The billionaire Trump ally has pushed back at criticism over transparency, saying his department’s work is ‘common sense’.
President Donald Trump’s adviser Elon Musk made a rare public appearance at the White House on Tuesday to defend the swift and extensive cuts he’s pushing across the federal government, amid concerns that he’s amassing power with little transparency or accountability.
Billionaire Musk stood next to Trump in the Oval Office at the White House with his four-year-old son as the United States president praised his work in the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Trump signed an executive order expanding Musk’s powers to continue downsizing the federal workforce, by which a DOGE representative will need to approve almost all new hiring.
Wearing a “Make America Great Again” cap, Musk defended DOGE’s work as “common sense” and “not draconian or radical”. He described the federal bureaucracy as an “unelected” fourth branch of government with “more power than any elected representative”.
“The people voted for major government reform, and that’s what the people are going to get,” he told reporters. “That’s what democracy is all about.”
Concerns that the White House has been moving to limit independent oversight have grown after the inspector general for the US Agency for International Development (USAID) was fired on Tuesday, a day after warning that it had become nearly impossible to monitor $8.2bn in humanitarian funds after DOGE began dismantling the agency.
Musk claimed DOGE’s work was being shared on its website and on X, the social media platform he owns, despite the website containing no information and the X posts lacking details, including which programmes are being cut and where the organisation has access.
In response to a question about false statements that the US was spending $50m on condoms for Gaza, he acknowledged that some of the claims he’s made about government programmes have been wrong.
“Some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected. So nobody can bat 1,000”, he said.
Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, pushed back at criticism over transparency, saying he expected to be held fully accountable. “I fully expect to be scrutinised and get, you know, a daily proctology exam, basically,” Musk said. “It’s not like I think I can get away with something.”
His companies hold contracts with the Pentagon and intelligence community worth billions of dollars, and critics say DOGE’s work will give Musk access to sensitive payment systems at the US Treasury.
The push towards mass layoffs comes after the Trump administration attempted to cajole federal workers into accepting buyout offers, an effort that was blocked by a federal judge.
Trump and Musk lashed out at federal judges on Tuesday, questioning the independence of the judiciary and threatening action. Musk claimed on X that the country was being destroyed by a “judicial coup”, while Trump blamed “highly political judges” for slowing his agenda.
“We want to weed out the corruption. And it seems hard to believe that a judge could say, we don’t want you to do that,” Trump said. “So maybe we have to look at the judges.”