Elon Musk is shredding America’s government as he did Twitter

JUST PAST midnight on February 3rd Elon Musk appeared on X to explain what he is doing to the federal government. He had to speak over the patter of his four-year-old son, also called X. The bureaucracy, Mr Musk argued, constitutes an illegitimate “fourth branch of government”. He then came to the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which he denounced as little more than a device to funnel taxpayers’ money to Marxists and criminals. He had, he claimed, the full support of Donald Trump and is “shutting it down”, notwithstanding that the agency’s existence is mandated by Congress. Later he posted that he had spent the weekend “feeding USAID into the woodchipper”.

Even as Mr Musk was speaking, workers at USAID’s headquarters in Washington were being told not to come in the next day. Later on February 3rd Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, announced he had been made acting head of the agency while it faces “reorganisation”. But there is already little of the agency left for him to head. By February 4th the usaid website had been replaced with a single statement, announcing that by the end of the week, all of its permanent workers would be placed on administrative leave. Overseas staff will return to America within a month.

The takedown of USAID is the most dramatic example of what seems to be Mr Musk’s plan for the whole of government. It is drawn from his playbook as a corporate boss. Just over two years ago Mr Musk took over Twitter in a messy $44bn deal. Within a few months, much of which he spent at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco, he had reduced the company’s headcount by around four-fifths. A third of the staff accepted buyouts; many of the rest were fired. They included senior executives who were sacked instantly to stop their stock options vesting. Every decision, such as those about which Twitter accounts to ban, was put directly into Mr Musk’s hands.

Now he is trying to do the same thing with over 2m federal employees, in an attempt to cut $1trn—more than half of all discretionary spending—out of the federal budget. It is, says Donald Kettl, of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, like nothing that has ever happened before. “On a scale of one to ten, this is about 145. It’s so far off the charts,” he says. Richard Nixon was the most recent American president to govern as if the laws of the land did not apply to him, but “this is far beyond anything that Nixon even attempted”.

The first hints of Mr Musk’s seriousness came on January 28th, when most federal employees were sent an email by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the closest thing the government has to a human-resources department. The message offered “deferred resignation”. It had the subject line “fork in the road”, the same as in the email sent to Twitter employees when Mr Musk took over there. Lots of federal employees have been sent several more emails affirming the offer since. One went out to air-traffic controllers less than a day after a plane crash in Washington, DC, which has raised questions about short-staffing at Reagan airport.

DOGE is technically embedded in the US Digital Service, an organisation created by Barack Obama to spread the use of new technology across government. But DOGE is an entirely new thing. Its employees seem to be junior workers pulled in very recently from Mr Musk’s many private firms. Wired, a magazine, has identified six engineers now working with DOGE. The one who sent the email shutting down USAID, Gavin Kliger, graduated from high school in 2017. The youngest of the six, Edward Coristine, is 19; his relevant work experience consists of a few months interning at Neuralink, Mr Musk’s brain-implant firm. On his now-deleted LinkedIn profile, he took the moniker “bigballs”.

These engineers—and it is unclear how many more there may be—now are able to enter just about any government building they like. They have apparently installed sofa beds in the office of the OPM. Under an executive order that Mr Trump signed on his first day in office, they are promised “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems”. The fact that they are handling classified data implies some DOGE workers have also been issued with the “interim Top Secret” clearances created by another of Mr Trump’s executive orders.

Government employees report that staffers from DOGE are turning up at their offices, demanding data and running “code reviews”. Civil servants tell The Economist what the doge people are most keen on is access to personnel records. In some agencies they are also conducting interviews. According to one civil servant the questions include, “Which of your colleagues are most expendable?”

Delete, delete

Here, too, Mr Musk seems to be applying lessons from his takeover of Twitter, where a small group of trusted acolytes combed through records like the company’s Slack channels and email accounts to decide whom to fire. Defenders of the old order were quickly removed. Yet the federal government is a much larger beast than Twitter, which at its peak had just 7,500 workers. And Mr Musk has been touching some extremely sensitive parts of it. On January 31st it emerged that David Lebryk, a senior career Treasury official, is retiring after clashing with officials from DOGE. They may have obtained access to the government payments system, which pays the government’s bills and makes almost 90% of its bank transfers.

Mr Musk has suggested in a tweet that he has direct control, claiming that his team are “rapidly shutting down” government payments to contractors. Jonathan Blum, a political appointee at the Treasury, denied this in a letter to Congress, saying doge’s access is “read only”. But insiders doubt this, and despite two court rulings compelling the government to make payments, a growing number of non-profits contracted to provide federal services report not being paid.

Is any of this legal? Agencies established by Congress cannot simply be shut down by fiat, and Mr Rubio’s appointment is not much of a figleaf. doge workers can enter buildings, but laws about the handling of government data remain in force. Few legal experts think that the offer of “deferred resignation” is lawful. Nick Bednar, of the University of Minnesota’s law school, notes that various laws exist to stop the government from offering no-work jobs. Workers who accept the offer—which had a deadline of February 6th—“could very much be left high and dry”, he says.

Lawsuits are being filed, and protest is growing. A few Democrats have threatened to shut down Mr Trump’s appointments in the Senate over the usaid shutdown. On February 3rd, at the aid agency’s headquarters, Kristina Drye, a USAID speechwriter, says that she “signed a contract to serve the American people” and, despite getting the email, decided to go into the office anyway. A security guard escorted her as she retrieved some books, as well as a pair of beloved high heels. She says she does not expect to ever go back in. What Mr Musk is doing is “sheer, blatant disregard” for important work, she says. But doge is already moving into new agencies. Nobody is stopping him. ■

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