Elon Musk Coups The Administrative State - The Monday AM Quickie 2/3/25
If you're interested in tracking all the ways in which this administration could be on the take, I wrote about Trump's adventures with crypto shitcoins as a vehicle for political corruption. -Jacob
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THE BIG NEWS
Elon Musk Coups The Administrative State
Welcome to the new regime. Sure, Donald Trump is still president and presently wrecking America's alliances and (in due course) its economy and public health, but Elon Musk and his tech allies have begun asserting themselves in powerful ways. Late last week and into the weekend, Musk and his DOGE cronies – which apparently include a handful of early 20s engineers plucked from Musk's firms and companies like Palantir – began pushing their way into agencies and systems across the federal government. They're already wreaking destruction.
Websites like reproductiverights.org have been taken down, along with that of USAID, one agency where Musk lieutenants forced their way in after repeated confrontations with career staffers. A number of government agencies have taken down thousands of once-public data sets, including about public health issues. References to LGBTQ people, ethnic minorities, DEI, and anything deemed "identity-based" or reflective of "gender ideology" have been removed from government offices, public areas, and websites.
Perhaps most worryingly, Musk and DOGE are working to insinuate themselves into the systems that control federal spending and basic government functions, including record-keeping on millions of government employees. According to Reuters, Musk's people locked career employees out of their systems at the Office of Personnel Management. Meanwhile, workers across the federal bureaucracy are receiving emails from OPM encouraging them to quit their jobs or firing them outright (which may be illegal).
At the Treasury Department, Musk's people were engaged in a multi-day standoff with career staffers who wanted to prevent the unelected outsiders from accessing sensitive systems tracking all government payments and disbursements – more than $6 trillion dollars each year. Newly installed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent ultimately intervened on behalf of Musk & co. The richest man in the world has started posting about his team poring over government expenses and blocking individual payments that they – without authority or real evidence – deem suspect, as they decide which agencies, like USAID, should be axed.
"These payment systems simply cannot fail, and any politically motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy," said Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden.
It seems like we are very much in that risky territory – a recapitulation of Musk's chaotic, wrecking-ball takeover of Twitter, but this time applied to the federal government. If this were happening elsewhere, we'd call it for what it is: the richest man in the world taking over the basic infrastructure and operations of the US state.
MORE STORIES TO WATCH
Trump Starts A Trade War For No Reason
In what you could, I guess, call a fulfillment of one of his more inane campaign promises, President Donald Trump started trade wars with our closest allies over the weekend, slapping tariffs of 25% on all goods coming from Mexico and Canada. He also added a 10% tariff on all Chinese imports. Trump's soup-brained justification is that our nearest and dearest allies have not sufficiently staunched the flow of Chinese fentanyl and migrants, and so they must be punished and bullied into compliance. The tariffs could lead to increased prices for consumers, less cross-border trade, a return of inflation, and the destabilization of the US economy. Even Trump acknowledged that US consumers might feel "some pain."
Soon-to-be-outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum expressed disappointment and even incredulity at Trump's decision, which could trigger retaliatory economic measures that will probably help no one. Few outside the MAGA faithful understand what Trump is doing here. Even the Wall Street Journal called it "the dumbest trade war in history," launched "for no good reason."
Another Plane Crash And An FAA System Goes Down
A small jet operating as an air ambulance crashed shortly after takeoff on Friday, plummeting into a neighborhood in northeast Philadelphia. The jet carried six people, including a pediatric patient, all of whom died. One person on the ground also died and 22 were injured. Local buildings were damaged, with several houses catching fire, and debris was spread across more than four blocks. It's the second major air accident to occur recently, two days after a US Army Black Hawk helicopter collided mid-flight with a regional passenger jet near Washington DC, resulting in the deaths of 67 people.
Yesterday, the FAA's "primary system for sending real-time safety alerts to pilots" – the kind of alerts that warn pilots of a potential collision with another aircraft – went down for a few hours. The FAA claimed that it was able to rely on a backup system and air travel operations were unaffected. But it comes at a time when the entire air travel system is considered understaffed and over-stressed, as near-misses have become more common.
QUICKEST QUICKIES
- Immigration Raids Provoke Protests High-profile ICE raids continue to occur across the country, terrifying housekeeping staff in Brooklyn, street vendors, US citizens caught in the dragnet, and people with no criminal history (among so many others). Yesterday, thousands of people protested against Trump's mass deportation program in Los Angeles, shutting down part of the 101 Freeway. Protesters also assembled in Fresno, in the heart of California's farm country, and in Riverside, San Diego, and other cities. via Fox 26 News, CBS News, and LAT.
- Team Musk Kneecaps US Foreign Aid The Trump administration recently announced that it was freezing all foreign aid – except to Egypt and Israel, naturally – and now Elon Musk's DOGE-ocrats have taken aim as USAID. Two officials from the agency were put on leave after they refused to allow DOGE staffers access to USAID systems. According to CNN, "the DOGE personnel wanted to gain access to USAID security systems and personnel files." Musk has also repeatedly posted on X that USAID personnel are Marxist un-American traitors who deserve etc etc – you get the idea. via CNN and AP News.
- Trump Fires The Head of the CFPB President Trump fired Rohit Chopra, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency that, in line with its name, has returned billions of dollars to consumers exploited and gouged by big businesses. Elon Musk and MAGA have made the CFPB, a consumer-protection agency developed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, one of their principal targets in their war against the administrative state. via AP News.
- Cowed By Trump Admin, Some Hospitals Stop Serving Trans Patients NYU Langone Health, one of the top hospital networks in the country, has been canceling appointments for trans youth seeking gender-affirming care. Children's National Hospital has similarly paused services for trans youth. The change in policy is in response to a slate of Trump executive orders targeting trans health care, attempting to codify the gender binary, and threatening state and federal agencies, grant recipients, and contractors with consequences if they continue to serve trans people. via WaPo and NYT.
SOME NUMBER
90,000
That's how many government employees have used OpenAI's ChatGPT software in the last year, according to the incredibly over-hyped, over-valued artificial intelligence startup. OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman have been pivoting hard toward the Trump administration – praising him in public, donating to his inauguration, signing on for the massive Stargate data center project, and now making a deal to have its software used by the country's nuclear labs. It's just a balky piece of snake-oil software that hallucinates fake information – what could go wrong?
ON THE SHOW TODAY
2/3: Happy Monday! Sam and Emma speak with Nathan Tankus, proprietor of the Notes on the Crises newsletter, to discuss the reporting that Elon Musk and his associates have taken over crucial payment controls in the Treasury Department.
DON'T MISS MR CLIPS
OOF! RFK Jr. Gets Exposed During Confirmation Hearing
He has zero qualifications for the HHS job and would likely cause unnecessary deaths, but let's hear him out.
Why Is Mainstream Media Still So Bad At This?
The corporate media is doing corporate media things again, as it bends the knee for Trump.
PARTING WORDS
"This is an insider’s game. A perfectly fine longtime insider won, but we missed a transformational leader at a time when we need to show voters Democrats are doing things differently. Everyone wishes Ken the best."
-- Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, speaking to The Guardian about the election of Ken Martin, the chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, as the next head of the Democratic National Committee. Green supported Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler, who finished second. Other candidates included former Bernie campaign manager Faiz Shakir, presidential candidate and America's aunt Marianne Williamson, and former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley.
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