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In 2022, the Pentagon proudly announced a committee on diversity and inclusion, with a Marine veteran and senior director at Tesla, serving as a member. The same person, who spent nearly six years at Tesla, also helped push Elon Musk to make Juneteenth a company-wide holiday. But Musk is a notorious recipient of lucrative government contracts and changes with the winds of presidential administrations.
Now in 2025, as a “special government employee” heading up the “department of government efficiency” (Doge), Musk is going to war with those kinds of government diversity and inclusion programs and slashing whatever he sees as a “waste” of public coffers.
But legal resistance is mounting, as Doge faces countless lawsuits alleging everything from privacy concerns to free speech violations, which all leads to one important question: is any of this even legal?
Laurence Tribe, one of the nation’s leading and preeminent constitutional scholars and a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, has already argued that much of Trump’s blitzkrieg of executive orders on the day of his inauguration disregards the US constitution. He told the Guardian he saw Musk’s actions as furthering that culture.
On whether or not Doge and Musk can legally have this much power over an array of government departments, Tribe was emphatic: “NO.”
Musk has applied a buckshot method across the government, offering CIA agents walking papers while appraising the Department of Education – all at the same time.
Tribe said the lack of guardrails being placed on Doge’s maverick initiatives, raises “both” questions of illegality and ethical wrongdoing that can be challenged in court. As for Musk’s status as a federal contractor (such as his StarLink work with the Pentagon) and now a government employee, Tribe sees it as “absolutely” a legal conflict of interest.
Musk is certainly facing roadblocks: protests at the buildings of USAid – another target of Doge he called a “radical-left political psy op” on X – have brought in hundreds and has attracted broader Democratic backlash. But Doge continues unabated, honoring Trump’s campaign promise to rid the federal government of the “woke” Biden-era.
On Wednesday, Senator Bernie Sanders went further, telling CNN: “What Musk is doing is illegal and unconstitutional.”
Sanders explained how outright deleting an agency like USAid, which was itself a creation of Congress, requires congressional approval.
“You can’t do it unilaterally,” he said.
But with a Republican supreme court supermajority that almost always sides with the Trump administration, any of these lawsuits that do end up being tested in the highest US court risks rulings in favor of Musk and Doge. Many of these Doge-related lawsuits will go on for months and be heard by benches stacked with Trump appointees from his first presidency. Musk has also begun publicly chastising lower court judges who go against the spirit of the administration.
Doge, nonetheless, will continue to be sued.
It took only minutes after Trump was sworn in for a Maryland-based public interest law firm to file a 30-page lawsuit alleging Musk’s Doge should be considered a “federal advisory committee”, which makes it subject to government transparency laws and public scrutiny, which includes note keeping and meeting records, as required by law.
So far, Musk has reportedly employed a team of very young programmers who brazenly took control of the treasury department payment system, which gave them access to the addresses, social security numbers and bank account information of Americans.
Tribe says that act alone raises, “serious issues of privacy”. Doge is indeed already facing legal action for that treasury fiasco, with a judge approving a temporary hold on Doge from fully accessing the payment system, while another judge ordered a freeze on the deadline for federal workers to accept a buyout.
Ultimately, the only real guardrails on Musk and Doge will be in the hands of the courts. Even if Doge is found to be violating labor laws, national security statutes or constitutional rights – cases will inevitably be gummed up in the legal process, which could allow enough time for some of these federal workers to relent and take buyouts.
“Obviously what Musk is doing is illegal,” said Ed Ongweso Jr, a senior researcher at Security in Context, an international project of scholars housed at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “And on some level it boils down to the world’s richest man – a child of apartheid who surrounds himself with sycophantic phrenologists – trying to consolidate control over as much of the state apparatus as possible.”
Ongweso has been following the rise of the tech-bro class and its cozying up to presidential administrations. Musk’s Doge takeover is the latest iteration.
“For years, both parties have fetishized Silicon Valley to varying degrees, eagerly swallowing the sector’s gibberish about making governance efficient via algorithmic rule via privatization,” he said.
Ongweso pointed out that Musk is a veteran of the mass layoff and knows they come with lawsuits. But it hasn’t stopped him before.
At Tesla’s Fremont, California, plant a Black former employee was awarded $3.2m in a racial harassment case, while the plant itself has been sued multiple times on racial discrimination and labor law grounds.
“Learning that a key Doge staffer was a skull measuring eugenicist should come as no surprise given the rampant racism (slurs, swastikas, a hanging noose, etc) at Musk’s Fremont Tesla factory,” he said.
And when it comes to laying off workers, Musk has the same recycled playbook.
“He’s been sued for failing to provide advance notice for 2024 mass layoffs at Tesla and for 2022 Twitter layoffs that were a transparent attempt to get out of severance pay,” explained Ongweso.
“It’s obvious lawsuits aren’t a deterrent for the world’s richest man – why would he stop mass layoffs, slashing and burning operations, or recruiting racists when it’s worked out so well for him that he’s now in firm control of America’s administrative state?”
