Trump Guts Crucial OPM Team as Elon Musk Gains Even More Power

The Trump administration has fired members of the “privacy team” at the Office of Personnel Management, a move that will hinder public access and scrutiny over government records related to the security clearances of Elon Musk and his team at the Department of Government Efficiency.

CNN discovered the terminations when it made a freedom of information act (FOIA) request to OPM looking for those records, particularly regarding DOGE workers who were granted access to classified or sensitive information. An OPM email address responded to CNN’s request and said, “Good luck with that, they just fired the whole privacy team.”

OPM is the government agency tasked with overseeing and managing the entire federal workforce, and the privacy team’s job was to ensure that the agency follows the law with its data privacy practices and protects the trust of the public. The Trump administration not only fired those employees, but also members of OPM’s communications staff and the employees who handled FOIA requests, two unnamed sources told CNN.

When CNN reached out to OPM regarding the status of the privacy team, an official OPM told them that the entire privacy team wasn’t laid off, but didn’t elaborate further. The firings fit a pattern that started when Musk’s DOGE effort set its sights on the agency shortly after Trump’s inauguration.

Late last month, Musk’s cronies allegedly set up a private server at OPM headquarters and were sued for allegedly funneling federal employees’ private information to a Musk employee. Musk installed his own personal associates into high positions at the agency, and locked out the career employees who used to run the agency from its computer systems.

The latest moves suggest an effort to stifle transparency and keep much of DOGE’s activities and plans for the federal workforce hidden from the public. And with federal law enforcement also in the Trump administration’s crosshairs, there doesn’t seem to be much recourse.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and the entire Trump administration are trying very hard to convince the public that Elon Musk—the man who has used the Department of Government Efficiency to fire tens of thousands of federal workers—is actually just a normal adviser with no real power. 

“DOGE does not have statutory authority,” said Leavitt on Tuesday afternoon, when asked s by CNN’s Alayna Treene about Musk’s ability to hire and fire federal workers. “DOGE is advising.... It’s ultimately up to the discretion of these secretaries to make these hirings & firings.”

This comes after the Trump administration filed a court declaration on Monday stating that Musk is just a “senior adviser to the president,” a position that holds “no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself.” The sudden change in heart comes after more than a dozen Democratic states sued the Trump administration for illegally giving Musk executive powers, in violation of the Constitution.

It’s a clear attempt to avoid legal trouble, and unfortunately, one unlikely to stand up in court. Trump explicitly appointed Musk as head of DOGE just one week after he won the election, and has bragged about Musk’s work gutting the federal government ever since.  Musk even held a press briefing in the Oval Office, as Trump signed an executive order expanding DOGE powers. This sudden obscuring of Musk’s role is pathetic at best.

Donald Trump’s White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt boosted billionaire Elon Musk’s fantastical allegations of widespread fraud at the Social Security Administration (SSA)—and got called out for it.

“President Trump has directed Elon Musk and the DOGE team to identify fraud at the Social Security Administration. They haven’t dug into the books yet, but they suspect that there are tens of millions of deceased people receiving fraudulent Social Security payments,” Leavitt said during an appearance on Fox News Monday.

Leavitt said DOGE was seeking to “identify payments that are going to deceased people who are no longer living, and should no longer be receiving that money.”

She claimed she had spent the day battling with “fake news reporters” who had been “fearmongering” about Musk. Earlier that day, Michelle King, SSA’s acting commissioner, resigned due to a clash with the unelected bureaucrat, who recently gained access to the agency’s databases that contain troves of sensitive data belonging to American citizens.

For someone with mere “suspicions,” as Leavitt put it, Musk has been steadily ramping up his public claims about fraud at the Social Security Administration. Last week, he claimed that DOGE’s review of the SSA had uncovered people marked as 150 years old who had been receiving social security benefits.

“Now, do you know anyone that’s 150? I don’t know. They should be in the Guinness Book of World Records.… So that’s a case where I think they’re probably dead,” Musk said during an appearance in the Oval Office.

He repeated the claim on X Sunday, attaching a chart of how many people in different age brackets had received social security benefits, suggesting that more than 16 million people whose ages were marked between 110 and 370 years old were receiving social security benefits.

“According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE! Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security,” Musk wrote.

In total, the chart inexplicably alleged that 400 million people were receiving social security benefits, while the SSA’s website states that in 2024, there were only 68,455,973 social security recipients.

But that’s not the only part of Musk’s fraud claims that don’t quite pass the smell check.

DOGE didn’t discover fraud, but a filing error that was already made public in a 2023 report from the Inspector General’s Office. The office found that the Social Security databases, specifically the Death Master File (DMF) and the Numident, a file containing identifiable information for each person issued a Social Security number, were not always updated when someone died.

The Numident contained the names of more than 18 million people born before 1920 who had no death information. “Death information missing from the Numident and the DMF hampers both SSA and Government-wide efforts to prevent and detect fraud and misuse,” the report authors said. This isn’t the first time that Musk has claimed DOGE discovered something that was actually publicly available.

Crucially, this so-called discovery doesn’t necessarily indicate fraud.

The 2023 report found that 98 percent of social security numberholders aged 100 years or older were not receiving benefits. Ultimately, the report determined that the system didn’t need to be updated because it was too expensive. Musk should like that kind of thing, right?

SSA has other means of combatting this issue. Since 2015, the SSA has had a policy of automatically terminating entitlement to beneficiaries who are “age 115, or older,” “in any current continuous suspense for seven years or more” or “entitled on a record where there are no other beneficiaries in a non-terminated status younger than the age of 115.”

Experts have suggested another possible explanation for the wide-ranging ages of beneficiaries is a quirk of COBOL, a 60-year-old programming language, which might use May 20, 1875, as a reference point in its coding. A COBOL system might indicate that anyone with a missing birthdate in the SSA’s database was 150 years old, which could explain Musk’s assertion about the droves of centenarians receiving social security benefits, according to Wired.

All of these holes render Leavitt’s desperate attempts to back up Musk’s outrageous claims all the more ridiculous.

“This is absurd, corrosive nonsense,” wrote journalist James Surowiecki in a post on X Tuesday. “There are not tens of millions of dead people getting Social Security checks, and the only reason Leavitt is out here making these hysterical claims is because Elon Musk misunderstood a table of numbers.”

Even one right-wing commentator was left questioning Musk’s math.

“Sounds like WH may have misinterpreted DOGE data on social security… it seems we are NOT PAYING these benefits… rather, these people (age 150 and whatever) are just on the rolls despite no checks going out,” Trish Regan wrote on X Tuesday.

“If that’s the case, this is not the huge find that people hoped for,” she said. “While social security records SHOULD be cleaned up, it appears this finding will have little savings effect since the checks weren’t going out. Looks like the team got out over its skis 🎿on this one. Sure—clean up the records, but it’s critical to present the math CORRECTLY.”

In another post, she urged Musk and DOGE to “triple check the math.”

Push may finally come to shove for New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

Adams’s political boss—New York Governor Kathy Hochul—signalled that the mayor’s time in Gracie Mansion may be coming to an end following the joint resignation of four top officials in Adams’s administration: First Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer, and Deputy Mayors Meera Joshi, Anne Williams-Isom, and Chauncey Parker.

“If they feel unable to serve in City Hall at this time, that raises serious questions about the long-term future of this Mayoral administration,” Hochul wrote in a statement Monday.

“I recognize the immense responsibility I hold as governor and the constitutional powers granted to this office,” she continued. “In the 235 years of New York State history, these powers have never been utilized to remove a duly-elected mayor; overturning the will of the voters is a serious step that should not be taken lightly. That said, the alleged conduct at City Hall that has been reported over the past two weeks is troubling and cannot be ignored.”

“Tomorrow, I have asked key leaders to meet me at my Manhattan office for a conversation about the path forward, with the goal of ensuring stability for the City of New York,” Hochul wrote.

“Let me be clear: my most urgent concern is the well-being of my 8.3 million constituents who live in New York City. I will be monitoring this situation extraordinarily closely to ensure that New Yorkers are not being shortchanged by the current crisis in City government.”

In order to dismiss him, Hochul must first serve the mayor with a copy of charges that could warrant his removal, according to the city’s charter. Adams would then have “an opportunity to be heard in his defense.” But, as Hochul noted, the path forward on Adams’s dismissal would not just be incredibly opaque but totally unprecedented, as the governor’s power to unseat an elected mayor has never been flexed in the state’s history.

Adams pleaded not guilty to criminal charges last September, denying allegations that he had accepted more than $100,000 in illegal campaign contributions as well as lavish gifts from a Turkish official and business leaders interested in buying his favor during his tenure as Brooklyn borough president.

The mayor has come under heavy fire since acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove told federal prosecutors in Manhattan to drop the corruption case against Adams after Hizzoner allowed ICE agents to enter Rikers Island for the first time since 2015. That sparked widespread criticism that the New York mayor was no longer an independent political entity and prompted the mass resignation of seven federal prosecutors, who quit in protest of the Justice Department order.

In a profound resignation letter, acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Danielle Sassoon outlined that Adams’s legal team had sought a political “quid pro quo” with the Trump administration. In another blistering resignation letter, assistant U.S. Attorney Hagan Scotten claimed that the scheme to use prosecutorial power to forgive Adams and simultaneously advance Donald Trump’s agenda was in blatant violation of the nation’s laws.

“If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion,” Scotten wrote. “But it was never going to be me.”

A federal judge set a hearing for Adams’s case on Wednesday, ordering attorneys working on the case to explain why the Justice Department had requested the charges be dropped.

Steve Bannon is not happy with Elon Musk, and revealed as much in an interview with the conservative website UnHerd Tuesday.  

The far-right commentator and former Donald Trump adviser told the outlet that “Musk is a parasitic illegal immigrant. He wants to impose his freak experiment and play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, tradition or values.”

Bannon has feuded with Musk in the months following Trump election win, beginning with a disagreement  within the MAGA movement over H-1B visas. At the time, Musk posted about how more foreign tech workers were needed in the U.S. under the program, which allows immigrants in specialized fields to work in the United States temporarily. In response, Bannon called out the visa program as “a scam by the oligarchs in Silicon Valley to basically take jobs from American citizens.”

The dispute escalated into Bannon calling Musk a “truly evil guy” in an interview last month, vowing to get the tech mogul “kicked out” of Trump’s orbit by the inauguration. Bannon’s efforts were unsuccessful, as Musk has taken a powerful role in the Trump administration. 

“Musk is the one with power at the moment,” Bannon told UnHerd. “The Democrats are nowhere to be seen.” 

In Bannon’s opinion, the tech mogul’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative also hasn’t done enough to dismantle the administrative state. 

“DOGE is sitting there with the budget, but where the fuck are the DOGE cuts? We are 30 days away from approving a budget for the entire year with $2 trillion already baked in, and not one penny of anything that DOGE found. It’s ludicrous,” Bannon said, adding that he would like to see Musk’s efforts directed at cutting the massive Department of Defense budget. 

“I would like to see $100 billion taken off the $900 billion budget right now, which is really a trillion,” Bannon said, calling DOGE’s campaign “performative.”

Right now, Bannon is on the outside of the White House, looking in, so his opinions only carry limited weight at best with Trump. But he still commands influence within Trump’s support base, especially with his War Room radio show and podcast. It remains to be seen whether Bannon’s ideas for the GOP and Trump will be heard, or whether the party’s future lies with Musk.