Sen. Susan Collins told reporters on Monday she is “very concerned” about Elon Musk and his assistants demanding personal information from federal employees.
“I’m not sure where the authority of that would come from,” the Republican senator from Maine reportedly said.
President Donald Trump named Musk, the world’s richest man, a special government employee, which subjects him to less stringent rules on ethics and financial disclosures than other workers. He has an office in the White House and oversees a team of people at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
The Associated Press described the arrangement as creating “an alternative power structure inside the federal government for the purpose of cutting spending and pushing out employees” without congressional approval, “inviting a constitutional clash over the limits of presidential authority.”
Musk’s DOGE team has been dispersed throughout federal agencies to gather information and deliver edicts. Some of them were seen on Monday at the Department of Education, which Trump has vowed to abolish.
Collins’ comment on Monday came after a scene at the Washington headquarters for the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, where yellow police tape blocked access to the lobby and hundreds of employees were locked out of computer systems. Musk said Trump had agreed to let him shutter the agency.
The Associated Press contributed reporting.
