Yesterday, the NY Times assigned a team of six reporters— something you don’t see every day— to explain the parameters of Musk’s coup. In his first 2 weeks as, basically, co-president, Musk and his Lord of the Flies team have “gained access to closely held financial and data systems, casting aside career officials who warned that they were defying protocols. They moved swiftly to shutter specific programs— and even an entire agency that had come into Musk’s cross hairs. They bombarded federal employees with messages suggesting they were lazy and encouraging them to leave their jobs… Musk is waging a largely unchecked war against the federal bureaucracy— one that has already had far-reaching consequences. Musk’s aggressive incursions into at least half a dozen government agencies have challenged congressional authority and potentially breached civil service protections. Top officials at the Treasury Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development who objected to the actions of his representatives were swiftly pushed aside. And Musk’s efforts to shut down U.S.A.I.D., a key source of foreign assistance, have reverberated around the globe. Musk, the world’s richest man, is sweeping through the federal government as a singular force, creating major upheaval as he looks to put an ideological stamp on the bureaucracy and rid the system of those who he and the president deride as ‘the deep state.’… By Monday, U.S.A.I.D. was effectively paralyzed. In a live broadcast on his social media platform early Monday, Musk said the president agreed ‘that we should shut it down.’”
The day before, in an essay titled Elon Musk Is President, Jonathan Lemire wrote that “The world’s richest man has declared war on the federal government and, in a matter of days, has moved to slash its size and reach, while gaining access to some of its most sensitive secrets. He has shaped the public discourse by wielding the powerful social-media site he controls and has threatened to use his fortune to bankroll electoral challenges to anyone who opposes him. Elon Musk’s influence appears unchecked, triggering cries of alarm from those who worry about conflicts of interest, security clearances, and a broad, ill-defined mandate. But the Republican-controlled Congress has shown no desire so far to rein Musk in. There has never been a private citizen like him.
At times working from the White House campus, Musk plainly enjoys his position as the president’s most influential adviser. Trump famously turns on aides he believes eclipse him. But by his own account, he remains enamored of Musk, seeming to relish the fact that the world’s wealthiest person is working for him, the White House official told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity to relay private conversations. Trump, the official said, also believes that Musk has shown a willingness to take public pushback for controversial actions, allowing the president himself to avoid blame.
Over the weekend, Musk set his sights on the U.S. Agency for International Development, declaring in a series of tweets, without evidence, that USAID is “a criminal organization” that is “evil” and “must die.” The Trump administration, adopting a transactional, “America First” view of global engagement, has subjected the agency— the world’s largest provider of food assistance— to aid freezes, personnel purges, and mass confusion. Musk in recent days became the would-be executioner. In an X Spaces live chat early this morning, he said he had discussed USAID’s future with Trump “in detail, and he agreed that we should shut it down.”
“And so we’re shutting it down,” Musk said.
Hours later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he was assuming the role of acting director of the agency, which he said the White House wants to fold into the State Department. USAID’s proponents have long seen it as a useful tool of American soft power that acted as a bulwark against China and Russia; its apparent demise was cheered by former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who wrote on Twitter that Musk was making a “smart move” to “plug USAID’s Deep Throat. Let’s hope notorious Deep State doesn’t swallow him whole.”
Musk might not succeed in kneecapping the agency. Several Democrats denounced the plan to move it to the State Department, arguing that Congress established USAID as a separate agency and that moving or closing it would take a subsequent act of Congress. But Republicans on the Hill were muted, seemingly willing to sacrifice their power as a co-equal branch of government to appease Musk and Trump.
I sure wouldn’t cry if Musk met his own Luigi Mangione and I’m glad Democrats— and the mainstream media— appear to be finally waking up to the profound nature of the danger he poses to the country, but… USAID is the wrong battle to fight. It’s Republican bait to lure the Democrats into a brawl they will lose in the arena of public opinion. Reporting for PunchBowl yesterday, Jake Sherman, John Bresnahan and Max Cohen touched on why this is a losing battle for Democrats… and why the GOP wants this to be the one they slaughter Democrats on, just the way they used trans-gender sports in the last election. USAID does a lot of good but much of their work is easily slammed, “a clear example of a sprawling federal bureaucracy run amok. As GOP Rep. Wesley Hunt (Texas) pointed out on Twitter Monday, USAID spent $20 million to produce Ahlan Simsim Iraq, an Arabic-language version of Sesame Street, gave the Jordanians $100 million to build schools, funneled $11 million to Vietnam as part of an environmental protection program and spent $27 million for reintegration gift bags for deportees. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt also mocked some of USAID’s outlays on Monday, including ‘$70,000 for a production of a DEI musical in Ireland, $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, $32,000 for a transgender opera in Peru.’... [W]ith USAID, DOGE is feasting on low-hanging fruit. There’s nothing that draws as much GOP ire as foreign aid, especially when the U.S. government is saddled with $36 trillion in debt… ‘It is not too much to ask that our foreign aid and its delivery to actually comport with the objectives of our foreign policy,’ Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) said.”
Sun Tzu (The Art of War): “He who controls the battlefield, controls the war.”
Napoleon, who always sought to dictate the time and place of battle to maximize his advantages: “The side that choses the battlefield has already won half the fight.”
GOP lawmakers also do not seem to object to Musk’s installation of former staffers from Tesla, Twitter, and the Boring Company at several agencies, including the Office of Personnel Management, which essentially handles federal human resources, and the General Services Administration, which manages government real estate. Some of Musk’s lead aides, according to Wired, are between 19 and 24 years old. (When a user on Twitter later posted the names of those aides, Musk replied, “You have committed a crime,” and suspended the account.)
Over the weekend, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent granted DOGE staffers access to the system that sends out money on behalf of the entire federal government, ceding to Musk— whose wealth is estimated at more than $325 billion— a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit federal spending. That move ended a standoff with a top Treasury official, a career civil servant named David Lebryk, who was put on leave and then suddenly retired after he had tried to prevent Musk’s lieutenants from getting into the department’s payment system.
“The only way to stop fraud and waste of taxpayer money is to follow the payment flows and pause suspicious transactions for review. Obviously,” Musk posted today on Twitter. “Naturally, this causes those who have been aiding, abetting and receiving fraudulent payments very upset. Too bad.”
The department, in a process run by civil servants, disbursed more than $5 trillion in fiscal year 2023. Access to the payment system is tightly held because it includes sensitive personal information about the millions of Americans who receive Social Security checks, tax refunds, and other payments from the federal government. Moreover, two of Musk’s companies— Tesla and SpaceX— have more than $15 billion in government contracts, and according to some Democrats, he might now have access to information about competitor businesses, creating conflicts of interest. Musk also has business interests overseas, including in China.
A group of Senate and House Democrats has vowed a court battle over Musk’s access to the payment system. “Elon Musk, you may have illegally seized power over the financial payments systems of the Treasury, but you don’t control the money of the American people,” Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland said at a news conference today outside of USAID headquarters in Washington. “The U.S. Congress does that under Article 1 of the Constitution. We don’t have a fourth branch of government called ‘Elon Musk.’”
But this morning Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., released a letter he wrote to Musk declaring that his office would “pursue any and all legal action against anyone” who tried to impede DOGE’s work.
Last week, Musk was the driving force behind an email from the Office of Personnel Management with the subject line “Fork in the Road,” demanding that millions of federal employees accept massive workplace changes or resign. The White House official told me that Musk came up with the email subject line, which was also the language he used in an email to Twitter employees shortly after he purchased the company in 2022.
After taking over Twitter and rebranding it as Twitter Musk demolished the company’s value and sparked a mass exodus of users. But it gave him a powerful political platform— which he is also now using to try to influence European elections— and there are signs that business is improving. The site brought in $25 million in political advertising revenue in 2024, mostly from Republicans, and the Wall Street Journal reported last week that Amazon— owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns the dominant newspaper in the nation’s capital— was increasing its spending on Twitter.
Democrats are making high-minded arguments, but though they may be right, they will not win over the public. Sherman, Bresnahan and Cohn wrote that “Schumer warned that Trump, Musk and DOGE aren’t interested in the inner workings of USAID. Their ultimate goal, Schumer said, is dismantling the federal government: ‘[T]his is just the beginning. If DOGE attacks USAID today, then you can be sure they’ll move on to another target tomorrow. Who knows? Maybe it’ll be the Postal Service, or the IRS or even the Social Security Administration. They could be next. Or maybe our national security agencies.’ Democrats point to huge potential conflicts of interest for Musk, whose businesses include Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, Twitter and others. Federal contracts for Musk-controlled companies could run into billions of dollars. Democrats have honed in on attempts by DOGE aides to gain access to the federal payment system run by the Treasury Department as particularly worrisome. Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries are drafting legislation to bar that… Yet after Congress approved more than $120 billion supporting Ukraine, plus billions more for other regions, Republicans are happy to fight about U.S. spending abroad. Why? Because foreign aid isn’t something that directly affects the lives of most Americans. Republicans see this as an easy win, especially when there’s so much to mock.”
The fight over USAID works for much of the Democratic base but it won’t work for most Americans who don’t live inside the Beltway. There are better battlefields for Democrats to choose. When Musk bought Twitter, he gutted the company, reshaping it into a platform that prioritizes his ideological agenda. Now, he’s applying the same scorched-earth strategy to the federal government… much much higher stakes. I think the lessons from history are clear: when power is seized rather than earned, it’s wielded recklessly, without constraint, and without regard for democratic institutions. Musk’s power grab is not just a crisis for the federal workforce or for USAID; it is an existential threat to the constitutional order itself. The question is no longer whether Musk will overreach— it’s how far he’s going before someone stops him. Will a supine Congress reassert its authority? Will the courts push back? Or will the world’s richest man continue to rule as America’s first unelected autocrat, unchallenged and unchecked? If the answer to that last question is “yes,” then the United States has already crossed a threshold from which it may not return.
This isn’t just a crisis of governance; it’s a test of whether American democracy has the institutional resilience— and popular support— to withstand a hostile takeover from within. His unchecked control over federal agencies, financial systems, and even personnel decisions is an extraordinary consolidation of power— the kind of maneuver that, in another country, would be widely recognized as a coup. Yet, instead of resisting, the Republican Party has welcomed it, ceding its constitutional role as a co-equal branch of government to serve as Musk’s rubber stamp. The GOP, which once wrapped itself in the rhetoric of “limited government,” is now celebrating the most audacious power grab in American history— not by an elected official, but by a billionaire who treats the federal bureaucracy like his latest startup acquisition. Republican lawmakers are not just failing to act or surrendering; they are joining the enemy, hoping Musk’s wrecking ball will take out their political opponents while leaving their own positions intact. But power, once relinquished, is not easily reclaimed. Again, will anyone stop him before it’s too late?
As our Times reporters noted, “There is no precedent for a government official to have Musk’s scale of conflicts of interest, which include domestic holdings and foreign connections such as business relationships in China. And there is no precedent for someone who is not a full-time employee to have such ability to reshape the federal work force… There is not one single entity holding Musk accountable. It’s a harbinger of the destruction of our basic institutions. Several former and current senior government officials— even those who like what he is doing— expressed a sense of helplessness about how to handle Musk’s level of unaccountability. At one point after another, Trump officials have generally relented rather than try to slow him down. Some hoped Congress would choose to reassert itself... ‘The more I have gotten to know President Trump, the more I like him. Frankly, I love the guy,’ Musk said in a live audio conversation on Twitter early Monday morning. ‘This is our shot. This is the best hand of cards we’re ever going to have.’”
Better battlefield than USAID? How about deporting Elon Musk for lying on the paperwork that got him into this country in the first place? That’s easy to understand and nice and clearcut. Besides, wasn't he a DEI hire because of his autism? A beneficiary of affirmative action for white men?
Today's national anti-Trump protests. If you can't make it, wear something blue:
Comments