by Christopher Bing, Avi Asher-Schapiro and Annie Waldman
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When President Donald Trump announced his marquee government cost-cutting initiative, he left no doubt about whom he intended to run it: Elon Musk. Still, questions about the scope of Musk’s authority have hounded the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency ever since.
As DOGE began to order massive budget cuts and layoffs, and those affected by the moves began to raise questions in the press and in court about their legality, administration officials equivocated on Musk’s exact role, asserting he was simply a senior adviser to the president and had no official position in DOGE.
Five weeks after its creation and under pressure from a growing cascade of lawsuits, the White House revealed in late February that an obscure bureaucrat named Amy Gleason had been acting as DOGE’s administrator since nearly day one.
However, ProPublica has found that she does not appear to be running the budget-slashing group, according to interviews with six current and former government officials. All spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of losing their jobs.
“I get the sense that Amy is in the role of scapegoat,” said one source who had been in meetings with Gleason.
The exact chain of command at DOGE is not clear to most federal employees who brush up against the team. But sources told ProPublica that longtime Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, a former executive of Musk’s Boring Company and SpaceX, appears to be administering day-to-day operations. And at times, Musk himself issues commands from inside the Secretary of War Suite in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House, said a person familiar with the matter.
“I don’t know who Amy Gleason even is,” said one person who’s worked closely with DOGE’s leadership in a federal agency. “Davis runs the show.”
Musk, Davis and Gleason did not respond to requests for comment.
Since DOGE was created by executive order on Jan. 20, the Trump administration has gone to great lengths to put legal distance between Musk and the entity, saying he is neither an employee nor its head. And even though the order creates the role of an administrator — someone to coordinate with the White House and help place DOGE teams inside agencies — the Trump administration deflected questions about who was in that position for over a month.
The arrangement has confounded judges overseeing challenges to DOGE’s authority. “The whole operation, it raises questions,” remarked U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang, adding that the lack of clarity was “highly suspicious.”
This setup could make it more difficult to prove that Musk has violated conflicts of interests laws, which generally bar federal employees from getting involved in government matters that impact their own business interests.
By denying that Musk is the legal DOGE administrator “it gets him more removed, and it could make it harder to prove a violation,” said Richard Painter, a former top ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration.
In an interview with Fox News, Musk dismissed concerns about conflicts, saying, “I’ll recuse myself” if issues arise.
The announcement that placed Gleason in between Musk and DOGE’s daily operations appeared haphazard: Gleason was on vacation in Mexico when Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, named her as acting administrator to a group of reporters in Washington. Gleason told colleagues the White House had not coordinated the announcement with her.
Other parts of the rollout were equally perplexing: Leavitt asserted Gleason had been the administrator since nearly its inception — but colleagues said Gleason only began running staff meetings about a month into the administration with a small group of career technologists that predated the Trump administration.
Meanwhile, Gleason told her former colleagues back in Nashville, Tennessee — where she recently worked as a health technology executive — she was planning on returning there in a few short months.
One government worker who has been in meetings with Gleason described her as “someone with little to no actual decision-making” responsibilities.
She revealed as much to colleagues in meetings in recent weeks, where she made clear she was not deeply involved in the DOGE budget cutting that has put humanitarian programs in peril and forced thousands of employees out of work, sources who were in those meetings told ProPublica.
One reason it’s so difficult to pin down who is in charge of DOGE: It contains two separate teams that are almost entirely walled-off from each other.
In forming DOGE, Trump folded the entity into the existing U.S. Digital Service, a small unit of tech experts housed within the White House focused on improving government software platforms. While DOGE, on paper, has a similar mission, the actual work of Musk’s group has been far more expansive, such as cutting funding to programs and gaining access to sensitive agency data systems, as ProPublica and other media have reported.
In recent weeks, many holdover digital service workers have resigned or been laid off, and only a small group of a few dozen federal technologists remain. Gleason is only in charge of this smaller group, the sources said.
Officials who worked with Gleason, who served in the Digital Service during the prior Trump and Biden administrations, spoke highly of her dedication to the mission. One noted she helped upgrade health care technology across government, such as digitizing COVID-19 test results during the pandemic.
“My sense of her initial expectations was that USDS was going to have a synergy with DOGE … while also making government work better,” a former colleague said. “She was not expecting DOGE to come in and dismantle USDS.”
The secrecy surrounding Gleason’s appointment extends to all of DOGE. The Trump administration has offered scant information about its employees — except when compelled by lawsuits. In an effort to gain a clearer understanding of how the group operates, ProPublica has spent weeks identifying and profiling its staff.
Among them are engineers, lawyers, technology executives and consultants. Many were recruited from Musk’s businesses, including SpaceX, Tesla and Neuralink, or from firms owned by his business associates. Today ProPublica is adding 20 names to our running list, bringing the total to 66. None have responded to requests for comment.
Some have been enlisted to oversee cuts at the very agencies that conducted oversight of the industries where they’d previously worked.
DOGE assigned Tyler Hassen, an energy industry executive, to the Department of the Interior. Scott Langmack and Michael Alexander Mirski — two executives from real estate firms — have been seen at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. And former Tesla lawyer Daniel Abrahamson has worked for DOGE at the Department of Transportation — an agency reportedly in the midst of several investigations over the safety of Teslas. Tesla has defended the safety of its vehicles.
None of the DOGE staffers replied to requests for comment. The Interior Department said it doesn’t comment on personnel, adding that there were no “DOGE staffers” at the agency, and the Transportation Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Three of the names ProPublica is adding to our tracker are engineers from Musk’s SpaceX who have been issued ethics waivers by Trump administration lawyers to do work that could potentially benefit one of Musk’s companies. SpaceX, which includes internet satellite service Starlink, and Verizon are reportedly competing for control of a $2.4 billion Federal Aviation Administration contract, according to The Washington Post.
SpaceX responded to that reporting in a post on X. “Recent media reports about SpaceX and the FAA are false,” it wrote. “There is no effort or intent for Starlink to ‘take over’ any existing contract.” The FAA did not respond to a request for comment.
Publicly, Musk continues to champion DOGE’s mission. “The people voted for major government reform,” he said, “and that’s what the people are going to get.”
Kirsten Berg, Al Shaw and Andy Kroll contributed reporting.
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