DOGE has a new 'acting administrator,' but Elon Musk is still in charge

As recently as last Wednesday, President Donald Trump made it clear: Elon Musk is in charge of DOGE.

“I signed an order creating the Department of Government Efficiency and put a man named Elon Musk in charge,” Trump said in a speech to the Future Investment Initiative Institute in Miami Beach, Florida, according to video and the White House’s transcript. “Thank you, Elon, for doing it.”

Musk has done nothing to shake that idea. Musk helped coin the name of the office in September, before Trump won a second term, and Trump named him to the job a week after the election. Republican lawmakers have praised Musk’s performance at DOGE. Musk posts about DOGE daily on X, where he issues commands to the federal workforce on Trump’s behalf.

But on Tuesday afternoon, the White House revealed that a little-known official, Amy Gleason, now holds the title of acting DOGE administrator — a job that implies she heads up the agency. The White House didn’t say when Gleason was appointed, but the decision appeared rushed; she was scheduled to be on vacation Tuesday in Mexico, The New York Times reported, citing anonymous sources.

Making the situation even more complicated, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a briefing Tuesday that Musk was still “overseeing” DOGE without having the title of administrator. She didn’t elaborate.

The naming of Gleason followed a week of questioning and confusion over DOGE’s power structure sparked by lawyers at the Justice Department. In response to lawsuits filed against the government, the attorneys told two federal judges that DOGE didn’t have an administrator, at least so far as they knew.

It’s a strategy that some legal analysts said was meant to shield both Musk and DOGE.

“Over the last few weeks the Administration, its lawyers, Elon Musk, and individual DOGE employees have taken a bewildering variety of positions,” Walter Olson, a senior fellow for constitutional studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, said in an email. Olson said he believes the Justice Department’s stance is a strategy designed to battle the lawsuits challenging Musk’s authority.

Olson compared the strategy to a shell game, but he said he doubts it will work for long, noting that judges can take testimony under oath.

“It can put judges on their guard if they see the walnut shells of responsibility shuffled around so that the pea keeps being absent from the shell the opponent picks,” he said. “If the court process can freeze the position taken, the game can stop working after a couple of rounds.”

Joshua Gardner, a special counsel in the Justice Department’s Civil Division, broached the subject in a court filing Feb. 17, seeking to counter a lawsuit by Democratic state attorneys general who said Musk’s leadership of DOGE involved so much authority that he requires Senate confirmation under the Constitution. Gardner described Musk instead as a White House adviser with limited management capabilities.

“He is an employee of the White House Office (not USDS or the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization); and he only has the ability to advise the President, or communicate the President’s directives, like other senior White House officials,” Gardner said.

He cited a sworn declaration by a Trump appointee named Joshua Fisher, director of the Office of Administration. Fisher wrote, under penalty of perjury, that Musk is a part-time “Senior Advisor to the President,” not an employee of DOGE and not the administrator of DOGE.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan wrote in a ruling Feb. 18 that Musk “directs the work of DOGE personnel” regardless of his title and that he “has rapidly taken steps to fundamentally reshape the Executive Branch.” But she declined to issue a temporary restraining order, ruling that the Democratic states had failed to show a likelihood of irreparable injury.

On Monday, a second Justice Department lawyer, Bradley Humphreys, denied any knowledge about who is running DOGE when a federal district judge questioned him, the legal website Lawfare reported. Humphreys was in court defending the administration against a lawsuit brought by several labor unions to challenge DOGE’s access to federal government data.

Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly repeatedly asked Humphreys at a hearing who the administrator of DOGE is and how Musk fits into the organization, according to Lawfare, a nonprofit publication focused on government policy and legal issues. Humphreys said numerous times that he didn’t know.

Gardner’s and Humphreys’ statements broadcast the opposite of the general perception that Musk was in charge of DOGE.

It’s not clear whether Trump has ever signed a piece of paper giving Musk responsibility over DOGE, despite Musk’s apparent wielding of authority. Trump created DOGE by executive order on Jan. 20, his first day back in the White House. The order took an office called the U.S. Digital Service and renamed it the U.S. DOGE Service. It also said there would be a U.S. DOGE Service Administrator reporting to the White House chief of staff.

The naming of Gleason as acting administrator of DOGE came about suddenly and in peculiar circumstances. Just before her name was first made public, a reporter asked Leavitt at a briefing Tuesday to clarify who the administrator of DOGE is. She didn’t answer directly.

“Elon Musk is overseeing DOGE,” she said. When a reporter asked whether he was the administrator, she said, “No, Elon Musk is a special government employee,” referring to his part-time classification. The White House then confirmed Gleason had the acting administrator title.

The Justice Department didn’t respond to a request for comment. Gleason, Gardner, Fisher and Humphreys also didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Some legal experts who are following the situation say they’re baffled by the department’s attempt to upend months of public understanding about who’s in charge of DOGE.

Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus Laurence Tribe said the Justice Department lawyers are, in effect, “throwing sand” in people’s faces to try to confuse them. He said the lawyers should consider resigning in protest.

“The people who have to defend these clear violations of statutory and constitutional limits are going to have to steel themselves to either be fools or worse,” Tribe said in a phone interview.

“They don’t have good arguments, so if they’re willing to appear in court rather than resign, it’s because they value their jobs above all else, and that’s pretty pathetic,” he said.

Democratic state attorneys general are trying to press the issue. In the lawsuit overseen by Chutkan, they filed a motion Monday asking for an order for the Trump administration to produce documents about DOGE’s organization and structure.

“Due to the opaque and fast-moving nature of DOGE’s operations, significant pertinent information is exclusively in Defendants’ possession,” the attorneys general wrote in the motion. The Justice Department hadn’t responded to it as of Tuesday afternoon.

The structure of DOGE is unlike that of any previous office of the federal government, and it has been an opaque and changing organization from the beginning. In announcing the office Nov. 12, Trump said that it “will become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time,” referring to the massive interagency effort during World War II to develop the first nuclear weapons.

Trump also said in that initial announcement that DOGE would “provide advice and guidance from outside the Government,” with a deadline of July 4, 2026, to make recommendations. But the plan changed by the time Trump was sworn in, leading to the executive order.

The executive order placed DOGE within the Executive Office of the President — meaning it’s not an independent agency or department — but also not within the White House proper. The order also said that, in addition to the main DOGE headquarters, DOGE would have satellite teams throughout the federal government, with four people on each agency team: a team lead, an engineer, a human resources specialist and an attorney.

Under the order, agency heads such as Cabinet secretaries are supposed to have authority over the DOGE satellite teams. The heads are supposed to select the DOGE team members “in consultation with the USDA Administrator” — the position that, according to the Justice Department, was never filled.

But the authority of agency heads over DOGE has been a source of conflict. Over the weekend, several agency heads, including FBI Director Kash Patel, directed their agencies not to immediately respond to Musk’s request that they share their accomplishments from the past week.

The White House has never released a list of DOGE’s leadership, such as people reporting directly to Musk or Gleason, let alone a full list of staff members, adding to a culture of secrecy around DOGE and prompting news organizations to begin compiling lists on their own of dozens of staffers.

DOGE’s budget, so far, is about $40 million, ProPublica reported last week, citing records from the Office of Management and Budget.

Tribe said that, to be properly organized, DOGE would need a law passed by Congress establishing the office and that even then some of the actions it has allegedly undertaken — such as canceling congressionally mandated contracts, abolishing agencies or impounding appropriations — would be unconstitutional under the separation of executive and legislative powers.

“It fits nowhere on the organizational chart of the United States Constitution, and that’s not simply a problem of drafting,” he said. “It’s that the whole structure of our government deliberately makes no room for a free agent floating around the government.”

He said he agreed with the position of Democratic state attorneys general that the power of DOGE and Musk is so sweeping that it requires a nomination by the president and confirmation by the Senate under the Constitution’s Appointments Clause.

“As the spokespeople for the administration apparently started to realize that, they kept changing their conception and definition of what Musk and his Musketeers are up to,” he said.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com