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5 February 2025

The plot to asset-strip American government

Even the radical architects of Project 2025 didn’t propose what Elon Musk is doing to US democracy.

By Jill Filipovic

As Donald Trump enters his Mad King era and starts a trade war that seems primed to crater the global economy, he has handed the keys to the kingdom to the richest man on Earth: a man unelected, unconfirmed by Congress and unaccountable to the electorate.

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and owner of X, was chosen by Trump to lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency – Doge, like the internet meme about a dog, the kind of very-online joke that tickles the tastes of Musk’s pubertal fans. And while Musk’s appointment does seem like a put-on, it hasn’t been especially funny. Trump created Doge via executive order. Government agencies are supposed to be created by acts of Congress, but Trump got around that by renaming the existing federal Digital Service “Doge”, and keeping it within the executive office. The department is now digging into various nooks and crannies of the federal bureaucracy and rapidly dismantling them.

The Trump administration’s strategy has been to “flood the zone” with so many actions that it’s hard to keep up, let alone respond. But what Americans are seeing now is unprecedented: the systematic dismembering of its government. And it’s coming at the hands of a man who cannot legally run for president, and who is acting as if he’s drunk on his own grandiosity.

Musk seems to have brought in his own lackeys to staff up Doge, and it’s unclear who most of them are, given that they are not long-standing federal employees (those people are being put on leave, encouraged to quit or have been pushed out). Last November, Musk tweeted that he was seeking “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week” for Doge. Wired has since found a few of the hires, and they’re men in their early 20s with no government experience. They are not public servants. They do not seem to be adhering to the same ethical and transparency requirements as other federal employees, and given their position underneath the executive umbrella the Trump administration may argue they don’t have to. It’s unclear if they’ve all been subject to security screenings. And they have access to vast amounts of federal government data and information, some of it classified.

So far, the destruction has been swift and stunning. Musk’s aides took over the Office of Personnel Management, locked many of the agency’s actual employees out of computer systems and apparently gained access to the private information of the federal workforce, according to Reuters. They got into the Treasury department, accessing the system the federal government uses to make trillions of dollars in payments every year – everything from government contractor salaries to grandma’s Social Security payment. When a Treasury official tried to stand up to them, he was put on leave and then retired. Musk took to X to boast about shutting down payments to Lutheran Family Services, a group that provides, among other things, adoption aid and health services for the homeless.

Musk’s team also burrowed into Usaid, the country’s international aid and development organisation that funds programmes including famine relief and HIV treatment. Musk tweeted that Usaid is “a criminal organisation” and that it’s “time for it to die”. When officials denied Musk’s aides access into restricted areas and to classified documents, the officials were put on administrative leave. Thousands of aid workers around the globe were terminated or saw their employment paused. The agency’s website disappeared.

It’s hard to overstate how important Usaid has been. Just one programme, PEPFAR, the agency’s HIV/Aids relief programme started by George W Bush, is credited with saving the lives of millions of people. Usaid has long been a symbol of American goodness: of the US’s knowledge that with its extraordinary good fortune comes an obligation to care for others.

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It is also a project of self-interest: an America that is seen as good is one that stands stronger against malign opponents competing for power globally. When people the world over see that shipments of food and medical supplies are stamped with Usaid, the US enjoys greater global influence and national security as a result.

Project 2025, the right-wing plan designed for the Trump administration in order to radically reshape American government, devoted a chapter to Usaid, proposing scaling back its funding and enforcing an ideological overhaul that stripped out mentions of gender equality and reproductive rights – even the word “gender” itself. Project 2025 targeted organisations providing reproductive healthcare. This plan would have been disastrous, and it would have cost lives. But even the radical architects of Project 2025 didn’t propose what Musk is doing.

Republicans who know this is calamitous are nevertheless standing idly by, cowed by Trump and interested in self-preservation over national survival. Democrats seem to have come up with new and creative ways to remove their spines from their bodies; watching them feels akin to pulling the alarm for an out-of-control blaze only to see the firefighters sitting around the station remarking that someone should do something about this terrible event.

What Musk is doing, though, can only be done if our elected leaders let him. Congress created Usaid. One unelected man does not have the authority to dismantle it. But he will be able to destroy it if Congress stands idly by – and if the public fails to stand up and say: for America to be great, America needs to be good.

[See more: Trump’s America is a gangster’s paradise]

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This article appears in the 05 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The New Gods of AI