Despite what you may have heard, Elon Musk holds no official position in the United States government. He has not been elected to serve in any capacity. Nor has he been appointed, let alone confirmed, by Congress to any role that grants him legal authority over public policy or federal operations. Yet he has now seized core government powers, with the apparent approval of President Donald Trump. He has directed the shutdown of government departments, commandeered federal resources, and dictated policy decisions—all without taking the oath to uphold the Constitution that every public servant, from the president to a postal worker, is required to swear.
The so-called Department of Government Efficiency was ostensibly created by an executive order rebranding the U.S. Digital Service, an information technology advisory organization within the Executive Office of the President. USDS, a technology unit, was created by President Obama in the aftermath of the healthcare.gov debacle, and has been funded by Congress for the purpose of making recommendations for better IT practices across the government. Per Trump’s order, USDS was rebranded as the “US DOGE Service” and retains the same abbreviation. Confusingly, the order also establishes within USDS the “U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization,” which is what Musk has been calling the “Department of Government Efficiency.” Of course, nothing in Trump’s order purports to give DOGE any operational authority over government agencies, which would require an act of Congress.
More importantly, Musk has not been appointed to any official role at DOGE, whatever DOGE is. As far as anyone can tell, he is still just a private citizen, and has not complied with any of the laws applicable to federal employees and officials, such as disclosures and divestments to avoid conflicts of interest. And since he has not actually been appointed to anything, neither has he satisfied the most fundamental requirement for government officials: swearing an oath to the Constitution. Even his purported title has not been consistent, variously described as the “head,” “chair,” “co-chair” (before Vivek Ramaswamy’s departure), or “leader” of DOGE.
To be clear, Musk has no more lawful authority to start barking orders at government agencies than you or I would as random private citizens walking in off the street. He is not in anybody’s chain of command. He does not have lawful access to government systems and resources. Public officials should not recognize his claimed authority over them. If Trump wants to invoke constitutional executive authority, he can do it through the proper channels—but Musk is not the president of the United States and he has not been empowered as a legally valid conduit for the president’s orders.
The constitutional oath is not some ceremonial technicality. It is the cornerstone of legal legitimacy—the defining feature of who counts as “the government” in this country. Article VI, Clause 3 of the Constitution explicitly mandates that, “the Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution.” This requirement ensures that those entrusted with public authority are legally and morally bound to uphold the constitutional framework.
Without this oath, there are no legal powers, no public trust, and no constitutional authority. Musk is operating entirely outside this framework. He has not sworn to uphold the Constitution because he holds no position that would require it, yet he has been claiming and exercising power more expansively than any officeholder short of the president himself. Unlike the president, Musk cannot be impeached, because he holds no office. Unlike a cabinet secretary, his authorities are not defined by law. Unlike a civil servant, he cannot be subject to ethics or transparency laws. He governs without the constraints that define our system of government, and this amounts to an astonishing breakdown of the constitutional order.
Government by Oligarch Edict
The extent of Musk’s informal control is staggering. His companies—Tesla, SpaceX, and X (formerly Twitter)—have long been intertwined with government contracts and subsidies. But Musk has moved from being a corporate beneficiary to an unelected autocrat. Since Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, Musk has taken over key government functions, including direct control over the Treasury’s payment system. This system, the federal government’s financial lifeline, determines which agencies, contractors, and programs receive funding. It is, in essence, the federal government’s checkbook. Musk claims he has frozen payments to organizations he disapproves of, canceled allocations based on personal grievances, and redirected funds—all without congressional approval or legal oversight.
It’s not clear exactly how real some of Musk’s claims are. On X, after disgraced former Gen. Mike Flynn flagged Lutheran Family Services as objectionable, Musk claimed they would be cut off. LFS is a joint collaboration of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) and the more conservative Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (LCMS). It contracts for a wide range of healthcare and social services—for example, providing behavioral healthcare to at-risk children. There is no obvious reason why this organization would attract ire; LCMS is hardly anybody’s idea of a “woke” denomination. But it’s also unknown if Musk has done anything more than post about them on X.
Musk’s interference doesn’t stop with the Treasury. He has reportedly gained access to classified and sensitive information across multiple federal agencies, bypassing security clearance protocols. He created a novel system to mass email federal employees by way of the Office of Personnel Management, bypassing normal chains of command, while locking out those actually responsible for these systems. (One result being all 13,000 employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were bombarded with obscene spam when the unsecured all-staff email address leaked.) Through this, he has offered a confusing “buyout” scheme—a rehashed version of one he sent to Twitter employees he sought to purge after acquiring the platform—to all federal employees, offering several months of pay in exchange for resigning, despite no such program or funding being authorized by Congress.
Over the weekend, Musk ordered the shutdown of USAID, the United States’ primary foreign aid agency, instructing its employees to stay home indefinitely. In a confrontation at USAID headquarters, Musk’s deputies—many reportedly very young and unqualified, one even a literal teenager—threatened to call U.S. Marshals to obtain access at gunpoint. When USAID’s head of security refused, he was placed on leave, though it is again murky on whose authority. These are not the actions of a private citizen offering policy advice; these are the decisions of someone in actual control over the government.
Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution provides that the president “shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.” Somehow, Trump and Musk have managed to find a constitutional provision so basic and uncontested that nobody has ever even thought of violating it before: acting as (you could accurately call it impersonating) a government officer without having any formal documentation as one. Receiving a commission from the president is more than a technicality—it ensures that every federal officer derives their authority from a constitutional process. The commissioning process is how public servants are legally empowered to act on behalf of the government. Musk has received no such warrant, and yet he is running amok, interfering with lawful federal functions with impunity. This bypasses the fundamental constitutional requirement that all government officers derive their power through lawful appointment and are accountable to the people, either directly or through elected representatives.
A Coup by Any Other Name
What Musk is doing bears all the hallmarks of a coup d'état, even above and beyond Trump’s broader assault on the Constitution. A coup occurs when some person or group of persons seize extra-legal control over the state. Musk’s actions, though unconventional, fit within this framework. Without holding office or formal authority, he has effectively taken control of critical government functions, sidelining constitutional processes in favor of personal edicts.
Control over the Treasury’s payment systems is not just administrative meddling; it is a direct attack on Congress’s most fundamental power: the power of the purse. The Constitution plainly states: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” By seizing control over which payments are made and to whom, Musk has overridden the fundamental basis of representative legislative bodies in the English-speaking world since time immemorial.
His access to classified information without formal security clearances compromises national security protocols designed to protect sensitive intelligence, and violates a range of national security and information privacy laws, as legal scholars have been quick to point out. The arbitrary shutdown of USAID and the sidelining of its personnel further highlight the extent of Musk’s unchecked power over government operations, disrupting international aid efforts and weakening America’s diplomatic standing abroad.
The most alarming part of this power grab is that it lacks even the pretense of lawfulness. If the constitutional system functioned as designed, this could not happen. The entire American framework is built on limiting the concentration of power through elections, checks and balances, and the oath of office. Musk has bypassed all of these safeguards, acting as a government unto himself. He is acting in much the same way as he did when took over Twitter, embarking on a chaos spree of purges and issuing erratic commands. But he actually owns the company formerly known as Twitter—it was his to wreck as he pleased. He does not own, or even hold any position in, the United States government.
This represents a failure of the institutions tasked with protecting the constitutional order. Congress, rather than confronting Musk’s overreach, has largely remained passive, with some members eagerly cheering him on. The courts have barely had the chance yet to intervene in what appears to be a murky blend of private influence and public power that is so unprecedented that there are few clear precedents to apply. The public, with media coverage and politicians failing to convey how extraordinary the whole situation is, has not fully grasped the danger of allowing one private individual to exercise such sweeping control.
Allowing Musk to exercise government power without taking the constitutional oath goes to the very foundation of our republic. The Constitution is designed to ensure that no one governs without being bound by the supreme law of the land. Dispensing with it is a profound reversal of the entire project of Enlightenment liberalism: rejecting arbitrary authority and bringing power under the rule of law.
Musk receiving some formal appointment and taking the oath would not, of course, resolve the many other legal violations DOGE is perpetrating. For one thing, in exercising direct authority over government agencies, Musk is overstepping the Constitution’s limits for which officers in the executive branch must be Senate-confirmed. Nor is there any law giving the hollowed-out shell of the U.S. Digital Service any power to supersede normal chains of command across the rest of the government, something Trump’s own executive order acknowledged. But as a threshold matter, these are immaterial if Musk isn’t really part of the government at all.
The United States was not meant to be ruled by unchecked lawless power. Our deepest commitment embodied by the Constitution is to be governed by elected representatives, constrained by law, accountable to the people, and subject to certain guaranteed rights. That system, for all its imperfections, is now being dismantled before our eyes. The question is whether we will recognize this crisis for what it is, and whether we will act to stop it before it’s too late.
Update: Shortly after this piece was posted, news broke that the White House was now claiming Musk was a special government employee. This at least provides a fig leaf that he has some governmental status, but you can’t legally put SGEs in operational command and control of government departments because their role is purely advisory or consultative. They aren’t allowed to serve for more than 130 days in a year, and they are still subject to some though not all laws about financial disclosures and conflicts of interest, none of which Musk has done.
More to the point, making Musk an “employee” doesn’t solve the constitutional crisis at all. He is acting as an officer in the constitutional sense, actually wielding executive power, and doing so entirely outside the most basic of rules for how the executive branch is constitutionally structured. Executive branch officers have two options: they can be principal officers who must be Senate-confirmed or they can be inferior officers created by a specific statute allowing them to be appointed by the president or department heads or, in rare cases, the courts. Inferior officers, in this scheme, must still be subordinate to Senate-confirmed principal officers.
“The president just made up this job” isn’t one of those options. You can’t, as a constitutional matter, have somebody with actual direct operational authority who doesn’t hold an office created by law, either Senate-confirmed or within the rules for when Congress can pass a law waiving Senate confirmation for inferior officers.
To underscore how anti-constitutional the whole scheme is, this new official explanation would place him below the level of who is an officeholder subject to impeachment. It has long been the understanding that mere non-officer employees are not impeachable, in the same way Congress couldn’t impeach a postal worker or a park service groundskeeper. The White House’s position is that Musk’s government “job” is as a special, part-time, and unpaid employee within the president’s administrative staff’s advisory organization for making sure the government’s websites work. That pretense is exactly as absurd as it sounds.
The president can have advisors and consultants all he wants, but those people aren’t in charge of anything. They can’t issue orders, or seize resources, or take over systems, much less randomly shut down agencies and cut off payments at their whim. That’s the apparent reality of what Musk is openly claiming he can do, and seems to actually be doing. It represents a complete breakdown, in radical unprecedented ways, of lawful governance under the Constitution.
And while regular employees within the Executive Office of the President might often convey directives from the White House to various agency heads, what Musk is doing is altogether different. In numerous instances, he is not simply serving as a messenger between the president and the rest of the government—he is claiming authority to issue directives on his own say-so. For example, a 25 year-old at the so-called DOGE directly emailed USAID employees telling them to stay home, bypassing the nominal agency head altogether.
This is being done with only the vaguest of blessings from Trump. Neither the laws nor the Constitution enable Trump to create this sort of deputy president or de facto prime minister position with such sweeping powers, and the fig leaf of calling him a "special government employee" doesn’t change that.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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Department of Grifters and Extortionists
Excellent, thoughtful, incisive, reporting and analysis. As Mr. Craig mentioned though, this coup d'état doesn't seem to have been recognized as such, nor has it penetrated the major news or commentary outlets...at least in such a trenchant fashion as to be noticeable by the general public or its "representatives."
It seems now that the Legislative Branch (both parties included) has been reduced to the functional equivalent of a post-January, 1933 "Enabling Act" status in Germany or the Russian Duma under Putin: an echo chamber for the autocrat in the case of Republicans and an opportunity for hypocritical, sanctimonious, effete and humiliating posturing by "the opposition party".
Not to be overlooked though, is the propellant and lubricating judicial rulings from the erstwhile "independent and impartial" Judicial Branch.
No schadenfreude on my part, but as the late cartoonist, Walt Kelly wrote in 1970, "We have met the enemy and he is us."