Who’s in charge of DOGE? Not Elon Musk, White House says

Elon Musk is not the leader of DOGE — the mysterious Trump administration operation overseeing an effort to break and remake the federal bureaucracy. In fact, he’s not even technically part of it at all, the White House said in court papers Monday night.

In a three-page declaration, a top White House personnel official revealed that Musk’s title is “senior adviser to the president,” a role in which he has “no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself.”

That explanation, provided to a federal court by Joshua Fisher, the director of the White House’s Office of Administration, seems to directly contradict the way President Donald Trump and Musk have spoken publicly about the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, widely seen as a Musk-driven project to shrink and dismantle key aspects of the federal government.

The sworn statement instead deepens the questions surrounding DOGE. Fisher confirmed that Musk is not the official administrator of the office, which was established by Trump as an office in the Executive Office of the President. But Fisher did not indicate who the administrator actually is.