Moving swiftly
The Wall Street Journal on Musk’s war on the US government:
Elon Musk’s allies are moving swiftly to exert control over vast swaths of the U.S. government, as they demand access to sensitive information at federal agencies and lay out plans to block spending they deem excessive.
Musk, the billionaire adviser to President Trump who runs the Department of Government Efficiency, oversaw a successful effort by his representatives to get direct access to a payment system that distributes trillions of dollars to Americans each year. And individuals working for DOGE accessed the U.S. Agency for International Development following a clash with security officials.
The moves marked the start of a far-reaching campaign by Musk to upend the federal government agency by agency, according to his allies. The effort prompted outrage from Democrats, and some Republicans, who said Musk doesn’t have the authority to overturn programs and spending priorities decided by Congress. They also raised concerns about the nature of Musk’s operation, which is run by individuals with ties to the tech sector who haven’t been confirmed by the Senate and could benefit financially from the actions DOGE takes.
This is bad. Really bad. There are no barriers.
The episode unfolded as Musk worked to disassemble the 10,000-person, $40 billion agency and rein in its autonomy. Musk posted on X over the weekend that USAID was a corrupt organization filled with Marxist staffers, providing no evidence for his broadsides. “USAID is a criminal organization,” he wrote in one post. “Time for it to die.” Trump planned to release an executive order folding the USAID into the State Department.
No barriers. No guard rails. Nothing.
And from Zeteo (Mehdi Hassan’s website):
“An astonishing number of laws are seemingly being broken here. Serving as head of the newly-invented body known as DOGE (the so-called Department of Government Efficiency), a loose representative of the president without any clear role or official title, Musk has been granted access to highly restricted government computer systems. A private citizen with immense corporate interests and many business competitors now appears to have access to every bit of data the government owns. That includes personal data like names, addresses, social security numbers, health information, and welfare information. It also includes business data, such as data about the contracts and work of his direct competitors. It may be the vastest data breach in the history of the world – an industrial tycoon being handed the entire data repository of the United States government.
“But this violation, appalling as it is, pales next to the greater constitutional harm….”
Never thought I’d be in a world hoping for Steve Bannon and/or Trump to save us… No one’s dead but this is looking far worse than January 6th; a lot more people stand to suffer because Trump let the idiot play with government pay systems.
You say that as though financial gain isn’t the first, last, and every reason in between that Trump and Musk have taken over the country.
How oddly fragile it all is . . .
“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing besides remains.
Yes they’re all crowing about how everything will be so great when they’re done. What they seem to fail to realize is that all these sweeping changes could go horribly wrong. Putting countless thousands out of work, prices of goods skyrocketing, market pressure, and so on. The economy is not immune to collapse. It could even cause a depression. There are far too many factors for these man-children to take into account. Of course none of which will affect the wealthy much. The gap between the haves and have nots doesn’t mean shit to them.
Not so fast. Look at the destruction of wealth and almost an entire caste of wealthy people in Britain between 1901 and 1918. The same could be said for much of the rest of Europe in that period, and the Russians found novel ways to dispose of their wealthy over lords. What still remained was finally wiped out by the Great Depression and Second World War.
Do they still have wealthy people? Of course, but they are not the same sort of wealthy people living the same sort of lives.
And while the poor and not so poor are yet to feel the pain of Trump’s tariffs, the wealthy are already seeing wealth diminish as share markets decline.
How much confidence will investors have in a country that is in the process of destroying itself? How can they be ensured of protection under law with a regime that sees itself as being above the law? Or one which believes its word is law, when there are different “words” every day, and different mouths speaking them, some elected to official, legal offices, and others not? Whom do you believe? Who has the final say? Can you ignore the legal role of Congress, even if the Executive Branch and its cronies are trying to do an end run around it? Today’s confident directive might end up being next month’s walk-back, or next year’s Supreme Court defeat (assuming of course that enough of them ever decide that even they can’t stomach what’s going on). Do investors really like chaos and unpredictability in the countries they hope to invest in?
Trump & Co. believe in their invincibility, as well as the legality of their actions, but it’s Dunning-Kruger all the way down. “Everything is going to be bigger, better, faster, and cheaper!” They act like they can successfully switch out an airplane’s piston engine for a jet engine while the plane is flying, using nothing but an axe, a hammer, and a blowtorch.
Good questions.
Well, this is what I meant Rev, everyone will suffer, but deciding whether to skip a mortgage payment in order to keep the power on and eat vs. having to settle for a $2m yacht when you really wanted the $10m one is quite different. I see your point though, and yes it could conceivably wind up much worse. I’m not going to catastrophize, I just think the outcomes they are predicting are not guaranteed, or even probable.
I am catastrophizing… there’s too much uncertainty. I have a quite comfortable life but I’m seeing a world of no job, no savings, no retirement… we haven’t paid the house off yet and we’ve got a home equity loan to service (though we’re doing pretty good on that at the moment).