What will it take to stop Elon Musk and DOGE?

[ResidentialBusiness]

Over the first 16 days of the Trump administration, Elon Musk and a small team at the “Department of Government Efficiency” has systematically started to dismantle the agencies that keep the country running.

DOGE workers have taken multiple actions that experts say are illegal, from accessing private taxpayer data to pushing workers out of their jobs. Musk (and Trump’s) power grab has arguably created a constitutional crisis—and seems likely to only get worse.

“This is totally outside the bounds of the way the federal government should operate, and is required by law to operate,” says says John Davisson, director of litigation and senior counsel at the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center. So far, no one has stopped Musk. But it’s possible that lawsuits that are now underway could succeed.

Musk is behind a push to try to get 2 million federal workers to quit their jobs—including air traffic controllers, in an email that went out the day after a plane crash in D.C. killed 67 people. (This happened despite the fact that 90% of airports currently have a shortage of workers.) Only after a second plane crashed in Philadelphia, a day later, were air traffic controllers exempted from the general effort to try to get federal employees to take buyouts.

An email sent by DOGE officials claimed that workers who took buyouts would get paid through September if they agreed to quit this month. As of Tuesday, at least 20,000 workers had agreed to leave—but the government doesn’t have the funding to pay them, and DOGE doesn’t legally have the authority to make the buyout offer in the first place. Meanwhile, some roles that cover vital day-to-day work will go unfilled. Some agencies, like the Justice Department and FBI, have seen firings that are also likely illegal.

Musk’s team also reportedly accessed classified information at USAID, the international aid agency, without the proper clearance; the security officers who tried to stop them were put on leave. Musk later said that he “spent the weekend putting USAID into the wood chipper,” and that the humanitarian agency, which has saved millions of lives, was a “criminal organization” and it was “time for it to die.” On Friday, USAID announced that its 10,000 employees will be put on administrative leave.

DOGE also reportedly accessed private Treasury payment systems that contain Americans’ personal data, including tax information and social security numbers, despite potential conflicts of interest with his own businesses and the risk that the data could fall into the wrong hands. Another career official was placed on leave for trying to prevent Musk’s team—including some college-age programmers with no government experience—from seeing the data.

“That band of personnel is barreling in to agencies across the government, upending security and privacy and confidentiality protections and established procedures, to gain access to databases that in many cases contain vast amounts of sensitive personal information from the general public and from federal employees,” says Davisson. “And they are doing this to remake the federal government in their preferred manner, regardless of what Congress has ordained.”

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks to a crowd gathered in front of the U.S. Treasury Department in protest of Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency on February 4, 2025. [Photo: Anna Rose Layden/Getty Images]

‘The approach seems to be to move fast and break things, including the law’

Much of DOGE’s work is illegal, experts say. “Basically, the approach seems to be to move fast and break things, including the law,” says Laura Dickinson, a law professor at the George Washington University Law School who focuses on national security and human rights. “A lot of what his team is doing appears to be illegal, and they’re putting the burden of challenging this on people that are harmed.”

DOGE is potentially breaking multiple laws. Its access to taxpayer information, for example, “is very likely illegal under the Privacy Act and under aspects of the Internal Revenue Code, which guarantee confidentiality of information,” Dickinson says. “There’s also a case to be made that it could violate the Federal Information Security Modernization Act, which has some cybersecurity protection. The issue here is just that that personal data is very closely regulated—who can have access to it, for privacy reasons, but also for security reasons. It’s really quite dangerous to kind of change the process for handling that data. There could be greater exposure to hackers and others.”

In the case of USAID, because it was established by Congress, Musk and Trump don’t get to choose whether or not it survives. “There’s no current authority for this president, or any president, to abolish USAID,” says David Super, a law professor at Georgetown University with expertise in administrative and constitutional law. “So he’s flatly disregarding a binding statute of Congress.” The administration has folded USAID into the State Department, something that it also doesn’t have the authority to do.

Now Musk’s team is also targeting the Department of Education, which Trump reportedly wants to shut down via executive order. The DOGE team also showed up at the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on Tuesday, reportedly accessing computer systems with more confidential information. Project 2025 called for the agency to be “broken up and downsized.” Like USAID, the president doesn’t have the legal authority to close either department.

DOGE also doesn’t have the authority to tell employees to quit. Federal law does allow for buyouts, but only if an agency decides that it wants to staff to leave early and submits a plan to the Office of Personnel Management and gets the plan approved. DOGE has “created something entirely different, without any legal authority, in which they are effectively promising federal employees that they will be paid for doing no work between now and the end of September,” Super says. “Making such a promise is illegal, and they also have no authority to keep the promise even if they wanted to.” (Unions representing federal workers have warned that the buyout offers are scams, and that workers are unlikely to actually get paid.)

Lawsuits are underway

Because the work is illegal, lawsuits are part of the answer. Federal employee unions sued the Trump administration on Tuesday for allowing DOGE access to sensitive data. The largest union also sued over the buyout offers, saying that the policy is “pretext for removing and replacing government workers on an ideological basis.” Public Citizen, an advocacy group, is suing over DOGE’s violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, a law that requires public meetings and more transparency over what the government does. More lawsuits will come. USAID workers could sue, and so could recipients of funding from USAID, including contractors who work for the agency.

Anyone who’s affected, including citizens, could potentially sue. “For example, if there is someone who is signed up to get extension courses from the Agriculture Department and those courses are cut off because of the illegal change in the job responsibilities of the people who were supposed to teach that course, people could absolutely sue,” says Super.

It’s possible that some court cases could move quickly, in the same way that a court almost immediately blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to freeze all federal funding.

“That doesn’t mean that there won’t be serious harm,” Super says. “We’ve heard of AIDS treatment programs overseas and other things that desperately need continuity that have been shut down. All the people whose lives have been upended—people who are wondering how they’re going to make their mortgage, having taken jobs with the federal government often for less than the private sector would offer, expecting the job security that federal law provides them—now seeing their lives upset.”

Still, he says “lawsuits can stop these things quite quickly.” Though this also requires the Trump administration obeying the rulings of the court.

Congress also needs to act, says Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno, CEO of RepresentUS, a nonprofit that fights corruption. “It’s urgent that Congress do its job,” she says. “They are responsible for exercising oversight over the executive branch.”

Although several Congresspeople have spoken up—Senator Brian Schatz, for example, vowed to put a blanket hold on nominees for the State Department to protest what’s happening to USAID—the majority still haven’t. “Nobody should be silent in the face of this,” Sanchez-Moreno says. “And frankly, this should not be a partisan issue. This is about very traditional, historically conservative values of rule of law and preventing corruption and abuse of authority and respecting the constitution.” In her past work in international human rights, she says she saw firsthand how important it was to act.

“These sorts of issues are easier to address earlier than later—I say that having worked on autocracy and corruption in many parts of the world,” she says. “Once you have attacks on the rule of law, if it’s not protected in a pretty strong way, it can be harder to recover it.”

Everything DOGE has done follows the playbook that Musk has taken at his own companies, where he’s skirted labor laws and ignored safety regulations. In some cases, he’s gotten away with it. The stakes are obviously higher now.

“This is a fast-rolling catastrophe,” says Davisson. “It is happening right now and demands an immediate response. I think all of our business in Congress should be put to the side and stalled wherever possible until this gross criminality and illegality is corrected and the DOGE is forced out of these systems.”

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