Elon Musk’s Bureaucratic Coup
Welcome to the “rapid unscheduled disassembly” of the
United States government.
February 3, 2025, 6:09 PM ET
Elon Musk is not the president, but it does appear that
he—a foreign-born, unelected billionaire who was not confirmed by Congress—is
exercising profound influence over the federal government of the United States,
seizing control of information, payments systems, and personnel management. It
is nothing short of an administrative coup.
As the head of an improvised team within the Trump
administration with completely ambiguous power (the Department of Government
Efficiency, or DOGE, in reference to a meme about a Shiba Inu), Musk has
managed quite a lot in the two weeks since Inauguration Day. He has barged into at least one government building and
made plans to end leases or sell some of them (three leases have been terminated so far, according to Stephen
Ehikian, the General Services Administration’s acting administrator). He has
called in employees from Tesla and the Boring Company to oversee broad
workforce cuts, including at the Office of Personnel Management (one of Musk’s
appointed advisers, according to Wired, is just 21
years old, while another graduated from high school last year). During this
time, OPM staffers, presumably affiliated with DOGE, reportedly set up an
“on-premise” email server that may be vulnerable to hacking and able to collect
data on government employees—one that a lawsuit brought by two federal workers
argues violates the E-Government Act of 2002 (there has not yet been a response
to the complaint). Musk’s people have also reportedly gained access to the
Treasury’s payments system—used to disburse more than $5 trillion to Americans
each year (a national-security risk, according to Senator Ron
Wyden, a democrat from Oregon)—as well as computer systems that contain the
personal data of millions of civil servants. (They subsequently locked some senior employees out of those
systems, according to Reuters.) Musk did not immediately respond to a request
for comment.
Over the weekend, the Trump administration put two senior
staffers at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) on
administrative leave—staffers who, according to CNN, had tried to thwart Musk’s staff’s attempts
to access sensitive and classified information. Musk posted on X yesterday that “USAID is a
criminal organization. Time for it to die.” USAID staffers were barred from entering the unit’s
headquarters today.
This is called “flooding the zone.” Taken in aggregate,
these actions are overwhelming. But Musk’s political project with DOGE is
actually quite straightforward: The world’s richest man appears to be
indiscriminately dismantling the government with an eye toward consolidating
power and punishing his political enemies.
Two days before the 2024 election, I wrote that Musk’s chaotic takeover of
Twitter was going to be the blueprint for his potential tenure at DOGE.
Unfortunately, I was right—he’s running the exact same playbook. But it’s worth keeping
in mind that there are two ways of measuring success for Musk’s projects:
first, whether the organizations themselves benefit under his leadership, and
second, whether Musk himself gets something out of the arrangement. Musk’s stewardship
of X has been a financial nightmare. He has alienated advertisers, tanked
revenue and user growth, and saddled investment banks with debt from the
purchase that they’ll need to sell off. Yet Musk’s own influence and net worth
have grown considerably during this time. His fanboys and the MAGA faithful
don’t care that X is a flailing business, because Musk did deliver
on giving liberals their supposed comeuppance by de-verifying accounts and
reinstating banned trolls. He turned the platform into a conspiratorial
superfund site, has boosted right-wing accounts and talking points, and helped
elect Donald Trump as president. Musk’s purchase is a success in their eyes
because he succeeded in turning X into a political weapon.
Read: Musk’s Twitter is the blueprint for a MAGA government
The same thing is happening right now with DOGE. Musk and
his Silicon Valley acolytes are acting on a long-held fantasy of approaching the federal
government like a software company and running it like a venture-backed tech
start-up during the days of zero-percent interest rates. Here’s the problem:
The federal government is not a software company. “The stakes are wildly
different,” a former senior Twitter executive told me recently. This person,
who requested anonymity because they worked closely with Musk during his
takeover and fear retribution, argued that Musk seems incapable of recognizing
the limits of his own knowledge. When I asked them to describe Musk’s
managerial strategy, they borrowed a term of art from SpaceX’s own rocket
mishaps: “This is a rapid unscheduled disassembly of government services.”
The theory that the government is inefficient is not altogether incorrect. I
recently spoke with Robert Gordon, formerly the deputy assistant to the
president for economic mobility in the Biden administration, to get a sense of
how intricate government agencies are and what it would take to reform them.
Gordon, who has spent time in the Office of Management and Budget and as the
assistant secretary responsible for grants policy at the Department of Health
and Human Services, was quick to note that we desperately need to simplify
processes within the federal government to allow workers to execute more
quickly and develop more agile technology, such as the Direct File product that the IRS recently made to
allow Americans to file taxes for free. “No doubt the government could do more
here,” he told me. “But it requires incredibly specific approaches, implemented
in a thoughtful way. It requires paying enormous attention to detail, not
blowing shit up.” Musk and DOGE have instead operated with a “vast
carelessness,” Gordon wrote in a Substack post last week. “This government cannot trouble
itself to plan for the biggest things, the funds that thousands of
organizations use to serve millions of people,” he wrote. “It has swept up
civil servants in a vortex of confusion and fear.” Musk wrote today on X that the Treasury team
that built Direct File no longer exists. “That group has been deleted,” he
said.
Read: The American people deserve DOGE
Among Gordon’s biggest concerns is that DOGE’s slapdash
cuts will remove key links in the bureaucratic chain that make the government
function. Even simple-sounding procedures—allocating government funds in a
crisis like, say, a pandemic—require coordination among teams of civil servants
across multiple government offices. “All of this is done by back-office types,”
Gordon told me. “There are so many people in that process, and it matters
enormously how good they are.” That this system is inefficient is frustrating,
Gordon said, but he worries that the chaos caused by Musk’s efforts will halt
any possibility of reform. “If you want to make this system better, you need to
create space for civil servants who know what they’re doing to do that work,”
he told me. “What’s very likely to happen now because of this pressure is that
the most competent people on that chain are at super-high risk of saying, I
gave it my best shot; I don’t need this and quit, because they can get
better jobs. That’s what I see happening.”
Of course, the so-called tech right does not agree. As the political
scientist Henry Farrell wrote this past weekend, “The fact that none of
the DOGE people actually understand how government functions is a feature, not
a bug. If you understand the workings of the federal bureaucracy, you are
almost certainly part of the problem, not the solution.” But this reasoning is
not usually compatible with the reality of managing complex organizations. As
the former Twitter exec told me, after Musk took over the platform, his people
enthusiastically championed ideas that seasoned employees with knowledge of the
company had already researched and rejected: “It wasn’t that we hadn’t thought
about new ways, say, to do verification or handle bots, but we rejected them on
the basis of research and data. There was a huge contrast between the
methodical approach and Musk’s rapid-fire whims.”
When Musk barged into Twitter in 2022 as its new CEO, his
strategy was “decision making by vibes,” according to the former exec I spoke
with. Those vibes were often dictated by the sycophants in Musk’s orbit. The
executive described Musk as surprisingly receptive to ideas when presented with
facts and data, but said that few in his inner circle questioned or spoke
frankly with him: “And so, in the absence of rational decision making, we got
the vibes-based, yes-man approach.”
The former executive did point to a meaningful difference
between X and DOGE, however: The government is big and complex. This may be an asset during an
assault. “Even if you try to take a flamethrower to the government, the
destruction won’t be quick. There’ll be legal challenges and congressional
fights, and in the months and weeks, it’ll be individuals who keep essential
services running,” they said. The government workers who know what they’re
doing may still be able to make positive incremental change from within.
Read: There really is a deep state
It’s a rousing, hopeful notion. But I fear that the focus
on the particulars of this unqualified assault on our government is like
looking at X’s bottom line, in that it obscures Musk’s real ambitions. What are
DOGE’s metrics for success? If X is our guide, health, functionality, and
sustainability are incidental and able to be sacrificed. The end game for Musk
seems to be just as it was with Twitter: seize a polarized, inefficient
institution; fuse his identity with it; and then use it to punish his enemies
and reward his friends. DOGE is a moon-shot program to turn the government into
Musk’s personal political weapon.
About the Author
Charlie Warzel is a staff writer at The
Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Galaxy Brain, about technology, media, and big
ideas. He can be reached via email.
