Elon Musk’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Operation is a Coup
A large assortment of New York Times journalists, reporting Monday in a piece titled “Inside Musk’s Aggressive Incursion Into the Federal Government”:
In Elon Musk’s first two weeks in government, his lieutenants gained access to closely held financial and data systems, casting aside career officials who warned that they were defying protocols. They moved swiftly to shutter specific programs — and even an entire agency that had come into Mr. Musk’s cross hairs. They bombarded federal employees with messages suggesting they were lazy and encouraging them to leave their jobs.
Empowered by President Trump, Mr. Musk is waging a largely unchecked war against the federal bureaucracy — one that has already had far-reaching consequences.
Mr. Musk’s aggressive incursions into at least half a dozen government agencies have challenged congressional authority and potentially breached civil service protections.
Top officials at the Treasury Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development who objected to the actions of his representatives were swiftly pushed aside. And Mr. Musk’s efforts to shut down U.S.A.I.D., a key source of foreign assistance, have reverberated around the globe.
The reporters continue:
Since Mr. Trump’s inauguration, Mr. Musk and his allies have taken over the United States Digital Service, now renamed United States DOGE Service, which was established in 2014 to fix the federal government’s online services.
They have commandeered the federal government’s human resources department, the Office of Personnel Management.
They have gained access to the Treasury’s payment system — a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending.
Mr. Musk has also taken a keen interest in the federal government’s real estate portfolio, managed by the General Services Administration, moving to terminate leases. Internally, G.S.A. leaders have started to discuss eliminating as much as 50 percent of the agency’s budget, according to people familiar with the conversations.
Perhaps most significant, Mr. Musk has sought to dismantle U.S.A.I.D., the government’s lead agency for humanitarian aid and development assistance. Mr. Trump has already frozen foreign aid spending, but Mr. Musk has gone further.
USAID is now dead, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio assuming the top role in the organization. Thousands of foreign aid programs are completely gone, especially in South Africa, where Musk is from. Musk works as a “special government employee,” according to Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary who doesn’t even know the White House’s official position on some of the most consequential executive actions. (“The binder is in my head,” she says, referring to the binder of files press secretaries typically carry around.) This “special” access essentially gives him access to everything in Trump’s Washington, which is completely psychotic. “Special government employees” are only part-time consultants who offer experience from their own fields. They don’t have the right to fire whoever they want for fun on a Saturday.
Over the weekend, Musk waltzed into the Treasury Department and demanded access to the entire payment network the federal government uses to issue grants and loans. The entire thing. Treasury Department officials, who are career workers and not political appointees, and thus who can’t be fired by the president or any of his advisers, rejected Musk’s offer. They were placed on administrative leave the next morning. The same went for USAID, which Musk called a “criminal organization” for some ridiculous reason, probably because it gives money to anti-apartheid efforts in South Africa, which Musk, a noted neo-Nazi, staunchly rejects. Either way, both departments are now under full control by Musk.
It’s worth noting why this is specifically a coup and not just a deranged, rogue administration hellbent on destroying the United States from the inside. (It is, but that’s not relevant here.) The White House — also known as the executive branch — has absolutely zero discretion over federal spending. None, nil, null, naught, nothing, nada. If Congress passes a law that tells the president to spend money on something, that money must be spent that way. (Trump’s refusal to obey this core tenet of the American government caused his first impeachment in 2020.) The president, nor anyone who works for him, cannot disobey the law that Congress signed. He can veto a budget Congress passes, but he can’t violate the law. Appropriations are laws like any other statute passed by the legislature. Here’s Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 of the Constitution:
No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.
That statute isn’t ambiguous in the slightest. The laws are made by Congress, and no money can be appropriated without its approval. When the president wants to, say, suspend arms sales or foreign aid to a country on suspicion that it has broken the law or conditions placed on that aid, he may do so, but he must notify Congress if he pauses sales for 90 days or longer. This is the rule for everything in the federal government: While the executive branch enforces the law, it does not make the law. By turning off the USAID spigot, which was authorized by Congress months before Trump made his return to the Oval Office and Musk got his fingers on the federal government, the Trump administration is in blatant violation of not only the law Congress passed which appropriates funds to USAID, but also the foundational document of this government. This is entirely unconstitutional, and it’s being undertaken by an unelected billionaire bureaucrat who hasn’t even signed the ethics papers required to be a government employee.
Musk, who has no qualification nor right to be in the government whatsoever, came in with his billions and started firing people for no reason. Nobody has the right to fire these people other than career officials themselves. No political appointee can fire a career worker due to a law called the Civil Service Reform Act, passed in 1978. Civil workers are in a different class from political appointees associated with the administration, and Musk has no right to fire them or place them on leave. This is a coup, plain and simple — an unelected, unauthorized, unwelcome psychopath with a boatload of money is waging war against the United States and misusing tax money collected by Congress to enrich himself.
Musk has total, unfettered access to the coffers of the U.S. government. He can shut the whole thing down, change how money is distributed, or even worse, turn off programs he doesn’t like and use the remaining money to pay his companies. He controls the Treasury Department, for heaven’s sake. This is a brazen attack on the fundamental sovereignty of the United States. An immigrant from South Africa has infiltrated our country’s money supply and is using it to enrich himself without the knowledge or approval of the president, who’s too busy waging a trade war with Canada and Mexico to be bothered with anything Musk is doing. The people in charge of our country’s most important assets are 19-year-old college freshmen who named themselves after male genitalia on LinkedIn. (But saying that on X results in an immediate account suspension, which is illegal.) Here’s a story from some reporters at Wired, titled “A 25-Year-Old With Elon Musk Ties Has Direct Access to the Federal Payment System”:
A 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who previously worked for two Elon Musk companies, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the US government, three sources tell WIRED.
Two of those sources say that Elez’s privileges include the ability not just to read but to write code on two of the most sensitive systems in the US government: The Payment Automation Manager (PAM) and Secure Payment System (SPS) at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). Housed on a top-secret mainframe, these systems control, on a granular level, government payments that in their totality amount to more than a fifth of the US economy.
And here’s another story about how Musk’s lieutenants at DOGE have access to people’s Social Security numbers from Caleb Ecarma and Judd Legum at Musk Watch:
Several of Elon Musk’s associates installed at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) have received unprecedented access to federal human resources databases containing sensitive personal information for millions of federal employees. According to two members of OPM staff with direct knowledge, the Musk team running OPM has the ability to extract information from databases that store medical histories, personally identifiable information, workplace evaluations, and other private data. The staffers spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly and feared professional retaliation. Musk Watch also reviewed internal OPM correspondence confirming that expansive access to the database was provided to Musk associates.
The arrangement presents acute privacy and security risks, one of the OPM staffers said.
Among the government outsiders granted entry to the OPM databases is University of California Berkeley student Akash Bobba, a software engineer who graduated high school less than three years ago. He previously interned at Meta and Palantir, a technology firm chaired by Musk-ally and fellow billionaire Peter Thiel. Edward Coristine, another 2022 high school graduate and former software engineering intern at Musk’s Neuralink, has also been given access to the databases.
This is a complete hostile takeover of the federal government, much like Musk’s haphazard acquisition of Twitter back in 2022, except this time involving the most important collection of individuals in the world, bar none. This isn’t a social network — this is people’s livelihoods. Tens of millions of people rely on food stamps and Medicare to survive. Hundreds of thousands of businesses — including Musk’s own — elected favorable members of Congress to pass appropriations laws that would benefit their companies. Millions of Americans voted election after election to ensure their voices were heard. This is how a democracy works. Trump, but more especially Musk, is tearing down the fabric of American democracy. We live in an autocracy now controlled by an unelected billionaire who broke into the federal government in violation of every single foundational document this country was built upon.
I fully realize I sound insane writing this. How could the first and strongest democracy in the world break so quickly in just a few weeks? I feel crazy. I feel like a crank who’s lost their mind. I cope with that feeling by writing about my thoughts in a not-totally-rambling way. I hope everyone reading this finds a sliver of sanity and clings to it for dear life.