New York: Elon Musk’s appointment as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been legally challenged.
Fourteen US states, including two with governors from Donald Trump’s Republican Party, have filed a federal lawsuit against the US President and Musk, challenging the billionaire’s appointment as head of the newly-constituted DOGE.
The states have accused Musk of being a ‘designated agent of chaos’ and argued that his ‘sweeping authority’ as DOGE head is in violation of the Constitution of the United States, ABC News reported.
“Musk’s seemingly limitless and unchecked power to strip the government of its workforce and eliminate entire departments with the stroke of a pen, or a click of a mouse, would have been shocking to those who won this country’s independence,” stated the complaint, filed on Thursday in a federal court in Washington DC.
“There is no greater threat to democracy than the accumulation of state power in the hands of a single, unelected individual. The Appointments Clause of the Constitution, therefore, calls for someone with such significant and expansive authority as Musk to be formally nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate,” the lawsuit said.
Led by New Mexico, the other states which are part of the lawsuit are — Arizona, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington. Of these, Nevada and Vermont have Republican governors.
Though Trump and Musk have insisted that DOGE is ‘simply rooting out vast government waste and potentially even criminal corruption’ within the agencies, the suit of the 14 states contends that the Constitution prevents the US President from ‘overriding existing laws concerning the structure of the Executive Branch and federal spending,’ and, therefore, the commander-in-chief is forbidden from ‘creating’ or ‘extinguishing’ federal agencies.
Describing Musk as ‘far more than an adviser to the White House,’ the lawsuit has claimed that DOGE has ‘inserted itself into at least 17 agencies’, and called for Musk’s ‘officer-level governmental actions’ to date to be declared ‘unlawful.’
Another lawsuit was earlier filed against Musk, in a Maryland federal court, challenging his position as DOGE head.
