The New York Times reported on Elon Musk’s takeover of the federal government. Trump has given Musk the power to close down agencies authorized by Congress, like the USAID and the Consumer Financial Control Board. Not a peep from the Republican-dominated Congress, as the world’s richest man flaunts his power to redesign the government and Trump meekly accedes to his every demand.
If you click this link, the story is a gift article.
Who ever dreamed that the election of Trump would lead to Elon Musk terrorizing every agency, a Cabinet whose members are dedicated to the destruction of the agencies they lead (possible exception: Rubio), and a foreign policy aligned with Russia against Europe? A domestic team determined to stamp out civil rights, defend bigotry, take away access to Medicaid, and privatize as much of the government as they can?
The DOGE plan is a coup. The richest man in the world has taken ownership of the federal government, with the consent of an eccentric, ignorant dotard in the Oval Office who was probably elected thanks to rigging and suppressing of votes by Musk and Putin.
Here are excerpts from the article in The New York Times about Elon Musk’s biggest acquisition. The federal government. His motive: he was angry about being regulated by the federal government. This is the government that funded Musk’s empire; he has received some $38 billion in federal subsidies since 2008, when he took charge of a near-bankrupt Tesla company. He loved the subsidies but hated the regulatuon. How could he stop the oversight of his business empire by the feds? Give almost $300 million to Trump and get the promise that Trump would give him free reign to wipe out the bureaucracy and replace it with AI.
From The New York Times:
It started as Elon Musk’s musings at a 2023 dinner party about how he would gut the federal bureaucracy. It evolved into an operation that has given him a singular position of influence over the government.
The plan for his Department of Government Efficiency was mapped out in a series of closely held meetings in Palm Beach, Fla., and through early intelligence-gathering efforts in Washingto
Without ceding control of his companies, the richest man in the world has embedded his engineers and aides inside the government’s critical digital infrastructure, moving with a swiftness that has stunned civil servants.
The story begins:
On the last Friday of September 2023, Elon Musk dropped in about an hour late to a dinner party at the Silicon Valley mansion of the technology investor Chamath Palihapitiya.
Mr. Musk’s visit was meant to be discreet. Still skittish about getting involved publicly in politics, he told the guests he had to be careful about supporting anyone in the Republican nomination fight. And yet here he was — joined by Claire Boucher, the singer known as Grimes and the mother of three of his children — at a $50,000-a-head dinner in honor of the presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who was running as an entrepreneur who would shake up the status quo.
As the night wore on, Mr. Musk held forth on the patio on a variety of topics, according to four people with knowledge of the conversation: his visit that week to the U.S.-Mexico border; the war in Ukraine; his frustrations with government regulations hindering his rocket company, SpaceX; and Mr. Ramaswamy’s highest priority, the dismantling of the federal bureaucracy.
Mr. Musk made clear that he saw the gutting of that bureaucracy as primarily a technology challenge. He told the party of around 20 that when he overhauled Twitter, the social media company that he bought in 2022 and later renamed X, the key was gaining access to the company’s servers.
Wouldn’t it be great, Mr. Musk offered, if he could have access to the computers of the federal government?
Just give him the passwords, he said jocularly, and he would make the government fit and trim.
What started as musings at a dinner party evolved into a radical takeover of the federal bureaucracy. It was driven with a frenetic focus by Mr. Musk, who channeled his libertarian impulses and resentment of regulatory oversight of his vast business holdings into a singular position of influence.
Without ceding control of his companies, the richest man in the world has embedded his engineers and aides inside the government’s critical digital infrastructure. Already, his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has inserted itself into more than 20 agencies, The New York Times has found.
Mr. Musk’s strategy has been twofold. His team grabbed control of the government’s human resources agency, the Office of Personnel Management, commandeering email systems to pressure civil servants to quit so he could cull the work force. And it burrowed into computer systems across the bureaucracy, tracing how money was flowing so the administration could choke it off. So far, Musk staff members have sought accessto at least seven sensitive government databases, including internal systems of the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service.
Mr. Musk’s transformation of DOGE from a casual notion into a powerful weapon is something possible only in the Trump era. It involves wild experimentation and an embrace of severe cost-cutting that Mr. Musk previously used to upend Twitter — as well as an appetite for political risk and impulsive decision-making that he shares with President Trump and makes others in the administration deeply uncomfortable.
In reporting how Mr. Musk and his allies executed their plan, The New York Times interviewed more than 60 people, including DOGE workers, friends of Mr. Musk’s, White House aides and administration officials who are dealing with the operation from the inside. Speaking on the condition of anonymity, many described a culture of secrecy that has made them afraid to speak publicly because of potential retaliation.
Mr. Musk’s stealth approach stunned both Democrats and civil servants. Failing to imagine an incursion from inside the bureaucracy, they were caught essentially defenseless.
The Times has learned new details about how the operation came together after the election, mapped out in a series of closely held meetings in Palm Beach, Fla., and through early intelligence-gathering efforts in Washington.
Seasoned conservative operatives like Stephen Miller and Russell Vought helped educate Mr. Musk about the workings of the bureaucracy. Soon, he stumbled on an opening. It was a little-known unit with reach across the government: the U.S. Digital Service, which President Barack Obama created in 2014 after the botched rollout of healthcare.gov.
Mr. Musk and his advisers — including Steve Davis, a cost cutter who worked with him at X and other companies — did not want to create a commission, as past budget hawks had done. They wanted direct, insider access to government systems. They realized they could use the digital office, whose staff had been focused on helping agencies fix technology problems, to quickly penetrate the federal government — and then decipher how to break it apart.
Since this is a gift article, please open the link and read the rest of it.
Never before in American history has there been subversion of the U.S. government that was so well planned and executed.
What will be left? How many agencies will Musk close down? How many highly skilled and knowledgeable civil servants will be fired? Which agencies will be irredeemably crippled by the loss of their best leaders?
This story should lead the news every day.
