GOP WET DREAM
Efficiency or Empire?
How Elon Musk’s Hostile Takeover Could End Government as We Know It
February 13, 2025
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. financial power and a long-standing disdain for government oversight. His access to
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.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Failed Elites, Elon Musk, and Lies the Media Tell You
Washington Post columnist Matt Bai had a piece this week in which he implied that people did not realize the enormous political power that Elon Musk would have by taking ownership of a huge social media platform like Twitter.
“Musk’s purchase of Twitter in 2022 is a useful case study here. At the time, the $44 billion impulse buy seemed like an act of petulance and bad business acumen, and by some measures it was; Musk terrorized and fired its employees, vacillated between business models, drove away advertisers and ultimately lost billions.
“In retrospect, though, most of us who laughed at his hubris can see that Musk pulled off something remarkable. Whatever havoc he wreaked on the platform for its users and engineers, Musk created for himself the loudest personal microphone in the country — the modern equivalent of Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune. Musk’s dominance of Twitter took his cultural and political influence to a new level and made it possible for him to become the second-most powerful man in Washington. Not a bad return on investment.”
This is a complete lie. There were people who recognized the power associated with control of these social media platforms, they just were not given a voice in major media outlets like the Washington Post. A rational policy would have involved steps to downsize these platforms. Ownership of a smaller platform would still provide substantial political power, but it would be more comparable to the power associated with a television network or major newspaper. And a diversity of platforms would provide some possibility of balance,
It’s also worth noting that the Section 230 protection we give to Elon Musk means that, unlike print or broadcast outlets, he can freely spread defamatory material about any target of his wrath and face zero legal consequences. If he wants to spread lies to hundreds of millions of people about someone embezzling money or being a pedophile, we give him license to do so.
Whether modifying Section 230 protection is the best route for downsizing X and Facebook is a debatable point, but the fact that these platforms convey enormous political power to those who control them is not. The fact that Matt Bai and his clique were apparently unable to recognize this obvious reality shows their lack of understanding of the world around them.
This failure is reminiscent of the failure of nearly all economists and economic reporters to recognize the housing bubble, the collapse of which led to the Great Recession and the financial crisis. As with the political power of the huge social media platforms, those of us who warned of the bubble were largely denied access to major media outlets. (Paul Krugman was a very important exception.) Just as with Bai’s column, after the collapse the bubble, economic commentators all gave themselves a collective “who could have known?” amnesty.
The story here is a badly failed gatekeeping system for access to major media outlets. Access is overwhelmingly awarded based on connections and credentials, not on the merits of the arguments. The gatekeepers are either unable or unwilling to evaluate whether a particular argument is sensible.
This failure is a big deal and I’m sure it applies in many more areas than the two extreme cases I am mentioning here. (I could also include trade where the failures of the standard account presented in the media should be obvious.) This lack of competence, coupled with lack of accountability, gives the MAGA masses a very legitimate basis for their complaints about elites. Turning over control of the government to an ill-informed power-crazed billionaire is not likely to improve their circumstances, but the Matt Bais of the world, and the gatekeepers that push such lazy thinking forward are big part of what got us to this point.
While I’m on the topic of Matt Bai, let me also correct another point he made in his piece. He seems to be under the impression that Elon Musk has seriously studied the budget before diving in with his DOGE crew.
“My problem with this theory, though, is that you’re talking about a guy who almost single-handedly — and against all prevailing wisdom — built the country’s first successful electric car and then a private space company on which NASA is now dependent. Musk may be a lot of things, but dumb isn’t among them. I find it hard to imagine that he wouldn’t have bothered to familiarize himself with the federal budget before shooting off his mouth. I can see him devouring the entire thing while simultaneously stabbing his way through a swarm of goatmen in “Diablo.””
I don’t know about Elon Musk’s involvement with the goatmen in Diablo, but all the evidence suggests that he has not bothered to familiarize himself with the federal budget or the other economic issues he weighs in on.
He has talked about the federal workforce as though it is both growing rapidly and is directly a major source of waste. Both views are clearly false. Federal employees are a much smaller share of the workforce than they were half a century ago. Their pay accounts for less than 5 percent of the federal budget.
After his DOGE team broke into the government’s payments system, he claimed outrage at the fact that every payment that had been requested had gone through, even when the recipient was a known drug dealer or other type of criminal. Of course, it would have been outrageous if the opposite were the case. We would all be furious if the person processing payments at our bank decided not to have one of our checks go through because they decided they were going to a bad person. Obviously, Elon had not even done the most basic homework on this one.
I’ll mention one more Musk failing just to point out the extent to which he really is clueless about many of the areas where he weighs in. After the January jobs report was released, Musk fumed on Twitter that in the month from December to January, we had created over 1 million jobs for immigrants but just 10,000 jobs for native born workers.
This was an incredibly simple error. Every year, the Census Bureau puts in new population controls into its household survey in January. This can lead to a large break between the December and January data.
It is not necessary to read through long texts on this issue to understand what is involved. The Bureau of Labor Statistics described the impact of the new population controls on page 5 of the January jobs report. Apparently, Musk did not take the few minutes needed to review the report before going off on his nativist tirade to his hundreds of millions of followers.
This incredible sloppiness is important to recognize in order to understand our current situation. We have a greedy power-hungry clueless billionaire, taking advantage of a 78-year-old president suffering from dementia, to ransack the government for his own ends. That’s the truth even if the major media outlets are scared to tell it.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
Sleeping or Not, DOGE’s Lie
Photo by Minh Pham
So much going on! Will Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the Department of Government Efficiency succeed in their supposed quests to shut down everything from USAID to the Department of Education to God knows what else?
As the establishment crowd moans and the MAGA crowd rejoices over the sketchy claims of cuts and eliminations, I’m adopting (and strongly suggesting that others adopt) a wait-and-see attitude, a posture of sangfroid rather than swivet or schadenfreude (sorry if you have to look those terms up).
Just because someone associated with the government says X, one needn’t, and probably shouldn’t, unquestioningly believe X.
“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete,” CIA director William J. Casey allegedly told US president Ronald Reagan at a 1981 White House meeting, “when everything the American public believes is false.”
Nearly four decades later, Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, put it a different way to journalist Michael Lewis: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.”
The fecal matter in question seems to be “disinformation” on an industrial scale. Not just false claims, but conflicting claims and stage magic style misdirection — so much of it all that any attempt at figuring out what’s really going on feels like a 24/7 game of Whac-A-Mole [TM].
Neither of those formulations are really new, nor is the phenomenon limited to Republican administrations. The old saw, “how can you tell a politician is lying? His lips move!” remains perennially popular for good reason.
Politicians, policy-makers, and all too many “thought leaders,” lie.
They lie about their actions.
They lie about the motives behind their actions.
They lie about the effects, both prospective and retrospective, of their actions.
They lie knowingly, they lie constantly, and they lie for the most obvious reason: Telling the truth wouldn’t get them what they want. What they want, of course, is power. Ever more power, over more people and more things, world without end.
It’s not an occasional case, it’s a systemic attribute. As Friedrich Nietzsche noted in the 19th century, “everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.”
A collective entity built on lies must necessarily be made up of individual liars.
How can we know whether Trump, Musk, and friends are serious about cutting the size, scope, and power of government, or, if so, successful at doing so?
Figuring that out won’t be easy. Neither they, nor their opponents, nor their media hangers-on, are people any sensible American would ask for directions if lost, or leave alone in a room with their wallet.
Question everything. Then question the answers. Then hope for the best.
Will the Current Musk Coup Define Our Future?
Photograph Source: DanielGoldhorn – CC BY 4.0
The classic coup d’état has guns. Uniformed men run wild seizing government agencies and claiming control over what government does and who government serves.
But in our new cyber age, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder reflected this past week, a coup can unfold without any armed overthrow. We can have “a couple dozen young men go from government office to government office, dressed in civilian clothes and armed only with zip drives.”
These young men, operating upon “vague references to orders from on high,” can gain access to basic computer systems and “proceed to grant their Supreme Leader” effective power over just about everything that government does.
The historian Snyder is, of course, describing America’s current reality. He’s calling this reality a coup — and so are defenders of America’s democratic faith.
We aren’t living through “a coup with tanks in the streets and mobs overrunning government offices,” charges former U.S. attorney and current Brennan Center senior fellow Joyce Vance. We’ve living through “a quieter coup, a billionaires’ coup.”
“The richest man on Earth is attempting to seize physical control of government payment systems and use them to shut down federal funding to any recipient he personally dislikes,” adds in the University of Minnesota Law School’s Will Stancil. “Elon Musk is directly usurping Congress’s most important authority, the power of the purse.”
The Musk legions now hacking their way through the nation’s capital, the New York Times reports, have already “inserted themselves” into the databases of 17 federal agencies. These legions include fervent Musk admirers like Akash Bobba, a software engineer less than three years out of high school who once interned with a tech firm chaired by fellow Musk billionaire Peter Thiel.
One by one, the federal agencies that keep the nation running have fallen, with the full blessings of Donald Trump, under Musk’s effective control. Trump, meanwhile, is making headlines about taking over Gaza and Panama, in the process, notes Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut, “distracting everyone from the real story — the billionaires seizing government to steal from regular people.”
The Trumpsters, agrees Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont, are moving us “into an oligarchic form of society where extraordinary power rests in the hands of a small number of unelected multi-billionaires.”
Elected officials and progressive activists are pushing back in the courts to stop the Musk putsch and scoring some initial victories. One federal judge, for instance, has just blocked Musk’s access to the Treasury Department’s computer payments system. That access, the judge ruled, threatens “irreparable harm” to the personal and financial data of millions of Americans.
But lower-level court rulings may not pass muster with higher-level Trump-appointed judges. Stopping the Musk coup will require a broader popular mobilization, and that push back is indeed building, with protests drawing thousands in locales ranging from downtown Washington to a host of state capitols nationwide.
Our best hope to counter the Musk coup’s billionaire corporate backers — “and their boundless options” to shape “our elections, legislation, and judicial appointments”? That may well be intensified trade union action, suggests a new analysis long-time labor activist Michael Podhorzer, and that action is also building.
Labor’s national voice, the AFL-CIO, has just launched a new campaign, the Department of People Who Work for a Living, to challenge Musk and his “Department of Government Efficiency.”
“Government can work for billionaires,” points out AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler, “or it can work for working people — but not both.”
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