Musk’s DOGE plans rely on White House budget office. Conflicts await.
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Elon Musk’s influence over federal spending will flow through a White House budget office that helps develop regulations that affect his business empire. President-elect Donald Trump has asked Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla and SpaceX, and Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur who ran for president, to open a Department of Government Efficiency that will suggest ways to cut spending.
Musk and Ramaswamy have said the organization will work closely with the White House Office of Management and Budget, which analyzes federal spending and guides implementation of regulations. “We will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws," Musk and Ramaswamy wrote in an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal on Nov. 20.
Musk said Wednesday that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau should be eliminated. “Delete CFPB. There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies," Musk wrote on X, the social-media platform he owns.
Some regulations the budget office oversees affect companies that Musk controls. Helping steer its agenda would present myriad conflicts of interest, ethics experts said. “I’ve never seen anything like this," said Richard Painter, who served as a chief ethics counsel for President George W.
Bush. Painter said he believes the advisory group, which has an acronym, DOGE, that mirrors the name of a Musk-backed cryptocurrency, would have to make some meetings public under federal law. A spokeswoman for Ramaswamy said he and Musk are consulting legal advisers about their plans.
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