Does Elon Musk Even Have Security Clearance to Access Sensitive Data?

Elon Musk is now considered a “special government employee” by the White House. But exactly what kind of access that provides—and whether he has appropriate security clearance to access the nation’s most sensitive data—is still unclear to even top officials in the Trump administration.

CNN’s chief White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins pressed the issue during a briefing Monday, grilling White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt as to whether the world’s richest man had received a clearance or a background check to operate within the federal government.

“Can you confirm that Elon Musk is a special government employee?” Collins asked. “And what kind of security clearance does he have?”

“I can confirm he’s a special government employee,” Leavitt replied. “I can also confirm that he has abided by all applicable federal laws. As for his security clearance, I’m not sure, but I can check back with you.”

“Did he pass a background check, do you know?” Collins continued.

“I don’t know about the security clearance, but I can check,” Leavitt repeated.

Leavitt was also unaware as to whether Musk’s team—which consists of young people between the ages of 19 and 24—had received their own security clearances.

“I don’t, no, but again, I can check on that for you,” Leavitt said.

A special government employee is “anyone who works, or is expected to work, for the government for 130 days or less in a 365-day period,” according to the Justice Department.

Musk and his staffers at the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, have had seemingly unfettered access to federal databases containing Social Security numbers, home addresses, medical histories, and other sensitive data.

Last week, Musk’s team was spotted installing a commercial email server into the Office of Personnel Management, in what many considered to be a massive security risk. The server gave the uncleared team potential access to onboarding, job performance reviews, and government employee health care details, which could violate HIPAA laws.

“China and Russia are literally trying to hack us every day, and we just gave all this data over to somebody that’s not been properly vetted,” an OPM staffer told the substack Musk Watch on Monday.

“What [Musk is] doing will put so many government employees at risk. It’s not at all what the office is intended for,” a former OPM director told the digital publication. “I just can’t believe what I’m seeing.”

Tulsi Gabbard’s bid for national director of intelligence has gained a key supporter, in the form of “serial disappointer” Maine Senator Susan Collins, flipping an essential Republican holdout on one of Donald Trump’s most dangerous nominees.

In a statement Monday, Collins said that Gabbard had eased some of her concerns about her nomination, such that she could now support Trump’s disastrous pick.

“After extensive consideration of her nomination, I will support Tulsi Gabbard to be the Director of National Intelligence,” Collins said.

“As one of the principal authors of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 that established this coordinating position, I understand the critical role the DNI plays in the Intelligence Community. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, however, has become far larger than it was designed to be, and Ms. Gabbard shares my vision of returning the agency to its intended size.”

Ahead of Gabbard’s hearing last week, Collins had expressed dissatisfaction with Gabbard’s critique of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows intelligence officials to conduct surveillance operations on foreign targets and Americans without a warrant.

During the open hearing, Collins had also appeared frustrated when Gabbard refused to call whistleblower Edward Snowden a traitor before the Senate committee. Suddenly, it seems, Collins had a change of heart, though it’s unclear if they spoke more extensively since Gabbard’s hearings on Thursday.

“In response to my questions during our discussion in my office and at the open hearing, as well as through her explanation at the closed hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Ms. Gabbard addressed my concerns regarding her views on Edward Snowden,” Collins said. “I look forward to working with Ms. Gabbard to strengthen our national security.”

While many are disappointed by Collins’s change of heart, few can be surprised.

“You know there’s an old saying in soccer, in English football: It’s the hope that kills you,” said Joe Scarborough of MSNBC’s Morning Joe Tuesday. “I suspect they have a similar saying in Maine about Susan Collins.”

“Susan Collins never misses an opportunity to disappoint. She’s a serial disappointer. And Tulsi Gabbard rarely misses an opportunity to get it wrong,” said Richard Haass, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, on Morning Joe.

Representative Sean Casten, a Democrat from Illinois, went straight for the jugular.

“Why bother even being a senator if you think Tulsi Gabbard is fit for DNI? Just admit you’re a g-d rubber stamp for a felonious rapist,” Casten wrote in a post on X Monday.

A Department of Justice prosecutor is unhappy with the blowback Elon Musk’s fake “Department of Government Efficiency” is getting, and is threatening legal action. 

Interim D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin posted a letter to Musk on X Monday asking Musk to “utilize me and my staff to assist in protecting the DOGE work and the DOGE workers.

“Any threats, confrontations, or other actions in any way that impact their work may break numerous laws,” Martin wrote. “Let me assure you of this: we will pursue any and all legal action against anyone who impedes your work or threatens your people.” 

Martin is likely reacting to a Wired article published Sunday that named six young engineers whom Musk has brought with him to help take over government databases: Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger, and Ethan Shaotran. Some of them are still in college or are recent graduates, and many have connections to Musk’s companies, including xAI and SpaceX. 

Martin may also have been alluding to protests against DOGE. On Sunday, protesters showed up at the Office of Personnel Management’s  Washington, D.C., headquarters, attempting to block the doors of the building to stop DOGE employees from getting in. More demonstrators gathered outside of OPM on Monday to protest Musk and DOGE’s efforts, chanting, “We don’t want your tech solutions, give us back our Constitution,” and “Elon, Elon, have you heard? You’re a nasty, fascist nerd.”

The DOGE takeover at federal agencies including the OPM and the General Services Administration has been met with a backlash from civil servants in those offices, as well as the federal workforce at large. DOGE employees have locked out career employees at OPM and used an illegal server to facilitate their takeover of the agency, which manages all three million federal employees. 

Martin’s threats may have teeth, as Musk isn’t likely to take any challenges to his efforts lightly. But the tech mogul’s actions have likely also broken several laws through DOGE, including improper use of federal funds, possible HIPAA violations, and even security breaches of employees’ personal data. Donald Trump’s Justice Department doesn’t care about any of that, though.

The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau stopped performing its oversight duties as soon as Trump appointed Scott Bessent as acting head, fulfilling the wishes of the country’s most powerful civilian, billionaire Elon Musk.

Bessent, who also serves as treasury secretary, sent a mass email to CFPB staff instructing them to stop all regulatory work, stop enforcing any rules, and stop conducting investigations, due to the need to “promote consistency” and align politically with the rest of the Trump administration, according to The Washington Post. The agency has also halted all public communications.

After Trump’s reelection, Musk called for lawmakers to “delete” the CFPB, stating that there were “too many duplicative regulatory agencies.” Republicans have long taken aim at the CFPB, with Texas Senator Ted Cruz recently introducing a bill to defund what he called an “unelected, unaccountable bureaucratic agency.”

The CFPB took initiative against predatory lending and hidden fees under its previous head, Rohit Chopra, and also increased its surveillance of large tech companies like Apple and Google. But with Chopra out and Bessent in, those days are over.

“Shutting down CFPB enforcement actions that are on the verge of delivering money into the pockets of working people is at odds with President Trump’s claim that he wants to lower costs for families—which he has done next to nothing on so far,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren, who played a key role in creating the CFPB in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

The actions Warren mentioned are now essentially null and void, as Trump’s mass deregulation efforts continue.

JD Vance tried to defend Donald Trump’s tariffs Monday with an X post claiming that Mexico gave in to Trump’s demands in order to stall economic harm. However, the post quickly backfired on him.

Aside from the glaring mistake of spelling the president’s last name as “Trunp,” the vice president’s post included a screenshot of Trump bragging about Mexico sending 10,000 soldiers to the southern U.S. border. But there’s one problem with that: Mexico also deployed 10,000 troops to the border in 2021, under President Biden.

Commentators on X quickly seized on Vance’s attempt to seek praise over something Biden had also achieved without heavy tariffs.

Vance’s talking point even made it to Fox News, with commentator Marie Harf, a Democratic commentator, telling the right-wing network’s audience that Mexico’s troop deployment was nothing new.

Trump’s tariffs have already caused stocks to plummet and are drawing criticism from his fellow Republicans as well as retaliatory tariffs from Canada, with China threatening to take action with the World Trade Organization. Even if Trump claims that his tariffs have achieved something with Mexico (they haven’t), their full effects will be felt in the coming weeks and months, and experts say they won’t be good. Vance and the MAGA right may soon be struggling to find any silver lining.

Trump is placing a new condition on aid to war-torn Ukraine: guaranteed access to Ukraine’s valuable rare minerals in exchange for military support against Russia.

“We’re telling Ukraine they have very valuable rare earth; we want what we put up to go in terms of a guarantee. We want a guarantee, we’re handing them money hand over fist, we’re giving them equipment, [the European Union is] not keeping up with us,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday. “We have an ocean in between, they don’t. It’s more important for them than it is for us … so we’re looking to do a deal with Ukraine where they’re going to secure what we’re giving them with their rare earth and other things.”

“I want to have security of rare earth,” Trump added. “We’re putting in hundreds of billions of dollars. They have great rare earth. And I want security of the rare earth, and they’re willing to do it.”

Rare earths are minerals that go into making various technologies like phones and computers.

One of Trump’s biggest campaign promises was a swift and peaceful end to the war in Ukraine, even saying he’d end it “within 24 hours” of becoming president. Tacking on these conditions as soldiers on both sides suffer doesn’t seem to align very well with that promise.

Donald Trump’s latest solution to salvage TikTok for U.S. consumers includes a sovereign wealth fund, though how it would be funded isn’t exactly clear.

Trump signed an executive order Monday ordering the U.S. Treasury and Commerce departments to create the fund.

The president suggested that the fund could partially own TikTok, which has until mid-March to sell its U.S. operations or be banned from the American market.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent hailed the idea of a sovereign wealth fund. “We’re going to stand this thing up within the next 12 months. We’re going to monetize the asset side of the U.S. balance sheet for the American people,” he told reporters. “There’ll be a combination of liquid assets, assets that we have in this country as we work to bring them out for the American people.”

Trump pitched the idea as a presidential candidate during a speech at the Economics Club of New York in September, when he loosely said such a fund would be financed “through tariffs and other intelligent things” in order to build everything from major infrastructure projects (think airports and highways) to medical research. But exactly what the U.S. would gain from developing a sovereign wealth fund isn’t obvious.

“A sovereign wealth fund is a worthy idea in theory, but the United States is poorly positioned to create one because it’s $35 trillion in debt, requiring annual payments of $1 trillion just to cover the interest, and running an annual budget deficit of $1.5 trillion,” Timothy Noah reported for The New Republic in September.

“Opinions vary about how serious a problem this is, but it’s very much the opposite of a budget surplus, which is what a country typically must have in order to create a sovereign wealth fund. Countries with sovereign wealth funds usually have some resource (most often oil and gas) that’s gushing revenue faster than the government knows how to spend it.”

There are approximately 90 sovereign wealth funds around the globe, with more than $8 trillion in total assets, according to data from the International Forum of Sovereign Wealth Funds. Sixty percent of those are funded by natural resource revenues.

It’s therefore unclear how the U.S. could create a sovereign wealth fund of its own, or how that fund could somehow save TikTok access in the country.

Trump has promised to restore TikTok access to the American market, despite a congressional ban, a decision to uphold the ban by the Supreme Court, and contestations from some of his allies in the legislative branch who would like to keep the popular video-sharing app offline. After entering office, Trump signed an executive order to delay the ban by 75 days—a window accounted for within the ban so long as the company is pursuing a sale.

The president has said he was in talks with multiple people over the sale of the application and has promised an update on the issue sometime in February, according to Reuters.

In January, Trump stipulated that the company’s divestment from its Chinese-owned parent company, ByteDance, would also have to result in the U.S. gaining an ownership stake in the app.

Some of Trump’s allies could be the top contenders waiting in the wings for the company’s sale. Major Republican donor Jeff Yass reportedly owns a 15 percent stake in TikTok. Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort has business ties to the Chinese media industry, and former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin revealed his own plans to acquire the social media company via an investor group last year, just a day after the ban passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in the House.

But other options remain should TikTok never return. When the Indian government pulled the plug on the social media app due to a violent feud with China on their shared border, TikTok dropped its 200 million users. In the app’s wake, companies with format competitors to TikTok, including Youtube and Instagram, absorbed many of TikTok’s influencers onto their own platforms.

More than 1,100 Environmental Protection Agency employees could be at risk of spontaneously losing their jobs, according to a Trump administration memo.

Employees at risk include individuals who have spent less than a year in their current role, even if they were longtime employees of other divisions or departments.

“As a probationary/trial period employee, the agency has the right to immediately terminate you,” the email, obtained Monday by The New York Times, states.

A spokeswoman for Lee Zeldin, the newly minted administrator of the environmental agency and a longtime Trump ally, told the Times that “our goal is to be transparent.” She did not elaborate on when or why the mass layoff would begin.

“On his first day in office, [Zeldin] engaged directly with career staff across E.P.A.’s headquarters—spanning two city blocks in downtown D.C.—listening to their insights and perspectives,” the spokeswoman, Molly Vaseliou, told the publication in a statement. “Ultimately, the goal is to create a more effective and efficient federal government that serves all Americans.”

On Monday morning, agency employees were notified that their intranet was out of service, leaving them unable to do their jobs as they could not access internal documents or data, reported the Times. It is not clear if the intranet outage was directly related to efforts to cut the EPA staff.

The result: Morale at the agency is in freefall, with some employees feeling the pressure to finally consider Trump’s controversial “buyout” offer, which would pay them through September on the condition of their resignations.

“It’s bad,” Marie Owens-Powell, president of the EPA union, told CBS News on Friday. “I’ve been with the agency for over 33 years and I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“As far as we can tell, EPA workers were the only ones to receive a notice from their agency, intended to go to probationary employees to terrorize and scare them into thinking they were on their way out,” she said.

Hundreds of EPA grantees have also been locked out of their funds, according to Michelle Roos, president of the Environmental Protection Network. She told CBS that it has left organizations across the country unable to do the work for which the federal government has already approved funding.

Roos also told the Times that the EPA had long been at the center of the “bullseye” in the forty-seventh president’s mission to nix large swaths of civil servants, and that the drastic move to downsize EPA staff would be the “most chaotic and vindictive transition in the history of the Environmental Protection Agency.”

Legal experts claim that the Trump administration’s move to choke congressionally appropriated funding from federal agencies is “unconstitutional” and “unauthorized by law.”

“Ninety-five percent of the funding going to EPA has not only been appropriated but is locked in, legally obligated grant funding,” Jillian Blanchard, vice president of climate change and environmental justice for Lawyers for Good Government, told CBS. “The Constitution does not give the president a line item veto over Congress’s spending decision.”

Elon Musk has taken control of government employees’ private data by having his cronies illegally install a commercial server at the Office of Personnel Management.

Musk and his handpicked associates at the fake “Department of Government Efficiency” are using their ill-gotten access to control federal databases containing Social Security numbers, home addresses, medical histories, and other sensitive personal information, according to journalists Caleb Ecarma and Judd Legum at Musk Watch.

Many of these Musk staffers are young people between 19 and 24, such as software engineer Akash Bobba, an undergraduate student at University of California, Berkeley, and 2022 high school graduate Edward Coristine. At Musk’s direction, these inexperienced underlings now have access to the private information of every federal employee, and even people who have merely applied to federal jobs.

Musk’s people were given access to the federal government’s official hiring site USAJOBS, where people hoping to secure a federal job often enter their personal information including Social Security numbers, home addresses, and employment records, in their applications. They also gained access to the Enterprise Human Resources Integration, or EHRI, system, which contains Social Security numbers, dates of birth, salaries, home addresses, job descriptions, and disciplinary records of every single federal employee.

“They’re looking through all the position descriptions … to remove folks,” said one OPM employee about Musk’s team. “This is how they found all these DEI offices and had them removed—[by] reviewing position description level data.”

In addition, the DOGE staffers also have access to systems relating to onboarding, job performance reviews, and even the system the government uses to manage employee health care, which could violate laws on protected health information, such as HIPAA.

“What [Musk is] doing will put so many government employees at risk. It’s not at all what the office is intended for,” a former OPM director told Musk Watch. “I just can’t believe what I’m seeing.”

The unprecedented access also leaves federal employee data unsecured and vulnerable to hackers, said one OPM employee. One of the new email lists created by Musk’s people was already hit by a flood of spam emails last week.

“China and Russia are literally trying to hack us every day, and we just gave all this data over to somebody that’s not been properly vetted,” one of the OPM staffers said. “It’s not just Amanda Scales, it’s all the [political appointees] in that office right now. So it’s multiple vulnerability points.”

Many senior government officials have been locked out of EHRI and OPM, and thus can’t track what changes have been made by DOGE cronies. They could be doing irreparable damage to the federal civil service in their attempts to thin it out, with few, if any, ways of finding out what they’re doing. It kind of makes Hillary Clinton’s storing of government data on a private email server look rather quaint, doesn’t it?

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday he’s now in charge of the U.S. Agency for International Development, just hours after billionaire Elon Musk announced Donald Trump had signed off on shutting the agency down.

“I’m the acting director of USAID,” Rubio told reporters on a visit to El Salvador, criticizing the agency’s “insubordination” in complying with national interests.

“It’s a completely unresponsive agency. It’s supposed to respond to policy directives with the State Department, and it refuses to do so,” Rubio said. “Every dollar we spend and every program we fund, that program will be aligned with the national interest of the United States. USAID has a history of sort of ignoring that.”

The decades-old independent agency employs more than 10,000 people and works on the ground in more than 60 countries. It has been a target for both Musk and Trump in recent days, both of whom claim that its work is a waste of government funding.

The USAID overhaul is part of a larger assault on foreign aid funding, which Trump halted for 90 days in an executive order he signed January 20. Rubio later froze all funding, projects, and contracts at USAID, and at least 56 officials were placed on leave. On Saturday, the USAID website went offline without explanation, and two days later, USAID employees were told to stay home.

“These are taxpayer dollars and we owe the American people the assurance that every dollar we are spending abroad is being spent on something that furthers our national interest,” Rubio said Monday.

Rubio told reporters that some USAID programs will continue but under the umbrella of the State Department, an alarming move Democrats warned could be detrimental to national security.

“Congress established the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) as an independent agency, separate from the Department of State, to ensure that we can deploy development expertise and U.S. foreign assistance quickly, particularly in times of crisis, to meet our national security goals,” Democrats on the Foreign Relations Committee wrote in a letter to Rubio on Monday.

“For this reason, any effort to merge or fold USAID into the Department of State should be, and by law must be, previewed, discussed, and approved by Congress.”

This story has been updated.