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Out-sourcing dictatorship
There's been a lot of talk about Donald Trump turning the US into a dictatorship. He probably wants to move in that direction, but there are legal and Constitutional guardrails still standing that might slow him down. So to get around limits on what the President or the Executive Branch can do, he appears to be out-sourcing a lot of it to Elon Musk, who has no government job, no security clearance, no Senate-confirmed Executive Branch post... if he doesn't have it, nobody can take it away.
Summarizing from Heather Cox Richardson's latest vlog, although I had heard about some of this stuff myself too...
This isn't about partisanship any more; it's about your privacy and national security.
Q: What's worse than thousands of government bureaucrats each having partial access to your private information and making decisions about your life based on government regulations?
A: One person with no accountability to the public at all having complete access to your private information and making decisions about your life based on no regulations at all but his own whims.
Do you want one un-elected, un-cleared, un-confirmed person to have sensitive financial data about most of the companies and individuals in the US, just because he's the President's buddy?
Do you want one un-elected, un-cleared, un-confirmed person to have that many top-secret intelligence documents at his fingertips, just because he's the President's buddy?
Do you want one un-elected, un-cleared, un-confirmed person to have the unilateral power to sell government buildings, choose which government bills to pay and which to deny, and spy on government employees, just because he's the President's buddy?
Do you want somebody to become the President's buddy, and get all that power, by contributing $280 million to his Presidential campaign?
Summarizing from Heather Cox Richardson's latest vlog, although I had heard about some of this stuff myself too...
- A week or two ago, Musk went to the US Federal Payments System and demanded that he and a bunch of his assistants be given userid's and passwords with full access to the system. "The system" in question controls payments from the US government to individuals, companies, and organizations -- tax refunds, Social Security checks, Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements, Federal employee paychecks, research grants to academics, operating grants to humanitarian organizations, Pell grants to students, purchases of paper clips for government offices, purchases of bombers and missiles for the military, you name it. With read access to the system, they could see the details of all these payments for the last several decades: as Heather puts it, this would be the largest privacy data breach in human history. With controlling access to the system, they could decide which of the government's bills will get paid in the future and which won't, and perhaps even write themselves large checks with no oversight or authorization.
- Naturally, the head of the Federal Payments System, one David Lebryk, told Musk "absolutely not, not in a million years". Musk went screaming to Trump and/or Bessent (the newly-confirmed Secretary of the Treasury), Lebryk was placed on "administrative leave" and then forced into early retirement last Friday, while an unknown number of Musk's assistants were quickly declared to be Treasury Department employees and given an unknown level of access to the system. NY Times article here.
- So Elon Musk, who has never received a single vote, nor ever been confirmed or hired to any government post, has been given at least read access to this huge database of sensitive financial information about approximately everybody in the US.
- It's not clear whether he also has controlling access, the ability to write checks as he wishes and prevent other checks from being written. This Politico article says Treasury officials say the access is read-only. OTOH, Musk claims on X to have already stopped government payments to at least one humanitarian organization. Remember, these are expenditures that were passed into law as part of last year's Federal budget: once Congress has said "this money shall be spent in such-and-such ways," it legally has to be spent in those ways. Musk has no Congressional authorization to cut off spending (which would be difficult to grant because he isn't even a government employee), and it's not clear whether he's gotten authorization from anybody else either, or whether he's making these decisions entirely on his own.
- On Sunday, Musk similarly sent people to the USAID offices and demanded to enter a secure area to view classified documents. USAID doesn't have as much private information about US citizens, but lots of information about US foreign aid projects; more relevantly, since USAID is part of the State Department, it has lots of information from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, an intelligence agency comparable to the CIA or DIA, and much of that stuff is classified top secret.
- Naturally, the security people told Musk's people "Absolutely not, not in a million years". Musk went screaming to Trump and/or Rubio, the security people who told Musk to pound sand were "escorted off-site" and put on "administrative leave", and half a dozen of Musk's assistants (between the ages of 19 and 24; Wired article here) were given an unknown level of access. As far as I know, none of them was already a government employee, and I very much doubt that any of them had a top-secret security clearance. The chief of staff, appointed by Trump only a week or two ago, has resigned. (NY Times article here.)
- So Elon Musk, who has never received a single vote, nor ever been confirmed or hired to any government post, has been given access to a large cache of top-secret intelligence documents. All the intelligence sources used by the Bureau of Intelligence and Research should now be considered compromised.
- Musk has also told USAID employees to not come into the office on Monday, as he's in the process of shutting the agency down.
- Elon Musk's assistants, former employees, and friends, including at least one who graduated high school in 2024, have been installed in high-level positions in the Office of Personnel Management, the HR department for the Federal Government (Wired article here).
- Elon Musk's assistants, former employees, and friends have also been installed in high-level positions in the General Services Administration, which oversees government-owned real estate, government-owned laptops, and a bunch of stuff like that. They claim to have already put several government buildings up for sale (which may be a good idea, for all I know, but they don't have Congressional approval to do it), and may be installing spyware on employee laptops.
This isn't about partisanship any more; it's about your privacy and national security.
Q: What's worse than thousands of government bureaucrats each having partial access to your private information and making decisions about your life based on government regulations?
A: One person with no accountability to the public at all having complete access to your private information and making decisions about your life based on no regulations at all but his own whims.
Do you want one un-elected, un-cleared, un-confirmed person to have sensitive financial data about most of the companies and individuals in the US, just because he's the President's buddy?
Do you want one un-elected, un-cleared, un-confirmed person to have that many top-secret intelligence documents at his fingertips, just because he's the President's buddy?
Do you want one un-elected, un-cleared, un-confirmed person to have the unilateral power to sell government buildings, choose which government bills to pay and which to deny, and spy on government employees, just because he's the President's buddy?
Do you want somebody to become the President's buddy, and get all that power, by contributing $280 million to his Presidential campaign?
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