Elon Musk's DOGE: A Controversial Fusion of Tech and Government Power

The Tesla Revolt

The company's fate will reveal how strong the foundation of Elon Musk's influence really is. Donald Trump may be pleased enough with Elon Musk, but even as the Tesla CEO is exercising his newfound power to essentially undo whole functions of the federal government, he still has to reassure his investors. Lately, Musk has delivered for them in one way: The value of the company's shares has skyrocketed since Trump was reelected to the presidency of the United States. But Musk had much to answer for on his recent fourth-quarter earnings call -- not least that in 2024, Tesla's car sales had sunk for the first time in a decade. Profits were down sharply too. Usually, when this happens at a car company, the CEO issues a mea culpa, vows to cut costs, and hypes vehicles coming to market soon. Instead, Musk beamed about robotics, artificial intelligence, and Tesla's path to being "worth more than the next top five companies combined." This is the vision he has been selling investors for years: Making cars -- a volatile, hypercompetitive business with infamously low profit margins -- was only the start for Tesla. Its future business will be making fleets of self-driving taxis and humanoid robots trained for thankless manual labor. Whether his vision has any connection to reality is hotly debated by many AI and robotics experts, but most Wall Street analysts put their faith in Musk. And he has, at times, delivered on wildly ambitious goals. Shares jumped again after the call. (Tesla did respond to a request for comment; a DOGE official did not respond to an email seeking comment.) Musk gets the benefit of the doubt from investors because -- despite undelivered promises, half-baked ideas, and forgotten plans -- he has made Tesla worth, on paper at least, more than essentially the rest of the auto industry combined. His funders are asked to buy Musk's picture of the future, and the recent enthusiasm for Tesla stock suggests they believe that his political influence will help him get there. Musk needs that belief to hold. Tesla's stock price is the largest source of his enormous wealth and, by extension, his influence; if his plans succeed, that stock is also his clearest shot at achieving trillionaire status. Right now, though, Tesla's primary business is still selling cars that people drive, and Musk himself may be the biggest reason that faith in Tesla could falter. For all of Musk's ire for the former president, Tesla did very well in the Joe Biden years. The Model Y is the world's best-selling electric vehicle and its best-selling car, period. The company has comfortably been out of its "money-losing start-up" phase for years. Although the competition among EV makers is heating up, the only individual company close to eating into Tesla's market share is China's BYD, which for the first time last year produced more EVs than Tesla did. Yet that competition can't entirely account for Tesla's latest, abysmal numbers. Last year, Tesla sales were down nearly 12 percent in the EV stronghold of California. And in Europe, where Musk is helping supercharge far-right politics, Tesla's sales were down 63 percent last month in France and 59 percent in Germany. This is happening even as the rest of the worldwide electric market is growing fast; nearly every car company that makes EVs saw sales gains in 2024, some of them huge. Musk's activism does seem to be turning off the affluent or middle-income progressive crowd that was traditionally Tesla's bread and butter. Look no further than how the company's new, updated Model Y has been received. Musk's army of fanboys on X was as effusive as ever, but outside the hard-core Tesla bubble, the SUV was met with a flood of Nazi jokes following Musk's Sieg heil-ish arm gesture at Trump's inauguration. This type of reaction goes beyond that one car; the Cybertruck has a unique penchant for being the target of vandalism, and people appear to be making a killing selling anti-Musk bumper stickers to disgusted Tesla owners. In covering the auto industry, I can't go a week without fielding emails from people asking for advice on the best EV alternatives to Tesla -- many from longtime Tesla owners who say they're ready to move on. In theory, Musk's rightward turn could help him swap out traditionally liberal buyers for more conservative ones, who usually tend to be more skeptical of EVs. And it's likely that EVs will become less polarizing along partisan lines over time as electrification becomes more common on new cars. Right now, however, even the deep-red-coded Cybertruck doesn't seem to be changing many minds about the concept of battery-powered cars. Take a recent report from the EV Politics Project, a nonprofit group that studies the partisan divide over electric cars. Their study indicates that although Musk himself is now viewed much more favorably by Trump voters and Republicans, he's not leading some seismic shift in how they view EVs. Nor is he obviously trying to get MAGA voters to buy the new Model Y. In fact, those who follow the auto industry closely wonder if Musk is still interested in running a car company at all. On that January earnings call, he offered only a boilerplate response about "more affordable" new Teslas coming soon; the word Cybertruck was not uttered once. He is, however, clearly focused on the company's "unsupervised" robotaxi service. (Imagine Uber, except with Model Ys and Model 3 sedans, and with no humans behind the wheel.) He claims that Tesla will launch the taxis in Austin in June, the first step toward turning the company into the AI powerhouse that Musk thinks will make it so valuable. Right now, his AI ventures are separate, but he's started mingling them with his ambitions for Tesla. Ultimately, his thinking -- which he's articulated in earnings and public appearances over a number of years -- is that his roving network of autonomous vehicles can use their cameras to capture huge quantities of data, and those data can be used to train AI networks. In the immediate future, Musk wants Tesla robotaxis everywhere, as soon as possible, and sleeping next door to the White House could help advance that part of his vision. Critics have expressed concerns that his newfound influence could also help stymie federal investigations into Tesla, which are probing the crash record of the company's "Full Self-Driving" technology and its claims about the technology's safety. And his current political position could help eliminate one of his oldest foes: regulations. Tesla has long clashed with environmental rules (last year, a California judge ordered Tesla to pay $1.5 million over allegations that it mishandled hazardous waste), labor laws (employees at a Tesla plant have said that the company failed to pay overtime, among other alleged violations), and safety ordinances (the company was recently fined for violating California's workplace-heat-safety rules at one of their plants). But the greatest roadblock to Musk's vision of robotaxis everywhere is arguably America's current patchwork of state-by-state rules and regulations for autonomous vehicles, which may allow self-driving cars in some places but not others. No federal standards currently exist, but creating rules favorable to the industry would speed things up -- especially if those rules were tailored to especially benefit Tesla. Musk's approach to Tesla's future has more than a few problems that the rest of the self-driving-car industry does not face. Tesla relies solely on cameras and AI for its automated-driving systems, rather than lidar and other more advanced sensors used by competitors. Plenty of experts think Tesla's strategy can never power true autonomous driving. And Tesla is already years behind robotaxi companies operating in many cities right now, most notably Google's Waymo. Musk's Tesla faces the rising threat of China's advancements in AI too: Investors are noticing BYD's autonomy-focused deal with tech upstart DeepSeek. And they're noticing where Musk's attention lies; as he holds court in the Oval Office, Tesla's stock has begun losing all those postelection gains. The most daunting problem, though, may be the same problem Musk has always had: people. Even if he does succeed in tearing down the regulatory state for the sake of his own companies, who's to say anyone will buy what they're selling. Any power Musk has in the future depends on turning millions of people into Tesla customers. If he can't do that -- or at least keep convincing investors that he'll be able to -- he's just another guy screaming online.

Elon Musk's A.I.-Fuelled War on Human Agency

Not long ago, the American public could have been forgiven for thinking of Elon Musk's vaunted Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as a version of a familiar Republican cost-cutting, government-shrinking project. The man who took over Twitter and slashed its staff by around eighty per cent would take a similarly aggressive tack against bureaucratic inefficiency, reining in budgets and laying off federal employees. In the past couple of weeks, though, it's become clear that Musk's aim within the Trump Administration goes further: he wants not only to reduce the U.S. government but to install his own technological vision of the future at its heart. To run his agency, Musk brought on a group of tech-company managers and inexperienced twentysomethings whose credentials included internships at SpaceX. We watched as this crew began interrogating federal employees about their jobs, interfering with the system that controls payments at the Treasury Department, and trawling government budgets while Musk used X, the social platform he owns, to call out the agencies and programs in his crosshairs. The team was aided in this demolition job by a suite of tools from the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence. Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla software engineer who is now a deputy commissioner at the Federal Acquisition Service, recently told workers at the General Services Administration that the agency will be driven by an "A.I.-first strategy," which includes plans for a chatbot to analyze its contracts. DOGE is reportedly using A.I. software to identify potential budget reductions at the Department of Education. Anecdotes are circulating about A.I. filters that scan Department of Treasury grant proposals for forbidden terms -- including "climate change" and "gender identity" -- and then block the proposals. "Everything that can be machine-automated will be," one government official told the Washington Post. "And the technocrats will replace the bureaucrats." The federal government is, in effect, suddenly being run like an A.I. startup; Musk, an unelected billionaire, a maestro of flying cars and trips to Mars, has made the United States of America his grandest test case yet for an unproved and unregulated new technology. He is hardly alone in his efforts to frame A.I. as a societal savior that will usher in a utopian era of efficiency. The tech investor Marc Andreessen recently posted on X that wages will "logically, necessarily" crash in the A.I. era -- but that A.I. will also solve the problem, by reducing the price of "goods and services" to "near zero." (Any explanation of how that would happen was not forthcoming.) Last month, Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI and perhaps Musk's primary nemesis, launched a five-hundred-billion-dollar data-center initiative called Stargate with the coöperation of Trump. But Musk, with his position as a close Presidential adviser, and with office space in the White House complex, is uniquely and unprecedentedly poised to fuse the agendas of government and Silicon Valley. (On Monday, in what looked like an effort to troll Altman and derail an investment deal, Musk led a group of investors in a nearly hundred-billion-dollar bid to acquire OpenAI.) In a recent article for the advocacy nonprofit Tech Policy Press, the respected A.I. researcher Eryk Salvaggio labelled Musk's activities as an "AI coup." A government run by people is cautious and slow by design; a machine-automated version will be fast and ruthless, reducing the need for either human labor or human decision-making. Musk's program has already halted operations altogether at the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was responsible for more than forty billion dollars in foreign aid in 2023, and at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency that may have drawn Musk's special notice for its track record of suing tech companies for deploying loosely regulated technology. Trump and Musk both love to blame the country's problems on the so-called deep state, the federal employees who maintain the government's day-to-day operations. As many of those people now find themselves locked out of their offices, with their work phones deactivated, a new, inherently undemocratic deep state is moving in to fill the void: a system imposed by machines and the tiny élite who designed them. With DOGE, Musk is not only sidelining Congress and threatening to defy the courts, helping to bring the country to the point of constitutional crisis; he is also smuggling into our federal bureaucracy the seeds of a new authoritarian regime -- techno-fascism by chatbot. Some policy-related decisions in our daily lives are already made with the help of artificial intelligence. A 2020 government-commissioned report identified the use of A.I. tools in departments including the S.E.C. and the Social Security Administration; OpenAI already runs ChatGPT Gov, a self-hosted version of its chatbot that's designed for secure government use. But the Muskian technocracy aims for something more expansive, using artificial intelligence to supplant the messy mechanisms of democracy itself. Human judgment is being replaced by answers spit out by machines without reasoned debate or oversight: cut that program, eliminate this funding, fire those employees. One of the alarming aspects of this approach is that A.I., in its current form, is simply not effective enough to replace human knowledge or reasoning. Americans got a taste of the technology's shortcomings during the Super Bowl on Sunday, when a commercial for Google's Gemini A.I. that ran in Wisconsin claimed, erroneously, that Gouda made up more than half of all global cheese consumption. Musk, though, appears to have few qualms about touting A.I.'s conclusions as fact. Earlier this month, on X, he accused "career Treasury officials" of breaking the law by paying vouchers that were not approved by Congress. His evidence for this claim was a passage about the law generated by Grok, X's A.I. model, as if the program were his lawyer. (Actual human legal experts quickly disputed the claim.) It will not be hard for Musk to yoke his vision of government by A.I. to a narrative of American exceptionalism that the MAGA crowd can get behind. Recently, a Chinese A.I. company called DeepSeek released an open-source model that produced results rivalling OpenAI's, using far fewer resources. This stark evidence of foreign technological competition has provided cover to tech companies to push for more aggressive A.I. development in the U.S., an A.I. iteration of the space race. Already, Trump has begun rolling back the Biden Administration's efforts at A.I. regulation. Ultimately, though, Musk's push for A.I. in government may be best understood as a marketing tactic for a technology that Silicon Valley sees as an investment too big to fail. A.I. is meant to be powerful enough to rule the world, so rule the world it must. In a recent blog post, Altman heralded artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical A.I. model that meets or exceeds human cognitive abilities, as "just another tool in this ever-taller scaffolding of human progress we are building together," though he admitted that "the balance of power between capital and labor could easily get messed up." Of course, what tech entrepreneurs deem progress doesn't always align with more prosaic understandings of the collective good. Musk's position in the White House might teach us that disruption is more tolerable in our social networks than in our Social Security checks. ♦

Why America Should Fear Elon, the Great and Powerful Wizard

Elon Musk speaks during an Inauguration Day rally in Washington, D.C. Elon Musk's role as the head of the so-called "Department of Government Efficiency" is on the surface a dramatic effort to overhaul the inefficiencies of federal bureaucracy. But beneath the rhetoric of cost-cutting and regulatory streamlining lies a troubling scenario. Musk has been appointed a "special government employee" of an office that was renamed the U.S. DOGE Service on the first day of President Donald Trump's second term. The Musk team's purported goals are to maximize efficiency and to eliminate waste and redundancy. That might sound like a bold move toward Silicon Valley-style innovation in governance. But the deeper motivations driving Musk's involvement are unlikely to be purely altruistic. Musk has an enormous corporate empire, ambitions in artificial intelligence, desire for financial power and a long-standing disdain for government oversight. His access to sensitive government systems and power to restructure agencies have positioned the president's biggest campaign donor to extract unprecedented financial and strategic benefits for both himself and his companies, which include the electric car company Tesla and space transport company SpaceX. One historical parallel in particular is striking. In 1600, the British East India Company, a merchant shipping firm, began with exclusive rights to conduct trade in the Indian Ocean region before slowly acquiring quasi-governmental powers and ultimately ruling with an iron fist over British colonies in Asia, including most of what is now India. In 1677, the company gained the right to mint currency on behalf of the British crown. As I explain in my forthcoming book "Who Elected Big Tech?" the U.S. is witnessing a similar pattern of a private company taking over government operations. Yet what took centuries in the colonial era is now unfolding at lightning speed in mere days through digital means. In the 21st century, data access and digital financial systems have replaced physical trading posts and private armies. Communications are the key to power now, rather than brute strength. Viewing Musk's moves as a power grab becomes clearer when examining his corporate empire. He controls multiple companies that have federal contracts and are subject to government regulations. SpaceX and Tesla, as well as tunneling firm The Boring Company, the brain science company Neuralink, and artificial intelligence firm xAI all operate in markets where government oversight can make or break fortunes. In his new role, Musk can oversee - and potentially dismantle - the government agencies that have traditionally constrained his businesses. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has repeatedly investigated Tesla's Autopilot system; the Securities and Exchange Commission has penalized Musk for market-moving tweets; environmental regulations have constrained SpaceX. Through DOGE, all these oversight mechanisms could be weakened or eliminated under the guise of efficiency. But the most catastrophic aspect of Musk's leadership at DOGE is its unprecedented access to government data. DOGE employees reportedly have digital permission to see data in the U.S. government's payment system, which includes bank account information, Social Security numbers and income tax documents. Reportedly, they have also seized the ability to alter the system's software, data, transactions and records. Multiple media reports indicate that Musk's staff have already made changes to the programs that process payments for Social Security beneficiaries and government contractors to make it easier to block payments and hide records of payments blocked, made or altered. But DOGE employees only need to be able to read the data to make copies of Americans' most sensitive personal information. A federal court has ordered that not to happen - at least for now. Even so, funneling the data into Grok, Musk's xAI-created artificial intelligence system, which is already connected with the Musk-owned X, formerly known as Twitter, would create an unparalleled capability for predicting economic shifts, identifying government vulnerabilities and modeling voter behavior. That's an enormous and alarming amount of information and power for any one person to have. Like Trump himself and many of his closest advisers, Musk is also deeply involved in cryptocurrency. The parallel emergence of Trump's own cryptocurrency and DOGE's apparent alignment with the cryptocurrency known as Dogecoin suggests more than coincidence. I believe it points to a coordinated strategy for control of America's money and economic policy, effectively placing the United States in entirely private hands. The genius - and danger - of this strategy lies in the fact that each step might appear justified in isolation: modernizing government systems, improving efficiency, updating payment infrastructure. But together, they create the scaffolding for transferring even more financial power to the already wealthy. Musk's authoritarian tendencies, evident in his forceful management of X and his assertion that it was illegal to publish the names of people who work for him, suggest how he might wield his new powers. Companies critical of Musk could face unexpected audits; regulatory agencies scrutinizing his businesses could find their budgets slashed; allies could receive privileged access to government contracts. This isn't speculation - it's the logical extension of DOGE's authority combined with Musk's demonstrated behavior. Critics are calling Musk's actions at DOGE a massive corporate coup. Others are simply calling it a coup. The protest movement is gaining momentum in Washington, D.C., and around the country, but it's unlikely that street protests alone can stop what Musk is doing. Who can investigate a group designed to dismantle oversight itself? The administration's illegal firing of at least a dozen inspectors general before the Musk operation began suggests a deliberate strategy to eliminate government accountability. The Republican-led Congress, closely aligned with Trump, may not want to step in; but even if it did, Musk is moving far faster than Congress ever does. Taken together, all of Musk's and Trump's moves lay the foundation for what cryptocurrency investor and entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan calls "the network state." The idea is that a virtual nation may form online before establishing any physical presence. Think of the network state like a tech startup company with its own cryptocurrency - instead of declaring independence and fighting for sovereignty, it first builds community and digital systems. By the time a Musk-aligned cryptocurrency gained official status, the underlying structure and relationships would already be in place, making alternatives impractical. Converting more of the world's financial system into privately controlled cryptocurrencies would take power away from national governments, which must answer to their own people. Musk has already begun this effort, using his wealth and social media reach to engage in politics not only in the U.S. but also several European countries, including Germany. A nation governed by a cryptocurrency-based system would no longer be run by the people living in its territory but by those who could could afford to buy the digital currency. In this scenario, I am concerned that Musk, or the Communist Party of China, Russian President Vladimir Putin or AI-surveillance conglomerate Palantir, could render irrelevant Congress' power over government spending and action. And along the way, it could remove the power to hold presidents accountable from Congress, the judiciary and American citizens. All of this obviously presents a thicket of conflict-of-interest problems that are wholly unprecedented in scope and scale. The question facing Americans, therefore, isn't whether the government needs modernization - it's whether they're willing to sacrifice democracy in pursuit of Musk's version of efficiency. When we grant tech leaders direct control over government functions, we're not just streamlining bureaucracy - we're fundamentally altering the relationship between private power and public governance. I believe we're undermining American national security, as well as the constitutional power of We, the People. The most dangerous inefficiency of all may be Americans' delayed response to this crisis. Allison Stanger is a distinguished endowed professor at Middlebury College in Vermont and co-director of the GETTING-Plurality Research Network at Harvard University. Her forthcoming book is "Who Elected Big Tech?" This commentary was produced in partnership with The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization dedicated to bringing the knowledge of academic experts to the public.

Vance boosts AI industry in France as Trump embraces the 'broligarchy'

The White House's recent pro-tech agenda highlights the gap between Trump's populist rhetoric on the campaign trail and the policies he's pursuing now that he's in office. PARIS -- During his first weeks in office, President Donald Trump unleashed a blitz of industry-friendly tech directives that stand to further enrich some of his wealthiest supporters in Silicon Valley. In rapid succession, he ordered agencies to unwind artificial intelligence regulations that tech leaders say could dampen innovation. He signed an order intended to make the United States the "world capital" of cryptocurrencies. He established a new sovereign wealth fund that tech investors are eying as a potential vehicle for new investment in their companies. And perhaps most prominently, he established the U.S. DOGE Service, which some venture capitalists say will weed out unnecessary regulations and bureaucratic processes that make it hard to build companies. And on Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance warned world leaders at a global AI summit that regulating the development of AI would be "paralyzing one of the most promising technologies." He also criticized a slate of European Union laws that regulate American tech companies, aligning with U.S. executives who have long called the regulations burdensome for business. The rise of the self-described "broligarchy" highlights the gap between Trump's populist rhetoric on the campaign trail and the policies he's pursuing now that he's in office. As Trump crisscrossed battleground states for raucous rallies last year, he focused on the rising prices of food and trade policies that "put American workers first." The former real estate magnate mused about how he was more comfortable among blue collar workers than Wall Street executives. Skip to end of carousel Trump presidency Follow live updates on the Trump administration. We're tracking Trump's progress on campaign promises, his picks for key roles and legal challenges to his executive orders and actions. End of carousel His stump speech rarely touched on the topics du jour of Silicon Valley, focusing more on issues discussed at the kitchen table than in the start-up boardroom. But now, the pro-tech agenda is outshining some of the economic issues that he campaigned on -- potentially threatening his political clout with workers who supported his promises to "Make America Great Again" by elevating their interests. "The deregulation he already has pushed could end up raising people's costs," said Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "He's going to have a problem." A majority of Americans say that Trump is doing what he promised on the campaign trail, according to a new poll from CBS News-YouGov. However, 66 percent of respondents said that he is not focusing enough on lowering prices of goods and services. Only 35 percent of respondents said they think Trump's policies will make them financially better off. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. As Democrats scramble to find a message to counter the onslaught of action in Trump's first weeks, they have focused their criticism on his ties to unelected tech billionaires, especially his largest donor turned adviser, Elon Musk. Trump's warm relationship with Silicon Valley also marks a radical shift from just a few years ago. When top social media companies suspended his accounts in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Trump sued them and threatened to throw Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in prison for life. He signed an executive order in May 2020 that sought to overhaul Section 230, a key provision of internet law that shields tech companies from litigation over the posts people share on their sites. And he railed about concentration in the sector, as his Justice Department filed a landmark antitrust lawsuit against Google. But this time, the same CEOs he once pilloried sat as guests of honor under the Capitol Rotunda at his inauguration, including Washington Post owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Trump has given many tech leaders key roles in his administration, including installing prominent venture capitalist David Sacks as the White House crypto and AI czar. Trump has consistently backed Musk's strategy, even amid a barrage of legal challenges to the unprecedented access that Musk is seeking to government data sources. Tech CEOs and venture capitalists have so far been jubilant over the Trump administration's approach, praising the optimistic outlook following years of criticism of the industry. "Vice President Vance said a lot of things I really liked," said Open AI CEO Sam Altman during an event in Paris hours after Vance's remarks. Altman, who recently visited the White House to tout a $100 billion data center deal, said he was particularly energized by Vance's focus on the economic opportunity created by AI, which the vice president referred to as "lightning in a bottle." "Incredible to see a political leader translate how a new technology can promote human flourishing with such clarity," wrote Katherine Boyle, a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, on the social network X. "Exceptional speech." Trump has also made moves to give tech leaders greater input in policies moving forward, after many said they supported him after feeling shut out by the Biden administration. Trump signed an executive order that would establish a President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, which will include 24 members from the industry as well as government and academia. This group will be led by two tech leaders with ties to venture capitalist Peter Thiel, Sacks and Michael Kratsios, Trump's nominee for director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. The White House is also in the process of setting up a council of crypto leaders, which top executives are jockeying to join. Trump signed these executive orders in the Oval Office last month, with Sacks standing next to the Resolute Desk. After, Trump handed Sacks the black marker he used and told reporters that people were constantly asking him how he was able to get Sacks to work in the administration. "There's nobody like this guy," Trump said. Trump's supporters in the tech industry have fervently supported the efforts to roll back Biden-era rules and the broad efforts of DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, to downsize the federal government. Tech investor Jason Calacanis, who once described himself as a "Never Trumper," said on the popular tech podcast "All In" that he would give Trump a B letter grade for his work so far. He deducted points for Trump's grants of clemency to Jan. 6 rioters convicted of assaulting police officers and seditious conspiracy against the United States, as well as his decision to launch a meme coin. "That's the stuff that's going to derail this," Calacanis said. "He has to stay with the 2.0 agenda, as hard as it is." As Musk's allies cheer on DOGE, critics say DOGE's efforts threaten American workers who helped elect Trump. As Musk applies his corporate playbook of slashing personnel and replacing tasks with artificial intelligence to agencies across the federal government, Alondra Nelson, the principal deputy director for science and society of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during the Biden administration, said this initiative is a test case for Silicon Valley's vision for the future of the American workforce. "People who work in the AI industry in Silicon Valley have a future imagining in which you have no workers at all and AI does all of the work," she said. "That is at loggerheads with a populist agenda that says it's supposed to be investing in American workers and empowering American workers and supporting the American public." By rescinding the Biden AI executive order, the Trump administration is undermining ongoing work to ease that transition for workers, Nelson said. Under the order, the Labor Department developed a series of guidelines for employers to ensure they were protecting workers' rights as they introduce AI in their businesses. Now, the webpage redirects to an error. Sacks and other tech leaders have argued that the Biden order had created too many regulatory requirements that slowed companies down, allowing China to catch up in the AI race. They say that the recent release of a new artificial intelligence chatbot from the Chinese company DeepSeek shows the need for these rules to be rolled back. "It felt like that Biden EO was written in a vacuum in which the U.S. was the only player in AI," Sacks said on an episode of "All In," which he used to co-host. "It's pretty clear China is competitive." Alexandra Reeve Givens, the president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, said it's a "fallacy" that regulation and innovation are at odds. "The need has never been more urgent for users to tell what tools they can trust," she said, which she argued requires regulation. As Trump finishes his first month, political consultant Abby McCloskey said many of his supporters do not see his alliance with tech as undermining populist promises because they view Musk as a creative outsider who can "drain the swamp" -- separate from who they view as the Washington elites. "My sense is that the average person still thinks Trump is there for them -- whether rightly or wrongly -- and is not particularly bothered by involvement with Musk or AI or the rest of it," she said.

What Elon Musk could do with the digital keys to the kingdom

Elon Musk has quickly amassed incredible power of the government's digital infrastructure. Credit: KEVIN LAMARQUE/POOL/AFP via Getty Image Since late January, Elon Musk and the staff of his Department of Government Efficiency task force, or DOGE, have systematically accessed the digital networks and information databases that power the federal government. Among their first targets were the Treasury's payment system and the government's human resources department, known as the Office of Personnel Management, which maintains information on millions of federal employees. DOGE staff have also reportedly accessed payment and contracting systems for Medicare and Medicaid, as well as similar databases for the Department of Veterans Affairs. Musk is the CEO of companies with billion-dollar government contracts as well as a political operative. Last year, he spent more than $290 million to help elect President Trump and other Republicans. He claims that DOGE's activities are purely aimed at identifying waste and fraud. But political experts say that the systems and data potentially available to Musk also give him unprecedented power over his allies, enemies, business competitors, and the American people. One expert on authoritarianism, historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, called his actions a "new kind of coup." Many of Musk's actions appear to violate federal law, according to The Washington Post. Georgetown University Prof. Abraham L. Newman told Mashable that the information Musk and DOGE have reportedly accessed "basically tells you everything about our society." When this data is maintained by neutral civil servants to execute core government functions, like issuing Social Security payments to beneficiaries, that digital infrastructure is simply part of making "the trains run on time." And yet "when they start to be used for other purposes, for political purposes, then they can be extremely extremely dangerous," and used to "achieve political objectives," says Newman, author of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy. The information Musk has access to now, even if in a read-only format as one Treasury official insisted, may include Social Security numbers, federal employee health and personnel records, as well as federal student loan data. Speaking anonymously to The Atlantic, one federal contractor with experience working on classified government information-security systems called the situation "The largest data breach and the largest IT security breach in our country's history -- at least that's publicly known." Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren said this week that Musk may be able to view Americans' payment history and bank account numbers, among other types of personal data. "Elon now has the power to suck out all of that information for his own use," she said. Musk may also be able to view federal contracts held by companies that may or may not be competitors to Musk's own businesses, which include Tesla, SpaceX, and the social media platform X. Musk has yet to publicly produce an ethics waiver for his work with DOGE, as required by government employees who have conflicts of interest, nor has he publicly divested himself from his companies. Though the Treasury Department says DOGE has read-only access to its payment system, WIRED reported that one engineer linked to Musk had gained administrative privileges over the software that controls Social Security payments and tax returns, among other critical payments made by the federal government. That DOGE employee resigned Thursday, after the Wall Street Journal identified his previous social media posts that promoted racism and eugenics. By Friday, Musk was lobbying for him to return via a poll on X. While the Justice Department has limited DOGE's access to the payment system for now, any renewed administrative privileges could be used by Musk to stop payments he deemed fraudulent or wasteful, Newman says. Indeed, CNN has reported that Musk's associates at the Treasury Department asked its acting secretary to cease all U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) payments via the department's own processing system. The agency, which Musk succeeded in gutting this week, provides food, disaster relief, and medical assistance to some of poorest people in the world. University of Michigan professor Elizabeth Popp Berman, in a recent Liberal Currents essay called "Personal Discretion Over the Treasury's Payments System Means the End of Democracy," outlined the stakes of Musk's control over the government's payment systems, particularly if courts do not restrain him. "Having a president -- or, even more so, an unelected billionaire -- hold direct, granular control of nearly seven trillion dollars is power beyond the Founders' wildest dreams," Berman wrote. 2) Reward allies and punish enemies. Newman says that Musk could use administrative power over payments systems to divert resources to allies and target people or entities that he, or President Trump, doesn't like. Both men are known to attack their enemies on social media and in public. Trump, for example, said those involved with the House committee that investigated the January 6 attack "should go to jail." On his social media platform X, Musk recently accused Treasury officials of "breaking the law," without providing evidence. 3) Gain a massive competitive advantage over other business leaders. Since there seems to be no firewall between Musk's activity as a special government employee and his role as a CEO, Newman says people in business should be particularly alarmed by his access to federal data. A rival company could never outcompete a Musk enterprise that understood the government's inner workings, contracts and payment systems, Newman says. He adds that such a dynamic has the potential to undermine fair and free markets in the U.S. In the midst of DOGE's digital government takeover, Musk's social media company X announced that it was partnering with Visa to let users connect their checking and debit accounts in order to transfer funds to their X account. Musk has long wanted to transform X into a payment system for "everything." It's possible that DOGE's scouring of the federal government's own payment system could also benefit Musk's business aspirations, and would create conflicts of interest for any business leader in that position. 4) Use AI to analyze federal spending and contracts. Musk plans to use some form of artificial intelligence to analyze federal spending and contracts, according to the New York Times. It's unclear whether this would be an AI system that Musk owns, or AI programs that the federal government already uses. The Washington Post reported on new DOGE efforts to analyze spending at the Department of Education, using AI software accessible via Microsoft's cloud computing service Azure. That service offers access to a number of AI tools. DOGE and Microsoft declined to comment on the details to the Post. Azure did recently add the Chinese AI platform DeepSeek to its suite of tools, according to Reuters. At this moment, there's no clarity on the risks of the AI software DOGE is using -- or the safeguards in place to prevent it from making mistakes or committing hallucinations. 5) Consolidate and centralize power over the government's basic functions. Up until a few weeks ago, America's basic but vital bureaucratic functions were managed by career civil servants with background clearances, all of whom took an oath to serve the United States Constitution. Those civil servants didn't have access to a centralized system they could command on their own. As Musk gains entry to multiple vital systems across the government, it may be possible for him to consolidate and centralize those powers so that only a handful of Trump loyalists can control them. 1) The government's digital infrastructure breaks. As DOGE engineers work, at apparent breakneck speed, to access and analyze key systems, Newman says that there's a very real chance they may unintentionally break them. For example, unapproved software changes could hobble systems that distribute Social Security and Medicare payments, Newman says. "Mucking about with systems that are built on sixty-year-old code could be deeply disruptive to vital government functions, shutting down the Social Security payments many rely on or cutting off payments to small businesses that depend on government contracts for survival," Berman wrote in her essay. 2) Bad actors breach Americans' data. The fact that Musk and DOGE have collected vast amounts of Americans' data in ways that may not comply with the government's security practices is likely of interest to foreign governments and bad actors, says Newman. That information is highly valuable to anyone who can steal it. The Atlantic reported that some of the government's databases requiring a security clearance -- including those for the Department of Justice and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives -- can include sensitive personal information, such as sexual history or mental health records. For many of us, data breaches have become a mundane fact of life. But as Newman notes, the scale and scope of this case make it unique. One person -- Musk -- has the potential to know something about everybody in the U.S., and that person works for the government. As the situation unfolds, Newman encourages Americans to consider the fate of the country's digital bureaucracy as key to democracy. "I think we should be very cognizant of the fact that these things that seem boring, and often have boring names, are often the place where power lies," he says.

In chaotic Washington blitz, Elon Musk's ultimate goal becomes clear

Billionaire Elon Musk's blitzkrieg on Washington has brought into focus his vision for a dramatically smaller and weaker government, as he and a coterie of aides move to control, automate -- and substantially diminish -- hundreds if not thousands of public functions. In less than three weeks, Musk's U.S. DOGE Service has followed the same playbook at one federal agency after another: Install loyalists in leadership. Hoover up internal data, including the sensitive and the classified. Gain control of the flow of funds. And push hard -- by means legal or otherwise -- to eliminate jobs and programs not ideologically aligned with Trump administration goals. The DOGE campaign has generated chaos on a near-hourly basis across the nation's capital. But it appears carefully choreographed in service of a broader agenda to gut the civilian workforce, assert power over the vast federal bureaucracy and shrink it to levels unseen in at least 20 years. The aim is a diminished government that exerts less oversight over private business, delivers fewer services and comprises a smaller share of the U.S. economy -- but is far more responsive to the directives of the president. Though led by Musk's team, this campaign is broadly supported by President Donald Trump and his senior leadership, who will be crucial to implementing its next stages. And while resistance to Musk has emerged in the federal courts, among federal employee unions and in pockets of Congress, allies say the billionaire's talent for ripping apart and transforming institutions has been underestimated -- as has been proved in the scant time since Trump's Jan. 20 inauguration. "Chaos is often the birthplace of new orders, new systems and new paradigms. Washington doesn't know how to deal with people who refuse to play the game by their rules," said investor Shervin Pishevar, a longtime friend of Musk's. Noting that Musk's political inexperience has long been derided in Washington, Pishevar added: "Donald Trump and Elon Musk are two different storms backed by a majority of Americans -- one political, one technological. But both are tearing through the same rotting structure." DOGE's early directives, its technology-driven approach and its interactions with the federal bureaucracy have provided an increasingly clear picture of their end goal for government -- and clarified the stakes of Trump's second term. If Musk is successful, the federal workforce will be cut by at least 10 percent. A mass bid for voluntary resignations -- blocked by a federal judge who has scheduled a Monday hearing -- is expected to be only the first step before mass involuntary dismissals. Those are likely to include new hires or people with poor performance reviews, according to a plan laid out in memos issued over the last week by the Office of Personnel Management, which is now under Musk's control. Unions this week advised workers to download their performance reviews and personnel files in preparation for having the information used against them. As much as half the government's nonmilitary real estate holdings are set to be liquidated, a move aimed at closing offices and increasing commute times amid sharp new limits on remote and telework. That is intended to depress workforce morale and increase attrition, according to four officials with knowledge of internal conversations at the General Services Administration, another agency taken over by Musk. "We've heard from them that they want to make the buildings so crappy that people will leave," said one senior official at GSA, which manages most federal property. "I think that's the larger goal here, which is bring everybody back, the buildings are going to suck, their commutes are going to suck." To replace the existing civil service, Musk's allies are looking to technology. DOGE associates have been feeding vast troves of government records and databases into artificial intelligence tools, looking for unwanted federal programs and trying to determine which human work can be replaced by AI, machine-learning tools or even robots. That push has been especially fierce at GSA, where DOGE staffers are telling managers that they plan to automate a majority of jobs, according to a person familiar with the situation. "The end goal is replacing the human workforce with machines," said a U.S. official closely watching DOGE activity. "Everything that can be machine-automated will be. And the technocrats will replace the bureaucrats." Skip to end of carousel Help us report on DOGE The Washington Post wants to hear from people affected by DOGE activities at federal agencies. You can contact our reporters by email or Signal encrypted message. Jeff Stein: jeff.stein@washpost.com or jstein_wapo.1066⁩ on Signal. Elizabeth Dwoskin: elizabeth.dwoskin@washpost.com or lizza_dwoskin.42 on Signal. Hannah Natanson: hannah.natanson@washpost.com or natanson.11 on Signal. Jonathan O'Connell: jonathan.oconnell@washpost.com or jonathanoc.76 on Signal. End of carousel The defenestration of the federal workforce could clear the way for Trump and Musk to cancel federal spending or eliminate entire agencies without approval of Congress, an unprecedented expansion of executive power. This week, Tom Krause, a Musk ally, was installed to oversee an agency in the U.S. Treasury Department responsible for executing trillions of dollars in annual payments to the full array of recipients, from contractors and grantees to military families and retirees. The Bureau of Fiscal Service has long simply cut the checks as ordered by various federal agencies, but Krause's appointment may change that. Meanwhile, White House officials have begun preparing budget documents that seek to cut some agencies and departments by as much as 60 percent, according to two other people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect internal deliberations. It's unclear whether Trump will feel compelled to ask Congress to approve those cuts. Though the Constitution specifically invests spending power in Congress, Musk and Trump budget chief Russell Vought have argued they should have authority to slash spending unilaterally. Taken together, experts say, these shifts amount to one of the most aggressive attempted overhauls of the federal government in American history. David Super, an administrative law professor at Georgetown University, said the proposed cuts would return the modern civil service to the late 19th century, before the enactment of anti-corruption reforms. Super said the two biggest previous power grabs were President Richard M. Nixon's 1973 attempt to cancel federal programs he didn't like and President Harry S. Truman's 1952 effort to nationalize the steel industry -- both of which were struck down by the courts. "The administration is doing the equivalent of these moves several times a day, every day," Super said. "The division we've had since 1787 is checks and balances -- that no one branch is preeminent, but that all three are required to work together. The vision here is an extremely strong executive and a subordinate judiciary and Congress." Musk's defenders say he and Trump are applying the long-standing idea of "zero based budgeting" -- taking all spending to zero and then rebuilding from scratch -- to the federal government for the first time. The moves are also characteristic of Musk's boundary-pushing management style. When he took over Twitter, he fired more than 75 percent of the staff. He also has had a preference for a lean workforce at Tesla, an opposition to unions at all his companies and a habitual willingness everywhere to push past norms and rules. Avik Roy, founder of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a think tank that promotes free markets, said the aggressive measures are justified in part by the severity of the nation's deteriorating fiscal picture and the staggering rise in regulations during the Biden administration. "There's been this massive freak-out over what Trump and Elon are doing. But frankly it's not been an evenhanded narrative. Because, when Biden was in charge, when Obama was in charge, they did a lot of things that were shot down 9-0 by the courts and there was not the degree of concern over breaking laws and precedent," Roy said, pointing to President Joe Biden's unilateral effort to cancel student loan debt. Of Trump and Musk, Roy said: "They're trying to say, 'Let's start with a clean slate, figure out which programs meet important objectives, and which are fraud and abuse.' How much of that will survive legal challenge remains to be seen, but if some get knocked down and some lead to more government efficiency, that's a good thing." Initially, few expected Musk to cause such seismic shifts. Musk said he wanted to remake the federal government from scratch -- to "delete" all that he viewed wasn't working and start over -- but few took that ambition literally, said Joe Lonsdale, an investor and Palantir co-founder who is friends with Musk. In the weeks after the election, Trump said Musk's "Department of Government Efficiency" would be a nongovernmental entity providing nonbinding advice to the administration. Some Trump advisers described it as place to sideline the overzealous billionaires who wanted to help Trump but knew nothing about how Washington worked. But within hours of taking office, Trump signed an executive order placing DOGE squarely inside the White House, in an office responsible for information technology, the U.S. Digital Service. Within days, it became clear that Musk's ambitions were not merely to remake government technology, as some speculated, but to revamp the entire federal bureaucracy. DOGE co-leader Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur and former GOP presidential candidate, quickly left the project amid differences over Musk's plans to dismantle government by foregrounding technology and bypassing Congress. "Everyone in the DC laptop class was extremely arrogant," Lonsdale said. "These people don't realize there are levels of competence and boldness that are far beyond anything in their sphere." The DOGE playbook has been the same everywhere, according to more than two dozen federal workers with direct knowledge of DOGE activities, as well as records obtained by The Post. The workers -- employed at OPM, GSA, FEMA, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Education Department -- spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. DOGE comes in fast, going around lower-level IT staffers, who typically raise privacy concerns but are overruled by senior leaders who fold to DOGE's demands. DOGE team members are then given superpowered user accounts enabling them to access and edit reams of government data with little to no oversight, the people said. That allows them to make changes at lightning speed, bypassing typical security protocols and alarming government employees tasked with keeping sensitive data secure. At OPM, for example, DOGE team members gained the ability to delete, modify or export the personal information of millions of federal workers and federal job applicants. After The Post reported on security concerns over such access, OPM's interim leadership on Friday directed DOGE agents to be removed from the sensitive personnel system. Federal workers who have been in meetings with DOGE staffers say their driving mission seems to be slashing spending -- both by canceling government contracts and eliminating jobs. They often appear tense, as it facing significant pressure from their bosses to move fast, said a person who has worked with them. At the GSA, acting administrator Stephen Ehikian -- a former Silicon Valley executive -- and other Trump appointees have pushed aggressively to cut costs by at least 50 percent, in part by eliminating half of all federal real estate nationwide. That measure was outlined in an email Tuesday to real estate staff from Michael Peters, the new head of the public buildings service. The messaging has appeared deliberately designed to increase attrition. In an email Tuesday, Ehikian warned of a "very high probability" that the 2,000 people who live more than 50 miles from a service station would be assigned farther away as part of his effort to reorganize the agency. Staff would not know whether they had been reassigned -- say, from North Carolina to Colorado -- until days after they had to decide whether to accept Musk's offer to resign with eight months pay. The Education Department may be furthest along the DOGE path to demolition. DOGE staffers there have begun using AI to analyze the department's financial data, aiming to cancel every contract that is not required by law or essential to the department's operations, according to two employees. On Friday, records obtained by The Post show DOGE staffer Ethan Shaotran editing the department's website. He also started putting together a new webpage that will track the cancellation of Biden-era grants that pushed "divisive and toxic ideologies through the K-12 system," according to the records. Under a heading called "Collected Lowlights," Shaotran listed nixed programs: A "JEDI" (Justice, Equity Diversity & Inclusion) training for teachers; workshops on "Decolonizing the curriculum" and "Becoming an anti-racist educator"; and "Using taxpayer funds to establish an 'Equity & Social Justice' center.'" "It's an incredible snatch and grab blitzkrieg," one Education Department official said. "We're like the French in the Maginot Line on the border with Germany, and they're like going around us through Belgium. They're just ... they're so fast." A nascent resistance may yet constrain Musk's ambitions. Already, multiple lawsuits have been filed to limit DOGE's access to sensitive federal material. Congress may object to entire federal agencies being abolished without its consent. And the civilian workforce has viewed "buyout" offers skeptically, with unions telling members who work from home not to accept any offers to resign while they plan a legal challenge. But people who have known Musk for years say his single-minded willingness to break rules in service of a larger mission is unparalleled. He once told Tesla employees they would lose stock options if they joined a union -- a comment deemed an unlawful threat by the National Labor Relations Board and the courts. He has tussled with the Federal Aviation Administration over launching rockets without proper permission and paid fines from the Environmental Protection Agency for dumping wastewater on protected Texas wetlands. For now, most congressional Republicans are supporting Trump and Musk's transformation of the federal government. But even some conservatives and longtime Trump allies have expressed reservations about their methods. "It's a wrecking ball, rather than a scalpel here. Not that I'd complain about that -- I've always said we need a wrecking ball," said Stephen Moore, an outside adviser to Trump who has been working to shrink government since the Reagan era. "But how much authority does the Constitution really give the president to completely reorganize the government on his own?" Moore said. "We're moving toward an imperial presidency. And whether or not that's a good thing remains to be seen." Emily Davies contributed to this report.

How Elon Musk is using tech to DOGE the government

Elon Musk is using his tech and leadership playbook in a crusade against the federal bureaucracy as he and his allies attempt to gain access to sensitive information and use emerging tech to speed up the process. Musk and his allies in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are harnessing tech -- from artificial intelligence (AI) to mysterious servers -- while taking a sledgehammer to federal spending and introducing modernized systems. The "move things fast and break things" approach is reminiscent of Musk's leadership at his other companies, notably the social platform X, where the billionaire, surrounded by a group of loyal deputies, slashed the employees and programs he deemed unnecessary. Musk's leadership style, described at times as reckless or intense, is central to his polarizing influence in the tech world. Now, he's bringing that attitude to Washington as Trump tasks him with leading efforts to reduce the federal workforce. "Because there's such energy behind different initiatives, it seems like they're willing not just to go fast and break things, but to shake things up and go until you're told, 'No,'" Sarah Kreps, director of the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University, said. The tech leader's execution of the DOGE task force mimics many of the steps he took after purchasing the social media platform X, then known as Twitter, in 2022. The chaotic takeover was marked by the quick firings of top executives, a reduction in at least half of the company's workforce and a rollback of some policies, often regardless of how the shift could impact the company. In an email in 2022, Musk encouraged company employees to leave or commit to being "extremely hardcore." The subject line was "A Fork in the Road." Nearly two years later, hundreds of thousands of federal employees received emails this week with the same "Fork in the Road" subject line that offered a deferred resignation, promising staffers would retain their full salary and benefits without working through Sept. 30. "The subject title...he didn't even bother to change it at all, and it was on purpose too, like a f -- you," one federal employee who received the email told The Hill on the condition of anonymity. The employee pointed to the legal battles former Twitter employees have since brought against Musk over the severance packages he promised them during layoffs. Employees who take the buyouts "can't say they were wrongfully terminated because you volunteered to do it," the employee said. "And then guess what? If they decide to change our minds and change the rules of the game afterward, well it will be a big f -- you [to feds] or 'fork you'," they quipped. "And that's what happened at Twitter." Like with his X takeover, Musk has installed a tight-knit team of allies to orchestrate DOGE's campaign. Many of these staffers are young adults with ties to his other companies, but little to no prior government work. Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer, was tapped to lead technology efforts at the General Services Administration (GSA), while Amanda Scales, a previous employee of Musk's AI firm, xAI, is now the chief of staff for the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). While Shedd and Scales' links to Musk are more public, the exact roles of some of his other deputies are a bit murky. Among those include Edward Coristine a 19-year-old working as a "DOGE engineer" with the Small Business Administration (SBA), according to a picture of his sba.gov email address obtained by The Hill. At OPM, Coristine has the title of "expert" with an opm.gov email, according to a different screenshot obtained by The Hill. Coristine previously interned at Musk's brain-computer interface Neuralink and told Northeastern University's student newspaper Musk was one of his idols and he did not plan to return to school this spring, ProPublica reported. Bloomberg reported that Coristine was fired from an internship after he was accused of sharing information with a competitor. Tech observers have mixed reactions when it comes to Musk's recruitment of some young workers, though they note it is nothing new for his playbook. "SpaceX did not become this hugely successful company ... by just going after mid-career people who've been doing this for decades," said Kreps. "They did it by going after precocious people who might, in some cases, not even have a college degree." Meanwhile, Musk, who now describes himself as "White House Tech Support" has taken on DOGE with just as much intensity as his other ventures. He claimed to be sleeping in DOGE's office, Wired reported this week, quickly drawing comparisons to when he said he used to sleep on the factory floor of Tesla. With a group of tech-oriented staffers running the show, it is no surprise the integration of emerging technology is playing a key role in DOGE's efforts. The executive order for DOGE reinforces the task force will pursue its agenda "by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize government efficiency and productivity." DOGE is reportedly using AI in various ways to slash costs and identify areas that need cutting. The New York Times reported earlier this week that Shedd informed GSA staffers that AI will be a central part of their efforts to reduce costs. GSA employees were informed leaders have discussed eliminating 50 percent of the agency's budget. WIRED later reported DOGE is seeking to develop "GSAi," a custom generative AI chatbot for the GSA, while The Washington Post reported the DOGE team is putting sensitive federal data into AI to determine potential spending cuts. The integration of AI into the federal government marks a major shift for the U.S. government, which has typically hosted outdated technology. Trump has pushed for American leadership in AI, and his administration is currently seeking input on an AI "action plan." It is not immediately clear if Musk will try to implement X's own AI model, Grok, at federal agencies, or if Grok has been deployed to assist DOGE's efforts. DOGE did not respond to The Hill's request for comment on these reports. Elizabeth Laird, the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT)'s director for equity in civic technology, noted there is a great deal of uncertainty about this emerging tech as most of these media reports have relied on anonymous accounts. "It raises serious questions about not just whether this is something the federal government should be doing, but whether it's even complying with long-standing privacy protections," she told The Hill. "We are talking about the most sensitive information that people provide in order to receive a government service." "AI is still rapidly developing and maturing," she continued. "We know that AI has issues with just flat out being inaccurate and in this case, where you're talking about using AI to make life-impacting decisions about what continues to get funded, I think there are also serious questions about whether this tool can even responsibly do what we're hearing it's being used to do." Some employees are concerned about the integration of Google's AI chatbot Gemini. One U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) employee, who was granted anonymity to speak freely without fear of retaliation, said it was an "open secret" to not put anything "remotely critical" in emails or chat messages about the American First policy agenda and that the Gemini installation "instilled this almost McCarthy-like panic." The large language model was installed on January 15, prior to Trump's inauguration, according to Google spokesperson José Castañeda. Google's workplace contract with USAID was also put in place prior to the Trump administration. Another USAID employee theorized that Gemini was installed "to be able to use AI to query all communications around USAID to either look for people who weren't loyal to the Administration above everything else, or to find people still talking about things like DEIA, gender, etc., and use that as a reason to terminate them." "That's just my intuition," they added. Castañeda emphasized that the data employees put into Google Workspace services like emails and documents stays in the Workspace and is not used to train or improve generative AI. USAID has since been slashed from more than 10,000 employees to fewer than 300 as part of DOGE's campaign.

Efficiency - or empire? How Elon Musk's hostile takeover could end government as we know it

Elon Musk's role as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE, is on the surface a dramatic effort to overhaul the inefficiencies of federal bureaucracy. But beneath the rhetoric of cost-cutting and regulatory streamlining lies a troubling scenario. Musk has been appointed what is called a "special government employee" in charge of the White House office formerly known as the U.S. Digital Service, which was renamed the U.S. DOGE Service on the first day of President Donald Trump's second term. The Musk team's purported goals are to maximize efficiency and to eliminate waste and redundancy. That might sound like a bold move toward Silicon Valley-style innovation in governance. However, the deeper motivations driving Musk's involvement are unlikely to be purely altruistic. Musk has an enormous corporate empire, ambitions in artificial intelligence, desire for financial power and a long-standing disdain for government oversight. His access to sensitive government systems and ability to restructure agencies, with the opaque decision-making guiding DOGE to date, have positioned Musk to extract unprecedented financial and strategic benefits for both himself and his companies, which include the electric car company Tesla and space transport company SpaceX. One historical parallel in particular is striking. In 1600, the British East India Company, a merchant shipping firm, began with exclusive rights to conduct trade in the Indian Ocean region before slowly acquiring quasi-governmental powers and ultimately ruling with an iron fist over British colonies in Asia, including most of what is now India. In 1677, the company gained the right to mint currency on behalf of the British crown. As I explain in my upcoming book "Who Elected Big Tech?" the U.S. is witnessing a similar pattern of a private company taking over government operations. Yet what took centuries in the colonial era is now unfolding at lightning speed in mere days through digital means. In the 21st century, data access and digital financial systems have replaced physical trading posts and private armies. Communications are the key to power now, rather than brute strength. The data pipeline Viewing Musk's moves as a power grab becomes clearer when examining his corporate empire. He controls multiple companies that have federal contracts and are subject to government regulations. SpaceX and Tesla, as well as tunneling firm The Boring Company, the brain science company Neuralink, and artificial intelligence firm xAI all operate in markets where government oversight can make or break fortunes. In his new role, Musk can oversee - and potentially dismantle - the government agencies that have traditionally constrained his businesses. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has repeatedly investigated Tesla's Autopilot system; the Securities and Exchange Commission has penalized Musk for market-moving tweets; environmental regulations have constrained SpaceX. Through DOGE, all these oversight mechanisms could be weakened or eliminated under the guise of efficiency. But the most catastrophic aspect of Musk's leadership at DOGE is its unprecedented access to government data. DOGE employees reportedly have digital permission to see data in the U.S. government's payment system, which includes bank account information, Social Security numbers and income tax documents. Reportedly, they have also seized the ability to alter the system's software, data, transactions and records. Multiple media reports indicate that Musk's staff have already made changes to the programs that process payments for Social Security beneficiaries and government contractors to make it easier to block payments and hide records of payments blocked, made or altered. But DOGE employees only need to be able to read the data to make copies of Americans' most sensitive personal information. A federal court has ordered that not to happen - at least for now. Even so, funneling the data into Grok, Musk's xAI-created artificial intelligence system, which is already connected with the Musk-owned X, formerly known as Twitter, would create an unparalleled capability for predicting economic shifts, identifying government vulnerabilities and modeling voter behavior. That's an enormous and alarming amount of information and power for any one person to have. Cryptocurrency coup? Like Trump himself and many of his closest advisers, Musk is also deeply involved in cryptocurrency. The parallel emergence of Trump's own cryptocurrency and DOGE's apparent alignment with the cryptocurrency known as Dogecoin suggests more than coincidence. I believe it points to a coordinated strategy for control of America's money and economic policy, effectively placing the United States in entirely private hands. The genius - and danger - of this strategy lies in the fact that each step might appear justified in isolation: modernizing government systems, improving efficiency, updating payment infrastructure. But together, they create the scaffolding for transferring even more financial power to the already wealthy. Musk's authoritarian tendencies, evident in his forceful management of X and his assertion that it was illegal to publish the names of people who work for him, suggest how he might wield his new powers. Companies critical of Musk could face unexpected audits; regulatory agencies scrutinizing his businesses could find their budgets slashed; allies could receive privileged access to government contracts. This isn't speculation - it's the logical extension of DOGE's authority combined with Musk's demonstrated behavior. Critics are calling Musk's actions at DOGE a massive corporate coup. Others are simply calling it a coup. The protest movement is gaining momentum in Washington, D.C., and around the country, but it's unlikely that street protests alone can stop what Musk is doing. Who can effectively investigate a group designed to dismantle oversight itself? The administration's illegal firing of at least a dozen inspectors general before the Musk operation began suggests a deliberate strategy to eliminate government accountability. The Republican-led Congress, closely aligned with Trump, may not want to step in; but even if it did, Musk is moving far faster than Congress ever does. Destroy the republic, build a startup nation? Taken together, all of Musk's and Trump's moves lay the foundation for what cryptocurrency investor and entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan calls "the network state." The idea is that a virtual nation may form online before establishing any physical presence. Think of the network state like a tech startup company with its own cryptocurrency - instead of declaring independence and fighting for sovereignty, it first builds community and digital systems. By the time a Musk-aligned cryptocurrency gained official status, the underlying structure and relationships would already be in place, making alternatives impractical. Converting more of the world's financial system into privately controlled cryptocurrencies would take power away from national governments, which must answer to their own people. Musk has already begun this effort, using his wealth and social media reach to engage in politics not only in the U.S. but also several European countries, including Germany. A nation governed by a cryptocurrency-based system would no longer be run by the people living in its territory but by those who could could afford to buy the digital currency. In this scenario, I am concerned that Musk, or the Communist Party of China, Russian President Vladimir Putin or AI-surveillance conglomerate Palantir, could render irrelevant Congress' power over government spending and action. And along the way, it could remove the power to hold presidents accountable from Congress, the judiciary and American citizens. All of this obviously presents a thicket of conflict-of-interest problems that are wholly unprecedented in scope and scale. The question facing Americans, therefore, isn't whether government needs modernization - it's whether they're willing to sacrifice democracy in pursuit of Musk's version of efficiency. When we grant tech leaders direct control over government functions, we're not just streamlining bureaucracy - we're fundamentally altering the relationship between private power and public governance. I believe we're undermining American national security, as well as the power of We, the People. The most dangerous inefficiency of all may be Americans' delayed response to this crisis.

How Elon Musk's DOGE Could End the U.S. Government as We Know It

Are Americans willing to sacrifice democracy in pursuit of Musk's version of efficiency? Elon Musk's role as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE, is on the surface a dramatic effort to overhaul the inefficiencies of federal bureaucracy. But beneath the rhetoric of cost-cutting and regulatory streamlining lies a troubling scenario. Musk has been appointed what is called a "special government employee" in charge of the White House office formerly known as the U.S. Digital Service, which was renamed the U.S. DOGE Service on the first day of President Donald Trump's second term. The Musk team's purported goals are to maximize efficiency and to eliminate waste and redundancy. That might sound like a bold move toward Silicon Valley-style innovation in governance. However, the deeper motivations driving Musk's involvement are unlikely to be purely altruistic. Musk has an enormous corporate empire, ambitions in artificial intelligence, desire for financial power and a long-standing disdain for government oversight. His access to sensitive government systems and ability to restructure agencies, with the opaque decision-making guiding DOGE to date, have positioned Musk to extract unprecedented financial and strategic benefits for both himself and his companies, which include the electric car company Tesla and space transport company SpaceX. One historical parallel in particular is striking. In 1600, the British East India Company, a merchant shipping firm, began with exclusive rights to conduct trade in the Indian Ocean region before slowly acquiring quasi-governmental powers and ultimately ruling with an iron fist over British colonies in Asia, including most of what is now India. In 1677, the company gained the right to mint currency on behalf of the British crown. As I explain in my upcoming book "Who Elected Big Tech?" the U.S. is witnessing a similar pattern of a private company taking over government operations. Yet what took centuries in the colonial era is now unfolding at lightning speed in mere days through digital means. In the 21st century, data access and digital financial systems have replaced physical trading posts and private armies. Communications are the key to power now, rather than brute strength. Viewing Musk's moves as a power grab becomes clearer when examining his corporate empire. He controls multiple companies that have federal contracts and are subject to government regulations. SpaceX and Tesla, as well as tunneling firm The Boring Company, the brain science company Neuralink, and artificial intelligence firm xAI all operate in markets where government oversight can make or break fortunes. In his new role, Musk can oversee - and potentially dismantle - the government agencies that have traditionally constrained his businesses. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has repeatedly investigated Tesla's Autopilot system; the Securities and Exchange Commission has penalized Musk for market-moving tweets; environmental regulations have constrained SpaceX. Through DOGE, all these oversight mechanisms could be weakened or eliminated under the guise of efficiency. But the most catastrophic aspect of Musk's leadership at DOGE is its unprecedented access to government data. DOGE employees reportedly have digital permission to see data in the U.S. government's payment system, which includes bank account information, Social Security numbers and income tax documents. Reportedly, they have also seized the ability to alter the system's software, data, transactions and records. Multiple media reports indicate that Musk's staff have already made changes to the programs that process payments for Social Security beneficiaries and government contractors to make it easier to block payments and hide records of payments blocked, made or altered. But DOGE employees only need to be able to read the data to make copies of Americans' most sensitive personal information. A federal court has ordered that not to happen - at least for now. Even so, funneling the data into Grok, Musk's xAI-created artificial intelligence system, which is already connected with the Musk-owned X, formerly known as Twitter, would create an unparalleled capability for predicting economic shifts, identifying government vulnerabilities and modeling voter behavior. That's an enormous and alarming amount of information and power for any one person to have. Like Trump himself and many of his closest advisers, Musk is also deeply involved in cryptocurrency. The parallel emergence of Trump's own cryptocurrency and DOGE's apparent alignment with the cryptocurrency known as Dogecoin suggests more than coincidence. I believe it points to a coordinated strategy for control of America's money and economic policy, effectively placing the United States in entirely private hands. The genius - and danger - of this strategy lies in the fact that each step might appear justified in isolation: modernizing government systems, improving efficiency, updating payment infrastructure. But together, they create the scaffolding for transferring even more financial power to the already wealthy. Musk's authoritarian tendencies, evident in his forceful management of X and his assertion that it was illegal to publish the names of people who work for him, suggest how he might wield his new powers. Companies critical of Musk could face unexpected audits; regulatory agencies scrutinizing his businesses could find their budgets slashed; allies could receive privileged access to government contracts. This isn't speculation - it's the logical extension of DOGE's authority combined with Musk's demonstrated behavior. Critics are calling Musk's actions at DOGE a massive corporate coup. Others are simply calling it a coup. The protest movement is gaining momentum in Washington, D.C., and around the country, but it's unlikely that street protests alone can stop what Musk is doing. Who can effectively investigate a group designed to dismantle oversight itself? The administration's illegal firing of at least a dozen inspectors general before the Musk operation began suggests a deliberate strategy to eliminate government accountability. The Republican-led Congress, closely aligned with Trump, may not want to step in; but even if it did, Musk is moving far faster than Congress ever does. Taken together, all of Musk's and Trump's moves lay the foundation for what cryptocurrency investor and entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan calls "the network state." The idea is that a virtual nation may form online before establishing any physical presence. Think of the network state like a tech startup company with its own cryptocurrency - instead of declaring independence and fighting for sovereignty, it first builds community and digital systems. By the time a Musk-aligned cryptocurrency gained official status, the underlying structure and relationships would already be in place, making alternatives impractical. Converting more of the world's financial system into privately controlled cryptocurrencies would take power away from national governments, which must answer to their own people. Musk has already begun this effort, using his wealth and social media reach to engage in politics not only in the U.S. but also several European countries, including Germany. A nation governed by a cryptocurrency-based system would no longer be run by the people living in its territory but by those who could could afford to buy the digital currency. In this scenario, I am concerned that Musk, or the Communist Party of China, Russian President Vladimir Putin or AI-surveillance conglomerate Palantir, could render irrelevant Congress' power over government spending and action. And along the way, it could remove the power to hold presidents accountable from Congress, the judiciary and American citizens. All of this obviously presents a thicket of conflict-of-interest problems that are wholly unprecedented in scope and scale. The question facing Americans, therefore, isn't whether government needs modernization - it's whether they're willing to sacrifice democracy in pursuit of Musk's version of efficiency. When we grant tech leaders direct control over government functions, we're not just streamlining bureaucracy - we're fundamentally altering the relationship between private power and public governance. I believe we're undermining American national security, as well as the power of We, the People. The most dangerous inefficiency of all may be Americans' delayed response to this crisis.

It's Time to Worry About DOGE's AI Plans

Donald Trump and Elon Musk's chaotic approach to reform is upending government operations. Critical functions have been halted, tens of thousands of federal staffers are being encouraged to resign, and congressional mandates are being disregarded. The next phase: The Department of Government Efficiency reportedly wants to use AI to cut costs. According to The Washington Post, Musk's group has started to run sensitive data from government systems through AI programs to analyze spending and determine what could be pruned. This may lead to the elimination of human jobs in favor of automation. As one government official who has been tracking Musk's DOGE team told the Post, the ultimate aim is to use AI to replace "the human workforce with machines." (Spokespeople for the White House and DOGE did not respond to requests for comment.) Using AI to make government more efficient is a worthy pursuit, and this is not a new idea. The Biden administration disclosed more than 2,000 AI applications in development across the federal government. For example, FEMA has started using AI to help perform damage assessment in disaster areas. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has started using AI to look for fraudulent billing. The idea of replacing dedicated and principled civil servants with AI agents, however, is new -- and complicated. Read: The government's computing experts say they are terrified The civil service -- the massive cadre of employees who operate government agencies -- plays a vital role in translating laws and policy into the operation of society. New presidents can issue sweeping executive orders, but they often have no real effect until they actually change the behavior of public servants. Whether you think of these people as essential and inspiring do-gooders, boring bureaucratic functionaries, or as agents of a "deep state," their sheer number and continuity act as ballast that resists institutional change. This is why Trump and Musk's actions are so significant. The more AI decision making is integrated into government, the easier change will be. If human workers are widely replaced with AI, executives will have unilateral authority to instantaneously alter the behavior of the government, profoundly raising the stakes for transitions of power in democracy. Trump's unprecedented purge of the civil service might be the last time a president needs to replace the human beings in government in order to dictate its new functions. Future leaders may do so at the press of a button. To be clear, the use of AI by the executive branch doesn't have to be disastrous. In theory, it could allow new leadership to swiftly implement the wishes of its electorate. But this could go very badly in the hands of an authoritarian leader. AI systems concentrate power at the top, so they could allow an executive to effectuate change over sprawling bureaucracies instantaneously. Firing and replacing tens of thousands of human bureaucrats is a huge undertaking. Swapping one AI out for another, or modifying the rules that those AIs operate by, would be much simpler. Social-welfare programs, if automated with AI, could be redirected to systematically benefit one group and disadvantage another with a single prompt change. Immigration-enforcement agencies could prioritize people for investigation and detainment with one instruction. Regulatory-enforcement agencies that monitor corporate behavior for malfeasance could turn their attention to, or away from, any given company on a whim. Even if Congress were motivated to fight back against Trump and Musk, or against a future president seeking to bulldoze the will of the legislature, the absolute power to command AI agents would make it easier to subvert legislative intent. AI has the power to diminish representative politics. Written law is never fully determinative of the actions of government -- there is always wiggle room for presidents, appointed leaders, and civil servants to exercise their own judgment. Whether intentional or not, whether charitably or not, each of these actors uses discretion. In human systems, that discretion is widely distributed across many individuals -- people who, in the case of career civil servants, usually outlast presidencies. Today, the AI ecosystem is dominated by a small number of corporations that decide how the most widely used AI models are designed, which data they are trained on, and which instructions they follow. Because their work is largely secretive and unaccountable to public interest, these tech companies are capable of making changes to the bias of AI systems -- either generally or with aim at specific governmental use cases -- that are invisible to the rest of us. And these private actors are both vulnerable to coercion by political leaders and self-interested in appealing to their favor. Musk himself created and funded xAI, now one of the world's largest AI labs, with an explicitly ideological mandate to generate anti-"woke" AI and steer the wider AI industry in a similar direction. Read: If DOGE goes nuclear But there's a second way that AI's transformation of government could go. AI development could happen inside of transparent and accountable public institutions, alongside its continued development by Big Tech. Applications of AI in democratic governments could be focused on benefitting public servants and the communities they serve by, for example, making it easier for non-English speakers to access government services, making ministerial tasks such as processing routine applications more efficient and reducing backlogs, or helping constituents weigh in on the policies deliberated by their representatives. Such AI integrations should be done gradually and carefully, with public oversight for their design and implementation and monitoring and guardrails to avoid unacceptable bias and harm. Governments around the world are demonstrating how this could be done, though it's early days. Taiwan has pioneered the use of AI models to facilitate deliberative democracy at an unprecedented scale. Singapore has been a leader in the development of public AI models, built transparently and with public-service use cases in mind. Canada has illustrated the role of disclosure and public input on the consideration of AI use cases in government. Even if you do not trust the current White House to follow any of these examples, U.S. states -- which have much greater contact and influence over the daily lives of Americans than the federal government -- could lead the way on this kind of responsible development and deployment of AI. As the political theorist David Runciman has written, AI is just another in a long line of artificial "machines" used to govern how people live and act, not unlike corporations and states before it. AI doesn't replace those older institutions, but it changes how they function. As the Trump administration forges stronger ties to Big Tech and AI developers, we need to recognize the potential of that partnership to steer the future of democratic governance -- and act to make sure that it does not enable future authoritarians.

Who is helping Elon Musk gut the US government?

The billionaire's cost-cutting 'Doge' staff includes wealthy executives, far-right ideologues and young engineers Elon Musk's rapid attempt to defund and depopulate the federal government has thrown US politics into chaos while the billionaire's so-called "department of government efficiency" seizes control of operations at key agencies. Carrying out this hostile takeover are a team of staffers made up of wealthy executives, far-right ideologues and young engineers that have come to make up Doge. At government institutions such as the treasury department, General Services Administration and United States Agency for International Development, Musk's allies have gained access to computer systems, including the sensitive personal data and payment information of tens of millions of Americans. His team is working to shut down USAid, the world's largest single supplier of humanitarian aid, and members have been spotted at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Education and National Institutes of Health. To undertake this unprecedented and potentially illegal gutting of public funding, Musk has assembled loyalists who largely lack government experience and who range from tech elites to Maga diehards, according to a review of the people publicly associated with Doge. Doge has not released any detailed account of who is working at the unofficial agency, and Musk, along with other staff, is technically a "special government employee", which allows him and others to evade ethics and financial disclosures that would normally apply to government workers. The Doge team has taken steps to avoid public scrutiny, including limiting their online footprints. A lawsuit filed by unions of federal workers alleges that Musk's allies in Doge have held calls and interviews in which they have withheld their last names in an effort to escape media scrutiny. These interviewers have also allegedly refused to answer questions while talking to federal employees. Musk shared a letter on X sent to him from the Trump-appointed federal prosecutor for Washington DC that vowed to pursue "any and all legal action against anyone who impedes your work or threatens your people", which includes identifying them. As hundreds of employees were put on administrative leave at USAid, several sources told the Guardian that Musk was directing Doge's day-to-day operations personally. "This was just the Doge dudes just literally on the phone with Musk just getting directions from him," one USAid employee said. Within the White House, Musk appears to be running Doge with a high degree of independence and with Donald Trump's backing. The president briefly praised Musk's team on Monday, although he said that he had not met with them personally. "They work, actually, out of the White House," Trump said. "They're smart people." A Doge spokesperson did not respond to a list of questions concerning its staff and operations. Several people at Doge come directly from Musk's private companies, including the Boring Company, Tesla and xAI. One executive taking a lead role overseeing the effort, according to multiple outlets, is Musk's longtime lieutenant Steve Davis. Davis has worked for Musk in different capacities for about 20 years and is president of the tunnel-digging Boring Company. He was present on Saturday night at USAid when Doge staffers and agency security officials clashed over Musk's team's demands for access to restricted areas, multiple sources told the Guardian. When USAid officials attempted to block the team, two sources said that Davis threatened to bring in US marshals to the agency. The Guardian granted anonymity to those sources to protect them from retaliation. Davis is known for cost-cutting and running fast-paced operations, which have at times resulted in clashes with safety regulators. While he was president of Boring in 2023, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha) found that 15-20 Boring employees in Las Vegas were burned with chemical accelerants due to hazardous working conditions at the site. The company's former safety manager told Fortune that Davis undercut and isolated him in ways that prohibited him from doing his job, while former employees said Davis imposed difficult deadlines and encouraged a breakneck pace. One Boring employee emailed the safety manager warning that workers "consistently flirted with death" while in the tunnels, according to Fortune. The Boring Company did not return a request for comment on these allegations. Another former Musk employee, Amanda Scales, worked at the billionaire's artificial intelligence startup xAI before becoming chief of staff at the office of personnel management, which functions as the government's human resources agency. Shortly after Trump's inauguration, the acting head of OPM instructed heads of agencies to send Scales a list of employees on probationary periods or administrative leave as the new administration seeks to make drastic cuts to the federal workforce. Allies of the world's richest man have also been placed in key positions at the General Services Administration - which handles government real estate and federal IT structure - and the treasury department. The former Tesla engineer Thomas Shedd is now in charge of the GSA's Technology Transformation Services, with 404 Media reporting that Shedd told workers he wants to implant artificial intelligence throughout government systems to write software and automate services. Musk himself has said he wants to deploy AI to review government payments for potential waste. Tom Krause, the CEO of the multibillion-dollar tech company Cloud Software Group, and a Musk ally, is now working within the treasury department. A judge ruled on Thursday that he was one of two "special government employees" associated with Doge who can access sensitive treasury data. Several tech moguls have said they are collaborating with Doge, though it's not always clear in what capacity. The billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who donated $2.5m to a pro-Trump political action committee and celebrated his re-election, told the New York Times last month that he was "helping Doge". Andreessen did not go into detail on what his help entailed and said he was not speaking for Musk, but he appeared to have advance knowledge of Doge's goals and told the Times it had plans for "the money side", head count and regulation. Weeks after the interview, Musk's lieutenants went after the money side of the federal government - the treasury department. In addition to the more established executives working at Doge or collaborating with the group, Wired reported that Musk has hired a group of young engineers who are fresh out of college or high school and possess little experience outside of tiny tech firms. These Doge staffers, who according to the outlet range from 19 to 25 years old, have at times been given huge amounts of access and power over the federal government - including sources telling Wired that the engineer Marko Elez had gained direct "write access" to treasury department payment systems. Elez resigned on Thursday after the Wall Street Journal asked the White House about his links to a now-deleted social media account that promoted eugenics and racism. Among other racist posts, the account posted on X that "you could not pay me to marry outside my ethnicity" and called for repealing the Civil Rights Act, according to the Journal. Earlier that day, a judge had granted Elez and one other Doge employee the power to see sensitive treasury department data. Another young Doge staffer with access to sensitive government systems, 19-year-old Edward Coristine, has gone by the username "Big Balls" online and founded a company called "Tesla.Sexy LLC", according to Wired. He has reportedly been on calls with GSA employees as they are asked to defend their jobs. "These people are clueless, given how smart they're supposed to be," one USAid employee currently on administrative leave said of the young Doge team. "They're under the impression that if you just say [to do something], then it will magically happen." Along with the staff working with Doge full-time, some even sleeping in government buildings, Musk's team has worked in tandem with Trump hardliners to dismantle or exert control over government agencies. Doge staffers showed up to USAid in the past week with Peter Marocco, who briefly served at several different agencies during Trump's first term and was accused by multiple staffers of poor leadership and toxic workplace behavior. Marocco was allegedly photographed inside the Capitol building during the January 6 riot, according to a widely cited, citizen-led investigation that has accurately named numerous other rioters. When Dallas's D Magazine asked him about the allegations last year, Marocco did not deny them but called the reports "smear tactics". The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has now tapped Marocco to run USAid and review its programs as Musk continues work to shut down the agency entirely. Current and former USAid staffers told the Guardian last week that Marocco represented a disaster for the agency, with one former official calling him "a destroyer". "He's the most unqualified person to be sitting in any seat of government, let alone the person who has the keys to our foreign assistance," another former colleague at USAid who still works at the agency said. Also working with Doge is the far-right Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is head of a "delivering on government efficiency" group within the House oversight committee. Greene, who has espoused numerous extremist conspiracies and in 2022 spoke at a white nationalist event, has used her power to demand that NPR and PBS testify about their operations. Greene cited a PBS report that stated Musk gave "what appeared to be a fascist salute" during a speech last month as one of the reasons to compel the news outlet's executives to appear at the hearing. The conservative ideology extends to Doge's human resources department, where the head of HR is an employment attorney and consultant who has promoted a "non-woke" alternative to diversity, equity and inclusion programs, 404 Media reported. Stephanie Holmes told the rightwing Federalist Society in 2022 that she started her firm to counter the "really progressive ideology that HR was pushing into corporate America". The spokesperson for Doge is Katie Miller, who is married to the deputy White House chief of staff, Stephen Miller. Before working at Doge, Miller was Vice-President Mike Pence's press secretary and a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, where she defended Trump's anti-immigration policies, including during the period when it was separating migrant families at the border. During Doge's takeover of agencies on Sunday, Miller issued a statement on X claiming that no violations of security protocol had taken place. On Wednesday night, she told reporters that Musk would decide for himself when his actions constituted a conflict of interest. Stephen Miller has also begun working closely with Musk in the new Trump administration, according to the New York Times, and on Monday went on Fox News to defend the shutdown of USAid by decrying it as a "swamp nest of bureaucrats". During Trump's first term, Miller served as a key policy adviser and pushed for extreme policies such as banning immigration and travel from Muslim-majority countries. In 2019, more than 50 civil rights organizations and 20 Democratic senators called for Miller's resignation after it emerged that he sent hundreds of emails to far-right editors at Breitbart that included him citing information from prominent white nationalist websites. Some of the men associated with Doge in the months before Trump's official order on 20 January have either been given roles elsewhere in the administration or pushed out entirely. The former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy was originally slated to co-lead Doge with Musk, trumpeting the agency in posts on X. He left after reportedly facing internal tensions with the Tesla CEO and announced a run for Ohio governor. The former Trump tech adviser Michael Kratsios was helping interview hires for Doge, according to Bloomberg, but has since been nominated as the president's science adviser. The top Silicon Valley investment banker and Musk ally Michael Grimes was also reportedly in discussions about joining Doge. He's now expected to join the commerce department. Others hold unclear roles within Musk's unofficial agency, such as the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Baris Akis, who, the New York Times reported, has become close to Musk and an integral part of Doge in recent weeks. Akis is a Turkish national who does not hold US citizenship, according to the Atlantic, which reported that Trump's advisers declined Musk's request to officially hire him because of his immigration status. It is unclear in what capacity, if any, he is still involved in the effort. The Doge spokesperson, Katie Miller, did not respond to a request for comment on whether Akis is still involved in Doge. Government watchdog groups have condemned the lack of transparency around Doge's operations. "It's inappropriate for the federal government to purposely hide the identities of senior officials who are shaping the policies and servicing the public," said Scott Amey, the general counsel of the Project on Government Oversight. "These officials must be held accountable for their work, both by their colleagues and the public. It's also crucial that these officials abide by ethics and transparency requirements to assure the public they are serving in the best interest of our communities."

The US Government Is Not a Startup

It feels like no one should have to say this, and yet we are in a situation where it needs to be said, very loudly and clearly, before it's too late to do anything about it: The United States is not a startup. If you run it like one, it will break. The onslaught of news about Elon Musk's takeover of the federal government's core institutions is altogether too much -- in volume, in magnitude, in the sheer chaotic absurdity of a 19-year-old who goes by "Big Balls" helping the world's richest man consolidate power. There's an easy way to process it, though. Donald Trump may be the president of the United States, but Musk has made himself its CEO. This is bad on its face. Musk was not elected to any office, has billions of dollars of government contracts, and has radicalized others and himself by elevating conspiratorial X accounts with handles like @redpillsigma420. His allies control the US government's human resources and information technology departments, and he has deployed a strike force of eager former interns to poke and prod at the data and code bases that are effectively the gears of democracy. None of this should be happening. It is, though. And while this takeover is unprecedented for the government, it's standard operating procedure for Musk. It maps almost too neatly to his acquisition of Twitter in 2022: Get rid of most of the workforce. Install loyalists. Rip up safeguards. Remake in your own image. This is the way of the startup. You're scrappy, you're unconventional, you're iterating. This is the world that Musk's lieutenants come from, and the one they are imposing on the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration. What do they want? A lot. There's AI, of course. They all want AI. They want it especially at the GSA, where a Tesla engineer runs a key government IT department and thinks AI coding agents are just what bureaucracy needs. Never mind that large language models can be effective but are inherently, definitionally unreliable, or that AI agents -- essentially chatbots that can perform certain tasks for you -- are especially unproven. Never mind that AI works not just by outputting information but by ingesting it, turning whatever enters its maw into training data for the next frontier model. Never mind that, wouldn't you know it, Elon Musk happens to own an AI company himself. Go figure. Speaking of data: They want that, too. DOGE agents are installed at or have visited the Treasury Department, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Small Business Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Labor. Probably more. They've demanded data, sensitive data, payments data, and in many cases they've gotten it -- the pursuit of data as an end unto itself but also data that could easily be used as a competitive edge, as a weapon, if you care to wield it.

Musk to replace sacked government workers with machines

Doge said it has identified and cut more than $1 billion in spending since becoming operational three weeks ago. Members of Mr Musk's task force are now embedding in some of the government's largest programmes, particularly those focused on healthcare, in a bid to cut waste. The department is also working with the general services administration (GSA), which manages government buildings and commercial real estate, to cut single out leases that can be cancelled or lapsed. Among the sweeping cuts are $30 million in contracts for digital modernisation projects and at least $4 million in leases for little-used office space, according to The Wall Street Journal. The roving pack Mr Musk's allies have started using AI to analyse financial data in the education department, aiming to cancel every contract that is not required by law or essential to the department's operations, two employees said. Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer now working in the department, is said to have held a meeting last Monday outlining plans to implement AI into the government. "I'm not saying that this is an easy task, but it is a task that's worth trying to pursue and one that only we can do as an internal team, right?" he said, according to 404 media, who obtained audio of the meeting. Asked about Mr Musk's war on government efficiency, Donald Trump said on Sunday night: "Oh, he's not gaining anything, In fact, I wonder how he can devote the time to it. He's so into it." "I'm going to tell him very soon, like maybe in 24 hours, to go check ... the Department of Education. "He's going to find the same thing. Then I'm going to go to the military. Let's check the military. We're going to find billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse." Described as a "roving pack", Doge reportedly goes over the heads of lower-level IT employees, who typically raise privacy concerns, to senior leaders who reportedly succumb to the department's demands. Doge staffers are then given "superpowered user accounts", which allow them to "access and edit reams of government data with little to no oversight" at "lightning speed" and "bypassing typical security protocols". Mass voluntary resignations expected to be followed by mass involuntary dismissals. New hires and people with poor performance reviews will be the first to go, according to a plan laid out by the office of personnel management, which is now under Mr Musk's control. Mr Musk's plans follow the same track as his business ventures. When he took over Twitter in 2022, he fired more than 75 per cent of staff, while he has repeatedly downsized and cut thousands of workers at Tesla. The tech tycoon's plans would also see a dramatically smaller and weaker government, which would exert less oversight over private business, deliver fewer services and comprise a smaller share of the US economy, according to the Post. Legal pushback But US courts have started to push back. A federal judge on Saturday temporarily blocked Doge from accessing government systems used to process trillions of dollars in payments. While a federal judge in Massachusetts has temporarily blocked the mass bid for resignations, in response to a lawsuit by several employee unions who challenged the government's legal authority to make such an offer. A hearing is scheduled for Monday. The public citizen litigation group has filed lawsuits arguing that Doge is required by law to be more transparent. Congress may also object to entire federal agencies being abolished without its consent. But Mr Musk's unelected power continues to be supported by the White House. Last week, Mr Trump appointed him as a special government employee. "If there's a conflict, then we won't let him get near it. But he does have a good, natural instinct," Mr Trump said.