President Trump and Elon Musk took questions from reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday, and Trump signed an order directing federal agencies to work closely with Musk's effort to shrink the federal workforce.
The order sets forth rules requiring government agencies to hire no more than one employee for every four workers who leave, and it compels agencies to work with Musk's team to identify large-scale reductions in force and determine which agency components can be eliminated outright, Reuters reports.
“Trump resisted the suggestion by Democrats and other critics that Musk's role presents a conflict of interest,” Reuters says.
“If we thought that, we would not let him do that segment or look in that area, if we thought there was a lack of transparency or a conflict of interest,” said Trump.
Meanwhile, a New York Times article by two reporters who’ve spent the past year investigating Musk’s business with the federal government says many of the federal employees who’ve been pushed out were leading investigations, enforcement matters or lawsuits pending against Musk’s companies.
At least 11 federal agencies that have been affected by those moves have more than 32 continuing investigations, pending complaints or enforcement actions into Musk’s six companies, according to the Times.
Among them:
— Federal Aviation Administration fines of Musk’s SpaceX rocket company, for safety violations
— Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit pressing Musk to pay the federal government perhaps as much as $150 million, accusing him of having violated federal securities law
— The National Labor Relations Board, an independent watchdog agency for workers’ rights, has 24 investigations into Musk’s companies
— At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a public database shows hundreds of complaints about Musk's electric car company Tesla, mostly about debt collection or loan problems. The agency also would have regulated Musk’s new efforts to bring a payments service to X.
None of the investigations or lawsuits involving Musk and his companies, at least so far, have formally been dropped since the start of the new administration, according to more than a dozen current and former federal officials interviewed by the Times.
And the Times found no evidence that Musk directly ordered that an investigation into one of his companies be shut down or stalled.
“The shifts at the agencies in many cases reflect changes in national priorities that come with a president who has long complained that government regulation has been too aggressive, a view widely held in the business community,” says the Times.
“But the upheaval at federal agencies represents one of the first tests of a wide range of conflicts of interest Mr. Musk has brought to the White House, including 100 contracts with 17 federal agencies,” the Times says.
Musk controls Tesla, which is publicly traded. He's the founder of SpaceX; the artificial intelligence start-up xAI; the Boring Company, a tunneling venture; and Neuralink, which is developing brain computer implants. All of those are private companies. Musk also owns the social media platform X, formerly Twitter.
Musk’s companies secured $13 billion in contracts over the past five years, making SpaceX, which collects most of that money, one of the largest government contractors, the Times says. And there's already talk in the Trump administration of expanding these deals, especially at the Air Force.
On Monday, Trump fired the head of the Office of Government Ethics, an independent agency. The office had pending requests to investigate Musk based on allegations raised by Democrats in Congress last week that Musk’s role as a federal government official creates an unavoidable conflict of interest.
The letter from 12 House Democrats said, “The American people deserve assurances that no individual, regardless of stature, is permitted to influence policy for personal gain.”