U.S. Democratic Representative Mark Pocan plans to introduce a bill designed to ban “special government employees” like Elon Musk from having federal contracts so they can’t steer spending towards their own self-interest.
The proposed bill is called the ELON MUSK Act, which stands for Eliminate Looting of Our Nation by Mitigating Unethical State Kleptocracy.
“No government employee, ‘special’ or not, should have any financial interest in who the government does business with,” Pocan, the House Democrat from Wisconsin, said in a statement. “Elon Musk is the poster child for this type of abuse. After more than $20 billion in federal contracts, there’s no way Musk can be objective in what he’s doing. Protecting the taxpayers has to be our number one priority.”
Musk’s SpaceX holds federal contracts with NASA and the Department of Defense.
The federal government has in place ethics rules for how special government employees should behave. Musk appears poised to ignore some of those. For example, the governing statute on financial conflicts of interests prohibits special employees from “participating in matters that affect [their] financial interests.”
When President Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, he put Musk in charge of a controversial new advisory group called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) which has far-reaching power across federal agencies, many of which regulate industries in which Musk has a stake.
The ethics rules also advise that such employees should not generally engage in outside activities, including employment, that conflict with official duties. In addition to being the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI, Musk also owns X (formerly Twitter), Neuralink, and The Boring Company.
Musk’s infiltration of federal agencies has already sparked public protests and political opposition as he has demanded unfettered access to federal government agency computer systems, including the Treasury Department’s payments system which handles Social Security and Medicare.
House and Senate Democrats also introduced a bill Tuesday to block “unlawful access” to the Treasury payments system, and two federal employee unions have filed suit to block DOGE access to the system.
