The Trump administration is attempting to shield its former DOGE czar, Elon Musk, from having to testify in a legal case involving his work for the “government efficiency” initiative. DOGE has been sued many times over the past year for its efforts to carve up the government, but one of the most longstanding litigation efforts involves its attack on USAID, the international aid agency, which was all but shuttered earlier this year.
In February, several former USAID officials and contractors filed a lawsuit against Musk and DOGE that accused them of an “unconstitutional power grab” and characterized the gutting of USAID, which was created by Congress, as a violation of the separation of powers. The litigation argued that Musk had exercised an unconstitutional level of “power within the US government that’s reserved for Senate-confirmed officials,” Bloomberg notes.
Musk worked as a “special government employee” for the first five months of this year, and the government has maintained that he was not in charge of major policies at DOGE, despite public rhetoric by Musk (and Trump) that would suggest it.
Earlier this year, the government attempted to get the case thrown out, but, in August, a Maryland judge ruled that it could continue. Now, at the very least, the government is hoping to keep Elon off the witness stand.
Bloomberg first noted that the government has now sought a protective order to keep Musk from having to testify. In a motion filed on Nov. 21, the government moved to seek a “protective order precluding the depositions of Elon Musk,” as well as two other former administration officials, Peter Marocco and Jeremy Lewin. The government argues that extraordinary circumstances needed to be met before such depositions were necessary. The motion reads:
As the government understands it, Plaintiffs seek to depose each to determine who made the decision to take certain actions and the current operating status of USAID. But longstanding limitations on deposing high-level Executive Branch personnel requires Plaintiffs to show exceptional circumstances exist before the depositions occur. Because Plaintiffs have not made—and cannot make—that showing, a protective order is warranted.
The government also argued that the deposition of Musk “would necessarily intrude on White House activities and the president’s performance of constitutional duties, which triggers significant separation-of-powers concerns.” Additionally, the government said that litigants should “exhaust alternatives” before resorting to depositions.
Gizmodo reached out to the Trump administration. We also reached out to Musk via his startup xAI, but the company responded with an automated message that merely read: “Legacy Media Lies.”
The closure of USAID has been blamed for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people who were reliant on the aid program, a vast majority of whom are children. Musk, meanwhile, has called USAID “evil” and a “criminal organization.”
Last week, Reuters reported that DOGE was officially dead. The news agency quoted Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor, who said that DOGE “doesn’t exist” anymore, even though it has a charter that isn’t set to expire for another eight months. Kupor added that DOGE was no longer a “centralized entity,” and Reuters noted that many former DOGE-lings had since moved on to other positions within the government.
The White House and Musk have since come out to rebuff Reuters’ claims. “As usual, this is fake news from @Reuters,” the official DOGE account on X posted Monday. “President Trump was given a mandate by the American people to modernize the federal government and reduce waste, fraud and abuse,” it added. “Just last week, DOGE terminated 78 wasteful contracts and saved taxpayers $335M. We’ll be back in a few days with our regularly scheduled Friday update.”
“Reuters lies relentlessly,” Musk added Tuesday.
Whether DOGE is alive or not, the fact of the matter is that it is a terrible, inefficient, and generally stupid organization that might as well be dead for all the good it’s actually done the American people. After Musk promised to carve trillions of dollars out of the federal bureaucracy, it went on to do very little cost-saving and, instead, helped throw the federal bureaucracy into chaos during the first part of this year. All the while, DOGE bragged of huge savings for the American people, but journalists repeatedly showed that the organization was misrepresenting its activities and that its savings projections were plagued by rudimentary math mistakes. A recent report showed that DOGE had wasted billions of dollars while only saving a tiny fraction of what it had claimed.
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