When President Trump signed an order imbuing the so-called Department of Government Efficiency with even more power over the federal work force, Elon Musk was there, championing the work as an exercise in transparency.
“All of our actions are maximally transparent,” Mr. Musk said last week, standing in the Oval Office. “In fact, I don’t think there’s been — I don’t know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the DOGE organization.”
But in case after case, federal judges have begged to differ.
The work of Mr. Musk, who Mr. Trump has said is the leader of the operation tasked with making “large scale” reductions across every department, has been largely shrouded in secrecy. Team members have spent weeks burrowing into multiple federal agencies, demanding access to data for undisclosed purposes.
Anxious career employees have received little direct information, leaving them reliant on office rumors and news reports for updates. The identities of the members of Mr. Musk’s team, too, have been closely held.
Court filings in the torrent of lawsuits challenging the incursions have offered a crucial, though limited, window. As some of the only firsthand accounts of what Mr. Musk’s associates are doing across a number of departments, they paint a picture of a tightly managed process in which small groups of government employees have swept in and out of agencies, grabbing up data in apparent pursuit of larger political projects.
The filings have also offered revelations about what information security and ethics trainings those employees have undergone. But many questions remain, frustrating the judges trying the cases.
In at least one filing, the government has shown an effort to wall off Mr. Musk, in particular, from scrutiny by asserting that he is not, in fact, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency nor an employee of the office.
Lawyers defending the Trump administration in lawsuits have sought to document the efforts by Mr. Musk’s team as routine. The government has repeatedly filed affidavits by the civil servants working with Mr. Musk’s associates stating that everyone from the Musk unit has been given appropriate training and agreed to security measures meant to prevent illegal disclosures of privileged data. (In a case involving the Musk team’s work at the Education Department, however, an employee acknowledged that another operative had not completed trainings as of last Sunday.)
And like Mr. Musk, lawyers representing the government have repeatedly asserted that all efforts associated with the operation are aimed at auditing government books for signs of “waste, fraud and abuse.” The office did not respond to a message seeking comment.
In case after case, judges have strained to establish even basic facts about the staff members who have descended on federal agencies. Attempts to press for specifics, such as how many associates of Mr. Musk have been detailed to specific agencies, whether they have arrived as employees of those agencies or as representatives from the White House, and what grounds they have for demanding entry into agencies’ systems, have been largely unsuccessful.
In a lawsuit brought against the Education Department that challenges the Musk team’s review of sensitive student data, like tax information and Social Security numbers, a government employee named Adam Ramada identified himself as a member of Mr. Musk’s team. Mr. Ramada said he had been detailed to the department to audit its federal student loan portfolio starting on Jan. 28. He did not respond to a message seeking comment.
Reporting by The New York Times and other outlets has suggested that more than a dozen people associated with Mr. Musk have been added to the department’s employee directory and have pursued a variety of projects, including building A.I. tools to replace older customer care platforms the government previously paid contractors to manage.
But in a sworn declaration, Mr. Ramada stated that he was working with two unnamed government employees from other agencies as part of a six-person team. He said those six people had not yet examined any tax data but planned to scrutinize the costs of “student loan repayment plans, awards or debt discharges.” Student debt forgiveness was one of the main priorities of the Education Department under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
In an earlier case, Mr. Ramada had said in a filing that he was also detailed to the Labor Department, where he was part of a three-person team focused on “obtaining accurate and complete data to inform policy decisions.”
Additionally, it was only through court filings that the Treasury Department acknowledged that another associate of Mr. Musk, Marko Elez, had briefly been provided direct access to the Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s payment systems and source code.
And, in an extraordinary declaration in a separate case on Monday, the director of the White House Office of Administration stated that Mr. Musk was in fact neither the legal head of the Department of Government Efficiency nor an employee. The statement, made by Joshua Fisher, drew a technical distinction aimed at insulating Mr. Musk from some legal challenges even as Mr. Musk has both publicly and privately asserted himself as the clear leader of the effort.
While the deluge of lawsuits challenging Mr. Musk’s authority has at times provided some clarity, many of the filings appear to obfuscate basic details about the larger goals at play and the people responsible for carrying them out. Most members of the small task forces described in the filings as being in place at various agencies remain anonymous.
For example, a filing by an official describing the Musk team’s presence at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau stated that only one unnamed person from the operation had been detailed to the bureau as part of a “core team” of six people to help with the general tech modernization goals laid out in Mr. Trump’s executive order establishing the office.
But days earlier, Adam Martinez, who made that declaration, appeared to have told employees in an email that at least three Musk team members were already on site at the bureau and required prompt access to data, including human resources and financial systems, according to reporting by Wired.
On Monday, while considering whether to temporarily block Mr. Musk’s team from embedding in more than half a dozen federal agencies for two weeks, Judge Tanya S. Chutkan asked government lawyers directly whether the Musk-led operation had recommended layoffs at those agencies in the weeks ahead.
“DOGE’s actions in this case — in this arena — have been very unpredictable and scattershot, and I have no idea whether that is by design or simply by virtue of the scope of their remit,” Judge Chutkan said. “But that’s why I’m asking you: Have there been terminations, will there be terminations, when are they going to be and where are they going to be?”
A lawyer representing the government responded, “Obviously, I can’t commit to ‘no one will get fired the next few weeks’ if someone assaults their co-workers tomorrow.”
Judge Chutkan declined on Tuesday to issue an emergency restraining order in that case, finding that it was too unclear what role Mr. Musk’s operatives had played and what downstream effects their work so far could have on the coalition of states that sued.
The presence of Mr. Musk’s teams at different agencies has often been a precursor to major cuts and staff reductions that appear to be informed more by Mr. Trump’s political agenda than by conventional definitions of “fraud” or “waste.” Those have included a wide variety of humanitarian aid programs, grants for institutions conducting medical research across the United States and a spate of haphazard layoffs.
In court, government lawyers have described personnel moves as a part of the natural turnover when the government changes hands.
“My head is not buried in the sand,” Simon Jerome, a lawyer from the Justice Department, told the judge in the education case. “I understand sort of the tenor of the conversations and the disruption — and I don’t mean that in a pejorative way — I just mean that there’s certainly been a lot of turmoil. But I would resist the idea that the degree of public hubbub around the change in presidential administrations, or decisions that a new administration makes, makes it unusual.”
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