Elon Musk’s rapid unscheduled disassembly of the US government

Almost 250 years after the Declaration of Independence, America has gotten herself a new king. His name is Elon Musk.

“Wait a minute,” you may be saying. “What about President Donald Trump?” Trump ran, much like Silvio Berlusconi before him, primarily to avoid prosecutions. He has never liked being president and he has already gotten what he wants. He’s not the power center. Musk is.

Consequently I will not be bothering with whatever statements Katie Miller of DOGE and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt are putting out. We all have eyes; we can see what is going on. Musk has taken over the civilian government. This is a billionaire pulling a heist on the entire nation.

Here are the things Musk has installed his IT Renfields at:

We all learned in 2022, with the weaponization of SWIFT, that technical systems are a source of power. By controlling the infrastructure, Musk controls the nation. The two most obviously significant agencies on that list are the Treasury, which controls the money, and the Department of Energy, which controls the nuclear secrets. Less obviously significant but equally troubling is the General Services Administration, which is effectively the infrastructure of the government itself.

The GSA, an agency most of us have never had to think about, is in charge of buildings, sure. But also it runs an awful lot of the technical infrastructure of the government — it is basically the feds’ IT. If the US government were a brain, the GSA is the brain stem, the part that manages heartbeats and breathing so they’re below the level of thoughts.

“This is the largest data breach and the largest IT security breach in our country’s history—at least that’s publicly known,” a contractor who’s worked on classified systems at government agencies told The Atlantic.

Here’s the threat intelligence team at the Treasury, as reported by Wired, just to underline the seriousness of Musk’s access: “We further recommend that DOGE members be placed under insider threat monitoring and alerting after their access to payment systems is revoked. Continued access to any payment systems by DOGE members, even ‘read only,’ likely poses the single greatest insider threat risk the Bureau of the Fiscal Service has ever faced.” After The Washington Post inquired about that memo, the person who wrote it was ”removed” by contractor Booz Allen. But a second warning memo was also sent by a Treasury insider, warning of risks from DOGE.

Judge Paul Englemayer granted a temporary restraining order to 19 states seeking to halt Musk and crew’s access to the Treasury systems. Englemayer wrote that the states would experience “irreparable harm in the absence of injunctive relief.” Why? “Both because of the risk that the new policy presents of the disclosure of sensitive and confidential information and the heightened risk that the systems in question will be more vulnerable than before to hacking,” he wrote.

Fantastic. This is an agency that controls $5 trillion, and contains sensitive personal information for — among others — American spies abroad. It’s also, by the way, tax season. And now Trump says that “we have less debt than we thought of?” Boy, that sounds like a fun new way to default on a loan. It’s a terrifying prospect if you are a finance-knower: US bonds are the safest assets in the world, at least for now, and making them risky shakes the foundation of the global financial system. On the other hand, Trump might just be saying shit again.

Oh, sure, yes, there are those challenges in the courts to Musk’s access to the Treasury, and to shutting down USAID, which may well have been illegal. Here’s the thing: Musk doesn’t care about laws. Remember when he was meant to receive a “Twitter sitter” after the time he pretended he wanted to take Tesla private? The courts ordered one. It has never appeared. Or maybe we should talk about the depositions he hasn’t shown up for. Or all the government requests to fix Tesla’s so-called Autopilot that he’s ignored. And given the lying about the Treasury access, I don’t think we can rule out the possibility that Musk and co. simply lie under oath. He’s also got himself a cadre of elite lawyers, two of whom clerked for conservative Supreme Court justices, to argue for him in court.

So it’s no real surprise that he’s posting stuff on X that indicates he isn’t taking the court order to back away from the Treasury seriously. “Corrupt judges protecting corruption,” Musk wrote of the court order. Congressman Darrell Issa wrote that he was “immediately introducing legislation next week to stop these rogue judges,” which Musk quoted with American flag emoji. Vice President JD Vance, the nation’s highest-ranking kiss-ass, wrote on X, “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” Vance has always been in the running to be Yale Law School’s most embarrassing graduate, a competitive endeavor; calling for a coup in violation of his oath of office and a basic understanding of the Constitution pretty much cements him at the top of the list.

Are we still a nation of laws? Is anyone checking to see if the court order will be followed? About the only things Musk hasn’t taken over are the military and law enforcement. What happens if he obviously ignores a court order, and the court issues a warrant for his arrest? Does domestic law enforcement side with the court or with Musk?

Regardless of Musk’s personal contempt for the law, there’s also the fact of the January 6th pardons, which sent a clear message: breaking the law is okay, as long as Trump thinks it’s okay. And since Trump is effectively Musk’s puppet, Musk has carte blanche. The most these court orders might do is give cover to staffers at these departments to deny Musk’s team access to the things they want. Of course, we already know those staffers can be fired and replaced.

What has our Congress been up to while this hostile takeover of our government has been happening in plain sight? Well, the Democrats are still writing strongly worded letters, and showing up at protests, and allowing glorified mall cops to turn them away from the departments Musk has already conquered. The closest they’ve come to action is Senator Cory Booker’s threat of a debt default or government shutdown. The Republicans… aside from the ones vociferously approving of Musk usurping their control over the nation’s spending, they appear to be Milford Men. They are ready to make a horse a consul.

Musk is now flexing his power. After his staffer Marko Elez resigned for saying he “was racist before it was cool,” Musk put up a poll on X, the go-to groyper platform, asking if Elez should be reinstated. As of this writing, the answer was “yes.” Elez had read and write access to the Treasury’s systems.

Should Elez come back? Local lapdog Vance thinks so! (Sure sounds like Vance is taking orders from Musk rather than the other way around.) Musk then posted that Elez “will be brought back.” That does rather make it clear who’s in charge, doesn’t it?

So now that Musk has control of the guts of the government, let’s consider his extraordinarily reckless history with payments and IT systems. When Musk was running the company that would become PayPal, it had what his coworker and buddy Peter Thiel called “a runaway fraud problem.” When Thiel thought about writing a book about the experience, he said he’d title the Musk chapter “The Man Who Knew Nothing about Risk.”

This may explain why Musk has hired Edward Coristine, who was fired from a cybersecurity firm for “leaking internal information to the competitors,” according to an internal message reported by Bloomberg. Oh, and also he’s on a watch list for federal cybercrime enforcement, and worked at a startup with convicted hackers. Now, of course, he’s got access to our government’s internal systems. Neat! Also there’s Gavin Kliger, who seems to have his own interest in white supremacy. It’s unclear what he does at the Office of Personnel Management, but he probably should not be in that building at all.

No wonder they’re hiding from the regular USDS employees.

This kind of sloppiness makes sense for those of us who followed Musk’s Twitter takeover. Musk has a real interest in moving fast and breaking things, with an emphasis on breaking things. For instance, there’s the time a “bug” restored deleted tweets. Or that time private tweets were made public. Or the older images that no longer displayed.

Now, imagine this at the Treasury, with a bunch of children who don’t know COBOL toying with the systems. Even a slight bug can fuck up trillions of dollars — during tax season. I don’t want to think about what happens with a bug in the code at DoE, because one possible answer is a leak of our nuclear secrets — which is something we, as a nation, used to take so seriously that we executed people.

Oh sure, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright says that the DOGE dorks don’t have access to nuclear secrets but hey, remember when the Treasury said DOGE didn’t have write access and that was not true at all?

Even discounting the possibility of some catastrophic mistake, let’s think about what success would look like for King Elon. Judging by his constant, unhinged posts on X, his hiring practices, and his support of Germany’s far-right party, it seems like he’s down with white supremacy. That also clears up any question about his let’s-argue-about-whether-it’s-a-Nazi-salute “gesture” at the inauguration; it was meant both to signal he could say or do anything he wants without consequence and to fire up his base of racists. So that probably means immigration cutoffs except in the cases of H-1bs that now work like indentured servitude, and government pressure on anyone who hires women, trans people, or non-white men. The non-prosecution of hate crimes, obviously. I’m not confident in continued protections for abortion or even birth control, because of Musk’s weird pronatalist thing.

Musk’s paramount goal, however, is always for Musk to acquire more money and power. This usually comes at the expense of literally everyone else.

So it’s not hard to imagine that means his AI endeavor gets embedded in the government, X becomes the main platform for all government communications (and maybe also the main payment provider, just like WeChat, because that’s the kind of thing you can do in an authoritarian government), Starlink becomes the de facto internet provider, and suddenly every government official drives a Cybertruck. What happens to the other tech giants? Well, turns out they were sucking up to the wrong guy. Bad news for Blue Origin and OpenAI: King Elon holds a grudge.

Anyone who objects gets shipped to Guantanamo, or better yet, El Salvador. After all, Musk already has a pet prosecutor, Ed Martin, who (while not advocating for the last wave of insurrectionists) told Musk that he’d begin proceedings at Musk’s referral and anyone who has “broken the law or even acted simply unethically” can expected to be chased “to the end of the Earth.” This is to say nothing of the possibility of stochastic violence from white supremacists, spurred by posts on X.

The only thing we all really have going for us is that Musk has a tiny team. Sure, they can download a ton of sensitive government data — not great! — but they can’t run all of these agencies at once. And none of these people has the 20 years’ experience with COBOL that would be necessary to take this stuff over quickly. Leaving aside Musk’s propensity for fucking around and finding out, his ability to control all these systems remains somewhat limited by his staffing. Maybe he can get Trump’s people to help him, but given Musk’s arrogance, I suspect Musk will want to hand-pick a team; I’d guess he assumes Trump’s people are idiots, given how easily he’s run through them.

But the more systems Musk has access to, and the more data he can futz around with, the more likely it becomes that something catastrophic happens. Because it seems Congress won’t act, and Musk can ignore the courts at will, it seems that the defense of citizens’ private data, classified information, and all government payments falls on government staffers and their unions alone.

There’s a reason Musk-hater Steve Bannon has been daring him to start taking a look at the Pentagon. Bannon knows that’s where this all falls apart. The military has been suspiciously quiet about this direct threat to national security, and there’s no telling how the spies feel. Given how much of the government Musk has taken over, an anti-Musk junta isn’t beyond the pale — and while Musk presumably has private security, there are a lot more people in, say, the Army.

This strikes me as an all-or-nothing action for Musk. If he wins, he rules the most powerful nation on Earth. If he loses, he’s going to have legal headaches for the rest of his life, maybe even the sort that land him in jail. X continues to hemorrhage money, Tesla’s declining sales catch up with the company, and maybe worst for him, he’s publicly humiliated — having gone from King Musk to nothing at all. I expect him to fight tooth and nail to hold on to the power he’s grabbed. The question is if he’ll have to.