Meet the Trump appointee apparently maintaining 'unheard of' ties to Tesla

The Trump appointee heading a government technology unit at the General Services Administration is on an “unpaid leave of absence” from Tesla — where he’s worked as an engineer — while working for the government. 

Thomas Shedd, who until recently was also simultaneously leading the Labor Department’s technology office, reported in his public financial disclosure for GSA that he was on unpaid leave from billionaire Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company. 

Experts characterized that arrangement as outside the norm for government work.

“It’s unheard of,” said Virginia Canter, chief counsel for ethics and anticorruption for the nonprofit Democracy Defenders Action. “From a conflict of interest perspective, it's a mess. It's highly inappropriate.”

Shedd has “decided to go into this job with a conflict of interest in Tesla,” said Richard Painter, a former White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush. “A leave of absence from a private sector employer is very rare in government.”

The revelation comes months after Musk left the controversial, government-slashing Department of Government Efficiency in June, only to later publicly feud with Trump over the administration's tax and domestic policy package. The billionaire’s involvement with DOGE had raised its own ethics questions, as the administration razed government agencies tasked with investigating and regulating Musk’s businesses and DOGE accessed sensitive data across federal agencies. 

Musk has 52 ongoing contracts with government agencies, with most of the money going to his company SpaceX, per The Washington Post, which also noted that Tesla received a $465 million Energy Department loan in 2010 and has cashed in on federal and state regulatory credits. 

A GSA spokesperson told Nextgov/FCW in a statement that “the deputy commissioner, like all GSA employees, completed ethics training. All appropriate ethics policies and processes were followed regarding previous employment and potential conflicts of interest.”

Shedd came into GSA as the head of TTS on day one of Trump 2.0. TTS provides digital services across the government, including by maintaining some of the systems that are central to government contracting.

Until recently, he was also the chief information officer at the Labor Department for several months, where he was in charge of the technology and data for the entire department and its 27 agencies.

Shedd’s financial disclosure for GSA, obtained by Nextgov/FCW, states that his software integration management position at Tesla ended in January. But later in the document, which Shedd signed off on in April, it says of his employment agreements and arrangements that he “will take an unpaid leave of absence” from Tesla. 

GSA did not provide clarification about Shedd’s employment arrangement with Tesla or stock holdings. Tesla and the Labor Department did not respond to requests for comment, and the White House referred Nextgov/FCW to GSA.

A GSA ethics official signed off on the form as part of a process that is designed to evaluate Shedd’s government job against his interests, said Cynthia Brown, the senior ethics counsel at the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

If they saw a conflict of interest, they would have had to put measures in place to remedy that, like having another government official sub in to do the work when needed, she said. 

“Ultimately the burden lies … on that official to comply,” said Brown. “It's very possible that the ethics office spoke with him about the risks that there could be conflicts, and he will have to just be very vigilant.”

His situation could trigger a conflict of interest statute that requires him to recuse himself from matters that have a clear economic effect on Tesla, unless he received a waiver, said Painter. Stock holdings can also trigger that law, too.

There are also rules in place that government employees can’t work on anything involving a former employer for a year since they left that job, said Brown.

Shedd reported that he would keep his vested Tesla stock options, of which he has up to $250,000, even after leaving Tesla. 

He said that he “will forfeit” other unvested stocks “upon separation” from Tesla, leaving open the question of what counts as separation, given the future tense used here on the form, said Brown. 

As for Tesla’s employee stock purchase plan, the document says both, “my participation in the employee stock purchase plan will cease upon my separation from the company,” and “I am no longer actively participating in this program.”

‘Boundaries being pushed’ 

As a deputy commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service and head of TTS — two titles that have historically been paired as one job — Shedd is in charge of SAM.gov, the government’s contracting front door, and the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, the government’s standardized cloud security setup.

“Does he have direct oversight over Tesla contracts? Probably not,” one former GSA official, who asked to remain anonymous in order to speak freely, told Nextgov/FCW. “But these other influence areas and adjacent areas probably require some scrutiny.”

During his time at GSA, Shedd has pushed for the use of AI and, as has happened with other DOGE affiliates, asked for root access to a government system, causing concern and a resignation from one government engineer in response.

In March, he emailed staff at 18F, a government tech consultancy within TTS, at 1 a.m. on a Saturday to tell them that the office was shuttered and its workers laid off, weeks after Musk posted on X — formerly Twitter — several times that 18F and TTS had been “deleted.” The same month, he warned staff that the TTS overall would be cut down to half its size with extraneous work not in statute or otherwise deemed critical eliminated.

At the Labor Department, Shedd was the acting CIO for about four months, where he was in charge of technology and data across the department. He chose a few projects for modernization, but didn’t ever really set a broad direction, according to one current employee, who spoke on background as they were not authorized to speak on the record. 

As with TTS, the Labor tech shop has also lost employees. Shedd told staff in an all-hands meeting that if he was a young employee at the department, he would weigh leaving the job in search of more “stability” via the administration's deferred resignation program against staying at the department if one is “ok with the chaos,” according to one former employee.

Among the questions raised by Shedd’s apparent entanglement with Tesla is what, if any, relevant data Shedd accessed in these roles, especially given that Tesla has been under investigation by Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration and that DOGE has come under fire for accessing data across the government.

“As a political appointee at GSA, you get access to and exposed to a broad variety of issues and items, even if they’re not in your direct purview. You are sitting in committees that influence government contracts, contracting language, [Federal Acquisition Regulation] revisions,” said the former official. 

“Do they affect Tesla directly? No,” they continued. “But they could set the structure of contracting in a way that favors certain types of companies or certain types of products, or remove scrutiny that otherwise would be applied.”

Shedd’s Tesla connections may also have a broader relevance with Musk’s other businesses. Musk recently proposed that Tesla invest in his other company, xAI, for example, which itself scored a contract with the Defense Department last month. GSA has been considering adding Musk’s Grok to a governmentwide AI offering, and Shedd himself talked about the TTS cloud team helping GSA at large with its AI work.

Other Musk companies to consider are SpaceX — and within it, Starlink, which was installed at GSA in February — X and Neuralink.

“From a conflict of interest perspective, I don't think you can look at this narrowly as he has a conflict of interest with Tesla,” said Canter. “Should he be recused from having anything to do with not just Tesla, but with any of Elon Musk’s businesses?”

“There should be full transparency about what his relationship is with Tesla [and] what arrangements have been made to address the obvious conflicts of interest,” she added. 

Shedd isn’t the only DOGE-adjacent or direct DOGE associate with ethics considerations.

ProPublica reported earlier this summer that it had identified at least 12 DOGE workers that were still employees or advisors at their former companies. At least nine still received corporate benefits.

Still, cases under the criminal conflict of interest statute that may be relevant to Shedd — and all other executive branch employees other than the president and vice president — are rarely prosecuted, said Painter, who noted that “the people that are supposed to be enforcing the ethics rules are getting canned.”

Generally, the system of government ethics relies on norms, said Brown.

“The ethics rules were not written with a lot of enforcement teeth,” she said. “We’re seeing more areas where the boundaries are being pushed.”