The White House clouded the already murky authority structure of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency in a court filing arguing that Elon Musk isn't even an employee of the advisory panel — and a reporter who has covered its inner workings tried to make sense of that Wednesday.
The tech billionaire has been installing youthful employees with no government experience at federal agencies, where they have accessed highly sensitive data on taxpayers and payment systems. Musk has made sweeping cuts to congressionally approved funding and the government workforce while claiming to have an outside role in Donald Trump's administration.
"It is about transparency [and] by definition, they are not," said CNN's Kate Bolduan. "He is not and DOGE is not being transparent, providing the data or even providing the numbers of people who have been fired, in one regard, or the numbers of dollars that they are freezing up.
"By definition, they're not being transparent. Why do you think he keeps saying this?"
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The administration has promised "radical transparency" on various endeavors, but Wired reporter Makena Kelly, whose work helped unmask some of the otherwise undisclosed DOGE employees, agreed with Bolduan the agency was anything but that.
"You can tell just by the way that DOGE is even set up," said Kelly, a senior political correspondent for the tech publication. "They don't even want to comment on all these things, and why is it so opaque? I think it's so people don't ask too many questions. You know, there's a lot of things that DOGE is doing, and they're doing things that I think experts will say are incredibly illegal."
DOGE has been hit with multiple lawsuits over its alleged violations of privacy laws and the legality of its work, but Kelly said that Musk apparently believes he's been transparent about his actions because of the way he defines that word.
"It's posting on X," she said. "That's exactly what it is, and that's what we've seen play out this week. Of course we have the DOGE Twitter account, X account, that was created and then a variety of other X accounts that were created for every federal agency. It looked like the CFPB, the FTC, etc, everything like that, and where they're crowdfunding, crowdsourcing all of this information from people who are just on X."
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