The White House said on Monday that Elon Musk, who has moved rapidly to shrink the size of the US government at the behest of President Donald Trump, is now considered a “special government employee”.
The designation, musk, allows the world’s richest man to work for the federal government, but potentially avoids the disclosure regulations about the conflict of interest and finance that apply to regular government employees.
Musk still runs an electric car company Tesla and aerospace company Spacex, while presiding over Trump’s cost to cut the cost of the government’s efficiency. As the CEO of SpaceX, the Musk takes care of the company’s contracts with the Pentagon and the intelligence community that are worth billions of dollars.
White House Press Secretary Karolin Levitt said Musk has been classified as a “Special Government Employees”. Another senior official of the White House said that Musk is not getting government salary and is following the law.
Special government employees are appointed to their positions for more than 130 days, but Trump did not say how long the musk will last.
Musk, who has promised “Mass Head-Count Reduction” in the federal bureaucracy, has conducted extensive investigations in recent times as his team has been used or controlled by many government systems. Musk’s tricks have scared the government workforce and created anarchy inside some agencies.
Reuters said on Friday that Kasturi’s associate on charges of running the Human Resource Agency of the US government has excluded the career civil servants from the computer system, which includes personal data of millions of federal employees, according to two agency officials.
Musk has also targeted the American agency to close for international development, calling the humanitarian agency a leftist organization for the White House unacceptable.
Democratic MPs have reduced what has been depicted as an undeclared billionaire to gain a lot of power on the federal government.
Trump, which officials say that the USAID has been assigned to Kasturi to oversee the reform of the USAID, defended Kasturi on Monday, but said what their advisors can do, its limitations.
“Elon cannot do anything without our acceptance and will do anything, and we will approve where they are suitable; where suitable is not suitable, where not suitable; where we do not.”
Trump said, “This is something that he feels very strongly, and I am impressed, because he is running, obviously, a big company,” said Trump. “If there is any conflict, we will not let it go near it. But he has a good, natural instinct. He has got a team of very talented people.”
Questions about accountability
Since assuming office on January 20, Trump has in his first steps to reduce the bureaucracy and set up hundreds of civil servants firing and firing hundreds of civil servants and ignored hundreds of civil servants.
A separate American official said that Trump is not closely monitoring the tricks of Musk, but is being kept till date. “He has read,” the officer said about Trump’s awareness about Musk’s activities.
Cathleen Clarke, a government morality professor at Washington University School of Law, said that most special government employees do not need to file financial revelations in public.
He said that Musk’s new designation could be a way to avoid disclosing his finance and many of his conflicts.
“If they do not publicly do their financial disclosure, it can make it impossible for the public and non -government organizations and journalists to make him and the government accountable and ensure that he does not participate in those cases Where is his struggles, “he said.
Musk spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to help Trump win the November presidential election.
On X, the social media platform is also the owner of Musk, he shared a post with right -wing commentator Rogan O’Handley stating that Musk had campaigned prominently with Trump and voters deliberately cut their costs agenda Voted for
(Except for the headline, the story has not been edited by NDTV employees and is published by a syndicated feed.)
