White House Says Musk Will Decide His Own Conflicts of Interest. Uhhh…

As Elon Musk‘s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) continues to wreak havoc with the internal mechanics of the federal government in its efforts to gut and dissolve vital agencies, the White House is signaling that it has no problem with the richest man on the planet serving as his own ethics watchdog.

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt fielded a question about Musk being a special government employee while his various companies have billions in government contracts, and whether the Trump administration was taking steps to curtail the many conflicts of interest that has created. Leavitt replied that the president had already addressed this concern, saying that “if Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with the contracts and the funding that DOGE is overseeing, Elon will excuse himself from those contracts.”

Of course, it’s nearly impossible for Musk to direct any action by DOGE in Washington without potentially affecting one of his businesses. X, formerly Twitter, currently faces a lawsuit from the Securities and Exchange Commission that alleges he withheld information about the stake he was acquiring in the company ahead of his bid to purchase it. The Department of Labor, which could be next on the chopping block for DOGE, has probed and fined Tesla and SpaceX for unsafe working conditions through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Tesla is also under investigation by the Justice Department for possible securities and wire fraud related to its unsupported claims about fully autonomous vehicles.

SpaceX has additionally been fined by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Aviation Administration — and Musk personally pressured the last FAA administrator to resign, leaving the agency leaderless when a commercial passenger jet and U.S. Army helicopter collided in mid-air over the Potomac River in D.C. last week, killing 67 people. (Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on Wednesday that DOGE staff were going to “plug in to help upgrade our aviation system.” Duffy’s department includes the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which has its own ongoing investigation into Tesla’s self-driving features.) The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is suing Tesla over alleged racial harassment at a manufacturing plant, and the National Labor Relations Board has tangled with both Tesla and SpaceX, with the result that Musk’s companies and other corporate behemoths are waging a legal battle to see the agency declared unconstitutional and wiped off the map for good.

Editor’s picks

Musk has given no indication that he might stop short of meddling in any one of these regulatory bodies, whether by firing workers, appointing new leadership, or redirecting funds from the Treasury Department, where DOGE is already deeply embedded. “Regulations, basically, should be default gone,” he said in a recent late-night call on X Spaces. On Wednesday, he touted the work he claimed DOGE would be doing at the FAA, an agency he has long criticized for its enforcement actions against SpaceX — brazenly diving into an area where he has a well-known conflict of interest. Meanwhile, it seems unlikely that a government in which Musk wields this kind of power will pull SpaceX’s lucrative contracts with NASA and the Defense Department.

Multiple unions have sued the Treasury, the Labor Department, and DOGE itself in an attempt to thwart the commission’s access to sensitive data and highly secured systems in these institutions, and federal officials have argued that Musk’s aggressive incursions violate federal law. Yet Musk and DOGE seem indifferent to those accusations, behaving according to Trump’s legal strategy of daring anyone to stop him from doing whatever he wants. They also have an eager ally in the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Ed Martin, a MAGA activist and 2020 election denier. This week, after Musk claimed that those who publicly name DOGE employees are breaking the law (they are not), Martin vowed to devote Justice Department and FBI resources to prosecution of such supposed crimes.

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee took their own stab at holding Musk to account for his swift and reckless dismantling of federal agencies, with a motion to subpoena the billionaire. It failed in a 19-20 vote. Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat who missed the vote, said on X that he would have supported the motion, prompting Musk to reply, “Don’t be a dick.” Anyone else looking to check this oligarch can expect a similar response.