Trump Unleashes Legal Chaos for Elon Musk’s DOGE in Speech to Congress

The president revealed who’s really running the Department of Government Efficiency, days after his administration offered a cozy alternative in order to salvage the group’s work as it’s interrogated in the courts.

While discussing DOGE in his speech to a joint session of Congress Tuesday evening, Trump mentioned that the unofficial agency is “headed up by Elon Musk, who is in the gallery tonight.”

But that wasn’t the administration’s story last week. In a court declaration filed Monday, the White House asserted that Musk’s official title is “senior adviser” to Trump. That title offers the unelected billionaire “no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself,” the administration claimed, and leaves him with no formal responsibilities to run DOGE as either an employee or an administrator, as a mere employee of the White House.

The administration claims the real head of DOGE is Amy Gleason, a low-profile, first-term Trump official with experience in health care tech. Mere weeks before her name came up as the chief of the controversial organization, attorneys for the Justice Department didn’t know her, and even DOGE staffers were unaware that she had been fronting the operation as recently as one day before her role was announced.

The explanation came as Musk faced growing legal scrutiny for his role in dismantling federal agencies and firing thousands of federal employees. The Trump administration had argued that Musk was not the head of DOGE in order to defend the group’s work from several lawsuits.

On Friday, confusion over Musk’s role led to a tense back-and-forth between Judge Theodore Chuang and Justice Department attorney Joshua Gardner, with Chuang noting that the administration’s sudden excuse was “highly suspicious” and “raises questions.”

“There’s an affidavit saying he’s a senior adviser of the president,” Chuang said. “But there’s a ‘strange disconnect’ where he has referred to himself in public as affiliated with DOGE and not as a senior adviser to the president—until recently, after these lawsuits were filed.

Trump’s Freudian slip Tuesday night could warrant further interrogations into the nature of Musk’s involvement in DOGE.

In a press conference last week, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt falsely claimed that Gleason’s appointment had been common knowledge for weeks and that the Trump administration had been completely “transparent” about her appointment. (By Wednesday, Gleason’s LinkedIn had not been updated to reflect her new role.)

Democratic resistance to Donald Trump’s agenda was remarkably quiet on Tuesday, barely managing to make it on camera during the president’s official State of the Union address.

While Trump rattled on about all the myriad ways in which his administration is working to undermine and dismantle federal agencies, Representatives Jasmine Crockett and Maxwell Frost stood up to leave the lower chamber. As Crockett approached the door to exit, she took off her jacket and revealed the back of her shirt, which read “RESIST,” reported The Hill’s Mychael Schnell.

Frost, who had also removed his coat, had on a black shirt that read, “No kings live here,” per Courthouse News’s Benjamin Weiss.

A cohort of Democrats stood up and followed them, according to Punchbowl News’s Jake Sherman, similarly turning their backs to Trump as they removed their coats to reveal T-shirts that also read, “RESIST.”

Other protests by Democratic lawmakers were more profound. Texas Representative Al Green made waves from the onset of Trump’s opening remarks, interrupting the president by yelling, “You have no mandate to cut Medicaid!” That got him ousted by House Speaker Mike Johnson, who called on the sergeant of arms to remove the 77-year-old from the chamber.

Democrats spent days deciding how to protest Trump’s address. A small faction decided not to attend. That included Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Patty Murray, the latter of whom on Monday said that the true state of the union saw Trump “spitting in the face of the law.”

At the beginning of Donald Trump’s address to Congress Tuesday night, Democratic Representative Al Green was removed from the chamber after interrupting the president.

Green reportedly kept yelling at Trump, “You have no mandate to cut Medicaid!” The Houston-area congressman, 77, also waved his cane in the direction of the president. Speaker Mike Johnson warned Green to stop several times—before ordering the sergeant of arms to remove him from the chamber.

Green’s removal is unprecedented in the history of presidential addresses to Congress, as dissenting members of Congress usually aren’t removed from the chamber, even if they’ve shouted at the president. Green, who has already introduced articles of impeachment against Trump, probably won’t mind being the first.

The radical divide in American politics was on full display during Donald Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress from the very moment he stepped into the upper chamber.

As the president passed droves of fawning Republican lawmakers, a small protest by one Democrat was snatched away from her by a member across the aisle.

Representative Melanie Stansbury held up a sheet of paper that read, “This is not normal,” before Texas Representative Lance Gooden ripped it away from the New Mexico Democrat and tossed it in the air.

Democrats have spent days deciding how to protest Trump’s unofficial State of the Union address. A small faction decided not to attend. That included Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Patty Murray, the latter of whom on Monday said that the true state of the union saw Trump “spitting in the face of the law.”

But that plan flew in the face of the silent protest top Democrats in Congress had organized. In a letter issued Monday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries urged his party to make a “strong” and “dignified” presence at Trump’s speech, rather than run away. During Trump’s address, a large collection of Democratic women on the left side of the aisle were seen wearing pink while men wore blue and yellow ties in quiet opposition to Trump’s agenda.

“There is nothing I can do to make them laugh or smile or applaud,” Trump told the chamber once his speech began, and after Texas Representative Al Green had been booted from the session by House Speaker Mike Johnson. Trump then went on to argue that he deserved the adoration of Democrats on the basis that he had already made “astronomical achievements” in his time in office.

“This is a time for big dreams and bold action,” Trump continued, underscoring his executive orders withdrawing the U.S. from the U.N. Human Rights Council and the World Health Organization, and his freeze on hiring federal workers and on delivering foreign aid, among other monumentally disruptive executive actions.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is charged with eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse. But some of its employees are earning hefty taxpayer-funded paychecks. 

Wired reports that some software engineers and executives who are part of DOGE are drawing six-figure salaries, in some cases from the government agencies they are cutting. For example, Jeremy Lewin, a DOGE staffer assigned to the General Services Administration who helped lead attacks on the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the National Institutes of Health, is pulling in $167,000 per year. 

In another instance, Kyle Schutt, a software engineer at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is making a salary of $195,200, the maximum annual salary that a “General Schedule” federal employee can make, including bonuses. And Nate Cavanaugh, 28, whose work for DOGE comprises interviewing GSA employees, makes over $120,500 per year. That’s close to what the average GSA employee, who typically has been with the agency for 13 years, earns per year at $128,565.

When he began recruiting for DOGE in November, Musk described the work as “tedious” and said “compensation is zero,” calling his ideal candidates “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.” So far, the pseudo-agency has tapped into vital government systems and fired thousands of employees. 

Now it appears that compensation is far higher than zero for at least a few employees. Despite Musk describing DOGE as “maximum transparent,” spending and salary ranges for the effort have not been made public. A recent report says that DOGE has received about $40 million in funding, and the White House did not respond to Wired’s questions about salary ranges or where DOGE’s funding is coming from in the federal budget.

DOGE’s cuts are ostensibly supposed to be saving taxpayers money, but not only are some of its employees drawing a high salary, government spending has actually gone up since the inauguration. Plus, while DOGE was claiming billions of dollars in savings, it has had to go back and make corrections to many of its claims, showing that its boasts were exaggerated or fraudulent.

The high salaries seem to be part of the many lies coming from Musk and his pet project about how much money DOGE is saving and what it’s actually doing. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise from a greedy welfare billionaire who owes much of his wealth to government funding, and who is enriching himself even more with his and Donald Trump’s government overhaul.   

Donald Trump’s top lawyer Alina Habba defended the firing of thousands of U.S. military veterans on Tuesday, claiming they “perhaps” aren’t capable of doing their jobs.

“You know, we care about veterans tremendously.… But at the same time, we have taxpayer dollars, we have a fiscal responsibility to use taxpayer dollars to pay people that actually work,” Habba told reporters on Tuesday. “That doesn’t mean that we forget our veterans by any means, we are going to care for them in the right way, but perhaps they’re not fit to have a job at this moment or not willing to come to work.

“And we can’t, you know, I wouldn’t take money from you and pay somebody and say sorry, you know, they’re not going to come to work,” Habba said. “It’s just not acceptable.”

As part of the Department of Government Efficiency’s purge of the federal government, Trump and Elon Musk have fired an estimated 6,000 veterans from the federal workforce as of last week. Veterans make up one-third of the federal workforce.

The mass firings have also exacerbated a longtime staffing shortage at the Department of Veteran Affairs. More than 2,000 VA employees have been fired since Trump took office, hindering their ability to seek health care or adjudicate their disability claims.

Last week, DOGE also canceled over 800 contracts that help VA employees with hiring as well as offering medical services and cancer programs, though some of the cancellations have since been walked back, making things even more confusing.

The cuts have sparked outrage among veterans and Democratic lawmakers. The two groups have banded together against the president, despite an estimated 65 percent of veterans who voted in the 2024 election having backed Trump, according to exit polling.

“Donald Trump and Elon Musk are utterly betraying our veterans—indiscriminately firing men and women who have served our nation in uniform and endangering the care and benefits they deserve and have earned,” Democratic Senator Patty Murray said in a statement last week.

But Habba justified Trump’s attack on veterans, arguing that it’s their fault they no longer have a job. Her comments come shortly before Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress Tuesday evening, where a number of Democrats have invited fired federal employees—including veterans—as their guests.

Once again, Republicans are asking the American public to forgo the evidence of their eyes and ears.

Republican lawmakers were met with fire and fury over the weekend as their constituents hounded them for failing to intervene in a budget resolution that will result in billions in cuts to Medicaid, as well as refusing to speak out against Elon Musk’s unchecked dissolution of federal agencies and, with it, thousands of federal jobs and popular social programs.

But at least one Republican has decided the best option is to threaten criminal charges for Americans who dare to dissent against Donald Trump’s agenda. Speaking with the Meg Ellefson Show on Friday, Wisconsin Representative Derrick Van Orden likened his constituents to Nazis, claiming that only Communists and fascists would protest their lawmakers.

“People who associated with the Communist movement and the National Socialism movement used to get their way politically, is—they would do stuff like this, and they were called agitators,” Van Orden told the podcast.

Fact check: It was notoriously unsafe to speak out against the government in Soviet Russia, as well as in Nazi Germany. Under the Nazi regime, Germany shuttered anti-Nazi newspapers, controlled what media appeared in newspapers and on the radio, banned books that the Third Reich determined were “un-German,” and by 1934 had made it officially illegal to criticize the Nazi government, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Freedom of speech and the right to protest, on the other hand, have been cornerstones of American democracy since the country was founded.

Van Orden then said that if protesters came to his town halls and acted “in an unlawful manner,” or if they were “disrupting or refusing to leave a venue,” then he would have them “arrested and charged with a class B misdemeanor.”

Van Orden’s outlandish comments preceded instructions by the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, who on Tuesday directed party members to stop holding in-person town halls to avoid the backlash. House Speaker Mike Johnson endorsed the order later Tuesday, washing his hands of lawmakers’ upset constituents by watering them down as “professional protesters.”

Meanwhile, Trump explicitly threatened to violate the Constitution on Tuesday, pledging to prosecute protesters and withhold federal funding from universities or schools if attendees choose to express their First Amendment rights.

Within weeks of returning to office, Donald Trump has tossed America’s greatest alliances in favor of a rocky relationship with Russia—and world powers have taken note.

The battered relationships are partially the result of Trump’s spontaneous trade war, threatening America’s economic relationships with a handful of its longest allies, including Canada, Mexico, the U.K., and a collection of European nations.

The president’s controversial tariffs went into effect first thing Tuesday, imposing 25 percent levies on Canada and Mexico as well as a 10 percent tariff hike on Chinese goods. In return, Canada and China slapped the U.S. with equal tariffs, while Mexico promised to do the same with further details to come Sunday. The spontaneously unpaused levies immediately followed reports that Trump had directed administration officials to draft a proposal that would lift sanctions on Russia.

In doing so, Trump has morphed America—previously understood to be the strongest global power—into an international pariah.

Speaking with reporters on Tuesday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau used profoundly strong language in describing what he believed to be Trump’s plan to dismantle Canada’s economy in order to “annex” its land as a potential fifty-first state.

“I can tell you that every country is very, very aware that if the American government is willing to do this to their own closest ally, neighbor, and friend,” Trudeau said, “then everyone is vulnerable to a trade war.”

Trudeau continued that the international focus has extended not just to the Trump administration’s movements but to the American public’s reaction to the fracturing of these alliances as the president continues to align U.S. policy with Moscow (a detail that Trump has repeatedly failed to deny.)

“What do the American people think?” Trudeau said. “How do Americans feel about jettisoning one’s friends and allies in favor of a country that has never wished Americans well, and continues to act in ways that harm the global economy and, specifically, the American economy and American values and principles?”

Speaking directly to the American public, Trudeau added that Canadian citizens still view the southern nation as their “neighbor” and “partner.”

“This is a policy decision by the American government designed to go after the Canadian economy. This is a trade war, yes. But Canadians are hurt. Canadians are angry,” Trudeau said, adding that the country’s residents would continue their boycotts of American goods and services.

“We’re probably going to keep booing the American anthem,” Trudeau said. “But let me tell Americans, we’re not booing you; we’re not booing your teams or players. We’re booing a policy that is designed to hurt us.”

Trudeau’s missive echoed similar comments made by a top European diplomat following Trump’s disastrous meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday, which in just a handful of minutes effectively tanked peace talks with the war-battered nation while elevating Kremlin talking points.

“Today, it became clear that the free world needs a new leader. It’s up to us, Europeans, to take this challenge,” said EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas in reaction to Trump’s performance.

Former Polish President Lech Wałęsa wrote a letter to Trump on Monday describing how Poland had watched the U.S. leader’s treatment of Zelenskiy with “horror and distaste,” likening the White House’s ruthless bullying of a beleaguered wartime leader to the Soviet Union’s Communist courtrooms.

“The history of the 20th century shows that every time the United States wanted to maintain a distance from democratic values ​​and its European allies, it ended up being a threat to itself,” the letter read. “President Woodrow Wilson understood this, deciding that the United States would enter World War I in 1917. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood this, deciding after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 that the war in defense of America would be fought not only in the Pacific, but also in Europe, in alliance with the countries attacked by the Third Reich.”

Wałęsa also scorned America’s sudden decision to reverse course on its signed treaties, calling on the U.S. to honor the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which America and the U.K. mutually agreed to defend Ukraine’s borders in exchange for its surrender of nuclear weapons.

“These guarantees are unconditional: there is not a word about treating such aid as economic exchange,” Wałęsa wrote.

The letter was signed by Wałęsa as well as 38 other Polish activists who were imprisoned under Poland’s USSR-backed regime prior to the fall of communism in 1989.

In a shocking reversal, President Trump is reversing a directive to fire thousands of probationary federal employees.

The Office of Personnel Management, which manages the federal workforce, issued a memo Tuesday to all federal agency heads saying that they don’t have to comply with previous instructions to fire employees who have held their jobs for one year or less. The memo states that instead, federal offices now have until September 13 to determine how to reduce staff.

The surprise shift comes only a few days after a federal judge ruled that OPM’s instructions to federal agencies to fire probationary employees was illegal, stating on Friday that “[t]he Office of Personnel Management does not have any authority whatsoever under any statute in the history of the universe, to hire and fire employees within another agency.”

What this means to the many federal workers who have already been axed is unclear, although several federal agencies have scrambled to rehire workers working in critical areas since last week’s court ruling. These employees include bird flu experts and people working with nuclear weapons.

Federal workers have been put through the wringer ever since Trump was sworn in, being subject to ultimatums from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which now plans to track them. Even with this latest reversal, many of them may still get axed in “large-scale” reductions. But now, at least some of them will get to keep their jobs.

This story has been updated.

People are paying millions to wine and dine President Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida, Wired reported Tuesday.  

Trump’s team clearly saw an opportunity for a cash grab in the frenzy of business moguls scrambling to court the president and get on his good side. For $5 million, business leaders can meet one-on-one with Trump at his estate, a “hot ticket” opportunity in the business world, sources told Wired. 

For those looking for a classier affair, they can pay $1 million to dine with the president in a candlelit group setting. Invitations to a March 1 candlelit dinner were sent out by MAGA Inc., a pro-Trump super PAC that contributed over $400 million last year to help get him elected. 

“You are invited to a candlelight dinner featuring special guest President Donald J. Trump. Additional details provided upon RSVP,” the invitation read. “RSVPs will be accommodated on a first come, first serve basis. Space is very limited. $1,000,000 per person.” 

“Donald J. Trump is appearing at this event only as a featured speaker, and is not asking for funds or donations,” the invitation continues. 

The dinner was formally titled “MAGA INC. Candlelight Finance Dinner,” and was included on the president’s official schedule, yet more evidence of the blurry lines between Trump and the private business world.

The Washington Post reported that Trump hosted two similar candlelit dinners at Mar-a-Lago before he took office, one on December 19, 2024, and one on January 19, the eve of his inauguration.