Several Senate leaders wrote to the Department of Justice (DOJ), Office of Government Ethics (OGE), and inspector generals at the Department of the Treasury, IRS and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to investigate whether Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employees broke the law while working at various agencies.
The letter was endorsed by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Jack Reed (D-R.I.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), ranking members of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee.
The senators referred to media reports that “DOGE employees at the Treasury, IRS and the CFPB have been engaged in the dismantling of these agencies while holding hundreds of thousands of dollars of stock in private companies benefitting from these individuals’ efforts to eliminate key programs, staff, and policies. This poses a clear conflict of interest and potential criminal violation of federal ethics law.”
Specifically, they pointed to a ProPublica story that said Gavin Kliger, a DOGE aide at the CFPB, was warned by bureau ethics attorneys that he held stock in companies that are on the CFPB’s “prohibited holdings” list since they are “subject to examination by the bureau,” including $715,000 of investments in Apple Inc., Tesla Inc., Alphabet Inc., and two cryptocurrencies. He was advised “not to participate in any actions that could benefit him personally.”
“Three days later, Mr. Kliger ‘participated in mass layoffs at the agency anyway, including the firings of the ethics lawyers that warned him’ of his conflicts,” the senators wrote, quoting the story. “The conflicts are obvious: ‘a defanged and downsized consumer watchdog is unlikely to aggressively regulate those and other companies, freeing them of compliance costs and the risk associated with examinations and enforcement actions. That in turn could boost their stock prices and benefit … Kliger.’”
The senators also referred to media reports that Tom Krause, who headed the Treasury’s DOGE team, has financial holdings worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in companies that have business before or provide services to the Treasury, including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, PNC, U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley and Santander.
The media reports indicate a “pervasive problem with Elon Musk and DOGE employees trampling ethics rules and laws to benefit their own pockets at the expense of the American public,” the senators continued.
“These DOGE employees’ conflicts of interest and role in the mass firings at CFPB, Treasury, and IRS undermine the integrity of their decision-making and the actions taken by the agencies where they work,” they wrote.
The senators called on the DOJ, OGE, and inspectors general of the Treasury, Office for Tax Administration, and the Federal Reserve to investigate the legality of the conflicts and whether DOGE employees violated federal ethics laws.
“Neither Mr. Musk nor those working on his behalf with DOGE are above the law, and if they have failed to follow it, the DOJ and other relevant government officials should hold them accountable,” they concluded.