Trump Kicks Off Legal Chaos by Revealing Elon Musk Actually Runs DOGE

Donald Trump called Elon Musk the head of the Department of Government Efficiency Wednesday, and while this may seem obvious to everyone, the White House has been pretending like it isn’t—and the truth could land them in legal trouble. 

During an appearance at the Future Investment Institute Summit in Miami, Trump told attendees at the Saudi investment fund event exactly what Musk’s real job is.

“I signed an order creating the Department of Government Efficiency, and put a man named Elon Musk in charge,” Trump said. 

For an administration that loves to tout its own radical transparency, they sure seem to want to mislead Americans on who is really calling the shots at DOGE.

The Trump administration filed a court declaration Monday asserting that Musk’s official title is “senior adviser to the president,” a position that holds “no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself.” It also claims that Musk isn’t a DOGE employee or its administrator, but an employee of the White House. 

The filing flies in the face of Trump’s original announcement naming Musk the head of DOGE, as well as everything we’ve seen from Musk since, as the unelected bureaucrat has taken aim at essential federal employees, sending agencies scrambling to hire them back. Most recently, he and his friends at DOGE pretended to save money by eliminating fictionalized government contracts. 

Monday’s filing came as Musk faces legal scrutiny in federal court this week. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ultimately declined to issue a temporary restraining order against Musk and DOGE Tuesday, saying that it wasn’t yet clear that their actions would cause irreparable harm. 

By obfuscating leadership, it seems that the Trump administration wants to avoid accountability for its actions. U.S. District Judge John Bates ruled last week that DOGE should be considered an “agency,” although Trump was “curiously” avoiding calling it that explicitly.  

“This appears to come from a desire to escape the obligations that accompany agencyhood—such as being subject to the Freedom of Information Act, the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedures Act—while reaping only its benefits,” Bates wrote in his order.

Donald Trump’s gutting of the federal government is coming to the Department of Defense.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has told DOD and military leaders to make plans for cutting 8 percent of the defense budget for each of the next five years, The Washington Post reports, citing a department memo and unnamed officials.

Proposals for cuts are due back by February 24, the memo states, with the Trump administration including a list 17 exceptions from the chopping block. These include nuclear weapons and missile defenses, drones and other weapons, and military operations at the southern U.S. border.

“President Trump’s charge to DoD is clear: achieve Peace through Strength,” Hegseth wrote in the memo on Tuesday. “The time for preparation is over — we must act urgently to revive the warrior ethos, rebuild our military, and reestablish deterrence. Our budget will resource the fighting force we need, cease unnecessary defense spending, reject excessive bureaucracy, and drive actionable reform including progress on the audit.”

So far, the massive DOD budget of $850 billion has been spared from the heavy-handed cuts elsewhere in the federal government led by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, including the elimination of the U.S. Agency for International Development. This is despite the fact that the DOD has a long history of failing audits and funding bloated projects without facing any consequences.

It’s probably not a coincidence that Musk’s companies have hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in defense contracts. Until now, DOD employees were also spared from Trump and Musk’s mass purge of government employees, although that will soon change. The department has sent a list of all its probationary employees to the Trump administration, and many, if not most, of those employees will likely be sacked like those at other government agencies.

It remains to be seen how the coming budget cuts will affect national defense and national security. The Trump administration has already been forced to try and undo cuts at the Department of Energy after mistakenly firing critical employees who deal with nuclear weapons. The Department of Agriculture has also scrambled to rehire bird flu experts it says were “accidentally” fired. Will the Trump administration jump the gun again in the defense department?

Missouri Republicans are advancing an effort that would require pregnant people to register in a statewide database.

House Bill 807, called the “Save MO Babies Act,” is intended to target people “at risk for seeking abortion services” and to “reduce the number of preventable abortions.” If passed, the registry would start on July 1, 2026, and would be managed by the Maternal and Child Services division of the state’s Department of Social Services, according to the bill text. But the bill does not specify the scope and scale of such a registry, or exactly how “at risk” individuals would be identified.

Even the bill’s author, adoption attorney Gerard Harms, admitted that the bill was “very inartfully drafted” while making his case before the state House Children and Families Committee on Tuesday, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

The effort was roundly condemned by both government-wary Republicans and pro-abortion Democrats.

“ARE YOU SERIOUS!?” House Democrats wrote in a post on Facebook, according to the paper.  

“We have to imagine even conservative Missourians would be horrified by this idea,” the Democrats said.

In November, Missouri voters narrowly approved a ballot measure that enshrined abortion access in their state constitution. 

The measure, called the Right to Reproductive Freedom Initiative, solidified that the government has no role in a person’s “fundamental right to reproductive freedom,” including but not limited to prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, birth control, abortion care, miscarriage care, and respectful birthing conditions. It also undid the Show-Me State’s total abortion ban, which took effect one hour after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

Still, that hasn’t stopped state lawmakers from fighting for stronger abortion restrictions. Last month, Missouri Representative Eric Burlison introduced the “Life at Conception Act” at the federal level, aiming to classify a fetus as a person under the 14th Amendment. Meanwhile, state Representative Brian Seitz introduced a bill—Joint Resolution 39—that would prevent abortion access after a fetal heartbeat is detected, allowing only narrow exceptions for medical emergencies. 

Vice President JD Vance issued a stark warning to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Wednesday, cautioning the war-battered leader against “badmouthing” Donald Trump even as the U.S. pushes forward with handing over Ukrainian land to Russia in lopsided peace talks.

“The idea that Zelenskiy is going to change the president’s mind by badmouthing him in public media,” Vance told the Daily Mail, “Everyone who knows the president will tell you that is an atrocious way to deal with this administration.”

Russian forces crossed the Ukrainian border on February 24, 2022, which Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to justify by falsely claiming that he needed to protect civilians in eastern Ukraine.

The U.S. and Russia opened discussions Tuesday aimed at ending the three-year war in a meeting that excluded Ukrainian leadership. Hours after the meeting ended, Trump suggested that Kyiv had started the conflict—a Russian talking point that drew Zelenskiy’s ire.

“I would like to see more truth from the Trump team,” Zelenskiy told reporters in a sandbagged presidential palace Wednesday, adding that the MAGA leader lives in a “disinformation space.”

But Trump did not respond well to Zelenskiy’s words. In a lengthy and venomous post on Truth Social Wednesday, the U.S. president wrongly accused the democratically-elected Ukrainian leader of being a “dictator.”

“Zelenskiy admits that half of the money we sent him is ‘MISSING,’” Trump wrote, incorrectly asserting that the U.S. had provided $350 billion to Ukraine. In actuality, the U.S. has allocated $119 billion in Ukraine aid, according to the Kiel Institute, which has been tracking international financial assistance for Ukraine.

“He refuses to have Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden ‘like a fiddle,’” Trump continued.

“A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskiy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left. In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the War with Russia, something all admit only ‘TRUMP,’ and the Trump Administration, can do,” he added.

Not even other members of Republican leadership could give a full-throttled defense of Trump deriding Zelenskiy as a dictator.

“The president speaks for himself,” Senate Majority leader John Thune said Wednesday afternoon.

Vance met with Zelenskiy on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference last week as Russia navigated through Trump to organize a deal that defense experts have warned will overwhelmingly benefit Russian interests.

Earlier that week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the NATO conference in Munich that the administration’s peace talks with Russia had taken several chips “off the table,” including Ukraine’s possible NATO membership (something the military alliance had promised in 2008), the possibility of a U.S. presence in Ukraine to enforce postwar security guarantees, and the end of NATO missions to Ukraine. He also added that it would be “unrealistic” for Ukraine to return to its pre-war borders, effectively ceding land to Moscow.

Donald Trump called himself “THE KING” on Wednesday, and the rest of the White House was overjoyed to see the president was dropping the pretense of democracy. 

Trump announced in a post on Truth Social that his administration would challenge New York City’s recent policy installing congestion pricing, with an added rhetorical twist. 

“CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!” Trump wrote.

While not exactly surprising given Trump’s previous references to himself as the savior of the country, and his penchant for trolling, the president dubbing himself a “king” should theoretically rub everyone the wrong way—but not the fascists who work for him.  

Alas, the right-wing shills that run Trump’s communications basked in the wash of his declaration of unchecked power. 

Taylor Budowich, the White House deputy chief of staff posted an AI-generated picture of Trump wearing a jeweled crown and fur-trimmed cape on X. 

Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt also boosted the president’s disturbing missive on social media. 

It’s worth noting that Republicans weren’t always like this. Flashback to 2014, and Senator Rand Paul was tossing barbs at former President Barack Obama for being a “president who thinks he’s a king.”

Republicans’ sycophantic support demonstrates that Trump’s autocratic (or monarchic) ranting isn’t merely him going rogue; it’s a distinct rhetorical feature of his entire administration, which has already set to work uprooting the checks and balances that underpin American democracy, and replacing it with something wholly different. 

On Tuesday night, Elon Musk claimed that “if the will of the president is not implemented, and the president is representative of the people, that means the will of the people is not being implemented. And that means we don’t live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy.” 

It’s not a bureaucracy Americans need fear, but a monarchy.