Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have been tearing their way through Washington’s federal agencies, and House Democrats are worried that he may turn his attention to the Department of Energy next.
In a letter to recently confirmed Energy Secretary Chris Wright this week, three members of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology expressed “great alarm” over DOGE’s successful efforts to “gain access to highly sensitive systems” across agencies including Treasury Department, the Office of Personnel Management, and the Education Department.
The risk to the Department of Energy, the letter said, is “heightened due to the enormous conflicts-of-interest that the leader of DOGE, Elon Musk, has with DOE.”
The White House has said that Musk will police his own conflicts of interest between Musk’s cost-cutting efforts and his own financial interests; he will “excuse himself from those contracts” that intersect with one of his six companies, according to press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Secretary Wright said in an interview with CNBC last week that the three DOGE representatives currently posted in the Department of Energy “don’t have anybody’s proprietary information.”
Of course, a major part of DOE’s work (and the majority of its budget) is focused on maintaining the country’s nuclear stockpile. The representatives did not touch on nuclear in their letter, given its focus on Musk, but there have been separate concerns about whether DOGE employees will have access to the highly sensitive data from that sector. Wright addressed those rumors in the CNBC interview, saying the engineers won’t be “seeing our nuclear secrets.”
As Wright put it: “nothing to be worried about here.”
However, sources within the agency have confirmed that Wright granted access to DOE’s IT and cybersecurity office to Luke Farritor — a 23-year-old DOGE engineer who previously interned at SpaceX.
In their letter to Wright on Monday, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Deborah Ross (D-Pa.), and Emilia Sykes (D-Ohio) said the most immediate concern for DOE is ensuring that DOGE isn’t granted access to “sensitive and proprietary information” — about technologies and business models, for example — in order to serve Musk’s personal interests.
Via the Solar Energy Technologies Office and the Loan Programs Office, DOE is in possession of “highly sensitive proprietary data from Tesla’s direct competitors in the electric vehicle sector,” the letter said. “The possibility that such proprietary data could be obtained by the CEO of Tesla…risks compromising the department’s ability to collaborate with the private sector on a broad range of critical issues in the future.”
That kind of breach would be particularly “galling — and hypocritical” given that it was the LPO that helped to jumpstart Tesla’s meteoric growth, via a $465 million loan from the Obama administration. The fate of LPO’s current pipeline of loans remains a major question mark as the second Trump administration approaches the one month mark. Conditional commitments are particularly vulnerable, but there’s also concern about disbursements of finalized loans, which include billions of dollars for EV makers like Rivian as well as for battery manufacturing.
The letter also requests responses to four questions by February 18, including whether any DOGE employees have attempted to access proprietary information inside DOE, and whether Wright intends to block access requests that violate “any and all DOE policies and procedures, federal laws and regulations, and official protocols.”
