WASHINGTON – Elon Musk suggests he has obtained entry to the private monetary information of federal staff, however the White Home is not going to say how or why.
Musk, the world’s richest individual and now a prime aide to President Donald Trump, alluded to this information throughout an Oval Workplace look with Trump Tuesday night as he took questions from reporters.
“We do find it sort of rather odd that, you know, there are quite a few people in the bureaucracy who have, ostensibly, a salary of a few hundred thousand dollars but somehow managed to accrue tens of millions of dollars in net worth,” he mentioned.
In actuality, solely 3% of the two.4 million federal staff make greater than $200,000 a 12 months, whereas half make between $50,000 and $110,000 a 12 months, in line with authorities figures. Additional, staff who’ve made six figures for quite a few years might simply be price seven figures, notably these of their 50s or 60s who’ve been saving for retirement for many years and have appreciable fairness of their properties.
However Musk’s assertion raises the extra basic query about how he would know the monetary conditions of federal staff.
“How on earth would he have the information about the net worths of government employees?” requested Norm Eisen, a prime White Home ethics lawyer beneath President Barack Obama. “Either he’s making it up, which is profoundly concerning for the most powerful government official in history, or he has gotten access to data that he has no business getting.”
White Home aides failed to reply to a number of HuffPost queries on the matter.
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The federal authorities has prepared entry to its personal payroll information and is aware of exactly how a lot it pays federal staff. However it’s unclear how it could know in regards to the whole monetary holdings and money owed of its staff, other than the relative few who’re required to file annual monetary disclosures.
The White Home, in the meantime, is refusing to make public Musk’s personal monetary disclosure type and any associated ethics waivers he acquired due to his multi-billion contracts with the Pentagon and NASA for launch companies.
When HuffPost requested Trump why the White Home was not making Musk’s type public throughout a mid-flight information convention Sunday, Trump lied. “It is public,” he mentioned. “All you have to do is read it.”
Excessive-ranking authorities staff are usually required to submit monetary disclosure varieties which might be then made obtainable to the general public on the Workplace of Authorities Ethics’ web site. This week, Trump fired the top of that workplace.
In a press briefing on Wednesday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt mentioned that Trump and Musk would work collectively to ensure Musk abides by ethics legal guidelines. “We feel very confident with the ethics and the guardrails that have been put in place here,” she mentioned.
Musk, who like Trump is vulnerable to spreading falsehoods and wild conspiracy theories on social media, accused some federal staff of abusing their positions to get richer in his Oval Workplace look.
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“I think the reality is that they’re getting wealthy at the taxpayer expense. That’s the honest truth of it,” he mentioned, with out offering any proof.
On Tuesday, he was posting comparable claims about lawmakers and their worths, utilizing a listing he discovered with faulty numbers. “It’s not like these politicians started companies or were NBA All-Stars, so where did they get all the money?” he wrote. “Does anyone know?”
