Psst — there is no administrator of DOGE. There is Elon Musk.
Psst — there is no administrator of DOGE. There is Elon Musk.
A mong the strangest aspects of the new Trump administration has been the treatment of DOGE’s inner workings as if they were a state secret. A government has lots of secrets, of course — they’re a national security necessity. But the identity of the official who is running an agency — even such agencies as the CIA and other repositories of highly classified information — is not supposed to be a state secret. To turn it into one would be to impede the Senate’s constitutional duty to advise on and consent to the appointment of such officials before they are allowed to wield government power.
Since being reelected, President Trump has regarded Senate confirmation as a nuisance to be circumvented, not a mandate of the law he is sworn to faithfully execute. Recall the cockamamie scheme to contrive a recess that might allow him to appoint cabinet and other officials without a confirmation process — notwithstanding that Republicans hold a six-vote Senate majority, such that any barely qualified nominee should sail through (and, in fact, all Trump’s nominees, save the objectively unconfirmable Matt Gaetz, have so far been confirmed, though some by the slimmest of margins).
I am convinced that the desire of the president and his top adviser, Elon Musk, to avoid a confirmation process for Musk is the reason for the mystery that has shrouded the inner workings of DOGE — the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency Service. Even as the administration brags about DOGE’s supposed transparency, getting information about how it is structured and how it operates has been much harder than pulling teeth — to the great frustration of not only journalists but also federal judges now hearing challenges to DOGE’s “deconstruction of [the] unconstitutional administrative state” (as a White House “fact sheet” describes its mission).
Finally, after over a month of stonewalling — including a bizarre interlude at Tuesday’s White House press briefing in which Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt snapped, “I am not going to reveal the name of that individual from this podium,” as if she’d been asked who buried Jimmy Hoffa — the administration informed the press that the acting leader of DOGE is an obscure official named Amy Gleason.
Or is she?
It’s something of a labyrinth. As I recounted over the weekend, President Trump lawfully established DOGE as a component of the Executive Office of the President. (EOP was stood up by President Franklin D. Roosevelt shortly before World War II.) DOGE was tucked into EOP’s Office of Management and Budget because it was structured as a refinement of the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) — an OMB entity that President Obama set up in 2014. The USDS was conceived as a crossroads between heath care and digital technology because its immediate task was to address the troubled rollout of the so-called Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).
We don’t know much about Amy Gleason, but we do know that she specializes in health-care reforms and how they might be advanced by digital technology. She worked in the USDS during the first Trump administration, assigned to help with the Covid response at the Department of Health and Human Services, the New York Times reports. During the Biden years, Gleason was employed by a health-focused investment firm that is run by Brad Smith, a health-care executive who had worked on the Covid response with the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner (who was an influential White House official in Trump I). The Times reports that “late last year” (it’s not clear whether this means after Trump’s election in November), Gleason rejoined the USDS.
As I noted over the weekend, the executive order, which established DOGE as a “reorganization and renaming” of the USDS, decreed that there would be an administrator. But the order should be read carefully — it doesn’t actually call for a DOGE administrator; it refers (six times) to a USDS administrator.
See, while DOGE tweaks the structure of USDS, at least temporarily, it did not put the USDS out of business. Rather, as Trump’s executive order puts it, the USDS has been “publicly renamed” as “DOGE.” This is basically an inside joke: DOGE is an homage to dogecoin, the digital currency touted by Musk, who is a crypto enthusiast. The “Department of Government Efficiency,” which was first conceptualized when Musk joined the 2024 Trump campaign, was derived from the crypto currency’s name. So, the labeling of the government agency as DOGE is just branding; its existence has not eliminated the USDS. To the contrary, the executive order creates DOGE as a “temporary organization” that has been “established within the USDS” (emphasis added).
DOGE’s lease on life is supposed to end on July 4, 2026, the 250th birthday of these United States. In the interim, according to the executive order, “The U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization shall be headed by the USDS Administrator.” (Emphasis added.) That is to say, Amy Gleason is the administrator of the USDS, not of DOGE. And while DOGE is supposed to wrap up in 18 months, the USDS is slated to continue . . . though what it would be called at that point is anybody’s guess.
There is no administrator of DOGE. There is Elon Musk.
It appears that Gleason’s main function is as a placeholder who links DOGE to the USDS. It’s not clear that she has anything of substance to do with DOGE. In fact, if Gleason had answered Musk’s weekend directive that all government employees report on what they’d been up to lately, her response would apparently have been “vacationing in Mexico.” Since DOGE is cooking on countless fronts — in government agencies, in courtrooms, in the White House, on X/Twitter — it’s odd to have the person identified as “running DOGE” (as the Times puts it) out on holiday. But of course, she’s not running DOGE. On paper, she’s running the USDS, which for now exists mainly to house DOGE administratively in the EOP.
Why all this three-card monte? Trump and Musk are trying to steer clear of the Constitution’s appointments clause. To repeat what I explained over the weekend:
Musk is one of the world’s richest men and has extensive business ties to the government, which heavily regulates some of his most important corporate interests (electric vehicles, space travel, artificial intelligence, social media, etc.). Furthermore, the DOGE initiative is one that Trump clearly wanted to hit the ground running at the start of the new administration, with Musk calling the plays.
It’s understandable, then, that Musk and the administration would have wanted to avoid a searching confirmation process. Not only would that have been very intrusive for Musk (whose life and financial affairs are extraordinarily complicated); it would almost certainly have caused him to decline to serve. If he were deemed the rough equivalent of a cabinet secretary, then he’d have had to separate himself from his private businesses — which he wants to continue running — in order to comply with government conflict-of-interest rules. Moreover, had Musk’s confirmation been required, it would have delayed DOGE’s operations and provided the entrenched bureaucratic interests that Trump is trying to gut, or at least tame, with more time and information to prepare their opposition.
Hence, instead of being formally designated as the chief operative of an agency that is exercising extensive executive power, Musk is couched as a mere “special government employee” (SGE).
On SGEs, the Wall Street Journal reported last night that the Trump administration is rife with them — working for the president while continuing their private gigs . . . and enhancing their value in those already well-compensated private gigs because of their insider status in the administration. “SGE,” the Journal amplifies, is
a status under federal ethics laws that permits private-sector employees to work inside the government without having to relinquish their outside salaries or investments. Only a sliver of cases must publicly disclose clients or potential conflicts of interest. While the rules limit work to up to 130 days in any given year, it can be extended if the administration desires. . . .
SGEs have been around since the early 1960s, when Congress first enabled administrations to bring in outside experts without requiring them to leave their positions in academia or the private sector. The designation has typically been used to allow subject matter experts to sit on advisory boards or serve in narrow, specialized roles without giving up their jobs, as regular government employees are required to do.
I’ll close by reiterating something else I said in the weekend piece. There are plausible arguments that Elon Musk, despite the significant government activities he performs in running DOGE (which he is clearly doing, as President Trump has repeatedly said), is not an officer of the United States to the degree that the Constitution would mandate a Senate confirmation process. The administration has assiduously defined DOGE’s mission as “temporary,” and Musk’s SGE status is of even more limited duration; a confirmation-level officer, by contrast, must have continuous duties. Moreover, Musk can claim that he is just providing advice, not giving orders.
On the other hand, DOGE’s 18-month term, which is not all that short, can be extended — as can Musk’s “SGE” term. At this juncture, it’s hard to see how they wouldn’t be, given the way court proceedings have slowed DOGE down. Furthermore, the president’s rhetoric frames Musk as his powerful right-hand man, issuing directives that Trump backs and expects executive agencies to follow.
However this plays out, though, the Trump administration’s furtiveness in describing Musk’s role is not going to help in court proceedings, in which Musk and DOGE are trying to fight off appointments clause claims. If Trump officials had a good story about how Musk was playing a modest advisory role, they should simply have related it. Instead, they’ve been cagey. Courts really don’t like caginess.