The unclear, unchecked, and unvetted power being given to Elon Musk should be of grave concern to us all. As James Joyner noted this morning, he has been given vast access to key systems in the US government. It is not outside of the realm of possibility at the moment that he and his team could create vast harm to millions of people who rely on direct payments from the federal government for their basic health and welfare.
Allowing an unelected and unaccountable individual this kind of power and access is improper and scary. He has not been Senate confirmed (although, granted, that isn’t a huge obstacle these days) nor has he really been vetted in any way. He is an informal advisor to the president. But the level of access he is being given is unprecedented and unnecessary.
I will confess, I initially thought that DOGE was a juvenile joke (kind of like naming an agency the Federal Assessment and Reform Taskforce) which would amount to no more than the typical blue ribbon commission that would make recommendations about fraud and waste. I hoped, at least, that it was just Trump throwing Musk a bone.
I never would have guessed that within two weeks Musk would have access to the Treasury’s payment system.
I would note that CNN is correct, We do not know what exactly Elon Musk is doing to the federal government, and that is highly, highly disturbing.
“This is the critical battle to restore power to the PEOPLE from the massive unelected bureaucracy!” he wrote on the social media platform he owns, pushing people to rally at events opposing the use of taxpayer dollars to fund NGOs, nonprofits unaffiliated with the government that are supposed to do good works.
But, of course, this is nonsense. The payment authorized by the bureaucracy were made by the elected representatives of the people in Congress. Musk, and DOGE, are the ones who are unelected and lack any kind of democratic accountability. Yes, they were given access by the elected president, but despite the rhetoric being spouted about mandates, winning the presidency does not legally entitle you to do whatever you want.
CNN lists some of the specific Musk associates now in positions of power in Washington.
OPM confirmed to me that Amanda Scales, who used to work for Musk’s AI company xAI, is now chief of staff at OPM. Brian Bjelde, whose Linkedin profile still lists him as a SpaceX employee, is now a senior director, and so is Anthony Armstrong, a banker who worked with Musk to take over Twitter.
The New York Times report included other Musk allies in positions at other agencies, including the General Services Administration, which oversees federal real estate. Despite encouraging workers to return to the office, Musk also sees getting rid of government real estate or leases, and dispersing remaining workers throughout the country, as a cost saving technique.
Musk’s Twitter feed shows him ranting about regulations, corruption, and spending. The target at the writing of this post is the National Endowment for Democracy, for reasons that are unclear to me.
And then there is stuff like this:
Look, I don’t know what Lutheran Family Services does, but just because there is a word in the title of the entity that Mike Flynn (known QAnon devotee) and Elon Musk don’t like doesn’t mean it is corrupt. The main hospitals in Montgomery, AL have “Baptist” in their name. Will DOGE shut down federal dollars going to those entities?
Do I have to state that Musk and DOGE have not legitimate right to determine which payments are legal and which are not?
This is madness.
I was concerned enough with Musk’s penchant for performing Nazi-inspired symbolism and Holocaust minimizing, but we are now ranging into new levels of alarm. But perhaps folks who minimize such things can see the need for concern.
Along the lines of some of what James noted in his post (especially the stuff from Henry Farrell) all of this sounds far too much like the kind of TechBros should lead us nonsense espoused by Curtis Yarvin and others of his ilk.
Indeed, to expand on Yarvin’s influence on all of this, note the following passage from a 2022 article in The Nation.
Yarvin’s present claim to fame is that GOP Senate hopefuls Blake Masters in Arizona and J.D. Vance in Ohio have both favorably cited a key plank of his plan for post-democratic overhaul—the strongman plan to “retire all government employees,” which goes by the jaunty mnemonic “RAGE.” As Yarvin envisions it, RAGE is the great purge of the old operating system that clears the path for a more enlightened race of technocrats to seize power and launch the social order on its rational course toward information-driven self-realization. Collateral casualties in this “reboot” will be the nexus of pusillanimous yet all-powerful institutions Yarvin has dubbed “the Cathedral”—the universities, the elite media, and anything else that’s fallen prey to liberal perfidy as the heroic apostles of hard-right digital truth-telling have come wearily to know it.
This sounds painfully real at the moment.
I would also note this from The Verge:
There’s a tendency to not take people like Yarvin seriously. He and other far-right bloggers like Bronze Age Pervert position themselves as provocateurs and couch their work in absurd metaphors — it sounds inherently ridiculous to issue warnings about a guy who writes long essays about dark elves. And if you do take them seriously, they’ll say they were just trolling. But if you look past his edgelord posture and baroque prose, Yarvin has spent the better part of a decade clearly describing what he wants: a dictatorship.
This, also, sounds painfully real. The piece notes Yarvin’s associate with Peter Thiel and the now Vice President of the United States. It seems like not all that long ago there was dismissal about worrying about Vance’s Twitter feed, and yet here we are. I would recommend the piece in full as it notes connectivity between Yarvin’s views, Kevin Roberts at Heritage/Project 2025, and Vance.
Musk stands at a confluence of two very dangerous self-images. He is of the whole TechBro ilk who think that they understand the world better than the rest of us muggles, and therefore ought to be allowed to rule us. He is also a billionaire, a group of people who very easily buy their own press their vast wealth confirms their general superiority.
And now he is being given access to what money the federal government spends, and on whom.
I would love for all of this to be a fever dream, but we are headed some some serious man-made disasters in the coming days, weeks, and months. The only questions are going to be: how many people get hurt, and how badly?
Some other bits and pieces that didn’t fit in above.
I had mentioned this in my post on the California water situation, but who can possibly justify DOGE being involved here? What in the world does DOGE have to do with/know about water management in California?
DOGE just showing up and causing havoc certainly feels a lot more like an authoritarian extralegal strike teams than it does an orderly, legal process to reform government, now doesn’t it?
