The Trump administration has agreed to give Elon Musk and his surrogates access to highly sensitive government information, including extensive access to the federal payment system. The billionaire Republican megadonor also has lucrative government contracts. One need not be an expert in ethics laws to see the problem.
Earlier this week, Donald Trump, the beneficiary of many of Musk’s campaign contributions, told the public there’s no cause for concern. If there’s a conflict of interest, the president said, “then we won’t let him get near it.”
That might’ve seemed reassuring at a superficial level, but it naturally led to a series of related questions. For example, how exactly would administration officials keep tabs on what sensitive information Musk is examining? Who would be responsible for intervening and making sure the world’s wealthiest individual isn’t “getting near” potential conflicts?
The good news is, none of this is lost on members of the White House press corps, and a reporter asked press secretary Karoline Leavitt, “Elon Musk is currently a ‘special government employee,’ who also owns companies that have billions of dollars in federal contracts. You said earlier this week that he has abided by all applicable federal laws. But what steps is the Trump administration taking to address that conflict of interest?”
Referencing Trump’s comments from Monday, she replied:
The president was already asked to answer this question this week. And he said, if Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with the contracts and the funding that DOGE is overseeing, that Elon will excuse himself from those contracts, and he has again abided by all applicable laws.
The surface-level problem is the distance between what Trump said on Monday and what Leavitt said two days later.
But just below the surface is a far more serious concern: The White House press secretary told the public that the plan to address Musk’s potential conflicts of interest is to allow Musk to police his own potential conflicts of interest.
In other words, Team Trump’s plan is to simply trust the highly controversial billionaire megadonor to be responsible — in private and unsupervised, away from scrutiny, while examining highly sensitive government information that he really shouldn’t have access to — and self-determine when there are conflicts involving him and his endeavor.
What could possibly go wrong?
In related news, NBC News reported that Justice Department attorneys have agreed to “temporarily restrict staffers associated with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing information in the Treasury Department’s payment system.” The report added that the agreement “comes after a group of union members and retirees sued the Treasury Department alleging that providing DOGE access to the federal government’s massive payment and collections system — and the personal data housed in it — violated federal privacy laws.”
Of course, given that Musk and his surrogates were already given access to this system several days ago, the agreement seems a little late.
Politico reported, meanwhile, that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent assured congressional Republicans that the DOGE operation had “read-only” access to Treasury’s payment systems, though as The Wall Street Journal reported, Bessent’s letter to lawmakers “didn’t specifically say whether the employees were being given access to the underlying software that runs the payment systems or whether DOGE-affiliated workers could potentially edit computer code.”
