Elon Musk’s secretive government IT takeover, explained
If you have been avoiding Musk news entirely, it’s time to understand the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which it turns out isn’t even named after the right old internet meme. It’s much more the Department of All Your Base Are Belong to Us.
As Nicole Narea explains, Musk and a team of teens have “gained access to IT systems controlling critical functions of the federal government, from the Treasury Department to the Small Business Administration.” And no one knows exactly what they’re going to do with it.
There are a number of problems with this access (and potential control): conflicts of interest for Musk, interference issues for the congressional budget, and privacy concerns for basically everyone in the country. But hey, what’s the worst thing he could do with access to and control over federal payment systems?
The worst thing Trump has done so far
Dylan Matthews’s piece about the spending freeze that has hit the US Agency for International Development (USAID) explains exactly why that action was so disastrous: It’s a likely illegal move that variously unemployed, imperiled, or even physically endangered the people responsible for saving 50,000 lives a year from malaria and more than a million from HIV/AIDS. It’s also likely popular with the swath of Americans who don’t want to help anyone who has never had 14 varieties of Oreos to choose from at the supermarket. It’s evil and canny, which is arguably more dreadful than just plain evil.
The story, while named after Trump, also notes who’s taking credit for the entire shameful mess: Musk told his X followers, “USAID is a criminal organization.” Funny accusation, that.
All the ways Elon Musk is breaking the law, explained by a law professor
In theory, “move fast and break things” isn’t supposed to mean “the law.”
In this interview, Georgetown Law School professor David Super breaks down for Andrew Prokop the many, many, many, many illegal things that Musk is doing, presumably under the theory that the US justice system — and our own moral centers — will simply be overloaded. From sidelining civil servants to messing with Treasury Department payments to being a part of the government at all, Musk is taking a toddler-playing-the-piano approach to flouting American laws: indiscriminate, enthusiastic, loud and proud. I would hate to imply Musk isn’t conscientious and focused but …
What a wild conspiracy theory about Politico tells us about how Trump governs
The Politico funding dustup story should be fairly simple. To start at the end, USAID wasn’t funding the news organization Politico, departments were simply… subscribing.
To go back to the beginning: ugh. It all started on Musk’s X, where random users saw two separate events (the USAID freeze and a problem with Politico’s payroll) and assumed correlation. This would all be normal, brain rot, non-expert nonsense, if Musk didn’t have both seemingly unfettered power over internal federal bureaucracy and the ear of the president.
As Christian Paz points out, this kind of thinking means you’re cutting government spending while “relying on folks who preface their claims with ‘assuming this is accurate.’” But the frenzy also “opens up the real possibility that high-stakes decisions are made about important and valuable government services and programs without considering the negative, harmful effects they might have on everyday people.”
The blatant lie behind Elon Musk’s power grab
Let’s for one second take Musk at his word — that the entire DOGE enterprise is about hacking away at our national debt and looming deficit. Then let’s throw that out the window, because DOGE can’t achieve that with what it’s doing, like at all.
As Eric Levitz explains, the math just doesn’t subtract down. He writes: “Trimming ‘“millions’ from a $6.75 trillion federal budget has no meaningful impact on America’s long-run debt trajectory. The fact that the United States gave $32,000 to Peruvian artists working on a comic book ‘featuring an LGBTQ+ hero to address social and mental health issues’ may or may not be regrettable. But such spending has no bearing on our nation’s fiscal health.” Or, to call back to some of the other cuts made by DOGE, when the deficit is a number followed by 12 zeros, the salary of a person curing malaria in Uganda does not count.
There are some things that matter though. For one, there’s the $7.75 trillion Trump’s own proposals are expected to add to the national debt. For another, while Musk runs rampant through the halls of American power, he’s also still collecting billions of dollars in federal contracts. I wonder how many SpaceX and Tesla contracts we'll see suffer cuts?
