President Donald Trump has shot down Elon Musk’s request of getting Baris Akis, a Turkish-born green card holder, on board for the Department of Government Efficiency making it clear who is in charge, an Atlantic report claimed. The report said though US law generally prohibits non-citizens from working for the federal government, Elon Musk was hoping for an exception for Baris Akis, but the answer was an unequivocal no — delivered to Musk by Trump’s advisers.
The message delivered to him was that Trump’s White House is in the business of deporting people, and bringing in a foreign national to help shrink the government’s American workforce would send a confusing message, the report said.
Elon Muk and his team accepted the argument and “moved on”, the report said amid Musk’s growing influence in the government as he announced that he would shut down USAID to which President Trump too agreed.
As Elon Musk’s influence is worrying for even some MAGA voices, Trump recently said that Elon Musk won’t do anything without the administration’s approval. “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval. And we will give him the approval where appropriate, and where not appropriate we won’t,” the president said Monday in the Oval Office.
Who is Baris Akis?
Baris Akhis is a Turkish-born leader of a Silicon Valley venture firm who graduated from Stanford in 2016. According to the New York Times, Akis and Musk developed a close working relationship as they were involved in Trump’s transition. Akis put in more hours than any other tech leader beyond Elon Musk and now he has become the right-hand man to Steve Davis, who is Musk’s right-hand man for DOGE.
“Davis and Akis have been heavily involved in the Office of Personnel Management in recent weeks. But neither of them actually work there. Davis nowadays spends much of his time detailed to the General Services Administration, which helps manage federal agencies and which is a likely next target of Musk’s war on the bureaucracy,” the NYT report noted.
