Hoping for DOGE Transparency, The Intercept Publishes Musk’s Government Email

An independent news organization has obtained and published Elon Musk’s government email to encourage others to file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in order to make his work as head of the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) more transparent.

The Intercept, an investigative news website, announced that it had uncovered Musk’s email address on Thursday. It listed Musk’s government email as “[email protected].”

“The email address reflects his attachment to the White House Office, the Executive Office of the President, and, apparently, Musk’s full initials plus his birth year, 1971,” The Intercept article written by media law attorney and reporter Shawn Musgrave stated.

The publication justified the printing of Musk’s email info by noting that it could lead to more transparency at the legally dubious “department” he leads, including through additional FOIA requests by other news outlets. The Intercept stated that it has filed more than a dozen FOIA requests based on the newly unearthed email address alone.

Wrote Musgrave:

FOIA works best when requests are as specific as possible. The U.S. government sometimes plays games with journalists, researchers, and other watchdogs, rejecting asks it considers too vague — such as requests for correspondence that fail to include an official’s government email address.

The report from The Intercept recognizes that, by placing Musk in the White House, the Trump administration “has taken measures to shield Musk and DOGE from public accountability and transparency, including by making the case that DOGE itself is not subject to FOIA at all.” But the report also indicates that many groups advocating for more transparency in government believe those standards are worth challenging, especially given how DOGE’s actions have impacted myriad departments and agencies across the federal government.

“The government has given shifting and conflicting answers on Mr. Musk’s role, what DOGE is doing, and under what legal authority DOGE is operating,” Donald Sherman, chief counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told The Intercept.

“At every step, despite promising maximal transparency, [the administration is] taking every step they possibly can to shield DOGE’s operations from the public and from Congress,” Sherman added.

DOGE has indeed faced widespread backlash for its lack of transparency, as well as for its outlandish claims that it has supposedly saved billions of taxpayer dollars through the cuts it’s made to federal agencies — claims that have frequently turned out to be false or misleading and have oftentimes been erased from the DOGE website after reporting showcased the errors. A late February analysis of government contracts ended by DOGE, for example, found that nearly 4 out of every 10 of them didn’t net any real savings at all.

A FOIA request was filed against the Musk-managed department late last month by the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit group that aims to protect endangered species — alongside the request, the group also filed a lawsuit seeking to expedite and enforce it. Although DOGE faces a plethora of lawsuits, this appears to be the first one to request that it be more transparent with its work, according to a report from NBC News.

“FOIA was designed to ensure that monumental and consequential undertakings such as this could not take place without transparency,” the filing by the organization states. “Yet that is what is occurring as Defendants are engaging in wholesale disregard for FOIA’s pro-disclosure mandate.”

Americans overall are worried about DOGE’s work, including how it could directly benefit Musk himself, as the department has torn through several agencies that have previously regulated his businesses or were likely to do so in the future. Nearly 6 in 10 Americans (57 percent) have expressed those concerns, according to an Economist/YouGov survey published last month.