As Elon Musk leaves his formal US government position, dozens of legal challenges over the billionaire’s powerful role in the Trump administration and the work of the Department of Government Efficiency will press ahead.
“The case is absolutely relevant,” said Anjana Samant, a senior lawyer in the New Mexico Department of Justice, which is leading a group of states in one of the challenges.
The Democratic state attorneys want a judge to invalidate actions they contend Musk unlawfully took to upend federal government operations and to declare that the DOGE project has gone far beyond what US law allows.
The larger collection of lawsuits challenging Musk and DOGE activities to date are certain to continue. They include fights over DOGE access to Americans’ personal information, whether the office is subject to public records laws and its role in canceling federal grants and contracts, dismantling agencies and firing workers.
Hours after Musk and Trump appeared together in the White House, a federal appeals court handed the administration another DOGE-related loss. In a 2-1 order, an appellate panel left in place a lower court order that blocks the administration from carrying out mass layoffs across the US government.
White House spokesperson Harrison Fields declined to comment on the administration’s next steps in the various court cases, but said government lawyers “will continue to fight every single frivolous lawsuit that is brought our way.”
A Justice Department spokesperson and Musk didn’t respond to requests for comment. The Justice Department has represented Musk and DOGE in court and would be expected to continue defending against allegations related to government work.
Musk recently had criticized Trump’s tax cut proposal but he and Trump praised each other during Friday’s press event in the Oval Office. He also slammed the wave of court rulings against the administration, saying that “immense judicial overreach” is “undermining the people’s faith in the legal system.”
Some legal experts say Musk’s formal exit could give the Justice Department grounds to argue for dismissal.
Jeff Powell, a constitutional law professor at Duke University School of Law, said claims over the legality of Musk’s position under the Constitution’s Appointments Clause would no longer be valid once he’s left government service. Powell called the claims “meritless” to the extent the challengers want to hold Musk or DOGE responsible for communicating Trump’s “will” to Senate-confirmed officials who carried out the actions.
“Musk was a minion,” Powell said. “The lawsuits may have other things, they may challenge the substantive validity of the reduction of force or cancellation of contracts, but that had nothing to do with Musk.”
“You do have to take account of his prior statements that he’s gonna keep a hand in — to my mind, that’s an unconstitutional hand,” Eisen said.
Musk joined the administration as a “special government employee,” a temporary status set to expire this month. Legal challenges citing the Appointments Clause allege that Musk was functioning as a “principal officer” similar to Senate-confirmed agency heads who only answer to the president. Each of the lawsuits include other claims and defendants.
“Regardless of the title that he’s given by the government or what they say his role is, the real question for the Appointments Clause is, what actual power does he have,” Ferguson said.
Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, a group involved in a number of lawsuits against the administration, said in a statement that they would continue to challenge the legality of what Musk accomplished.
“While he may have left Washington, the havoc he has created has not,” she said.
