‘We will pursue any and all legal action against anyone who impedes your work or threatens your people,’ he wrote in a letter to Musk.
The acting U.S. attorney in Washington released a statement Monday assuring he will take legal action against any attempts to impede Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
“We must keep all our American government employees safe and we must protect the American people’s property,” interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin wrote in a letter addressed to Musk, released on X, adding that “anyone imperiling others [is] violating our laws.”
“We will pursue any and all legal action against anyone who impedes your work or threatens your people.”
He did not elaborate on who might be issuing threats or impeding DOGE’s work, though he made allusions to Black Lives Matter protests and riots, along with Antifa activity, in 2020.
“Late last week, we indicted an economist who worked at the Fed for economic espionage for the Communist Chinese,” he wrote. “Please be very aware that there are those who are acting against our American people in every way.”
Musk, who reposted Martin’s letter on Monday, formed DOGE in cooperation with the Trump administration with the stated goal of finding ways to reduce government spending by cutting wasteful programs and slashing federal regulations.
Also on Monday, Musk reposted a comment sourced from a Reddit sub-forum known as “FedNews,” allegedly made by a federal worker, who declared “war” against Musk for apparently putting his career at risk. The Epoch Times could not verify the authenticity of the comment.
Musk has faced some criticism from Democrats regarding DOGE and its activity in multiple federal agencies in recent days. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said in a post on Sunday that Trump was allowing Musk to “access people’s personal information and shut down government funding.”
“We must do everything in our power to push back and protect people from harm,” she said, without giving details.
In another post on, Feb. 1, Warren wrote that Musk “has access to government payment systems used to deliver Social Security and Medicare benefits” and that he also “drove out the senior career official at Treasury responsible for preventing a potential default on U.S. debt.”
Last week, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) expressed concern in a letter to new Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that DOGE and Musk associates “may have intended to access these payment systems to illegally withhold payments to any number of programs.”
“To put it bluntly, these payment systems simply cannot fail, and any politically motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy,” Wyden said in the letter.
Over the weekend, the website for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) went offline after Trump’s freeze on foreign aid and as Musk endorsed the dissolution of the program.
“Live by executive order, die by executive order,” Musk wrote in an X post about the agency. President John F. Kennedy, in an executive order in 1961, set up USAID as an independent agency to provide foreign aid, although in recent years, it has expanded to have more than 10,000 staff and a budget of more than $50 billion annually.
On Monday morning, he said that Trump told him that USAID should be shut down and added in a separate post that they “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”
In comments to reporters on Sunday evening, Trump said he believes the agency is being run by radicals.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.