How Musk And Trump Plan To Hijack The Country— Root Access And The Billionaire Takeover

Regulatory Capture on Steroids

Musk says the future of Tesla lies with self-driving cars— and one of the first targets DOGE went after is a small government team regulating autonomous vehicles. The notoriously crooked Musk apparently didn’t find any conflict of interest when he cut the team nearly in half. Ian Duncan reported that the loss of personnel from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, will “touch on many aspects of the agency’s safety work. ‘It was just very jarring to go from saving lives one day to being locked out of your computer the next,’ said one terminated employee.” This means there will be less scrutiny of robotic vehicles, precisely what Musk was aiming to achieve.

“If the question is, will this affect the federal government’s ability to understand the safety case behind Tesla’s vehicles, then yes, it will,” said one terminated engineer. “The amount of people in the federal government who are able to understand this adequately is very small. Now it’s almost nonexistent.”

…NHTSA employed nearly 800 people as of January. It is relatively small but plays a leading role in the federal government’s efforts to reduce the annual death toll on the nation’s roads. It works on improving driver behavior, sets rules for the safety of vehicles and holds the power to recall dangerous cars and trucks. In recent years its work has increasingly involved overseeing new driver assistance technologies and fully robotic vehicles— including investigations of safety risks in Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving technologies.

…Musk’s various roles represent numerous potential conflicts of interest. He is a leading figure in the Trump administration with responsibility for slashing the federal workforce and spending. At the same time he is the leader of companies, including Tesla and rocket firm SpaceX, that are regulated by the same agencies his team is targeting for cuts.

Trump and Musk said in a joint interview with Fox News this week that Musk would not be involved in any work that poses a conflict with his business interests.

NHTSA has been responsible for investigating the safety of Tesla’s vehicles as Musk has put increasingly sophisticated driver assistance technology in the hands of regular drivers. Tesla plans to put fully autonomous vehicles on the road this year. An agency investigation led to a recall of 2 million vehicles in December 2023, and it disclosed in April that it had documented numerous deadly crashes involving Autopilot.

NHTSA is also investigating deadly crashes involving Ford’s driver assistance technology and safety problems with Waymo and Zoox’s autonomous vehicles.

The Trump administration has said it wants to help get more autonomous vehicles on the road by creating a framework to oversee them.

“Autonomous vehicles, if done right, can make our roadways way safer,” Duffy said during a department-wide employee town hall Friday. “That’s the vision.”

But NHTSA has struggled for years to ensure the safety of new technologies that take over much of the job of driving from humans or replace drivers altogether. The systems largely fall outside existing safety rules, so Tesla and other companies have been free to put them on the road with limited federal oversight.

Under the Biden administration, NHTSA grew steadily from about 600 employees. As part of that growth the agency built the team of seven or so experts to better understand autonomous systems and take responsibility for regulating them. The team was small, and because it was relatively new and had recently hired a number of employees from outside the federal government, it was vulnerable to DOGE effort targeting probationary employees.

Shortly before Trump was elected, Musk said he would seek to use his role in the administration to have the federal government create a framework for autonomous vehicles, although he did not provide details. Tesla’s stock price surged after the election, as investors bet that his influence would benefit the company.

Duffy said during his Senate confirmation hearing that he would allow ongoing investigations into Tesla and other manufacturers to proceed. NHTSA has also left in place a Biden administration order that requires companies to disclose crashes involving automated vehicles and driver assistance systems. Tesla reported 84 incidents between mid-December and mid-January, according to a batch of data released on Tuesday, in line with previous months.

The FAA is by far the largest agency at the Transportation Department, employing almost 47,000 of its nearly 58,000 workers. While NHTSA gets far less attention than the FAA, another engineer who was terminated said its staff are keenly aware of the dangers on the roads.

“It sticks with me that we’re still in this place of about 40,000 deaths a year and a million or so pretty bad injuries,” said the engineer, who took a pay cut and accepted a long commute to start a job at the agency. “We’re a small organization who are passionate about that mission.”

Zeynep Tufekci is a sociology professor at Princeton, one of the world’s most prominent academic voices on social media and the public sphere. Her OpEd in yesterday’s NY Times, Here Are The Digital Clues To What Musk Is Really Up To, emphasizes that Musk has been able to do so much damage so quickly because he’s approaching DOGE from the perspective of an engineer, not as someone who has to answer to voters, “exploiting vulnerabilities that are built into the nation’s technological systems, operating as what cybersecurity experts call an insider threat. We were warned about these vulnerabilities but no one listened, and the consequences— for the United States and the world— will be vast. Insider threats have been around for a long time: the C.I.A. mole toiling quietly in the Soviet government office, the Boeing engineer who secretly ferried information about the space shuttle program to the Chinese government.”

Modern digital systems supercharge that threat by consolidating more and more information from many distinct realms.

That approach has delivered obvious benefits in terms of convenience, access, integration and speed. When the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission described how segmentation of information among agencies hd stymied intelligence efforts,  the solution was to create integrated systems for collecting and sharing huge troves of data.

Running integrated digital systems, however, requires endowing a few individuals with sweeping privileges. They’re the sysadmins, the systems administrators who manage the entire network, including its security. They have root privileges, the jargon for highest level of access…

“At certain levels, you are the audit” is how one intelligence official explained to NBC News the ease with which a single person could walk off with reams of classified data on a thumb drive. It’s the modern version of one of the oldest problems of governance: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” as the Roman poet Juvenal asked about 2,000 years ago. Who watches the sysadmin?

…[A]t the Office of Personnel Management all employment records have been neatly digitized in an uber-human resources department for the entire federal government. That’s why a team from Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency headed straight for O.P.M., dragging in sofa beds to sleep on so they could be there round the clock. O.P.M. is root access to the entire United States government.

With that kind of access, even a small team can search the entire government for employees whose job titles contain suggestions of wrongthink, or who might resist takeovers or wield bureaucratic tools to slow the pace of change.

In effect, this small DOGE crew has become sysadmins for the entire government. Soon after O.P.M., they descended on the Treasury Department, where every payment the government has made is stored: root access to the economy (including many companies that are direct competitors to those of Musk). Their efforts expanded recently to the IRS and Social Security Administration, both of which hold extremely personal, sensitive information: root access to practically the entire American population.

The Atlantic reports that a former Tesla engineer appointed as the director of the Technology Transformation Services— a little-known entity that runs digital services for many parts of the government— has requested “privileged access” to 19 different I.T. systems reportedly without even completing a background check, making him less vetted than the person delivering pizza to that mine.

All this has merged with and amplified another kind of insider threat brewing for decades on the political side: the expansion of unchecked executive power.

“With money we will get men, said Caesar, and with men we will get money,” Thomas Jefferson once wrote, to warn against the ways that what he called elective despotism can become a self-feeding cycle. He had feared that an elected authoritarian would not just pulverize the institutions meant to limit his power, but take them over to wield as weapons, thus further entrenching himself.

Even Jefferson couldn’t have imagined a future in which the arsenal being deployed included centralized databases with comprehensive records on every citizen’s employment, finances, taxes and for some, even health status.

After a judge blocked a Trump executive order, Elon Musk shared a post with his more than 200 million followers on Twitter that included the judge’s daughter’s name, photo and job, allegedly at the Department of Education. There’s no indication he got access to government databases about her, but how would we know if he had, or if he does so in the future?

How many people are now wondering about private information about themselves or their loved ones? How many companies are wondering if their sensitive financial data is now in the hands of a rival? How many judges are wondering if their family is next?

It didn’t have to be this way. Over the years, expert after expert and organization after organization warned about the dangers of consolidating so much data in the hands of governments (and corporations). As far back as 1975 Jerome Wiesner, then the president of M.I.T., warned that information technology puts “vastly more power into the hands of government and private interests” and that “the widespread collection of personal information would pose a threat to the Constitution itself,” risking the rise of an “information tyranny in the innocent pursuit of a more efficient society.”

It’s not a choice between efficiency and manila folders in underground mines. There have been plenty of promising efforts to develop digital technologies that preserve our privacy while delivering its conveniences. They have names like zero-knowledge proofs, federated learning, differential privacy, secure enclaves, homomorphic encryption, but chances are you’ve never heard of any of them. In the rush to create newer, faster, more monetizable technologies— and to enable the kind of corporate empires whose chief executives stood beside Donald Trump at his inauguration— privacy and safety regulations seemed like a bore.

Now we are stuck with a system that offers equal efficiency to those who wish to exercise the legitimate functions of government and those who wish to dismantle it, or to weaponize it for their own ends. There doesn’t even seem to be a mechanism to learn who has gained access to what database with what privileges. Judges are asking and not always getting clear answers. The only ones who know are the sysadmins, and they’re not saying.

This rotten Musk-Trump alliance is not just about deregulation, let alone government efficiency— it’s about consolidating power in ways that erode democratic accountability. By systematically dismantling oversight bodies like NHTSA while embedding loyalists in key positions with “root access” to the government’s most sensitive systems, they are creating a digital-age version of Caesar’s maxim: with data, they will get control, and with control, they will get more data. The ability to surveil, manipulate, and intimidate— whether through regulatory capture or targeted harassment— undermines the very foundations of a government meant to serve the public, not a handful of billionaires.

This is not just about Tesla, autonomous vehicles, or even Musk’s own financial interests. It is about the weaponization of technology to strip away the few remaining guardrails on power. Every authoritarian in history has dreamed of the kind of granular control that a fully integrated, unaccountable digital bureaucracy could provide. The question is no longer whether Musk and Trump will use this power for their own benefit— that much is obvious. The question is whether anyone left in government, business, or civil society has the courage and ability to stop them before it’s too late.