(C) Center for Economic & Policy Research
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Blame the Supreme Court for Elon Musk’s Corrupt Control of the Trump Administration [1]

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Date: 2025-03 

Blatant corruption in the United States is legal – even though the Supreme Court pretends it is not, for easily disproved reasons. Elon Musk’s purchase of power in the Trump Administration through spending hundreds of millions of dollars is the latest and most egregious example. Yet the Court’s dangerous and absurd reasoning has rendered Congress and state legislatures unable to fix this broken system without a constitutional amendment.

During the 2024 campaign, the world’s richest man Elon Musk spent $277 million to elect Donald Trump along with other Republican candidates. Consequently following his victory, President Trump has given considerable power over the entire federal government to Musk.

Musk leads the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). While DOGE is an advisory body rather than an official department, it has employees within each actual federal department. Musk has directed an operation to dramatically cut government operations through shifting priorities, ending contracts, and attempting to mass fire federal employees. President Trump has been severely deferential to Musk, suggesting in a meeting that if any of his Senate-confirmed cabinet members had a problem with Musk, they should leave.

Coincidentally, DOGE has focused on hampering the operations of agencies tasked with policing and overseeing companies run by Elon Musk. DOGE acted to cut the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) workforce by 10 percent when the agency regulates the safety of self-driving cars like those developed by Tesla, and has opened an investigation into millions of the company’s cars. Musk also is pushing cuts at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) which sued Musk in January for allegedly cheating Twitter investors out of $150 million. The agency also got Musk and Tesla to agree to a settlement due to allegations of securities fraud in 2018.

Along with earning $38 billion in government contracts and subsidies historically, Musk’s business empire still maintains significant ties to the federal government. Tesla and SpaceX received $3.67 billion from federal contracts in 2024 alone. In 2025, after pushing cuts to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Musk won a contract with the same agency to use SpaceX’s Starlink internet system, which threatens a 15-year and $2.4 billion contract the FAA signed with competing company Verizon in 2023.

The corruption works both ways. When widespread public anger towards Musk led to a consumer boycott and significant decline in the value of Tesla stock, President Trump said that the boycott was illegal and conducted a de facto commercial for Tesla in front of the White House. More specifically, Trump purchased a Tesla with Musk present on camera while reading from a notecard with sales information about Tesla products.

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[1] Url: https://cepr.net/publications/corrupt-control-of-the-trump-administration/

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