It took just a few seconds, but President Donald Trump's shout-out to Elon Musk during his long-winded and combative address to Congress may torpedo his own government's legal arguments in defense of DOGE, whose apparent leader, plaintiffs say, has no legitimate authority to ransack government agencies.
"I have created the brand new Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE — perhaps you’ve heard of it, perhaps — which is headed by Elon Musk, who is in the gallery tonight," Trump said in his Tuesday night State of the Union address, as Musk stood up and bowed.
GOP lawmakers greeted Trump's tribute with cheers and applause, though the remark was a gift to group of Democratic state attorneys general, who have filed multiple lawsuits against Trump alleging that DOGE is a cypher of an agency that walks, talks and quacks like federal advisory committee but does not abide by the usual accountability requirements. Worse, plaintiffs say, DOGE uses its power far more permissively than an advisory committee should.
The Democratic AGs and government lawyers have clashed over Musk's actual role in the department, with an affadavit by the Trump administration claiming that Musk is “not an employee of the U.S. DOGE Service or the U.S. DOGE Service temporary organization," and was instead “an employee of the White House office,” with the title of “Senior Advisor to the President" and “no actual or formal authority to make government decisions.”
The actual head of DOGE, the government later said, was Amy Gleason, a senior adviser at U.S. Digital Services who was apparently caught off-guard while vacationing in Mexico. Judge Theodore Chuang had already expressed annoyance over government attorneys' inability to give a straight answer over who was in charge of DOGE — but Trump may have unintentionally put those frustrations at rest.
Trump's line about Musk "undermines the administration’s position in a few of its court cases against DOGE’s effort to access agency systems," wrote Kyle Cheney, Politico's senior legal affairs reporter.
Later that evening, plaintiffs in one of the lawsuits alerted the court about Trump's speech as new evidence that Musk, not Gleason, actually runs DOGE.
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