WASHINGTON — With 50 days to go until billionaire Elon Musk’s tenure as a special government employee is legally required to end, House Democrats launched an initiative to remind the public.
“The clock is ticking,” Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, said at a "Fire Elon Musk" event Thursday, where he and other Democratic House members called for Musk’s departure.
Anticipating he might not step down, they said the billionaire presidential adviser has disobeyed conflict of interest rules and benefited from lucrative federal contracts.
“We are putting Trump and Musk on notice,” Casar said. “If you break the law and try to stay in power, we will support every legal, political, public pressure tactic available to us to enforce the law.”
A special government employee is “an officer or employee … who is appointed to perform temporary duties, with or without compensation, for a period not to exceed 130 days during any period of 365 consecutive days,” according to the Federal Labor Relations Authority.
Created by Congress in 1962 so the federal government could leverage the knowledge of outside experts in the private sector, special government employees are not allowed to use the position for private gain. During a House hearing on government efficiency in February, Casar estimated Musk was receiving $8 million daily from federal contracts with his company SpaceX.
“We would be here for hours if I tried to recount every single one of Musk’s illegal actions or abuses or attacks on working Americans,” Casar said at an event attended by six other House members, including Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif.; Rep. Gabe Amo, D-R.I.; and Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M.
In the 80 days Musk has served as a special government employee, he has become a controversial figure as an adviser to Trump and head of the U.S. DOGE Service tasked with rooting out fraud, waste and abuse in federal government. While many of his actions have been challenged in court, Musk has overseen staff reductions at several federal agencies, including the Department of Education, Health and Human Services and the Internal Revenue Service and gained access to federal databases containing sensitive personal information.
“He has been mining our data,” Stansbury said at Thursday’s press conference.
Stansbury, who serves in a leadership role on the DOGE Subcommittee of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, expressed concern over Musk’s announced merger of his social media company, X, and his private artificial intelligence company, xAI.
“He has spent days and days and weeks and weeks mining vital data of the American people. We’re talking IRS data, Treasury data, Social Security data,” she said. “What is he doing with this data? We don’t know because neither he nor any other member of DOGE have appeared before a public body to answer any questions under oath.”
She said Musk has been self-dealing since he began his work as a special government employee, seeking to install his Starlink Internet service at the Federal Aviation Administration — a report SpaceX has denied — and to ensure SpaceX wins a multibillion-dollar contract with the Department of Defense.
A request for comment from Musk’s SpaceX was not immediately answered.
“If we succeed in getting Musk out in the next 50 days, it’ll be the greatest victory by Democrats so far in the Trump administration” Casar said.