Elon Musk Weaponizes the Government

The U.S. identified key choke points that allowed it to weaponize the world’s payment, information, and physical infrastructure to achieve its ends. Musk’s DOGE is weaponizing the U.S. government’s payment, information, and physical infrastructure in highly similar ways, carrying out an end run around the political structures that are supposed to r... See more

What they need to grasp—and quickly—is that Musk, and by extension Trump, appear to be trying to turn these technical systems into levers of control. If the two succeed, which is uncertain, they will have an unparallelled political advantage over the months and years to come. Even if they fail, their mistakes may have catastrophic consequences.

As Nathan Tankus explains, the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the part of the Treasury Department that handles payments for the federal government, is supposed to be technocratic and focused purely on making sure the money goes where it is supposed to. Nonetheless, because it acts as an intermediary between the government and the rest of the governm... See more

DOGE operatives—one of them reportedly a recent high school graduate—have similarly taken control of key information systems at the Office of Personnel Management, locking out high-level career civil servants. This access provides Musk’s team with detailed and highly sensitive information on millions of government employees. It also has allowed the... See more

The federal payments system has been a panopticon for decades, waiting for someone with political ambitions to break down the bureaucratic firewalls protecting it, and open it up. Apparently, that has now happened. If the system transforms into a tool to arbitrarily block payments to entities whom Musk or Trump doesn’t like, which Musk has claimed ... See more