Musk Promises “Doge to Mars” But There’s Two Lawsuits Already
DOGE is hit with internal bickering between Musk and Ramaswamy. And two lawsuits claim DOGE violates FACA law.
FACA requires these groups to be “fairly balanced in terms of the points of view represented and the functions to be performed by the advisory committee,” the lawsuit states
How to Avoid Transparency Law
To avoid FACA, Musk is the new head of United States Digital Service, now renamed United States DOGE Service
DOGE can now avoid transparency and keep everything hush-hush.
But that changes nothing other than Musk’s ability to fire 200 people in a group with a mission to improve government technology.
How long will it be before Musk seeks more money to fund this operation?
Regardless, we’ve gone from three billionaires with conflicting goals to one billionaire who is openly trashing Trump’s pet AI project.
DOGE Overpromised and Will Underdeliver
December 29, 2024: Team Trump Accelerates Social Security Insolvency, Where’s DOGE?
Republicans expand Social Security at a cost of $196 billion. Guess who benefits.
December 27, 2024: Can DOGE Cut $2 Trillion Out of $1 Trillion? What About Revenue?
The answer to the first question is obvious. So let’s discuss what’s reasonable.
January 10, 2025: Elon Musk Admits DOGE Can’t Find $2 Trillion In Budget Cuts
Anyone with an ounce of common sense knew that wasn’t possible. He won’t find $1 trillion either.
Musk now has authority to fire 200 people while retaining authority to whisper sweet nothings in Trump’s ear.
Is this a step forward?
Despite my sarcasm, I wish Musk well. But all team DOGE has come up with are suggestions that Ron Paul, Rand Paul, and others made long ago.
Trump will still have to get those suggestions through Congress.
Meanwhile, DOGE can now come up with new ideas in secret, under guise of improving the digital infrastructure or whatever. But is government secrecy a good thing?
Secrecy sure would not have been welcome under Biden.