Even as the billionaire tech executive Elon Musk is seemingly everywhere in Washington, his role remains murky.
Early on in his interview with President Trump and Elon Musk yesterday, Fox News’s Sean Hannity tried ever so gently to get to the bottom of an important question: What does Musk actually do?
“He’s your tech support?” Hannity asked, referring to the words on the T-shirt Musk had opened his blazer to reveal a few moments earlier.
Musk said he was.
“He’s much more than that,” Trump insisted.
The exchange did little to answer the question. Musk’s precise role and responsibilities remain so vague, and so shrouded in secrecy, that even he and the president haven’t quite agreed on what to call it, or exactly how to talk about it.
Trump once said that it would be Musk’s job to “lead” the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, but a court filing this week said he was not actually the administrator of that effort — although it did not say who was. The White House has called Musk a “special government employee,” and Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, insisted that the department merely advised agencies, without the authority to fire people.
“He’s more powerful than a cabinet secretary, but he is not Senate-confirmed,” said Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a former Republican Senate aide, who added that, at the same time, Musk offers little public information about his day-to-day activities.
The White House has not laid out exactly how many people are part of Musk’s team, or exactly what they are doing. For all of Musk’s promises of transparency, the public is learning about his team’s work largely through reporting and through, as my colleague Zach Montague pointed out today, legal filings. Even judges are having difficulties ascertaining basic facts about the group’s incursion into agencies and the data its staff is collecting.