Elon Musk’s DOGE Is Breaking Rules to Install Grok in Government

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is letting his glitchy Grok AI chatbot sift through potentially sensitive government information, according to an exclusive report from Reuters Friday.

One person familiar with the matter told Reuters that DOGE had begun using a customized version of Grok, a generative AI chatbot developed by xAI, which is owned by the billionaire bureaucrat, to do their work.

“They ask questions, get it to prepare reports, give data analysis,” the person told Reuters. Grok was apparently being used to move through masses of information more efficiently in the organization’s search for supposed waste, fraud, and abuse.

Two other people said that DOGE had pressed officials at the Department of Homeland Security to use Grok, despite the fact that it was not approved for use there. Grok’s use in the federal government raises significant concerns about Musk’s many conflicts of interest in his government work and business ventures, as the government would have to pay for access to use the AI chatbot, the sources said.

“This gives the appearance that DOGE is pressuring agencies to use software to enrich Musk and xAI, and not to the benefit of the American people,” said Richard Painter, ethics counsel to former Republican President George W. Bush and a University of Minnesota professor. Musk has been accused of using the State Department to boost Starlink in foreign countries and the Commerce Department to boost Tesla.

Reuters could not independently confirm claims that DHS employees had actually started using Grok, or whether they needed to pay for it. A Homeland Security spokesperson said that “DOGE hasn’t pushed any employees to use any particular tools or products.”

Reports that Grok is being used in the federal government raise other concerns as well, about DOGE’s compliance with privacy laws and its handling of sensitive data. xAi’s website said that it may monitor Grok users for “specific business purposes.”

Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a nonprofit that advocates for digital privacy, told Reuters that DOGE using Grok was “about as serious a privacy threat as you get.”

Musk appears to maintain a disturbing control over Grok’s output. Recently, the AI chatbot began generating answers about white genocide—a nonissue that Musk is very passionate about—when asked unrelated queries.

In a strange appeal to a right-wing conception of masculinity, Representative Tim Burchett proclaimed that he does not drink any liquid out of straws, because he is a masculine man and straws are for feminine women.

“[Jesse] Watters says men should not drink out of straws in public, or at all,” a Fox News host told Burchett on Thursday, asking what the Republican representative thought.

“I don’t drink out of a straw, brother, that’s what the women in my house do,” Burchett responded.

Burchett was swiftly ridiculed online.

“Fellas, is it gay to drink out of a straw?” New York Representative Robert Garcia quipped. “Fox News always asking the tough questions.”

“What is it about these MAGA conservatives that they have to prove how manly they are all the time?” said one X user.

“Imagine your country’s on fire and Fox News is debating the gender politics of straws. Grown men on primetime TV clutching pearls over plastic tubes,” wrote another. “If masculinity is this fragile, maybe let it melt with the ice in their sad little cups.” Some simply posted uncaptioned pictures of President Trump and Burchett himself using straws.

This asinine idea that using a straw is unbecoming of a “real man” seemed to gain steam on the internet around 2015, when Esquire’s Jill Krasney and others proclaimed that “no self-respecting man consumes his libation with a straw.” But the trend was popularized by Fox News host Jesse Watters and his “rules for men.”

“I have rules for men, they’re just funny. They’re not that serious,” Watters said in March. “You don’t eat soup in public, you don’t cross your legs, and you don’t drink from a straw. And one of the reasons you don’t drink from a straw is the way your lips purse. It’s very effeminate.”

In 2023, Watters chided then-President Joe Biden for using a straw too.

“You know I recommend all men refrain from using straws. It’s unbecoming,” he said. “The way a man’s lips purse, the size of the straw is just too dainty, the way your fingers clasp on it.… No, come on. Straws are for women and little kids.”

Regardless of how serious Watters claims to be about his rules for men, there are quite a few poor souls out there pushing the same idea.

“Beloved, if you were unfortunate enough to be born to a single mother who didn’t teach you anything and ran your dad off then you probably don’t know this: Men do not drink from straws,” said the massively popular right-wing content creator Wranglerstar in a video titled “Everything is Falling Apart.”

This incredibly stupid talking point had been previously relegated to Watters and his right-wing acolytes in the depths of YouTube and TikTok. Now it’s getting airtime in the halls of Congress.

While House Republicans celebrated passing the president’s “big, beautiful” spending bill by a one-vote margin Thursday, caucus members in the upper chamber remained unimpressed.

Speaking with CNN’s Manu Raju later that day, South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham shot down some of the cuts as “not real,” arguing that the House had done next to nothing to actually bring down federal spending.

Even a $880 billion cut into Medicaid couldn’t offset the gargantuan price tag on extending Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which are estimated to add somewhere between $3.8 trillion and $5.3 trillion to the national debt. Those numbers have ruffled feathers among congressional budget hawks, who were under the impression that the Trump administration would be sizing down spending rather than beefing it up.

America’s national debt is currently more than $36.8 trillion, as of the time of publishing.

“Some of the Freedom Caucus members are warning you guys not to water down any of their cuts, what do you say to them?” Raju asked.

Graham could only laugh.

“Well, you had your chance,” the lawmaker said with a chuckle. “Some of these cuts are not real. And we’re talking about over a decade—you know, if you do a trillion and a half, that’s like a percent and a half.”

“So don’t get high on our horse here that we’ve somehow made some major advancement of reducing spending because we didn’t,” Graham noted.

Several conservative senators have indicated they won’t vote for the bill if it includes a debt limit increase, including Senators Rand Paul, Ron Johnson, and Rick Scott. The growing coalition of budget-conscious naysayers is threatening enough to potentially keep the bill from reaching the president’s desk, as Republicans grapple with their narrow majority in the Senate.

The Trump administration doesn’t want you to trust independent analysis of their “big, beautiful” tax bill.

The bill—now headed to the Senate—proposes cutting upward of $880 billion from Medicaid in order to make a multitrillion-dollar tax cut extension for multimillionaires and corporations more palatable to the American public. Trump’s bill is estimated to add somewhere between $3.8 trillion and $5.3 trillion to the national debt.

But when pressed by Fox News Friday to explain the massive expenditure, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent simply brushed the numbers off.

“You’re referring to the [Congressional Budget Office] scoring, which is 10-year scoring and it’s D.C.-style scoring,” Bessent said, clearing his throat. “We think that we can both grow the economy and control the debt.”

“What’s important, Bill, is that the economy grows faster than the debt,” Bessent told Fox Host Bill Hemmer. “So what I would tell your viewers to focus on, is what I’m focused on, is what [former] Secretary [Janet] Yellen was focused on, is what is total debt to GDP.

“We can grow our way out of this. If we change the growth trajectory of the country, of the economy, then we will stabilize our finances and grow our way out of this,” Bessent added.

The CBO is a nonpartisan federal agency that provides prospective analytics to Congress. On Tuesday, a CBO report of the House’s reconciliation package found that—if passed—the bill would disproportionately aid the wealthiest among us, lowering household resources by 4 percent for the bottom 10 percent of America, while raising resources by 2 percent for the richest 10 percent of the country.

But America’s finances are not stabilizing, in no small part due to Donald Trump’s on-again-off-again tariff plan that has rattled U.S. markets. Last week, credit firm Moody’s was the last of the three major bond rating agencies to downgrade the nation’s score. Moody’s reported that it appears increasingly unlikely that the U.S. economy will be able to keep up with its rising debt and interest payments, throwing off what was once an unshakeable confidence in U.S. growth.

In the wake of the downgrade, Bessent once again urged investors to close their eyes and disregard the news, claiming that the lowered score was simply a “lagging indicator” of U.S. performance.

America’s national debt is currently more than $36.8 trillion, as of the time of publishing. Whether or not the deficit actually affects the economy is still in debate, but having investors believe in the health of the economy is critical.

“The government deficit isn’t a problem until investors think it is,” Callie Cox, chief market strategist at Ritholtz Wealth Management, told Axios Monday. “And they’re increasingly telling us that the deficit is a problem.”

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. inadvertently destroyed his own nominee for surgeon general by giving a rare, good piece of medical advice.  

During an interview with CNN’s Kaitlin Collins Thursday, Kennedy was asked to explain a remark he’d made that people should not take his medical advice. 

“Absolutely. People should not be taking medical advice from somebody who is not a physician,” Kennedy said. 

That’s not great news for Casey Means, the wellness influencer and author Donald Trump nominated at Kennedy’s suggestion to serve as the surgeon general. Means is not a practicing physician because she has no active medical license, and she never completed her physician residency.

Unaware of how ridiculous he sounded, Kennedy continued, muddling his point entirely. “And they should also be skeptical about any medical advice. They need to do their own research,” he said.

In one breath, Kennedy warned against taking advice from unproven sources and also urged Americans to question any actual advice they do get and seek out their own alternative, unproven medicines. As an anti-vaccine advocate, Kennedy has repeatedly championed alternative, unproven medicines.