• With Trump's inauguration fast approaching, more details about DOGE have emerged.
• Musk, who Trump tapped to co-lead DOGE, may become a "special government employee."
• SGEs have less stringent ethics rules — to a degree — compared to regular federal employees.

With President-elect Donald Trump set to take office next week, a key detail has emerged regarding the Department of Government Efficiency, the forthcoming commission that Tesla CEO Elon Musk will co-lead alongside businessman Vivek Ramaswamy.

Some DOGE staffers who are expected to work unpaid for six months before returning to their more lucrative jobs would be classified as "special government employees," and Musk could be among them, The New York Times reported.

A special government employee is an individual who can be paid or unpaid and is categorized as a temporary worker. The federal government can employ that individual for no more than 130 days amid a consecutive 365-day span.

The designation is significant because special government employees — who are generally brought in to offer outside expertise to the federal government — are subject to more limited conflict of interest rules compared to regular federal employees.

When Trump tapped Musk, the wealthiest man in the world, to co-lead DOGE, government watchdogs, and some Democratic politicians questioned how he could handle such a role given potential conflicts of interest involving SpaceX, Tesla, and X.

Musk's omnipresence within Trump's political orbit in recent months has only reinforced those concerns. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts sent a letter to Trump's transition team asking if the tech executive would adhere to conflict-of-interest rules in his forthcoming role.

"Putting Mr. Musk in a position to influence billions of dollars of government contracts and regulatory enforcement without a stringent conflict of interest agreement in place is an invitation for corruption on a scale not seen in our lifetimes," Warren wrote at the time.

"Currently, the American public has no way of knowing whether the advice that he is whispering to you in secret is good for the country — or merely good for his own bottom line," she added.

Musk in 2024 spent over $250 million to help send Trump back to the White House and aid other GOP candidates in their respective races.

Business Insider reached out to Trump's transition team for comment.

• A former Disney employee agreed to plead guilty to altering allergen info on restaurant menus.
• Michael Scheuer admitted to the hack, as well as adding swastikas to the memus.
• He faces up to 10 years in prison for his charges, according to the plea agreement.

A former menu production manager for Disney World has admitted to altering allergen information and adding swastikas to menus as part of a plea agreement.

Federal authorities charged Michael Scheuer in October with causing the transmission of a program, information, code, or command to a protected computer and intentionally causing damage. Disney had fired Scheuer months earlier for misconduct, according to the criminal complaint.

In a plea agreement filed Friday in Florida federal court, first reported by Court Watch, Scheuer pleaded guilty to hacking and one count of aggravated identity theft. He faces a maximum of 10 years and a mandatory minimum of two years in prison for the charges.

The plea says the government agreed to recommend that Scheuer receive a downward adjustment on the length of his sentence for agreeing to take responsibility for the charges.

Scheuer also agreed to pay restitution to his victims, including Disney.

The agreement says that Scheuer changed allergen information on some of Disney's menus to falsely show that items were safe for people with allergies, which "could have had fatal consequences depending on the type and severity of the customer's allergy."

Scheuer also admitted to changing the regions of wines on some menus, some of which he changed to the locations of mass shootings, the plea agreement says.

"Scheuer also added or embedded images to one or more menus, including in one instance a swastika," the document says.

On some Disney menus that contained a QR code to show a digital version of the menu, Scheuer changed the code to direct to a website promoting the boycott of Israel, the document says. Manufacturers printed some menus with the falsified QR codes, but caught the change before they were distributed.

By the end of his hacking campaign, Scheuer had impacted "nearly every menu in the system," according to court documents.

"The entire repository of menus had to be reverted to older versions and brought up to date manually," the agreement says.

Scheuer's attorney, David Haas, did not immediately return a request for comment from Business Insider. Haas told CNBC that Scheuer is "prepared to accept responsibility for his conduct."

"Unfortunately, he has mental health issues that were exacerbated when Disney fired him upon his return from paternity leave," he told the outlet.

Disney did not immediately return a request for comment about Scheuer's plea agreement.

Disney became embroiled in a separate controversy involving food allergens in 2024 when a widowed husband filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the entertainment giant. The lawsuit said the man's wife experienced a "severe acute allergic reaction" and died after eating at a restaurant operated at Disney Springs.

Lawyers for Disney asked an Orange County court to dismiss the lawsuit because the husband previously purchased theme park tickets and signed up for a free Disney+ trial, but criticism from the public caused them to reverse course.

• Jamie Dimon urges incoming president Donald Trump to prioritize immigration policy in his second term.
• Trump has said he plans to conduct mass deportation in his second term.
• Dimon also advocates for education reform and doubling the earned income tax credit.

With Donald Trump set to take office in about a week, top Wall Street leaders are coming forward with advice.

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon honed in on immigration policy when asked what advice he'd give Trump for his second presidential term in a CBS News interview posted Sunday. "Get immigration, border security right," he said. "Then proper immigration after that."

Since his debut on the political stage, Trump has been outspoken about immigration policy. On the campaign trail last year Trump said he would carry out the "largest domestic deportation in American history." He also plans to end birthright citizenship, build new ICE detention centers, and reinstate his first-term policies. During his first term in office, he curtailed legal immigration rates, signed an executive order that suspended several types of work visas, including H-1B visas, which are crucial for the tech industry, and completed hundreds of miles of construction on a border wall between the US and Mexico.

Dimon says he agrees with Trump's big-picture view on immigration. "You could talk about specifics and disagree, but the concern around border security, obviously, every country in the world is concerned about that," he said.

Beyond immigration, Dimon says he wants to see changes to our education system. "I would love to see high schools, community colleges, and colleges measured on what is the outcome of the kid being educated. Like do they get a job that's well paying, not do they do math well," he said. "I believe that would put a lot more pressure on schools to teach skills that can give you really good paying jobs." That includes jobs in fields like data analytics, manufacturing, nursing, compliance, and financial skills, he said.

He's also in favor of eliminating tax breaks, even for the wealthy. He proposed doubling the earned income tax credit: a refundable tax credit for low to moderate-income workers, particularly those with children. "That alone would put a lot more money into the pockets of people who are working who are lower income, it would go into their communities, into their families," he said.

Fire-tracking app Watch Duty has become a crucial source of information for Los Angeles residents threatened by the ongoing wildfires.  As TechCrunch’s Maxwell Zeff explained, the app relies on a network of active and retired firefighters, first responders, official government reports, and volunteer reporters who monitor radio scanners to offer real-time updates on active wildfires. […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.