The Trump administration is just two days old and has already been hit with with at least four lawsuits over Elon Musk’s new occupation.
Titled the Department of Government Efficiency – or DOGE for short much like that meme of the dog which has now died and also got turned into a cryptocurrency – it’s supposed to be helping the new Trump administration find places to cut government spending.
Elon Musk, who on Trump’s inauguration day twice made a very distinctive gesture where he held his right arm up in the air to a crowd, had previously claimed that he could cut about $2 trillion in spending from the US government budget.
However, he later revised that projection down to $1 trillion in budget cuts suggesting that by aiming for two you could probably get one.
For reference, between October 2023 and September 2024 the US federal government spent about $6.75 trillion.
Elon Musk is supposed to be heading up the Department of Government Efficiency (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Musk was earmarked to run DOGE alongside Vivek Ramaswamy, who has quit the department just hours after Trump took office to leave the Tesla boss in overall control of it.
Meanwhile, the new department has already been the subject of a number of lawsuits.
The Washington Post reports that DOGE was sued mere minutes after Trump’s inauguration by law firm National Security Counselors, which claims that the department meets the standard to be classed as a ‘federal advisory committee’ and thus has a legal responsibility to take certain steps which are meant to ensure it provides the government with balanced advice that is transparent.
A second lawsuit filed by the groups Public Citizen, State Democracy Defenders Fund and the American Federation of Government Employees alleges much the same, while a third lawsuit from the groups Democracy Forward, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington also has the same argument that DOGE is going to be providing advice to the government and thus must be bound by the rules of the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA).
The second Trump administration has only just started and there have already been several lawsuits (Shawn Thew-Pool/Getty Images)
These three lawsuits may be complicated by an executive order from Trump declaring that DOGE is operating ‘within’ the US government, meaning it would not be a federal advisory committee and thus not subject to FACA.
Meanwhile, a fourth lawsuit from the Center for Biological Diversity is also targeted at DOGE but is not picking up the group over its status.
Instead, this fourth lawsuit is seeking public records on how individuals who have claimed to represent DOGE ‘have interacted with the White House since the presidential transition began in November’.
