A Grifter's Paradise
What is Elon Musk's real agenda amid Trump's attacks on the civil service, inspectors general, FBI, and checks in the system? To quote Coolio, "power and the money, money and the power."
According to Elon Musk, his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is upsetting the applecart in Washington solely because it is rooting out waste and fraud, and setting the stage for transformative change in the federal government that will improve its performance.
If you believe that DOGE is only an altruistic effort by the world’s richest person — whose immense wealth pegged at $426 billion is based to a large degree on government subsidies and contracts — I’ve got a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.
As I began writing this, a Reuters story broke on Saturday that Troy Meink, President Donald Trump’s Secretary of the Air Force nominee, had “arranged a multibillion-dollar contract solicitation in a way that favored Elon Musk's SpaceX, according to seven people familiar with the contract.” The decision by Trump to nominate Meink, “two of the people told Reuters, followed a recommendation from Musk.” That story didn’t mention that one of Musk’s senior advisors and the vice president of SpaceX’s shadowy special programs group is former four-star Air Force General Terrence “Shags” O'Shaughnessy, who reportedly led the SpaceX business unit that won the National Reconnaissance Office contract Meink is accused of influencing. All of this is to say that Musk isn’t above benefitting from the good ol’ revolving door and inside connections for profit.
And despite Musk saying DOGE would be “very open and transparent," we don’t even have the basics, such as proactive disclosures of the names of DOGE team members (many won’t even share their last names to government workers) and details about their corporate and financial entanglements. Musk has a checkered track record when it comes to honesty, even when it comes to his investors, some of whom ended up “suffering substantial economic harm” as a result of his omissions, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Look, I don’t doubt that Musk’s DOGE could result in some improvements to systems and find some actual instances of fraud and waste, although the latter is often in the eye of the beholder. Case in point: the $168,000 slated to be spent on an Anthony Fauci exhibit at the National Institutes of Health museum has been canceled. Was that waste? Reasonable people can disagree. While Fauci is among the top public enemies of the U.S. right partly due to anger over COVID-era lockdowns, learning loss, and questions over the origins of that virus, he’s also been one of the most influential persons in U.S. public health policy for about 40 years.
This isn’t the only penny-ante example that has been spun up by Musk as proof he’s doing a helluva job.
Another hullabaloo is around federal subscriptions to Politico Pro. Is the extent of Politico Pro subscriptions in the government wasteful? Maybe. But it’s not fraud, as some people seem to claim. Politico sells a service at a price to a buyer. It’s like saying your grocery store defrauded you because you bought an avocado.
The Mirage of DOGE’s Savings Claims
Musk is trying very, very hard — and he’s enabled by legions of online devotees — to spin DOGE as successfully rooting out waste and fraud on a large scale. However, there are many reasons to be skeptical of many of his claims. Just a few…
More than half of the savings claimed by DOGE isn’t even due to DOGE, it’s actually due to a Trump executive order canceling DEI programs in the federal government. Whether all or none of that is waste, or if it’s somewhere in between, is debatable. But what isn’t debatable is the credit for the cuts, and the credit does not go to DOGE.
It’s also probably not wise to put much stock in the specific dollar savings claims made by Musk and DOGE because they don’t provide a lot of receipts. As a Wall Street Journal story last Saturday noted, “DOGE didn’t provide comment or details of how it arrived at the spending cuts when asked.”
And it’s likely Musk and DOGE aren’t providing anywhere close to the full picture of what the actual savings are. Canceling contracts (“termination for convenience”) typically leads to a cancellation fee paid by taxpayers. Moreover, if an agency cancels a contract into its period of performance, the agency has to pay for the work and products supplied to date, plus the cancellation fee. Simply put, only a portion of a contract’s value is saved when it’s canceled.
Let’s then take the case of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Even if you don’t like USAID from an anti-imperialist perspective (“it’s a front for the CIA!”), what the Trump administration has said it wants to do is put USAID’s foreign assistance activities (basically almost all of what USAID does) inside the State Department as part of a “potential organization,” not get rid of them. People will need to be hired. Programs will need to be jumpstarted. Even if there are some administrative efficiencies and some programs aren’t brought back, U.S. taxpayers are not realizing anywhere close to 100% of the savings frome “eliminating” USAID. And when programs are transferred to State, will there be as much transparency as existed when they were at USAID?
There are other ways that the cost savings may illusory. If U.S. farmers in the Midwest — whose crops were purchased with USAID funds to then ship overseas — are simply provided with crop subsidies or direct payments in return for nothing so Trump can cushion any political blowback, did we save any money? At the end of the day, will we ultimately spend almost as much or perhaps even more while undermining our influence overseas?
If we have fewer government workers as a result of DOGE’s efforts, we may see a mirage of savings in the short run but see degraded government functions and more waste and fraud over the medium and long term. There’s a simple reason why. The missions the government has are not shrinking even as one of Musk’s aims is to reduce the number of in-house government staff to tackle those missions. That means fewer government workers will have to manage and oversee more government contracts, grants, and programs. Can those employees be adequately replaced with artificial intelligence? I have my doubts.
That there was so much waste and fraud related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is partially due to the decimated acquisition workforces of the departments of Defense and State and USAID, thanks in part to Clinton-era “Reinventing Government” efforts. Those Clinton-era changes hollowed out key parts of the government, and when the post-9/11 surge in defense spending came, the government ended up relying on contractors to manage contractors who managed subcontractors and on and on. All of those companies took a cut for profit and overhead, and some straight up engaged in fraud — and taxpayers foot the bill. It was extraordinarily expensive and still is. More than a decade ago, as I wrote for TIME magazine’s website, more money was “spent on DoD service contractors than on our uniformed men and women and DoD civilian employees combined.” A Pentagon slide I posted stated bluntly: “The savings are here.”
Could DOGE make a dent in waste and fraud? Maybe. There are certainly target-rich environments. Medicare Advantage is a great one. Pentagon spare parts contracts are another.
However, even if he trains his fire on those places, there is no conceivable way Musk will get anywhere close to the low-end savings of $1 trillion he claims he will achieve.
But is that Musk and DOGE’s real agenda? Is it just to save taxpayers money out of the kindness of his heart, or does Musk — an aggressive businessman — expect a return on investment for the over $250 million he spent to support Trump’s reelection?
DOGE, Elon Musk, and “Surveillance Capitalism”
The news reporting over the last week or so has made it clear that Musk-allied people on DOGE teams, including people who have been his employees (DOGE team members can be “special government employees” who can maintain their private sector jobs), are plugging into numerous sensitive government systems. These systems are chockfull of data related to millions of federal employees, medical data, student loan data, and trillions of dollars in granular payment transactions a year involving you, me, companies, hospitals, banks, other financial institutions, non-profits, state and local governments, and on and on. The data in these systems includes Social Security numbers, bank routing and account numbers, etc, etc. This is sensitive stuff.
After the Treasury Department DOGE team got access to payment systems and its data, a federal judge, citing “irreparable harm,” blocked further access and ordered those DOGE team members to “destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from the Treasury Department’s records and systems.”
It remains to be seen what will happen at Treasury, whether the judge’s order can be fully enforced and whether it is being complied with, and what will happen to DOGE access to sensitive systems and data elsewhere in the federal government. Musk seems to have contempt for the judge, calling for his impeachment.
Why is Musk so passionate about getting into these confidential and sensitive data sets at the Treasury Department and elsewhere when there’s quite a bit of public data on spending already available at USAspending.gov? Accessing vast pools of sensitive nonpublic data and the insights from having your employees poking around these systems can give Musk and his allies a major business advantage. This advantage is not only about gaining an edge over business competitors or getting inside intel to help potentially privatize government systems (by the way, Musk, Peter Thiel, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia Capital are all investors in Stripe, a digital provider of payment processing services).
The data itself and understanding how it’s managed in government systems are both immensely valuable to and can be monetized by Musk. A key concept that’s important to understand here was expounded upon at length by Shoshanna Zuboff, professor emerita at Harvard Business School, in a dense and challenging-to-read book called “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.” Zuboff’s concepts were applied to Musk’s then-relatively fresh acquisition of Twitter in a 2022 post by Jared Stacy called “What We’re Missing With Musk.”
“Surveillance capitalists like Google and Mark Zuckerberg and now Musk aim to extract as much data from users as possible. This data is then made available for purchase in a new market of behavioral futures,” Stacy wrote. “Twitter is, in this sense, an extraction operation. Much of our interaction with digital technology takes place along these lines. Twitter is like Google and Facebook in that it extracts and analyzes the ‘breadcrumbs’ of data. It stands to profit by interpreting these interactions and making them available to the highest bidder.”
And here’s where the DOGE access to government systems and their data comes in. “The more access Musk has to user data, the more he will seek to build an architecture around the human experience which can yield greater accuracy to their predictions, and make more profit,” wrote Stacy. (Italics mine.)
Given this, it’s not surprising that Musk’s DOGE team at Treasury had an X software engineer who focuses on artificial intelligence.
In a January 2023 interview with the Financial Times, Zuboff herself weighed in on Musk.
“Our political stability, our ability to know what’s true and what’s false, our health and to some degree our sanity, is challenged on a daily basis depending on which decisions Mr. Musk decides to take,” Zuboff said. “I regard this as fundamentally intolerable . . . These spaces cannot exist solely under corporate control . . . We’re two decades into the digital era but we have never, as democracies, taken stock of the meaning of these technologies.”
Zuboff and Stacy’s remarks came years before Musk’s DOGE teams were authorized by an executive order issued by Trump on Day One to have unfettered and full access to all unclassified information in all agency data systems. This arrangement undermines government control of sensitive data by giving privileged access to Musk — someone who wants to profit by accessing as much data about you, me, and everyone else.
There’s also the question of what happens if Musk’s DOGE teams break something or if there are serious adverse consequences from their actions, such as weak IT security enabling hacks of sensitive data. Who will bear those costs? I’ve seen nothing indicating that Musk will be on the hook, and that means we’ll pay the price.
When he took over Twitter (now X), Musk engaged in mass firings, and the company’s services deteriorated and he had to hire some people back. But the federal government is not a social media company. Human lives, the economy, and national security can be profoundly impacted by government functions that are interrupted. “The stakes are a lot higher than at Twitter,” Michael Morris, professor of behavioral science at Columbia Business School, told the Washington Post.
“You’re Fired”: The Checks in the System Have Been Weakened
The DOGE infiltration through government comes as checks inside the executive branch have been put under extreme pressure in recent weeks, and it’s hard not to see them bending — to the likely benefit of anyone looking to engage in misconduct and/or profit from inside access and influence.
What’s happening at Treasury shows that the front lines of the public’s defense are cracking.
A little more than a week ago, the highest-ranking career employee at the Treasury Department resigned after his concerns about a DOGE team’s access to sensitive payment systems at the department’s Bureau of Fiscal Services were apparently overruled by the agency’s political leadership, who put the career employee on administrative leave before he resigned. A few days later, a subcontractor employee for Booz Allen Hamilton warned in writing that “continued access to any payments systems, even ‘read-only’ likely poses the single greatest insider threat risk the Bureau of Fiscal Services has ever faced.” After news reports on the “insider threat” warning publicly surfaced on Friday, that subcontractor employee was removed and Booz said in a statement it is “seeking to have the report amended or retracted.”
(A brief aside: one of those DOGE team members posing an “insider threat” was discovered to have repeatedly posted racist, pro-genocidal, and pro-eugenics statements publicly online a few months ago. He resigned from the DOGE team, but Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Musk all called for him to be reinstated. It’s very striking how they view accountability and personal responsibility when it’s someone on their “team.”)
The situation involving the Treasury Department and the internal warnings there — and blowback against those making them — are serious enough that they call out for a thorough, professional, unbiased review by a watchdog office insulated from political pressure and interference. The scope is clear: Did Booz retaliate against an employee and seek to retract a report because it feared DOGE or political appointees would go after its federal contracts? Were the concerns legitimate and did Treasury take adequate steps to mitigate them? But on a scale of 1-10 — 10 being extreme potential for political pressure — this rates a 10.
Even if prodded by lawmakers, will Treasury’s inspector general office want to take this on, and if it does, will it want to deliver bad news if there’s any to share, especially since, just a few weeks ago, Trump fired at least 17 inspectors general throughout the government, including ones that have been probing matters involving Musk and his companies.
Pulling back further, will any inspector general office want to launch any investigations, reviews, or audits involving Musk or his DOGE teams in this environment?
Democratic senators have recently asked whether a Pentagon inspector general review, revealed by The New York Times in December, involving Musk’s compliance with security rules governing access to classified information has been dropped after Pentagon Inspector General Robert Storch was fired as part of the Trump’s recent Friday Night Massacre of the watchdogs.
Before the Times story, Senators Jack Reed (R.I.) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) wrote to both Storch and then-Attorney General Merrick Garland – who supervised the FBI – requesting an investigation citing Musk’s contacts with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Putin’s deputy chief of staff.
The reported “relationships between a well-known U.S. adversary and Mr. Musk, a beneficiary of billions of dollars in U.S. government funding, pose serious questions regarding Mr. Musk’s reliability as a government contractor and a clearance holder,” Reed and Shaheen wrote.
The FBI Under Pressure
The IGs aren’t the only check that’s been put under strain in ways that might reduce oversight involving Musk. The FBI is under pressure too. An inspector general review involving the handling of classified information by a person or company with extensive contacts with foreign governments considered hostile to U.S. interests, like the one at the Pentagon, could easily rope in the FBI given its national security role. When asked if the FBI could be involved in such a situation, whistleblower attorney Andrew Bakaj, who formerly worked for the Pentagon and CIA inspector general offices, told me that “the short answer is possibly and likely.”
“It depends on the scope of the investigation,” Bakaj wrote in an email to me. It is typical for the FBI to be involved in national security investigations of this nature given its central role in counterintelligence. In any case, longstanding Attorney General guidelines state that “the Offices of Inspector General and the Federal Bureau of Investigation must promptly notify each other in writing upon the initiation of any criminal investigation.”
But, like offices of inspectors general, will the FBI want to investigate Musk or any of his companies or close allies, especially now that Musk’s senior security director at SpaceX, Justin Monroe, is inside the FBI as an advisor?
And even if there’s an indication of criminal activity intersecting with Trump’s close ally Musk, will the FBI want to go there? Thousands of its agents have recently been threatened with termination for simply doing their jobs and investigating, often violent, crimes that occurred on January 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol. And Trump ultimately pardoned more than a thousand people for January 6-related crimes of which they were convicted — would he just end up pardoning Musk if any potential crimes are investigated?
Say the FBI or offices of inspectors general encounter serious evidence of crimes and they have the backbone to investigate. They then have to rely on the Justice Department, which ultimately supervises the FBI and is the only entity that can prosecute crimes. The Justice Department is now led by people who have defended Trump in his criminal cases and during his first impeachment.
And wait, there’s more.
Last week, we also learned from the New York Times that the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which typically interprets the law in very pro-executive branch ways, has been sidelined by the White House and often is not being asked to vet draft executive orders and other actions for their legality, which it has for decades. If the White House is bypassing OLC, then it does not want even a speed bump to get in its way.
As the checks inside the executive branch are weakened or bypassed, there is widespread fear that the current 6-3 conservative Supreme Court majority is less likely to put the brakes on presidential power than the court would have in the past. Even if courts, including the Supreme Court, block actions, Vice President J.D. Vance has suggested on multiple occasions, including as vice president, that the executive branch can ignore the judicial branch.
The Guardrails Will Further Weaken
It also bears reminding that federal civil service protections have not yet been stripped en masse — once that happens, people may be less willing to speak out and, if they do, they will have little to no redress if they face retaliation.
Trump’s rebranded Schedule F policy (now even more blandly called “Schedule Career/Policy” and now more expensive in scope) is still in the earlier phases of implementation. Once fully implemented, it will strip civil service protections from tens if not hundreds of thousands of career federal workers. Given that the removal of protections is most likely to strike workers who have some nexus to the policy-making process, it’s going to hit headquarters agency personnel the hardest.
Trump also asserted on Day One that all career senior executives “serve at the pleasure of the president,” which contradicts federal law granting them protections — and indeed, some career executives were fired, effectively immediately on January 20, hours after the inauguration, citing only Article II of the Constitution. The Office of Personnel Management also piled on with a memo last week saying chief information officers at agencies inherently have a nexus to policy making, essentially asserting they cannot have civil service protections. This will presumably help clear the way for DOGE team members to access agency IT systems.
What are these civil service protections? Boiled down, you just can’t be removed for no reason whatsoever, unless you’re a probationary employee (usually that lasts 1 to 2 years). You also need to be put on notice of the reasons (e.g. performance or conduct-related) before being fired and have a chance to respond before a termination goes into effect.
Career civil service employees are protected in law from reprisal for whistleblowing and “protected activity” like going to Congress, and for refusing to obey illegal orders. In practice, these legal protections often don’t live up to their promise, but sometimes they do (sadly it often takes a draining and extended legal battle).
To recap:
At least 17 inspector general offices have figuratively seen their leaders’ heads put on pikes;
The FBI’s ranks face the prospect of mass firings for just doing their jobs to investigate and prosecute crimes related to an attack on Congress as it certified valid election results;
Tens if not hundreds of thousands of federal employees will see their protections for whistleblowing and refusing to obey illegal orders taken away; and
A key Justice Department office is not being consulted by the White House anymore to determine if the president’s executive orders and actions are legal.
The impact of each of the guardrails being weakened, demolished, or bypassed — and certainly all together — will make questionable and even potentially illegal actions more likely throughout the government when the highest levels of power are involved. The hammer will continue to fall on rank-and-file federal employees when there are instances of misconduct. But if any DOGE team staffer, Musk, Trump, or high-level political officials who have the president’s favor engage in wrongdoing, especially if blessed as an “official act,” will the checks in the system stop them? It’s not looking good.
Good stuff, Nick. I've recommended A Grifter's Paradise to four friends who I think will appreciate it. -chris h.
p.s. for my latest emission on my DoD hobby, see:
https://fasab.gov/board-activities/documents-for-comment/2024-annual-report/