Musk Rampages Across a Government Clueless About What He’s Doing

A mere two days after his confirmation as Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent stunningly handed the keys of the vault to Elon Musk. Apart from bewilderingly ceding control of his fief, Bessent's action was entirely illegal, but immune Donald Trump told him to do so.

The Department of the Treasury issues almost all of the U.S. government’s disbursements, some $6 trillion a year in Social Security payments,
tax refunds, veterans benefits, and then some.

Musk, with neither Senate confirmation nor FBI background check nor security clearance, has been declared a “special government employee” to head a Potemkin “department” that by law could only exist if Congress creates it, but which has nevertheless been given illegal free agency to roam the government departments supposedly to sniff out inefficiencies.

Musk has brought along a troop of engineers age 19 to 25 who have no government clearance, yet the publication Wired reports they have apparent access to all of the data in the department’s systems. That would include your social security number, your tax returns, your payment history, your direct deposit bank account numbers, and so on.

The crew comes from his companies and, before that, we suspect, some may have been products of Peter Thiel's fellowship that paid promising youths to skip college and start businesses. Musk and Thiel were co-founders of PayPal. Wired says that one of them, a 25-year old named Marko Elez, was given administrative privileges into the payment system at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, which means he can alter the programming code that generates government payments "that in their totality amount to more than a fifth of the US economy". Admin access allows for the entire system to be navigated, system components to be disabled, files modified or erased, payments — down to the level of individual Americans — to be modified or stopped, or money to Trump's or Musk's disfavored federal agencies halted altogether.

The New York Times first broke the story of the Musk team entering Treasury. Its report, days earlier than Wired's, acknowledged that the access "could give the Trump administration another mechanism to attempt to unilaterally restrict disbursement of money approved for specific purposes by Congress", but otherwise complacently accepted that procedures were being followed. The reporters assured us that career Treasury Department attorneys signed off on access, the Musk team were made Treasury employees, passed "government" background checks, were granted security clearances, "have yet to gain operational capabilities”, and “any changes to the system would go through a review process and testing." Skepticism was fully lacking.

If all was calm and in order, how then to explain why David Lebryk, Fiscal Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and for a few days the acting secretary prior to Bessent’s arrival, was forced out after a 30-year career for denying access to Tom Krause, CEO of Silicon Valley company Cloud Software Group?

In a letter, the U.S. Treasury said four days after the Times report that "Elon Musk's government-efficiency team has been granted 'read-only access' to its payment system codes". Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) lashed back with,

"I’m sure the Treasury Secretary and the president want to save face and downplay the risks as Elon Musk seizes power, but nothing they’re saying is believable or trustworthy,"

He's right. A Treasury officer several levels down was made to sign that letter rather than the secretary, because it is a lie. Wired’s reporting directly contradicts and begs the question, what good is “read only”? Or as MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell put it,

”Read-only access? Really? Does Elon Musk seem like a read-only guy to you?”

The DOGE teams are out there to make changes.

Musk himself had already exposed the lie. In a tweet days earlier, he wrote that his team had learned that Treasury personnel were instructed to make illegal payments (a statement that itself is viewed as a lie to justify their making changes). Musk subsequently tweeted “The DOGE team is rapidly shutting down these illegal payments”. That gave it away. You can't do that under read-only.

DOGE has so far gained access to 11 agencies across the government, including the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services which has contracts totaling a trillion dollars. Several Musk associates have been given access to federal human resources databases at the Office of Personnel Management containing complete personal data, job applications, performance evaluations, medical histories of all of the millions of government employees.

The Treasury Department has now pledged to a federal judge that only two — Krause and Elez — would be allowed access to data according to strict limits and would continue to have read-only access, showing that department lawyers are either lying or covering up that there never was read-only. The judge asked the department attorney if Krause and Elez had distributed the fiscal data to "anybody else". Humphreys said, "As far as we are aware, no, they have not, outside the Treasury Department". As far as they are aware. In other words, they don't know.

Then Elez resigned when racist posts were discovered on Musk's X, mostly against Hindus and Indians working in Silicon Valley. Elez proudly summed it up last July with “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool”.

That Musk and crew undertook these projects in secrecy, with no explanation even now of what they are doing, has given rise to the worry of “state capture”, defined as when a powerful individual is able to capture the mechanisms of government and manipulate them for personal gain.

Far-fetched? Take note that the universal elimination of inspectors general at some 18 departments and agencies sets the stage for capture. And ominously, an enabling act may be in the works. One internal communication had a tech team member mulling over how sign-in access to the Treasury Department's systems could be simplified. That set off alarms — that Musk could be assigning creation of a "backdoor", a secret bypass of security for entering the system at will in the future. It sparked suspicion that its purpose was to enable data to be sucked from the Treasury's systems into the General Services Administration where another group of DOGE operatives are ensconced and for clandestine permanent access. Given that Musk’s companies have billions of dollars in contracts with the federal government, where are the safeguards against his tampering with business rivals henceforward?

Of still greater concern, what safeguards are there that data not be given to a foreign adversary? Tesla in China is utterly dependant on the good graces of the Chinese Communist Party, which has in the past few years made life increasingly difficult for U.S. corporations operating there. What is to stop Musk from extracting information to hand to China, or giving the CCP the keys to the back door, in return for favorable treatment? MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell asks:

”Does anyone think there is a zero chance of that happening? Does anyone think that Elon Musk, the most erratic public figure in the world not named Donald Trump can actually be trusted with anything?” The fact is, we don’t know what they are doing.

Why USAID?

Elon Musk on his own seems to have brought about the obliteration of the $45 billion a year aid agency. The world’s richest man has halted the flow of assistance to the world’s most vulnerable people in the poorest countries all over the world, cutting off the supply of food, healthcare, and life-saving drugs in the most desperate places such as war-ravaged Sudan. The United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, is the world’s biggest donor, providing humanitarian aid for tens of millions of people.

Not to Elon Musk who tweeted, “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.” Trump has said that USAID is run by "lunatics" and "radicals".

Republicans are complacent, always opposed to money spent on foreign aid, even though the USAID budget amounts to only .06% of the nation’s expenditures. Their knowledge of USAD seems to extend no further than a number of admittedly stupid projects which constitutes Fox News’ entire characterization of the agency. Primetime hosts Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters, and Sean Hannity gleefully told us of $2.5 million to promote DEI in Serbia, funds for a transgender opera in Columbia, $32,000 for a trans comic book in Peru. Not a single word about what good USAID does in the world, the good will image the agency spreads about our country. Nothing about the opening it creates for China and Russia to rush in and replace our image with their own. Going no further, the Fox News hosts ignorantly and irresponsibly leave their viewers thinking that the $45 billion a year is in its entirety a “slush fund”.

(Interestingly, on their first night after the story of the Treasury infiltration broke, none of the three nightly commentators of the supposed “news” organization made any mention whatever of Musk’s illegal Treasury breach).

The new Secretary of State Marco Rubio welcomes Musk’s destruction of USAID. Long a critic, he says:

” [E]mbassies around the world complain that USAID… is not only not cooperative, they undermine the work that we’re doing in that country…They won’t tell you what the programs are. They refuse to answer questions.”

A serious complaint, but one that suggests that USAID, an independent agency created by Congress in 1961 during the Kennedy administration, should dutifully follow the State Department's lead.

Accordingly, Rubio has folded whatever remnants left of USAID into the State Department, which amounts to quite a power grab. He has appointed to review the aid agency’s programs a top official at State, Pete Marocco, who once served at USAID. The review will be less than superficial. It is already decided that only 294 foreign service officers and civil servants will replace the several thousand who managed the disbursement the globe over of the tens of billions of dollars annually that has for decades so won America's reputation for humanitarian beneficence. Just 12 will handle what trickle of funds that may continue for the entire continent of Africa, for example.

As for Marocco, NBC News tells us that,

”his attempts to consolidate power and slash funding drove officials to write a dissent memo that ultimately pushed him out of office.”

The network also reports that Marocco and his now-wife were identified in multiple images as being among the Jan. 6 rioters at the U.S. Capitol, one of the images showing him entering the building through a broken window.

So, the question of why did Musk choose USAID as his first target? A Financial Times article of last September titled "Musk, Thiel and the shadow of apartheid South Africa" sheds some light. Both spent early years in South Africa, Musk until he was 17. Simon Kuper, the author of the article who also has ties to South Africa, says about the country in that period that Whites "of a certain mindset" thought that the differential between comfortable White society and the dreadful conditions under which Blacks lived, forcibly relocated into racially segregated neighborhoods, "was inscribed in nature".

"Certain people were equipped to succeed in capitalism, while others weren’t. That was simply the way it was, and it was pointless to try to mess with nature."

Perhaps an inborn indifference to the plight of other humans is why Musk has neither morals nor qualms about bringing USAID assistance worldwide to a halt. He had an influential grandfather who moved his family from Canada to South Africa because they "were very fanatical in favor of apartheid", according to Elon's father Errol. They had Nazi sympathies, the father said. Did that imprint on young Elon? In those years of his growing up and until the early '90s, Elon saw a meddling USAID working against granddad's apartheid until it was finally overcome. Is Elon using his control of the U.S. government to get even?