This article examines the controversial activities of DOGE, a budget-cutting initiative led by billionaire Elon Musk, and its impact on federal agencies. DOGE's tactics, which include accessing sensitive personal data and pressuring employees to resign, have raised serious legal and ethical concerns.
By the time the flyer was drafted, it was widely understood that a visit from the Department of Government Efficiency, the budget-cutting initiative run by the billionaire Elon Musk , could spell doom for a public agency. Among the entities paid such visits since Donald Trump assumed office are the Department of Education, which Musk has vowed to shut down, and U.S.A.I.D., where all but a few hundred workers were placed on leave and funding for virtually all programs was cut off.
(On Friday, in response to a lawsuit filed by federal unions, a judge appointed by Trump blocked the government from placing U.S.A.I.D. employees on leave and asked that those who had already been pulled from their jobs be reinstated, on the ground that they risked suffering “irreparable harm.”) DOGE is not a real agency, and the tactics it has employed—cancelling federal payments that Congress has approved, accessing government systems that hold sensitive personal information, purging civil servants by promising to pay them through September if they quit their jobs—are almost certainly illegal. This hasn’t stopped Trump from praising Musk’s performance. “I think he’s doing a great job,” the President told reporters last week. Dismantling the Department of Labor would be an audacious undertaking for a President who owes his second term, in no small part, to the support of working-class voters. The D.O.L.’s mission is to foster the welfare of working people and to safeguard their rights and benefits. Like a growing number of tech oligarchs, Musk appears to regard the very idea of empowering the government to perform such functions as an affront. Last year, his company SpaceX sued the National Labor Relations Board—which is tasked with preventing unfair labor practices and works with the D.O.L. to enforce compliance with labor laws—claiming that the agency is unconstitutional. (The lawsuit was filed shortly after the N.L.R.B. issued a complaint against SpaceX for allegedly firing eight employees who had criticized Musk in an open letter.) Musk is unlikely to hold a more charitable view of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a branch of the Labor Department whose mission is to protect employees from hazardous working conditions and to hold employers who put them at risk accountable. In recent years, OSHA has repeatedly fined Musk’s companies for serious safety violations, including an incident at a SpaceX facility in Texas in which a worker fell to his death from a truck whose cargo had not been properly secured. The fatality was first disclosed in an exposé published in 2023 by Reuters which documented at least six hundred previously unreported injuries at the company; its facility in Brownsville, Texas, had an injury rate six times higher than the industry average. (SpaceX has defended its safety practices in written responses to OSHA and California OSHA, where an employee was injured during a rocket-engine test.) OSHA has also fined another of Musk’s companies, Tesla, for exposing workers to hazardous chemicals and has issued a fine for multiple violations involving chemical burns and other injuries sustained by employees at a third Musk-owned business, the Boring Company. DOGE’s incursions into U.S.A.I.D. and several other agencies were not met with preëmptive on-site protests, in part because they were conducted at breakneck speed, but a different scenario played out on February 5th, at the D.O.L., where hundreds of people showed up. Some of the protesters were members of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., which had helped spread word about DOGE’s impending visit. Others came from groups such as the National Employment Law Project, a workers’-rights organization with an office in Washington. Much of the information that the Labor Department gathers—medical records, workers’-compensation claims, whistle-blower complaints—is confidential, a point that was underscored in a lawsuit that a group of federal-employee unions rushed to file in a U.S. District Court. The lawsuit sought to bar the Department of Labor from sharing sensitive information with DOGE; some members of the unions that brought it (presumably, D.O.L. employees) said that the department had instructed them to comply with DOGE’s demands. “The Department of Labor and its current leadership are acceding to this takeover, ordering Department employees to give DOGE access to whatever they ask for,” the lawsuit states. Going along with such a directive would violate workers’ privacy and could expose the identities of individuals who had filed complaints about wage theft and other unfair labor practices with the D.O.L.’s Wage and Hour Division, the lawsuit charges—complaints that are kept confidential to protect the people making them from reprisals
ELON MUSK DEPARTMENT OF LABOR GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY DOGE USAID NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY AND HEALTH ADMINISTRATION WORKERS' RIGHTS PRIVACY CONCERNS
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