West Virginia’s senior senator described relative comfort with the activities of Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who is moving fast and breaking things in the federal government.
“I think we’ll just have to see where this all goes. But for right now, I’m pretty comfortable with the direction that we see,” Senator Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., said in a Thursday news briefing in response to a MetroNews question.
“I think people wanted things to be disrupted and looked at in a different way, and I think that’s what Elon Musk brings and his Department of Government Efficiency.”
Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is not just serving as an advisory panel to recommend cost cutting.
Musk and his DOGE team are taking a more active, direct approach, gaining access to sensitive federal databases and dismantling agencies like US AID, a source of humanitarian assistance meant to assert American influence in the world.
Musk and his team also have moved to push out hundreds of thousands of civil servants.
The tech giant has said such moves are necessary to overhaul what he describes as an inefficient federal bureaucracy and to stop payments that he says are bankrupting the country and driving inflation.
The AFL-CIO, the national labor organization, has responded by launching a “Department of People Who Work for a Living.”
None of this is happening with explicit congressional approval, raising constitutional questions over the limits of presidential authority. The Constitution’s Article 1 gives Congress the power of the purse.
Officials in federal agencies and departments have raised alarms about whether Musk’s unilateral actions break the law.
Some of Capito’s Republican colleagues in the Senate have become vocal in their concern about Musk’s activities.
“Efficiency in government should be a goal for every administration, agency, and federal employee. But how we achieve it also matters,” stated Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska.
“By circumventing proper channels and procedures, and creating the potential to compromise the sensitive data of Americans, we create a tremendous amount of unnecessary anxiety. That is wrong. Good governance is based on trust, not fear.”
The chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Susan Collins, suggested Musk has overreached.
“There’s no doubt that the president appears to have empowered Elon Musk far beyond what I think is appropriate,” said Collins, a Republican from Maine. “I think a lot of it is going to end up in court.”
Collins also expressed alarm that the White House is undermining Congressional spending power.
“I am concerned if the Trump administration is clawing back money that has been specifically appropriated for a particular purpose,” she said.
Capito, who is also a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, did express some concern – particularly regarding the privacy of individuals who engage with government agencies as Musk’s team gains entry to information technology.
“I think we have to protect people’s privacy. Absolutely, they are going into systems, I think, to see if to try to weed out waste, fraud and abuse. And they’ve already found some of this very, very explicitly,” she said in the Thursday briefing with West Virginia reporters.
“And so I think that the American people want to have our government more accountable to what they’re spending, and if it takes an outsider to come in under the auspices of the President, which is what he’s doing — the president says ‘He’s not doing anything I’m not saying he can do or should do’ — so I think we’ll just have to see where this all goes.”