'Unchecked power; agent of chaos': 14 US states challenge Elon Musk's role as DOGE boss
The suit by 14 states says the US President cannot override laws on the executive branch and federal spending or create or dissolve federal agencies.
Fourteen US states, including two with governors from US President Donald Trump's Republican Party, have filed a federal lawsuit challenging billionaire Elon Musk's authority as the head of the new Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, created by Trump for his second term, which began on January 20.
The states, led by New Mexico, accused Elon Musk of being a ‘designated agent of chaos’ whose ‘sweeping authority’ as DOGE head, they argued, is in violation of the Constitution of the United States, ABC News reported.
“Musk's seemingly limitless and unchecked power to strip the government of its workforce and eliminate entire departments with the stroke of a pen, or a click of a mouse, would have been shocking to those who won this country's independence,” reads the complaint, filed on Thursday in a federal court in Washington, D.C.
“There is no greater threat to democracy than the accumulation of state power in the hands of a single, unelected individual,” the lawsuit said.
“The Appointments Clause of the Constitution, therefore, calls for someone with such significant and expansive authority as Musk to be formally nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate,” it added.
Besides New Mexico, the states which have participated in the lawsuit include Arizona, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. Nevada and Vermont have Republican governors.
This is the second lawsuit brought against Musk challenging his position as DOGE head. A separate one, filed in a Maryland federal court, makes the same constitutional claim as the latest one.
As per the suit of the 14 states, the Constitution prevents the US President from ‘overriding existing laws concerning the structure of the Executive Branch and federal spending,’ and, therefore, the commander-in-chief is forbidden from ‘creating’ or ‘extinguishing’ federal agencies.
Calling Musk ‘far more than an adviser to the White House,’ the states have claimed that DOGE has ‘inserted itself into at least 17 agencies, and called for 'Musk's officer-level governmental actions to date' to be declared ‘unlawful.’
However, both Musk and Trump have repeatedly insisted that DOGE is ‘simply rooting out vast government waste and potentially even criminal corruption’ within the agencies.