He has the power of the presidency now, complete with Supreme Court Presidential Immunity, and a guaranteed pardon for any crimes he commits with this massive breach of privacy and imminent threat to national security –
Elon Musk, the mad man now in blatant violation of the privacy of all Americans through their Social Security accounts, and an imminent threat to national security: NAJ screen shot
The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –
BREAKING NEWS – Get ready for the worst. Do not assume you can hide from Elon Musk. You can’t. If you have a contingency plan, put it into practice NOW! Sorry, but I’m going to slow walk this story as it developed on Monday.
As my readers know, I had already vowed that the 2024 election was going to be my last election to cover and that I was basically retiring from daily news reporting and from covering politics. My focus has changed to emmerse myself in the history of rock and roll, and I’m strongly considering getting back into the music business as a song writer, sound engineer, producer, web guy, publicist – and drummer!
So I’ve been hanging out for the past week somewhere in the vicinity of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, conducting more research for a book on Wayne Perkins and interviewing some local artists who were around back in the early days of The Swampers in the studios here.
This morning an email message came in from former Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan, who has a Substack newsletter and podcast now. I almost grabbed it and shared it at the time, but had other things to do. The headline?
“The split personality of Big Journalism in covering this nightmare: The reporting is essential. But what about the ability to make sense of the chaos and sound the alarm?”
She reiterated that on Friday, three reporters at the Washington Post broke a “huge story. It might have sounded like some kind of bureaucratic development inside the federal government, but it was much more important than that.”
The headline: “Senior U.S. official exits after rift with Musk allies over payment system.” Marked “exclusive,” it was written by Jeff Stein, Isaac Aarndorf and Jacqueline Alemany, and it should have sent shivers down the spine of every American: “The highest ranking career official at the Treasury Department left the agency after a clash with allies of billionaire Elon Musk over access to sensitive payment systems …”
And the article (link below) went on to say that David Lebryk, who had served for decades in nonpolitical roles at Treasury “had a dispute with Musk’s surrogates over access to the payment system the U.S. government uses to disburse trillions of dollars every year.” The systems “are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients, and tax refunds.”
“That’s $6 trillion in federal funds,” she said. “Normally, only a few career employees, nonpolitical types, have access.”
Then on Saturday, the New York Times had its own related blockbuster: “Elon Musk’s Team Now Has Access to Treasury’s Payment Systems.” Reported by Andrew Duehren, Maggie Haberman, Theodore Schleifer and Alan Rappeport, the article (link below) noted that the Musk allies who have been granted access to the payment system were made Treasury employees and obtained security clearances. One of those who now has access to the payment system is Tom Krause, the chief executive of a Silicon Valley company, Cloud Software Group.
Some commentary:
“This amounts to the most significant data leak in cyber history. Private individuals in the data business now have access to your Social Security information. This violates privacy laws in every state.” — Stuart Stevens, formerly a ranking Republican strategist and now an author. (Posted on X)
“As someone who spent a decade studying how centralized information system are used for coercion, this is a five alarm fire. We need to name it, identify risks, and seek to mitigate their impacts. … If you have access to payments and data, you can shut opponents off from key resources.” — Abe Newman, co-author of “Underground Empire: How American Weaponized the World Economy.” (Posted on Bluesky)
“This is a coup. Congress has the power of the purse, not the world’s richest unelected shadow president.” —New York Times commenter
“Yes, it’s a huge deal,” she wrote, “and we wouldn’t know about it (at least not right now) if it weren’t for those seven reporters I named, and others like them. That’s important to acknowledge. Those who trash the Washington Post, in understandable protest of its owner’s malfeasance, might take note.”
“Yet, when I looked for that story on major news sites late Sunday morning, it was not being shouted from the rooftops,” she said. “The Times and the Post had it high up, but it was not nearly the lead story on their apps; CNN barely noted it online at that time — an “analysis” piece, far down the list, said: “We do not know what exactly Elon Musk is doing to the federal government.” Groundhog Day got far more prominence there. I couldn’t find it on the CBS News site at all; maybe, to put the kindest possible spin on it, reporters there were working to confirm the story. CNN’s Jennifer Hansler and Alex Marquardt did break an important story Sunday, that two top security officials at the US Agency for International Development were put on administrative leave over the weekend after they refused to let Musk-associated interlopers access the systems at the agency.
“So, yes, we should appreciate all of this essential reporting. And yet, overall, the mainstream media is having as much trouble covering Trump’s firehose of chaos as it did covering his campaign.
“One reason is sheer overload — somewhat understandable given what has happened in a matter of days. Trump has released Jan. 6th criminals, started a trade war with America’s allies, blamed a tragic plane crash on DEI, targeted transgender people with a series of executive orders, enriched himself with a crypto meme scam, and nominated for cabinet positions a rogue’s gallery of the unqualified.”
The scholar Norman Ornstein had this to say: “We are in the middle of a fast moving putsch, a right wing authoritarian coup, a five alarm fire, and our media are treating it as if it were a little backyard bonfire.”
She asked: “Do you agree with Ornstein? What could the news media do differently in your view?”
“A few other troubling notes: Los Angeles Times owner, the billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, further interfered in his paper’s waning editorial independence by causing an op-ed critical of RFK Jr. to be misleadingly edited. And CBS News’s parent company, Paramount, appears in danger of settling a legal claim by Trump over the (unobjectionable) way Sixty Minutes handled its interview with Kamala Harris during the campaign. There is virtually no legal basis for Trump’s complaint; it’s a power play and effort to intimidate. Paramount absolutely should resist but may not because of fear that the merger it seeks with another media company could be a casualty of fighting Trump in court.
“My overall feeling — and message — is that we need the American press to be at its best right now. This is a full-on crisis, one of the worst in our history. I’m going to keep pressing for that here and in my columns for the Guardian US.”
Trump Enemy List
The press, of course, is on Trump’s Enemies List, and that includes me. I noticed my Social Security was supposedly in the bank a couple of days early, so I went to a local store to buy a few things. The card connected to Social Security would not work as debit or credit. There was an error on the machine. Went to another store, same thing. Called the bank and got the run around, saying there was a “HOLD” on the account. They demanded that I print out and MAIL them a bunch of documents proving my identity and permanent address. I explained that I am a writer traveling around in a camper van, do not have a printer, and no way to mail documents.
Of course they know this, because I’ve had this account for 20 years, and used it from multiple locations. It is known far and wide that for the past decade that’s what I’ve been doing, watchdogging Trump.
1080 search results for “Donald Trump”
GoFundMe: Fund Watchdog Journalism
The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department left the agency after a clash with allies of billionaire Elon Musk over access to sensitive payment systems, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks.
David A. Lebryk, who served in nonpolitical roles at Treasury for several decades, announced his retirement Friday in an email to colleagues that was obtained by The Washington Post. President Donald Trump named Lebryk acting secretary upon taking office last week. Lebryk had a dispute with Musk’s surrogates over access to the payment system the U.S. government uses to disburse trillions of dollars every year, the people said. The exact nature of the disagreement was not immediately clear, they said.
Officials affiliated with Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” have been asking since after the election for access to the system, the people said — requests that were reiterated more recently, including after Trump’s inauguration. Tom Krause, a Silicon Valley executive who has now been detailed to Treasury, is among those involved, the people said. Krause did not respond to requests for comment.
A spokeswoman for DOGE declined to comment. Lebryk could not be reached for comment.
When Scott Bessent was confirmed as treasury secretary on Monday, Lebryk ceased to be the acting agency head. Trump administration officials placed Lebryk on administrative leave before he announced he would step down, two of the people said.
Typically only a small number of career officials control Treasury’s payment systems. Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses and more nationwide. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients, and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.
The clash reflects an intensifying battle between Musk and the federal bureaucracy as the Trump administration nears the conclusion of its second week. Musk has sought to exert sweeping control over the inner workings of the U.S. government, installing longtime surrogates at several agencies, including the Office of Personnel Management, which essentially handles federal human resources, and the General Services Administration, which manages real estate. (Musk was seen on Thursday visiting the GSA, according to two other people familiar with his whereabouts, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal matters. That visit was first reported by the New York Times.) His Department of Government Efficiency, originally conceived as a nongovernmental panel, has since replaced the U.S. Digital Service.
The executive order Trump signed creating DOGE also instructed all agencies to ensure it has “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems,” which would appear to include the Treasury payment systems.
It is unclear precisely why Musk’s team sought access to those systems. But both Musk and the Trump administration more broadly have sought to control spending in ways that far exceed efforts by their predecessors and have alarmed legal experts.
On Monday, the White House Office of Management and Budget ordered a freeze on all federal grant spending — an order it rescinded two days later amid intense political backlash and lawsuits over the consequences of that decision.
Musk has characterized the rising national debt as an existential threat to the country and has proved willing to break norms in service of sweeping change.
Still, the possibility that government officials might try to use the federal payments system — which essentially functions as the nation’s checkbook — to enact a political agenda is unprecedented, said Mark Mazur, who served in senior Treasury Department roles during the Obama and Biden administrations.
“This is a mechanical job — they pay Social Security benefits, they pay vendors, whatever. It’s not one where there’s a role for nonmechanical things, at least from the career standpoint. Your whole job is to pay the bills as they’re due,” Mazur said. “It’s never been used in a way to execute a partisan agenda. … You have to really put bad intentions in place for that to be the case.”
In the 2023 fiscal year, the payment systems processed nearly 1.3 billion payments, accounting for about $5.4 trillion, nearly 97 percent made electronically, according to the Treasury Department. Every payment was made on time.
Lebryk’s departure is expected to be a shock to Treasury personnel, among whom he enjoys a sterling reputation. The lifelong bureaucrat joined the department as an intern in 1989 and spent three decades at the agency under 11 treasury secretaries, serving as acting director of the U.S. Mint and commissioner of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, among other roles.
In his email announcing his retirement, Lebryk praised the department’s staff.
“Please know that your work makes a difference and is so very important to the country. It has been an honor to work alongside you,” he wrote. “Our work may be unknown to most of the public, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t exceptionally important.”
Michael Faulkender, whom Trump nominated as deputy treasury secretary in December, praised Lebryk’s work in 2023.
“I could not, to this day, tell you his politics,” Faulkender, who served as an assistant secretary at Treasury during Trump’s first term, told The Washington Post at the time. “He always seemed to be relaxed and under control.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave representatives of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency access to the federal payment system late on Friday, according to five people familiar with the change, handing Elon Musk and the team he is leading a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending.
The new authority follows a standoff this week with a top Treasury official who had resisted allowing Mr. Musk’s lieutenants into the department’s payment system, which sends out money on behalf of the entire federal government. The official, a career civil servant named David Lebryk, was put on leave and then suddenly retired on Friday after the dispute, according to people familiar with his exit.
The system could give the Trump administration another mechanism to attempt to unilaterally restrict disbursement of money approved for specific purposes by Congress, a push that has faced legal roadblocks.
Mr. Musk, who has been given wide latitude by President Trump to find ways to slash government spending, has recently fixated on Treasury’s payment processes, criticizing the department in a social media post on Saturday for not rejecting more payments as fraudulent or improper.
The Musk allies who have been granted access to the payment system were made Treasury employees, passed government background checks and obtained the necessary security clearances, according to two people familiar with the situation, who requested anonymity to discuss internal arrangements. While their access was approved, the Musk representatives have yet to gain operational capabilities and no government payments have been blocked, the people said.
Mr. Musk’s initiative is intended to be part of a broader review of the payments system to allow improper payments to be scrutinized and is not an effort to arbitrarily block individual payments, the people familiar with the matter said. Career Treasury Department attorneys signed off on granting the access, they added, and any changes to the system would go through a review process and testing.
The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is not a government department, but a team within the administration. It was put together at Mr. Trump’s direction by Mr. Musk to fan out across federal agencies seeking ways to cut spending, reduce the size of the federal work force and bring more efficiency to the bureaucracy. Most of those working on the initiative were recruited by Mr. Musk and his aides.
Similar DOGE teams have begun demanding access to data and systems at other federal agencies, but none of those agencies control the flow of money in the way the Treasury Department does.
One of the people affiliated with DOGE who now has access to the payment system is Tom Krause, the chief executive of a Silicon Valley company, Cloud Software Group, according to one of the people familiar with the situation .
Last weekend, Mr. Krause had pushed Mr. Lebryk for entry into the system. Mr. Lebryk refused and then was subsequently put on administrative leave, according to people familiar with the matter.
A Treasury Department spokesman, a spokeswoman for DOGE and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.
In a process typically run by civil servants, the Treasury Department carries out payments submitted by agencies across the government, disbursing more than $5 trillion in fiscal year 2023. Access to the system has historically been closely held because it includes sensitive personal information about the millions of Americans who receive Social Security checks, tax refunds and other payments from the federal government.
Former officials said the onus was on individual agencies to ensure their payments are proper, not the relatively small staff at the Treasury Department, which is responsible for making more than one billion payments per year.
Mr. Lebryk, the career Treasury official who retired on Friday, had resisted requests from members of Mr. Trump’s transition team for access to the data last month. After Mr. Trump took office, the White House indicated that he should be removed from the job and, according to a person familiar with the matter, Mr. Bessent suggested putting him on leave.
Democrats raised alarm this week that the Trump administration and Mr. Bessent, who was just confirmed by the Senate this week, were compromising the federal government’s payments system.
“To put it bluntly, these payment systems simply cannot fail, and any politically motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy,” Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, wrote in a letter to Mr. Bessent on Friday. “I can think of no good reason why political operators who have demonstrated a blatant disregard for the law would need access to these sensitive, mission-critical systems.”
On Saturday, Mr. Wyden expressed concern that access to the payment system had been granted and pointed out Mr. Musk — a billionaire with a vast portfolio — has potential conflicts of interest.
“Social Security and Medicare benefits, grants, payments to government contractors, including those that compete directly with Musk’s own companies. All of it,” he wrote on social media.
During the transition, Mr. Musk vocally opposed Mr. Bessent being picked as Mr. Trump’s Treasury secretary. Mr. Musk, then just an empowered adviser to Mr. Trump, went public with his opinion that he preferred Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street executive, for the role because Mr. Bessent was “a business-as-usual choice.” Mr. Lutnick became Mr. Trump’s choice for Commerce secretary.
In Elon Musk’s first two weeks in government, his lieutenants gained access to closely held financial and data systems, casting aside career officials who warned that they were defying protocols. They moved swiftly to shutter specific programs — and even an entire agency that had come into Mr. Musk’s cross hairs. They bombarded federal employees with messages suggesting they were lazy and encouraging them to leave their jobs.
Empowered by President Trump, Mr. Musk is waging a largely unchecked war against the federal bureaucracy — one that has already had far-reaching consequences.
Mr. Musk’s aggressive incursions into at least half a dozen government agencies have challenged congressional authority and potentially breached civil service protections.
Top officials at the Treasury Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development who objected to the actions of his representatives were swiftly pushed aside. And Mr. Musk’s efforts to shut down U.S.A.I.D., a key source of foreign assistance, have reverberated around the globe.
Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, is sweeping through the federal government as a singular force, creating major upheaval as he looks to put an ideological stamp on the bureaucracy and rid the system of those who he and the president deride as “the deep state.”
The rapid moves by Mr. Musk, who has a multitude of financial interests before the government, have represented an extraordinary flexing of power by a private individual.
The speed and scale have shocked civil servants, who have been frantically exchanging information on encrypted chats, trying to discern what is unfolding.
Senior White House staff members have at times also found themselves in the dark, according to two officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions. One Trump official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said Mr. Musk was widely seen as operating with a level of autonomy that almost no one can control.
Mr. Musk, the leader of SpaceX, Tesla and X, is working with a frantic, around-the-clock energy familiar to the employees at his various companies, flanked by a cadre of young engineers, drawn in part from Silicon Valley. He has moved beds into the headquarters of the federal personnel office a few blocks from the White House, according to a person familiar with the situation, so he and his staff, working late into the night, could sleep there, reprising a tactic he has deployed at Twitter and Tesla.
This time, however, he carries the authority of the president, who has bristled at some of Mr. Musk’s ready-fire-aim impulses but has praised him publicly.
“He’s a big cost-cutter,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Sunday. “Sometimes we won’t agree with it and we’ll not go where he wants to go. But I think he’s doing a great job. He’s a smart guy.”
ImagePresident Trump standing on a tarmac next to three microphones on boom poles.
Mr. Trump has given Mr. Musk vast power over the bureaucracy that regulates his companies and awards them contracts.Credit…Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
Mr. Musk, who leads a cost-cutting initiative the administration calls the Department of Government Efficiency, boasted on Saturday that his willingness to work weekends was a “superpower” that gave him an advantage over his adversary. The adversary he was referring to was the federal work force.
“Very few in the bureaucracy actually work the weekend, so it’s like the opposing team just leaves the field for 2 days!” Mr. Musk posted on X.
There is no precedent for a government official to have Mr. Musk’s scale of conflicts of interest, which include domestic holdings and foreign connections such as business relationships in China. And there is no precedent for someone who is not a full-time employee to have such ability to reshape the federal work force.
The historian Douglas Brinkley described Mr. Musk as a “lone ranger” with limitless running room. He noted that the billionaire was operating “beyond scrutiny,” saying: “There is not one single entity holding Musk accountable. It’s a harbinger of the destruction of our basic institutions.”
Several former and current senior government officials — even those who like what he is doing — expressed a sense of helplessness about how to handle Mr. Musk’s level of unaccountability. At one point after another, Trump officials have generally relented rather than try to slow him down. Some hoped Congress would choose to reassert itself.
Mr. Trump himself sounded a notably cautionary note on Monday, telling reporters: “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval. And we’ll give him the approval where appropriate, where not appropriate, we won’t.”
“If there’s a conflict,” he added, “then we won’t let him get near it.”
However, the president has given Mr. Musk vast power over the bureaucracy that regulates his companies and awards them contracts. He is shaping not just policy but personnel decisions, including successfully pushing for Mr. Trump to pick Troy Meink as the Air Force secretary, according to three people with direct knowledge of his role.
Mr. Meink previously ran the Pentagon’s National Reconnaissance Office, which helped Mr. Musk secure a multibillion-dollar contract for SpaceX to help build and deploy a spy satellite network for the federal government.
Since Mr. Trump’s inauguration, Mr. Musk and his allies have taken over the United States Digital Service, now renamed United States DOGE Service, which was established in 2014 to fix the federal government’s online services.
They have commandeered the federal government’s human resources department, the Office of Personnel Management.
They have gained access to the Treasury’s payment system — a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending.
Mr. Musk has also taken a keen interest in the federal government’s real estate portfolio, managed by the General Services Administration, moving to terminate leases. Internally, G.S.A. leaders have started to discuss eliminating as much as 50 percent of the agency’s budget, according to people familiar with the conversations.
Perhaps most significant, Mr. Musk has sought to dismantle U.S.A.I.D., the government’s lead agency for humanitarian aid and development assistance. Mr. Trump has already frozen foreign aid spending, but Mr. Musk has gone further.
“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Mr. Musk gloated on X at 1:54 a.m. Monday. “Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”
Mr. Musk’s allies now aim to inject artificial intelligence tools into government systems, using them to assess contracts and recommend cuts. On Monday, Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who has been tapped to lead a technology team at G.S.A., told some staff members that he hoped to put all federal contracts into a centralized system so they could be analyzed by artificial intelligence, three people familiar with the meeting said.
Mr. Musk’s actions have astounded and alarmed Democrats and government watchdog groups. They question if Mr. Musk is breaching federal laws that give Congress the final power to create or eliminate federal agencies and set their budgets, require public disclosure of government actions and prohibit individuals from taking actions that might benefit themselves personally.
At least four lawsuits have been filed in federal court to challenge his authority and the moves by the new administration, but it remains to be seen if judicial review can keep up with Mr. Musk.
The New York Times spoke to more than three dozen current and former administration officials, federal employees and people close to Mr. Musk who described his expanding influence over the federal government. Few were willing to speak on the record, for fear of retribution.
“Before Congress and the courts can respond, Elon Musk will have rolled up the whole government,” said one official who works inside an agency where representatives from Mr. Musk’s cost-cutting initiative have asserted control.
Mr. Musk says he is making long overdue reforms. So far, his team has claimed to help save the federal government more than $1 billion a day through efforts like the cancellation of federal building leases and contracts related to diversity, equity and inclusion, although they have provided few specifics.
Workers in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which housed some operations for the United States Digital Service, arrived the day after Mr. Trump’s inauguration to find a sticky note with “DOGE” on a door to a suite once used as a work space for senior technologists at the agency.
It was one of the first signs that Mr. Musk’s team had arrived. Inside, black backpacks were strewed about, and unfamiliar young men roamed the halls without the security badges that federal employees typically carried to enter their offices.
The quick takeover was similar to the playbook Mr. Musk has used in the private sector, where he has been a ruthless cost cutter, subscribing to the philosophy that it is better to cut too deeply and fix any problems that arise later. He routinely pushes his employees to ignore regulations they consider “dumb.” And he is known for taking extreme risks, pushing both Tesla and SpaceX to the brink of bankruptcy before rescuing them.
In his current role, Mr. Musk has a direct line to Mr. Trump and operates with little if any accountability or oversight, according to people familiar with the dynamic. He often enters the White House through a side entrance, and drops into meetings. He has a close working relationship with Mr. Trump’s top policy adviser, Stephen Miller, who shares Mr. Musk’s contempt for much of the federal work force.
At one point, Mr. Musk sought to sleep over in the White House residence. He sought and was granted an office in the West Wing but told people that it was too small. Since then, he has told friends he is reveling in the trappings of the opulent Secretary of War Suite in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where he has worked some days. His team is staffed heavily by engineers — at least one as young as 19 — who have worked at his companies like X or SpaceX, but have little if any experience in government policy and are seeking security clearances.
Officially, Mr. Musk is serving as a special government employee, according to the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt. This is a status typically given to part-time, outside advisers to the federal government who offer advice based on private sector expertise.
The White House declined to say if Mr. Musk had been granted a waiver that allowed him to get involved in agencies whose actions could affect his own personal interests. And even if he had been given such a waiver, four former White House ethics lawyers said they could not envision how it could be structured to appropriately cover the range of the work Mr. Musk is overseeing.
In a statement, Ms. Leavitt said that “Elon Musk is selflessly serving President Trump’s administration as a special government employee, and he has abided by all applicable federal laws.”
Mr. Musk has told Trump administration officials that to fulfill their mission of radically reducing the size of the federal government, they need to gain access to the computers — the systems that house the data and the details of government personnel, and the pipes that distribute money on behalf of the federal government.
Mr. Musk has been thinking radically about ways to sharply reduce federal spending for the entire presidential transition. After canvassing budget experts, he eventually became fixated on a critical part of the country’s infrastructure: the Treasury Department payment system that disburses trillions of dollars a year on behalf of the federal government.
Mr. Musk has told administration officials that he thinks they could balance the budget if they eliminate the fraudulent payments leaving the system, according to an official who discussed the matter with him. It is unclear what he is basing that statement on. The federal deficit for 2024 was $1.8 trillion. The Government Accountability Office estimated in a report that the government made $236 billion in improper payments — three-quarters of which were overpayments — across 71 federal programs during the 2023 fiscal year.
The push by Mr. Musk into the Treasury Department led to a months-in-the-making standoff last week when a top career official, David Lebryk, resisted giving representatives from the cost-cutting effort access to the federal payment system. Mr. Lebryk was threatened with administrative leave and then retired. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent subsequently approved access for the Musk team, as The Times previously reported.
The Treasury Department’s proprietary system for paying the nation’s financial obligations is an operation traditionally run by a small group of career civil servants with deep technical expertise. The prospect of an intrusion into that system by outsiders such as Mr. Musk and his team has raised alarm among current and former Treasury officials that a mishap could lead to critical government obligations going unpaid, with consequences ranging from missed benefits payments to a federal default.
Ms. Leavitt said the access they were granted so far was “read only,” meaning the staff members could not alter payments.
Democrats on Monday said they would introduce legislation to try to bar Mr. Musk’s deputies from entering the Treasury system. “The Treasury secretary must revoke DOGE’s access to the Treasury payment system at once,” said Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader. “If he does not, Congress must act immediately.”
Another key pipeline is the government’s personnel database, run out of the Office of Personnel Management, where Mr. Musk has quickly asserted his influence. At least five people who have worked for Mr. Musk in some capacity now have key roles in the office, according to people familiar with their roles.
Last week, the personnel agency sent an email to roughly two million federal workers offering them the option to resign but be paid through the end of September. The email’s subject line, “Fork in the Road,” was the same one that Mr. Musk used in an email he sent to Twitter employees offering them severance packages in late 2022. Since then, Mr. Musk has promoted the offer on social media and called it “very generous.”
Mr. Musk is also studying the workings of the G.S.A., which manages federal properties. During a visit to the agency last week, accompanied by his young son, whom Mr. Musk named “X Æ A-12,” and a nanny, he spoke with the agency’s new acting administrator, Stephen Ehikian.
After the meeting, officials discussed a plan to eliminate 50 percent of expenditures, according to people familiar with the discussions. And Mr. Ehikian told staff members in a separate meeting that he wanted them to apply a technique called “zero based budgeting,” an approach that Mr. Musk deployed during his Twitter takeover and at his other companies. The idea is to reduce spending of a program or contract to zero, and then argue to restore any necessary dollars.
Inflicting Trauma
Russell T. Vought, who served in Mr. Trump’s first administration and is his choice again to lead the Office of Management and Budget, has spoken openly about the Trump team’s plans for dismantling civil service.
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Mr. Vought said in a 2023 speech. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”
Mr. Musk, who pushed Mr. Vought for the budget office role, for which he is awaiting Senate confirmation, has echoed that rhetoric, portraying career civil servants and the agencies they work for as enemies.
U.S.A.I.D., which oversees civilian foreign aid, is “evil,” Mr. Musk wrote in numerous posts on Sunday, while “career Treasury officials are breaking the law every hour of every day,” he said in another post.
Mr. Musk used the same tactic during his 2022 takeover of Twitter, in which he depicted the company’s previous management as malicious and many of its workers as inept and oppositional to his goals. In firing Twitter executives “for cause” and withholding their exit packages, Mr. Musk accused some of them of corruption and attacked them personally in public posts.
The tactics by Mr. Musk and his team have kept civil servants unbalanced, fearful of speaking out and uncertain of their futures and their livelihoods.
On Jan. 27, members of the team entered the headquarters and nearby annex of the aid agency in the Ronald Reagan Building in downtown Washington, U.S. officials said.
The team demanded and was granted access to the agency’s financial and personnel systems, according to two U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the activity and the agency’s inner workings. During this period, an acting administrator at the agency put about 60 senior officials on paid leave and issued stop-work orders that led to the firing of hundreds of contractors with full-time employment and health benefits.
By Saturday, the agency’s website vanished. And when the two top security directors tried to stop members of the team from entering a secure area that day to get classified files, they were placed on administrative leave.
Katie Miller, a member of the Musk initiative, said on X that “no classified material was accessed without proper security clearances.”
By Monday, U.S.A.I.D. was effectively paralyzed. In a live broadcast on his social media platform early Monday, Mr. Musk said the president agreed “that we should shut it down.”
A Culture of Secrecy
Mr. Musk’s team has prioritized secrecy, sharing little outside the roughly 40 people who, as of Inauguration Day, had been working for as part of the effort. The billionaire has reposted messages accusing people of trying to “dox,” or publish private information about, his aides when their names have been made public, claiming it is a “crime” to do so.
The opacity has added to the anxiety within the civil service. A number of the employees across the government said they had been interviewed by representatives of Mr. Musk who had declined to share their surnames. Mr. Musk’s aides have declined to answer questions themselves, consistently describing the sessions as “one-way interviews.”
Some workers who sat for interviews were asked what projects they were working on and who should be fired from the agency, people familiar with the conversations said.
“My impression was not one of support or genuine understanding but of suspicion, and questioning,” one General Services Administration employee wrote in an internal Slack message to colleagues, describing the interview process.
Some of the young workers on Mr. Musk’s team share a similar uniform: blazers worn over T-shirts. At the G.S.A., some staff members began calling the team “the Bobs,” a reference to management consultant characters from the dark comedy movie “Office Space” who are responsible for layoffs.
Many of Mr. Musk’s lieutenants are working on multiple projects at different agencies simultaneously, using different email addresses and showing up at different offices.
One example is Luke Farritor, a 23-year-old former SpaceX intern, who was among the workers given access to U.S.A.I.D. systems, according to people familiar with his role. He is also listed as an “executive engineer” in the office of the secretary of health and human services, and had an email account at the G.S.A., records show. Mr. Farritor did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Musk’s aides, including Mr. Farritor, have requested access to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services systems that control contracts and the more than $1 trillion in payments that go out annually, according to a document seen by The Times.
The team reports to a longtime Musk adviser, Steve Davis, who helped lead cost-cutting efforts at X and SpaceX, and has himself amassed extraordinary power across federal agencies.
In private conversations, Mr. Musk has told friends that he considers the ultimate metric for his success to be the number of dollars saved per day, and he is sorting ideas based on that ranking.
“The more I have gotten to know President Trump, the more I like him. Frankly, I love the guy,” Mr. Musk said in a live audio conversation on X early Monday morning. “This is our shot. This is the best hand of cards we’re ever going to have.”
Reporting was contributed by Erica L. Green, Alan Rappeport, Andrew Duehren, Eric Lipton, Charlie Savage, Edward Wong, Sarah Kliff and Karoun Demirjian.
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Sorry folks, but this is FAIR USE in a NATIONAL SECURITY CRISIS and people need this information without fucking PAY WALLS!
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