Wondering How Dangerous Elon Musk Is To The Country? How About Very, Very, Very?

Trump Turns A South African Nazi’s Kakistocracy Loose On America

The Presidential Greatness Project rates all the presidents and the latest one must have driven Trump wild. He’s dead last again— worse than James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, worse than Nixon and the 3 who caused the Great Depression (Coolidge, Hoover and Harding). Yep, #45 is the 45th best president. Lincoln is best, FDR second, Obama 7th best, Bill Clinton 12th best and, rubbing salt in Trump’s wounded ego, Biden is #14. Not enough salt? Kamala Harris is ranked as the 11th best vice president and Mike Pence is ranked as the 13th best.

And this rating is based solely on his first term. In other words, pre-Musk. Every president get a greatness rating. Lincoln’s is 93.97; FDR’s in 90.83; Washington’s is 90.32. The second worst president, James Buchanan— partially responsible for the Civil War— has a 16.71. Trump earned a 10.92, down a point since the 2018-2024 grading. My prediction is that once Musk is factored in, Trump will be in the single digits— and probably not in the high single digits.

Are you wondering why I think Musk will crash Trump’s already pathetic rating? Trump has pretty much sold governance to Musk and is allowing him— within boundaries— to run the show. Yesterday, Tim Reid reported that Musk aides who run the U.S. government human resources agency locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees, according to two agency officials. “Since taking office 11 days ago, Trump has embarked on a massive government makeover, firing and sidelining hundreds of civil servants in his first steps toward downsizing the bureaucracy and installing more loyalists. Musk and his employees are doing the dirty work, moving “swiftly to install allies at the agency known as the Office of Personnel Management… OPM has sent out memos that eschew the normal dry wording of government missives as it encourages civil servants to consider buyout offers to quit and  take a vacation to a ‘dream destination.’

Don Moynihan, a professor at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, said the actions inside OPM raised concerns about congressional oversight at the agency and how Trump and Musk view the federal bureaucracy.

"This makes it much harder for anyone outside Musk's inner circle at OPM to know what's going on," Moynihan said.

A team including current and former employees of Musk assumed command of OPM on Jan. 20, the day Trump took office. They have moved sofa beds onto the fifth floor of the agency's headquarters, which contains the director's office and can only be accessed with a security badge or a security escort, one of the OPM employees said.

The sofa beds have been installed so the team can work around the clock, the employee said.

Musk, a major donor to a famously demanding boss, installed beds at Twitter for employees to enable them to work longer when in 2022 he took over the social media platform. [Since then the value of Twitter has plummeted from $44 billion to around $19 billion, a lost of about 57%.]

"It feels like a hostile takeover," the employee said.

The new appointees in charge of OPM have moved the agency's chief management officer, Katie Malague, out of her office and to a new office on a different floor…

David Lebryk, the top-ranking career U.S. Treasury Department official, is set to leave his post following a clash with allies of Musk after they asked for access to payment systems, the Washington Post reported on Friday.

The new team at OPM includes software engineers and Brian Bjelde, who joined Musk's SpaceX venture in 2003 as an avionics engineer before rising to become the company's vice president of human resources. Bjelde's role at OPM is that of a senior adviser.

The acting head of OPM, Charles Ezell, has been sending memos to the entire government workforce since Trump took office, including Tuesday's offering federal employees the chance to quit with eight months pay.

"No-one here knew that the memos were coming out. We are finding out about these memos the same time as the rest of the world," one of the officials said.

Basically, Trump has granted Musk “unprecedented power to carry out his war on the ‘deep state,’ wrote Greg Sargent yesterday The justification for this is supposed to be that the government is corrupted to its core precisely because it is stocked with unelected bureaucrats who are unaccountable to the people. Musk, goes this story, will employ his fearsome tech wizardry to root them out, restoring not just efficiency to government, but also the democratic accountability that ‘deep state’ denizens have snuffed out— supposedly a major cause of many of our social ills. The startling news that [Lebryk] is departing after a dispute with Musk shows how deeply wrong that story truly is— and why it’s actively dangerous. The Washington Post reports that David Lebryk, who has carried out senior non-political roles at the department for decades, is leaving after officials on Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, sought access to Treasury’s payment system:

Lebryk had a dispute with Musk’s surrogates over access to the payment system the U.S. government uses to disburse trillions of dollars every year, the people said. The exact nature of the disagreement was not immediately clear, they said.

The news raises a complicated question: WTF??? Why is Musk’s DOGE trying to access payment systems inside the Treasury Department? It’s not clear what relevance this would have to his ostensible role, which is to search for savings and inefficiencies in government, not to directly influence whether previously authorized government obligations are honored.

Another question: Did Trump directly authorize Musk to do this, or did he not? Either answer is bad. If Trump did, he may be authorizing an unelected billionaire to exert unprecedented control over the internal workings of government payment systems. If he did not, then Musk may be going rogue to an even greater extent than we thought.

I contacted a few former officials at the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to try to gauge what this means. What was striking is the level of alarm they evinced about it. Here’s how The Post describes these systems:

Typically only a small number of career officials control Treasury’s payment systems. 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.

Former officials I spoke with were at a loss to explain why Musk would want such access. They noted that while we don’t yet know Musk’s motive, the move could potentially give DOGE the power to turn off all kinds of government payments in a targeted way. They said we now must establish if Musk is seeking to carry out what Trump tried via his federal funding freeze: Turn off government payments previously authorized by Congress. The White House rescinded the freeze after a national outcry, but his spokesperson vowed the hunt for spending to halt will continue. The former officials are asking: Is this Treasury power grab a way to execute that?

“Anybody who would have access to these systems is in a position to turn off funding selectively,” said Michael Linden, a former OMB official who is now director of Families Over Billionaires, a group fighting Trump’s tax cuts for the rich. “The only reason Musk wants to get himself in there must be because he wants to turn some things off.”

These officials describe these systems as almost akin to a series of faucets. Congress, by authorizing payments, fills the tanks and decides where the water will ultimately flow. The team overseen by the now-departing Lebryk in effect is in control of the spigots, these officials said.

What also alarms these officials is that this is unfolding even as a debt ceiling crisis looms. When the government is on the verge of defaulting on its obligations, these officials tell me, it’s Lebryk and his team who carefully monitor the situation to determine, to the greatest extent possible, on what date it will no longer be able to meet its obligations. This team monitors the water levels, these officials say, noting that this is how Treasury knows what to say in those letters that periodically warn Congress that a breach is approaching.

As it happens, this is precisely why we want career, non-political civil servants to be in charge of the spigots. To put it delicately, this is some really complicated shit, and we want the process to be administered in a totally non-politicized way. Letting someone like Musk anywhere near it risks corrupting it quite deeply.

“The payment systems are controlled by a small number of career officials precisely to protect them and the full faith and credit of the United States from political interference,” said Jesse Lee, who was a senior adviser to the National Economic Council under Biden. Or as Linden put it: “This is exactly the kind of thing you do not want political appointees getting involved in.”

All of which is why it’s critical to know whether Trump directly authorized this move by Musk. Trump’s executive order creating DOGE orders agencies to give it access to “all” unclassified records and systems. As The Post  notes, that would appear to include these Treasury ones.

… Whatever Musk intends with this new effort, this isn’t part of any war on the “deep state.” We’re witnessing a broad assault on that genuinely meritocratic achievement— one that could enable right-wing elites to corruptly loot the place, or install a highly “personalist” government marked above all by loyalty to Trump himself, or some combination of the two. And by all indications, that larger war is fully backed by the president himself.

This sounds like a kleptocracy on steroids. Would you expect anything more from Señor Trumpanzee? And just when the Washington Post confirms that Musk spent at least $288 million to election Trump and his allies this cycle “at a moment when he has amassed an extraordinary amount of power as a member of Trump’s inner circle — and decried by critics as a de facto, unelected co-president. He is also a driving force behind the effort to shrink the size of the federal workforce, helping to engineer a controversial offer this week to hundreds of thousands of career civil servants to quit their jobs and get paid through September. The staggering 2024 political spending by Musk and the extent of his influence over Trump, as well as the levers of the federal government, cap a remarkable transformation for the richest man in the world, who had only dabbled in politics before being welcomed into Trump’s inner orbit last year… The billionaire’s investment in the 2024 election has already paid off enormously, as his personal wealth has soared since Trump’s victory in November. Musk’s wealth is largely tied up in Tesla stock, which has seen massive gains in value since the election. Investors and analysts expect the electric vehicle company will benefit significantly from streamlined regulation on autonomous driving during the new administration.”