A federal appeals court on Friday allowed Elon Musk and his team of analysts to resume their work in helping to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, clearing the way for them to continue while the government appeals the earlier ruling.
The decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit came as the Trump administration was taking its final steps to effectively eliminate the agency after steadily chipping away at its staff and grant programs for weeks.
The appeals court panel said that whatever influence Mr. Musk and his team in the so-called Department of Government Efficiency had over the process, it was ultimately agency officials who had signed off on the various moves to gut the agency and reconfigure it as a minor office under the control of the State Department.
Earlier this month, Judge Theodore D. Chuang of U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland wrote that Mr. Musk, in his capacity as a special adviser to President Trump who was never confirmed by the Senate, lacked the authority to carry out what Mr. Musk himself described as a campaign to shut down the agency.
Judge Chuang pointed to public statements by Mr. Musk in which he described directing the engineers and analysts on his team, known as DOGE, to do away with U.S.A.I.D., previewing his plans and announcing their progress along the way.
On X, the social media platform he owns, Mr. Musk wrote in February that it was time for U.S.A.I.D. to “die,” that his team was in the process of shutting the agency down, and at one point that he had “spent the weekend feeding U.S.A.I.D. into the wood chipper.”
Judge Chuang reasoned that the central role that Mr. Musk’s task force had appeared to have played in shrinking the agency violated the Constitution, which requires that anyone exercising the level of authority Mr. Musk had claimed for himself must be confirmed by the Senate.
In its opinion on Friday, the appeals court took issue with the district court judge’s finding.
In essence, the opinion stated that the way the Trump administration had adopted Mr. Musk’s recommendations but put in place the changes on its own made it impossible to conclude that Mr. Musk had unilaterally closed the agency or subverted Congress.
“While defendants’ role and actions related to U.S.A.I.D. are not conventional, unconventional does not necessarily equal unconstitutional,” Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr., a Trump appointee, wrote in an opinion joined by another judge.
“The question is whether Musk both directed those decisions and did so without the approval or ratification of U.S.A.I.D. officials,” Judge Quattlebaum added. “And no record evidence shows that he did.”
Even so, the appeals court judges left open the larger constitutional questions that the DOGE operation has stirred in recent months, especially in light of public statements by Mr. Trump, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who have all publicly thanked Mr. Musk for helping dismantle the agency, and credited his team with bringing about that result.
On Friday, the agency’s remaining employees received an email titled “U.S.A.I.D.’s Final Mission,” informing them of a final round of planned layoffs that would reduce the agency’s work force from around 10,000 workers before Mr. Trump took office to around 15 legally required positions. The email was sent by Jeremy Lewin, a DOGE staffer who had led the effort to analyze the agency and was since named one of its official leaders in a formal governmental capacity.
In a separate opinion agreeing with the court’s decision but not the reasoning behind it, Judge Roger Gregory, a Clinton appointee, wrote that the lawsuit’s problem was that it too narrowly targeted Mr. Musk, and missed the bigger picture.
“Because plaintiffs failed to include the proper defendants, I am forced to concur in the majority’s grant of defendants’ request for a stay pending appeal,” he wrote. “But I write separately to make clear that my concurrence today should not be seen as an endorsement of the executive’s likely unconstitutional actions in closing U.S.A.I.D., effectively dissolving a ‘creature of statute’ that can only be created or destroyed by Congress.”
Judge Gregory added that the agency’s cuts, which an agency official estimated this month could cause tens of millions of disease infections and hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide, were most likely all unlawful in his view, as Congress never approved them.
He added that while the lawsuit had failed to resolve some of the most urgent questions about the separation of powers or clarify murky details about DOGE, the lawsuit would have needed to include Mr. Rubio or other officials who oversaw the cuts in order to block them from eliminating programs funded by Congress or direct them to reverse those actions.
“We may never know how many lives will be lost or cut short by the defendants’ decision to abruptly cancel billions of dollars in congressionally appropriated foreign aid. We may never know the lasting effect of defendants’ actions on our national aspirations and goals,” he wrote. “But those are not the questions before the court today.”