Elon Musk is beginning the process of stepping down from his role as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO posted on X on Wednesday night that his time as a special government employee is coming to an end and thanked President Donald Trump for the opportunity to cut down on wasteful spending.

“The ⁦‪@DOGE‬⁩ mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government,” Musk wrote in his post. The White House confirmed to FOX that Musk’s post is accurate and offboarding will begin Wednesday night.

Musk has been the public face of DOGE since Trump signed an executive order establishing the office on Jan. 20. DOGE has since ripped through federal government agencies in a quest to identify and end government overspending, corruption and fraud.

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He was officially hired as a “special government employee,” which is a role Congress created in 1962 that allows the executive or legislative branch to hire temporary employees for specific short-term initiatives.

Special government employees are permitted to work for the federal government for “no more than 130 days in a 365-day period,” according to data from the Office of Government Ethics. Musk’s 130-day timeframe, beginning on Inauguration Day, was set to run dry on May 30.

DOGE is a temporary cross-departmental organization that was established to slim down and streamline the federal government. The group itself will be dissolved on July 4, 2026, according to Trump’s executive order.

Musk and Trump have both previously previewed that Musk’s role was temporary and would end in the spring.

“You, technically, are a special government employee and you’re supposed to be 130 days,” Fox News’ Bret Baier asked Musk during an exclusive interview with Musk and DOGE team members in April. “Are you going to continue past that or do you think that’s what you’re going to do?” 

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Elon Musk was hired as a special government employee, which only permits 130 days of employment, when he was chosen to lead DOGE. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

“I think we will have accomplished most of the work required to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars within that timeframe,” Musk responded. 

Trump hinted at Musk’s departure in comments to reporters on March 31 when he was asked if he wants Musk to remain in a government role for longer than the predetermined 130 days.

“I think he’s amazing. But I also think he’s got a big company to run,” Trump said in March. “And so at some point he’s going to be going back.”

“I’d keep him as long as I can keep him,” Trump said. “He’s a very talented guy. You know, I love very smart people. He’s very smart. And he’s done a good job,” the president added. “DOGE is, we’ve found numbers that nobody can even believe.”

More recently, Musk said during a Tesla earnings call on April 22 that he will take a step back from his work as DOGE’s leader. 

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“I think starting probably in next month, May, my time allocation to DOGE will drop significantly,” Musk said during Tesla’s earnings conference call. “I’ll have to continue doing it for, I think, the remainder of the president’s term just to make sure the waste and fraud that we stopped does not come roaring back, which it will do if it has the chance. So I think I’ll continue to spend, you know, a day or two per week on government matters for as long as the president would like me to do so and as long as it is useful.”

Elon Musk jumps on state as he joins former president Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. (JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)

“But starting next month,” he added, “I’ll be allocating far more of my time to Tesla now that the major work of establishing the Department of Government Efficiency is done.”

Amid Musk’s work with DOGE, Democrats and activists have staged protests against the tech billionaire and his companies, including working to tank Tesla stocks. 

Musk has been the public face of DOGE for months, but is not an employee of the United States DOGE Service and does not report to the acting DOGE chief, according to a court filing in March that shed additional light on the internal workings of the office.

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“Elon Musk does not work at USDS. I do not report to him, and he does not report to me. To my knowledge, he is a Senior Advisor to the White House,” Amy Gleason, the acting administrator of DOGE, wrote in a declaration included in a court filing.

President Trump has spoken highly of Elon Musk’s work with DOGE since he was chosen to lead the new agency on Jan. 20. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Gleason previously worked for the United States Digital Service, which was founded in 2014 by former President Barack Obama as a technology office within the Executive Office of the President. Trump signed an executive order in January that renamed the office to the United States DOGE Service, establishing DOGE. 

Though Musk has been the public face of DOGE, he “has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself” and is working as a senior advisor to the president, a White House official said in a separate court filing back in February.

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Musk emerged as an ardent supporter of Trump at the height of the election cycle over the summer, officially endorsing Trump after the first assassination attempt against him in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024.

President Trump survived an assassination attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania in July. (Rebecca Droke/AFP via Getty Images)

“I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery,” Musk posted to X shortly after the attempt, accompanied by footage of Trump raising a fist and shouting “Fight, fight, fight!” after he was left bloodied by the assassination attempt. 

Musk hosted Trump on X for an expansive interview while on the campaign trail 

Across Musk’s tenure as a special government employee, Trump has praised the tech billionaire for his efforts to streamline the government and cut it of overspending, including during his first address to a joint session of Congress since his second inauguration.

“Thank you, Elon. He’s working very hard. He didn’t need this. He didn’t need this. Thank you very much. We appreciate it. Everybody here, even this side, appreciates it, I believe. They just don’t want to admit that,” Trump said in March during his address, quipping that Democrats were even grateful for Musk’s work at DOGE. 

The U.S. Justice Department has launched an investigation into whether California, its interscholastic sports federation and the Jurupa Unified School District are violating the civil rights of cisgender girls by allowing transgender students to compete in school sports, federal officials announced Wednesday.

The Justice Department is also throwing its support behind a pending lawsuit alleging similar violations of girls’ rights in the Riverside Unified School District, said U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, who oversees much of the Los Angeles region, and Assistant Atty. Gen. Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

Transgender track athletes have come under intense scrutiny in recent months in both Jurupa Valley and Riverside, with anti-LGBTQ+ activists attacking them on social media and screaming opposition to their competing at school meets.

Essayli and Dhillon, both Californians appointed under President Trump, have long fought against transgender rights in the state. Their announcements came one day after Trump threatened to withhold federal funding from California for allowing transgender youth to participate in sports.

The legal actions are just the latest attempts by the Trump administration to scale back transgender rights nationwide, including by bringing the fight to California — which has the nation’s largest queer population and some of its most robust LGBTQ+ legal protections — and targeting individual student athletes in the state.

Both Trump in his threats Tuesday and Essayli and Dhillon in their announcement of the investigation Wednesday appeared to reference the recent success of a 16-year-old transgender track athlete at Jurupa Valley High School named AB Hernandez. Trump wrongly suggested that Hernandez had won “everything” at a recent meet — which Hernandez didn’t do.

In a comment to The Times on Wednesday, Hernandez’s mother, Nereyda Hernandez, said it was heartbreaking to see her child being attacked “simply for being who they are,” and despite following all California laws and policies for competing.

“My child is a transgender student-athlete, a hardworking, disciplined, and passionate young person who just wants to play sports, continue to build friendships, and grow into their fullest potential like any other child,” her mother said.

The mother of another transgender high school track athlete in Riverside County who is the subject of the pending lawsuit the Justice Department is now backing declined to comment Wednesday.

The Justice Department said it had sent letters of legal notice to California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, state Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, the California Interscholastic Federation and Jurupa Unified.

The U.S. Department of Education had previously announced in February that it was investigating the CIF for allowing transgender athletes to compete. Dhillon said the two federal departments would coordinate their investigations.

Bonta has defended state laws protecting transgender youth, students and athletes, and advised school systems and other institutions in the state, such as hospitals, to adhere to state LGBTQ+ laws — even in the face of various Trump executive orders aimed at curtailing the rights of and healthcare for transgender youth. On Wednesday, his office said it remained “committed to defending and upholding California laws.”

Scott Roark, a spokesman for the California Department of Education, said his agency could not comment. Jacquie Paul, a spokesperson for Jurupa Unified, said the school system had yet to receive the letter Wednesday, and “without further information” could not comment. A spokesperson for the Riverside Unified School District also declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.

The CIF, in a statement, said it “values all of our student-athletes and we will continue to uphold our mission of providing students with the opportunity to belong, connect, and compete while complying with California law and Education Code.”

However, the sports federation also changed its rules for the upcoming 2025 CIF State Track and Field Championships, saying a cisgender girl who is bumped from qualifying for event finals by a transgender athlete would still be allowed to compete and would also be awarded the medal for whichever place they would have claimed were the transgender athlete not competing.

The changes brought renewed criticism from advocates on both sides of the political issue, including Chino Valley Unified school board President Sonja Shaw. Shaw is a Trump supporter running for state schools superintendent who has challenged pro-LGBTQ+ laws statewide and supports the latest investigation. She said that, in making the changes, CIF was “admitting” that girls “are being pushed out of their own sports.”

Dhillon said her office’s “pattern or practice” investigation will consider whether California’s laws and the CIF policies violate Title IX, a 1972 federal civil rights law prohibiting sex discrimination in educational programs and activities that receive federal funding.

Title IX has been used in the past to win rights for transgender people, but the Trump administration has taken a strikingly different view of the law — and cited it as a reason transgender rights must be rolled back.

Dhillon said the law “exists to protect women and girls in education,” that it is “perverse to allow males to compete against girls, invade their private spaces, and take their trophies,” and that her division would “aggressively defend women’s hard-fought rights to equal educational opportunities.”

Essayli said in a statement that his office would “work tirelessly to protect girls’ sports and stop anyone — public officials included — from violating women’s civil rights.”

LGBTQ+ advocates, civic institutions in California and many Democratic lawmakers in the state have denounced the framing of transgender inclusion in sports as diminishing the rights of women and girls and accused Trump and other Republicans of attacking transgender people — about 1% of the U.S. population — simply because they make for an easy and vulnerable political target.

Kristi Hirst, co-founder of the public education advocacy group Our Schools USA, said the Justice Department’s actions amounted to “bullying minors and using taxpayer resources to do so,” and that a “better use of public dollars would be for the Justice Department to affirm that all kids possess civil rights, and protect the very students being targeted today.”

The “pattern or practice” investigation is the second such investigation that Dhillon’s office has launched in the L.A. region in as many months. It’s also investigating Los Angeles County over its process for issuing gun permits.

Essayli’s separate decision to back the Riverside lawsuit adds another wrinkle to an already complicated case.

The group Save Girls’ Sports is suing over the inclusion of a transgender athlete in a girls’ track meet in October, a decision they allege unfairly bumped a cisgender girl from competition, and over a decision by high school officials to block students from wearing shirts that read, “IT’S COMMON SENSE. XX [does not equal] XY,” a reference to the different chromosome pairings of biological females and males.

Julianne Fleischer, an attorney with Advocates for Faith & Freedom who is representing Save Girls’ Sports, said Wednesday that Essayli’s decision to weigh in on behalf of the group was welcome.

“This case has always been about common sense, fairness, and the plain meaning of the law,” Fleischer said in a statement. “Girls’ sports were never meant to be a social experiment. They exist so that girls can win, lead and thrive on a level playing field.”

It was unclear how the case would be affected by Essayli’s interest.

The state and school district are asking for the lawsuit to be dismissed. A hearing is scheduled next month.

Essayli, formerly a state Assembly member from Riverside County, made his name in politics in part by attacking what he has called the “woke” policies of California’s liberal majority in Sacramento. Shortly before he was appointed as U.S. attorney last month, other California lawmakers blocked a bill he introduced that would have banned transgender athletes from female sports.

Hernandez, the mother of the targeted Jurupa Valley athlete, said Trump and other officials were bullying children by “weaponizing misinformation and fear instead of embracing truth, compassion and respect,” and asked Trump to reconsider.

“I respectfully request you to open your heart and mind to learn about the LGBTQ+ community,” she said, “not from the voices of fear or division, but from the people living these lives with courage, love and dignity.”

Elon Musk said he is “disappointed” by the costs of President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” passed by Republicans in the House last week.

“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Musk told “CBS Sunday Morning” in an exclusive broadcast interview.

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The remarks by Musk, who recently stepped back from running the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, are in contrast to Trump, who backed the legislation, which still needs Senate approval. 

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed 215 to 214 in the House. All Democrats and two Republicans, Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, voted against the bill. House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris, R-Md., voted “present.”

The bill is a victory for Trump and House Republicans, who overcame policy disagreements to deliver on Trump’s key campaign promises, including an extension of his 2017 tax cuts and no tax on tips, overtime and Social Security. 

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Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) speaks to the media after the House narrowly passed a bill forwarding President Donald Trump’s agenda at the U.S. Capitol on May 22.  (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

It aims to cut roughly $1.5 trillion in government spending. The U.S. government is still more than $36 trillion in debt and has spent $1.05 trillion more than it has collected in the 2025 fiscal year, according to the Treasury Department.

The bill still faces hurdles. 

President Donald Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk speak to reporters near a red Model S Tesla vehicle on the South Lawn of the White House Tuesday, March 11, 2025, in Washington. (Pool via AP) (Pool via AP )

The Senate is tasked with passing its own version. Republican leaders are hoping to send the bill to Trump’s desk by the Fourth of July. 

Fox News Digital’s Deirdre Heavey contributed to this report.