Musk Takes America
Youtube screenshot.
It is on. Elon is burrowing into a hostile takeover of the US government, regulations, and economy.
He is clearly quite used to getting everything he wants by any devious means or blatant powerplay. Donald Trump is turning out to be just a minor buffoon at Elon’s service, a pliable, if blustering, Muskateer.
Elon bought him and he’s now using him in many ways:
Musk demanded access to more than $6 trillion in US government payouts–everything from Grandma’s Social Security check and all her personal information to Medicare/Medicaid payments, government contracts, and literally tens of thousands of financial functions affecting every single American. Trump’s indentured squad had to fire a few key folks to clear the way, but now, in the name of efficiency, it’s all there for Musk.
Musk’s team have denied officials at the United States Office of Personnel Management access to the workings of OPM and have instead installed themselves in those offices, moving luxury sofa beds into the DC offices on upper floors, offices with panoramic views accessible only with security escorts. Some 2.2 million workers are now subject to any treatment, job loss, and even pension loss.
Remember that federal government building where you went to get much-needed unemployment insurance when the company you worked for laid off skilled workers? Yeah, chances are that building will close and be listed for sale as Musk begins shutting down some of the General Services Administration, putting buildings up for sale and terminating unknown numbers of some 7,500 building leases GSA administers.
This is tantamount to a blitzkrieg on the capacity of the US government to serve the US people and the pushback has begun.
The Center for Biological Diversity and others have launched notice of lawsuits aimed at the openly self-enriching conflicts of interest in having a billionaire with massive government contracts now in charge of oversight of all those contracts. In stark terms, Musk’s industries that have proven again and again to be bad actors in environmental pollution and yet now increasingly control the regulators. Conflict of interest red flags should be all over the field.
When, some two weeks ago, Musk gave his infamous Nazi salute, the reactions were swift and categorical. Author Rivera Sun, for example, said, “Take that Nazi salute seriously. Last time, 70 million people died.” She called for nonviolent people power in the streets.
Some of the lawsuits assert that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is itself illegal under various laws such as the Federal Advisory Committee Act.
While Democrats in office have criticized Musk, few Republicans are doing so–yet. In Europe, however, more political leadership is speaking out against Musk’s stated support for the neo-Nazi AfD party. While the leaders of Italy and Hungary are pro-Musk, leadership in Norway, Germany, France, and Spain have denounced much of what Musk is doing globally.
More and more independent citizen groups are beginning to formally oppose the most egregious of Musk’s actions and words. When Musk posted that Germans should move past any guilt about the European Holocaust, for example, reactions were swift.
When Germany rolled over Poland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, and other countries in the 1939-1940 offensive, many lost hope, seeing the ferocious Nazi military as unstoppable.
Then the world united and stopped it.
We can stop Musk too, but this time with what William James (echoed by Jimmy Carter some 66 years later) called the “moral equivalent of war.” Nonviolent civil resistance, with a synthesis of the inside game (politics) and the outside game (“street heat”), holds the most promise. More regular folks need to start observing and then observers need to start taking action.
Watergate led to Nixon’s downfall. ElonGate is a harbinger of defeat for Musk and Trump.
One Dog, Too DOGE, Red Tape, Green Tape
Image Source: myCountrAI on X, via AI image generation – Public Domain
With the end of January consigning Christmas decorations to cheerful memory, even if northern blizzards and hot-button issues stoked by the incoming Trump administration are less conducive to jollity, is it “time to cut the green tape”? Lauren Smith thinks that such eco-bureaucracy is “Why Britain can’t build anything” (spiked, January 29).
Solar power is not in fact as much of a real-world threat to England as it was in the hands of Christopher Lee’s fanciful Bond villain Francisco Scaramanga. Across the Atlantic, red-staters are the ones eager to snip red tape, even if the bounteously bearded fellow in a red hat gracing the Wall Street Journal editorial page was not Kris Kringle but Karl of Das Kapital, illustrating Jacob Berger’s case for why conservatives have more in common than they assume with the original Red (“Why MAGA Folks Should Read Marx,” January 23).
The prospect of a so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” may provoke Green New Dealers, but the original New Deal’s Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman had been promptly inducted into the “Society of Red Tape Cutters” created by Dr. Seuss for the staunchly leftist newspaper PM to laud “Boldness and Directness of purpose” in overcoming “petty bureaucratic detail.”
Even after Seuss became more associated with the amusements of what Dissent‘s Michael Kazin called “lovely nonsense with no discernible moral point” than pointed propagandizing, the lines were not so clearly drawn. In 1982, conservative columnist George Will gushed that “the space program is the greatest conceivable adventure; yet the government scants it.” Will leaves unnamed any particular “Philistine utilitarians” he has in mind who need to be swayed by “such marvels as nonstick frying pans” but must have had in mind the likes of Democratic Senator William Proxmire, who had infamously insisted that NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence “should be postponed for a few million light-years” (or at least “until right after the federal budget is balanced”).
In 1999, Garry Wills couldn’t understand why Americans would “want inefficient politicians to govern us” when “we do not want inefficient doctors to treat us, inefficient lawyers to represent us,” a year after Barry Goldwater’s New York Times obituary remindedreaders that his “philosophy was never more simply put” than when he had declared that “I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient… for I propose to extend freedom.”
The “new, smaller government” promised in Bill Clinton’s 1996 State of the Union address was compromised by micromanagement as well as malpractice — as when proposing deeper involvement “in the workplace, in religious, charitable, and civic associations” or “to cut bureaucratic red tape so that schools and teachers have more flexibility for grassroots reform, and to hold them accountable for results” in ways that were inevitably top-down — and laid the ground for the seemingly endless conflicts and post-dotcom-boom busts of the twenty-first century. Disentangling voluntary cooperation from such astroturfing is necessary to break free from red (and green) tape.
“Congress famously has the power of the purse,” wrote one analyst, “but it looks like DOGE is trying to snatch it.”
Reporting Friday that aides to Elon Musk — the billionaire backer of Republican President Donald Trump who runs the Department of Government Efficiency — locked career civil servants out of computer systems containing the personal data of millions of federal employees raised alarms among observers who said the move is consistent with the administration’s efforts to assert authoritarian control over the federal government.
An unnamed official at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) told Reuters that “we have no visibility” into what Musk aides “are doing with the computer and data systems,” and “that is creating great concern.”
“There is no oversight,” the official said, adding that “it creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications.”
The Reuters report came on the same day that The Washington Post reported that David Lebryk, who has worked in nonpolitical positions at the U.S. Treasury Department since the George H.W. Bush administration, will retire following “a clash with allies of billionaire Elon Musk over access to sensitive payment systems.”
As the Post noted:
Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses, and more nationwide. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients, and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.
The clash reflects an intensifying battle between Musk and the federal bureaucracy as the Trump administration nears the conclusion of its second week. Musk has sought to exert sweeping control over the inner workings of the U.S. government, installing longtime surrogates at several agencies, including the Office of Personnel Management, which essentially handles federal human resources, and the General Services Administration, which manages real estate.
On Friday, the Trump administration ordered the General Services Administration to create a plan to slash 50% from the independent agency’s budget, according to journalist Ken Klippenstein, who reported senior officials were left looking “‘shell-shocked’” by the directive.
Lebryk’s announcement underscored what critics have warned is an aggressive push by Musk and other unelected Trump acolytes to sideline civil servants as part of an agenda in which MAGA sycophants are empowered to weaken government checks and balances and ensure total loyalty to the president, who has repeatedly flirted with authoritarianism.
In a Friday article highlighting Lebryk’s announcement, Gizmodo’s Matt Novak reported that “while it’s not clear why [Department of Government Efficiency] wants access, experts are alarmed because there’s basically no plausible explanation that doesn’t involve tinkering with critical government functions by sidestepping Congress.”
“Lebryk’s departure is apparently related to the interference by DOGE-affiliated goons to access these payment systems,” Novak asserted.
Common Dreams reported earlier this week that Trump loyalists in the OPM and Office of Management and Budget associated with Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation-led blueprint for a far-right takeover of the federal government — are leading a sweeping effort to purge career civil servants and replace them with officials who will do the president’s bidding without question.
Don Moynihan, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy, told Reuters Friday that “this makes it much harder for anyone outside Musk’s inner circle at OPM to know what’s going on.”
Despite its name, DOGE is a presidential advisory committee, not a federal department — and critics including Novak have accused the billionaire Trump supporter of reaching “his tentacles into virtually every agency.”
“Congress famously has the power of the purse,” he wrote. “But it looks like DOGE is trying to snatch it.”
Earlier this week, Congressman Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), the ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, warned that Trump “is trying every trick he and his Project 2025 cronies can think of to circumvent established civil service protections so they can purge the civil service of experts and replace them with political loyalists.”
“The victims here, as is always the case with Donald Trump, are the American people who will see government services and benefits allocated not by nonpartisan civil servants, but by partisan hacks,” Connolly added.
Mark Mazur, who served in senior Treasury Department roles during the Obama and Biden administrations, told the Post Friday that the prospect of government officials using the federal payments system in service of personal political motives is without precedent.
“It’s never been used in a way to execute a partisan agenda,” Mazur stressed. “You have to really put bad intentions in place for that to be the case.”
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