WASHINGTON — Who, exactly, runs the so-called Department of Government Efficiency?

You might think it would be Elon Musk, the man who President Donald Trump said “will lead the Department of Government Efficiency” alongside Vivek Ramaswamy, before Ramaswamy stepped away from it last month.

But when Trump set up the cost-cutting body in an executive order on his first day, the order did not say who its “administrator” would be. Section 3(b) of the order reads: “There shall be a USDS Administrator established in the Executive Office of the President who shall report to the White House Chief of Staff,” using the abbreviation for United States DOGE Service, the official name of the effort, which is not actually a Cabinet-level department. Last week, White House representatives did not respond to repeated requests to identify that administrator.

Then on Monday evening, a White House official stated plainly that “Mr. Musk is not the U.S. DOGE Service Administrator.” The official, Joshua Fisher, made the statement in a declaration to a judge, U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is hearing a case filed by Democratic attorneys general against Musk and the DOGE effort.

Fisher added that Musk was “an employee in the White House Office” and “not an employee of the U.S. DOGE Service.”

Trump Speaks Like Musk Leads DOGE

Trump often talks about Musk as the functional leader of the DOGE effort, featuring him in a news conference last week where Musk answered questions about it.

A lot of secrecy has surrounded DOGE despite Musk’s attempts to position it as “maximally transparent.” The White House’s unwillingness to state who its administrator is only adds to that sense of opacity.

DOGE’s predecessor organization, the U.S. Digital Service, had administrators whose roles were public, most recently Mina Hsiang.

Leaders of Musk’s effort who could conceivably be its “administrator” include Steve Davis, Musk’s right-hand man for two decades, who has overseen the day-to-day work of his efforts in Washington, and Brad Smith, an official in the first Trump administration who has been intimately involved in DOGE’s moves. A White House spokesperson did not respond to another request for comment Monday evening in response to Fisher’s declaration.

The administrator has several powers, according to the executive order. Those include helping agency heads choose their DOGE team members and starting a “Software Modernization Initiative” to update the government’s technology. A second executive order, released last week, said the DOGE administrator would receive a monthly hiring report from each federal agency and would submit a report in 240 days to Trump on the order’s implementation.

It is not known who that report’s author will be.

—

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Theodore Schleifer
c. 2025 The New York Times Company