On Friday, Tim Carpenter reported that Kansas Senator Jerry Moran (R) did something congressional Republicans are loathe to do: he went up against Trump and Musk— in this case against the freeze on federal funding at USAID that “left $340 million in lifesaving food grown in the United States sitting at domestic ports awaiting delivery to locations around the world where people were starving... Moran, among farm-state senators on the Senate Agriculture Committee, said he encouraged Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state and acting administrator of USAID, to make certain U.S.-grown commodities were promptly shipped and distributed to people in need… $566 million in U.S.-grown commodities designated for humanitarian purposes was locked down in warehouses throughout the world. ‘Time is running out before this lifesaving aid perishes,’ Moran said. ‘Food stability is essential to political stability, and our food aid programs help feed the hungry, bolster our national security and provide an important market for our farmers, especially when commodity prices are low.’”
The other Kansas senator, MAGA hack Roger Marshall, “said during a news conference in Kansas that USAID was mired in corruption. The allegation mirrored [unsubstantiated] claims made by Trump and Musk… Marshall said he recommended an executive-branch crackdown on USAID when he spoke to Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who worked together at what Trump anointed as the Department of Government Efficiency… ‘One of the very first things I spoke to Elon and Vivek about was the problems in the USAID program,’ Marshall said. ‘I think it’s very good to take a pause on all of our money that we’re sending outside of this country. Let’s make America first again. Let’s get our own house in order.’”
Marshall is up for reelection next year. Kansas is pretty solid Republican state— and has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932— although they do have a Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, who is term-limited out. With Marshall taking such a strong position against his own state, there is a reasonable chance Kelly could beat him. Last year Trump swamped Kamala 57.2% to 41.0% winning 100 of the state’s 105 counties. Siding with Elon Musk against the state’s agricultural industry is probably a political death sentence.
“Musk’s blitzkrieg on Washington,” wrote a team of Washington Post reporters, “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 mens 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.” I’m not pointing any fingers, but did you ever hear of a criminal who didn’t want a smaller and weaker government?
“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 judgewho 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.”
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 Nixon’s 1973 attempt to cancel federal programs he didn’t like and President Harry 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.
…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.”
They think they’re no competent and so far above everyone else in every way. That has never been true and they’re already proving themselves to be an utter disaster. Theodore Schleifer, Nicholas Nehamas, Kate Conger and Ryan Mac reported that “at the end of his third week bulldozing through the federal government, Elon Musk sat down to give Vice President JD Vance a 90-minute briefing on his efforts to dismantle the bureaucracy. Musk was not alone. Invited to join him on Thursday morning in Vance’s stately ceremonial office suite in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House, were a clutch of young aides whose presence at federal agencies has served as a harbinger of the upheaval that would follow them. Across the federal government, civil servants have witnessed the sudden intrusion in the last two weeks of these young members of the billionaire’s team, labeled the Department of Government Efficiency. As Musk traipses through Washington, bent on disruption, these aides have emerged as his enforcers, sweeping into agency headquarters with black backpacks and ambitious marching orders.
While Musk is flanked by some seasoned operatives, his dizzying blitz on the federal bureaucracy is, in practice, largely being carried out by a group of male engineers, including some recent college graduates and at least one as young as 19.
Unlike their 20-something peers in Washington, who are accustomed to doing the unglamorous work ordered up by senior officials, these aides have been empowered to break the system.
Of the roughly 40 people on the team, just under half of them have some previous ties to the billionaire— but many have little government experience, the New York Times found… They all appear to have channeled his shoot-first, aim-later approach to reform as they have overwhelmed the bureaucracy.
A 23-year-old who once used artificial intelligence to decode the word “purple” on an Ancient Greek scroll has swiftly gained entree to at least five federal agencies, including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, where he has been seeking access to sensitive databases. He was part of a group that helped effectively shutter the United States Agency for International Development, joined by the 19-year-old, a onetime Northeastern student who was fired from a data security firm after an investigation into the leaking of internal information, as Bloomberg first reported.
In the past week, his aides have descended upon the Education, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, Transportation and Veterans Affairs Departments, along with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to people familiar with their activities.
…Even as Musk’s team members upend the government, their identities have been closely held, emerging only piecemeal when the new arrivals press career officials for information and access to agency systems.
The opacity with which they are operating is highly unusual for those working in government. Aside from those conducting classified or intelligence work, the names of public employees are not generally kept secret.
Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said the cost-cutting team has gone through the same vetting as other federal employees, but declined to say what the vetting consisted of or whether Musk’s aides have security clearances.
The Times identified members of Musk’s initiative through internal emails identifying their roles and interviews with employees across the government who have interacted with them. None of the Musk aides responded to requests for comment.
The secrecy, Musk allies have said, is necessary so the team members do not become targets.
Several of Musk’s aides have resisted being listed in government databases out of fear of their names leaking out, according to people familiar with the situation. Others have worked to remove information about themselves from the internet, scrubbing résumés and social media accounts.
When their names have been made public by news organizations such as Wired, they have been scrutinized by online sleuths. Musk has asserted, falsely, that the exposure of their roles is a “crime,” and Twitter has removed some posts and issued suspensions to those who publicize their identities.
One Musk aide whose name surfaced, Marko Elez, a 25-year-old former employee of Twitter, resigned on Thursday, according to a White House official, after the Wall Street Journal revealed that he had made racist posts on Twitter, writing in one message that “you could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.” Elez, a former employee at both Twitter and xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, was one of two staff members affiliated with Musk’s team who had gained access to the Treasury Department’s closely held payment system.
Elez was among those who had been invited to attend Musk’s meeting with the vice president before he resigned, according to documents seen by The Times. On Friday, Musk called for The Journal reporter to be fired and said he was reinstating Elez, a move that both the president and the vice president said they supported. “We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people,” Vance posted on Twitter.
…At the Office of Personnel Management, the nerve center of the federal government’s human resources operation, a small group of coders on Musk’s team sometimes sleep in the building overnight. They survive on deliveries of pizza, Mountain Dew, Red Bull and Doritos, working what Musk has described as 120-hour weeks.
At the General Services Administration, another central hub for Musk’s aides, beds have been installed on the sixth floor, with a security guard keeping people from entering the area.
While most senior employees wear suits, the aides favor jeans, sneakers and T-shirts, sometimes under a blazer, with one sporting a navy-blue baseball cap with white lettering reading “DOGE.”
The culture clash is evident. Perhaps unsurprisingly, career employees who have worked for decades in the government have bristled at taking orders from the young newcomers. One coder has openly referred to federal workers as “dinosaurs.” Some staff members at the personnel office, in turn, derisively call the young men “Muskrats.”
As they assess the workings of the government, Musk’s aides have been conducting 15-minute video interviews with federal workers. Some of their questions have been pointed, such as querying employees about whom they would choose to fire from their teams if they had to pick one person. At times, the aides have not turned on their cameras or given their last names, feeding suspicion.
In one video interview heard by The Times, a young team representative who introduced himself by his first name said he was an “adviser” to government leadership and a startup founder. He pressed the interviewee to describe their contributions with “highest impact” and to list any technical “superpowers.”
…Before joining the government, Coristine was fired in June 2022 from an internship at Path, an Arizona-based data security company, after “an internal investigation into the leaking of proprietary company information that coincided with his tenure,” the company said in a statement Friday.
One Musk acolyte has leaned into his new status as a Washington celebrity.
Gavin Kliger, a newly minted senior adviser at the personnel office, wrote a Substack post this week titled “Why DOGE: Why I gave up a seven-figure salary to save America”— and asked users to pay a $1,000-per-month subscription fee to read it.
The post behind the paywall appeared to have been left intentionally blank, according to users who saw it.
Kliger, 25, a software engineer, amplified a message posted on Twitter in December by Nick Fuentes, one of the country’s most prominent young white supremacists, which mocked those who celebrate their interracial families. The post was removed from Kliger’s page after The Times inquired about it. He did not respond to requests for comment.
And by the way, in December, that 25 year old racist, Marko Elez, wrote “I just want a eugenic immigration policy, is that too much to ask,” and “Repeal the Civil Rights Act.” That was enough for Musk, Vance and Trump to fall in love and bring him right back to DOGE.
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