NEW: Rep. Dave Min Introduces Legislation To Close Loopholes Allowing Special Government Employees To Profit Off Government Service

Washington, D.C. — Today, Representative Dave Min (CA-47) introduced the Ban on Self-Interested Contracting (BASIC) Act to prevent senior Special Government Employees (SGEs), like Elon Musk, from enriching themselves from government service, as reported by the Free Press. Specifically, the BASIC Act will prevent SGEs from receiving over $1 million in funding per year from the agencies where they work. Read the full article below. 

Rep. Min, a former SEC prosecutor and member of the House Oversight Committee, is working to restore trust in government. This bill is a continuation of his efforts as Chair of the Fighting Corruption Task Force to demand accountability in government and uphold the rule of law.

The Free Press

Elon Musk Left DOGE, but Democrats Want to Close the ‘Self-Dealing’ Loophole

Gabe Kaminsky

• It feels like a lifetime ago that Elon Musk palled around with President Donald Trump and slept on the floor of an office just steps away from the White House. The world’s richest man was classified as a “special government employee” while leading the cost-cutting crusade known as DOGE.
   
• In the latest sign that Musk is gone but not forgotten, some House Democrats will introduce legislation on Thursday aimed at closing what they claim are loopholes in federal law for special government employees (SGEs) like him.
   
• The bill would ban many such employees and their companies from receiving over $1 million in funding per year from the agencies where they work, according to a copy of the bill’s text reviewed by The Free Press. The bill also would create a searchable database of SGEs. There now is no centralized tracking and disclosure system for such employees.
   
• “Those who serve in government must, at the bare minimum, avoid exploiting their positions to enrich themselves, their families, or their business interests through insider information,” said Dave Min, a California Democrat who is leading the bill, called “The Ban on Self-Interested Contracting Act of 2025.”
   
• Co-sponsors include Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, André Carson of Indiana, and Steven Horsford of Nevada.
   
• “Public service is a privilege, not a pathway to personal gain,” added Min, who said he wants to address “the self-dealing behavior we have seen from too many in this administration.”
   
• SGEs may work for the federal government on a part-time basis for up to 130 days per year, on a paid or unpaid basis. They have been around for decades, with an average of about 2,000 per year, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report from 2016. But there has never been an SGE like Musk.
   
• He was not paid for his work at DOGE, where staffers swooped in across the federal government with a mandate to cut waste, fraud, and abuse.
   
• Musk was under no obligation to release documents that would itemize his holdings and other financial details, triggering scrutiny from Democrats about potential conflicts of interest due to his business ties.
   
• Musk’s SpaceX rocket company received billions of dollars in federal contracts long before he went to Washington on behalf of President Trump.
   
• Musk left DOGE in May and refocused on SpaceX and his social media platform X after a dramatic divorce with Trump over his signature tax and spending law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Musk said that it would worsen the deficit.
   
• He left behind a network of DOGE staffers—many of them young engineers with no prior government experience—who embedded at federal agencies. There is still a DOGE website that says it tracks how much has been slashed from the deficit, but some budget experts have said that the results are inaccurate and inflated.
   
• “DOGE people are here, but no one really knows what they actually do,” said one senior Trump administration official. “I don’t think a lot of them know what they have been doing.”
   
• A former DOGE official told The Free Press, “As far as I am concerned, there are no more meetings, no centralized communications. The whole idea was to save this country from financial ruin. But it became pretty clear after April that was not going to happen.”
   
• Still, it shows that Democrats are determined to continue pursuing the ethics questions that they began asking while Musk was leading DOGE. If the GOP loses the House or Senate in next year’s midterm elections, Democrats would gain more leverage to pursue investigations and their legislative agenda.
   
• The bill would not apply to people who only serve on advisory committees at federal agencies. It also would affect only those SGEs who are above GS-10 in the federal General Schedule (GS) pay system, meaning they are more senior. A House aide familiar with the proposal said lawmakers settled on the $1 million in funding limit per year in an effort to balance ethics reform with ensuring that business leaders can still participate in government.
   
• Each year, the federal government spends about $760 billion on contracts, according to the GAO, the independent agency that tracks the budget. Lawmakers and watchdog groups that support the bill say it would help thwart misuse of taxpayer dollars.
   
• “We need to be putting all the guardrails we can to make sure that money is awarded out responsibly and ethically,” said Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, the acting vice president of policy and government affairs at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group that endorsed the bill.
   
• Other supporters include the progressive Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Public Citizen, and Democracy Defenders Action.
   
• Debra Perlin, the policy director at CREW, said that the bill would help address questions about whether any SGEs are “improperly profiting off of their government service.”
   
• “The reliance on special government employees has increased dramatically during President Trump’s second term, leading to a new crop of government workers who lack proper oversight or regulation,” she said.

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