(Above: A scene from the post-Inauguration lunch in the U.S. Capitol. See Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Justice Bret Kavanaugh, Apple’s Tim Cook, and others…)
The digital coup that Elon Musk launched to capture the U.S. government started on January 20 (though it had been prepared for many weeks before then.) On January 20, shortly after Pres. Trump took the oath of office and briefly dropped by a lunch at which tech billionaires mingled closely with Supreme Court justices and senior legislators, he signed an Executive Order that stated,
This Executive Order establishes the Department of Government Efficiency to implement the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.
We could think of this as “Communiqué Number 1” of the Musk-Trump coup that we’ve seen playing out ever since.
On January 20, Musk and his digi-goons were ready. By the next day, civil servants arriving in the White House-adjacent Eisenhower Executive Office Building found the door to the space there that had long housed the White House’s Office of Digital Services (ODS) sported a note describing it as now housing “DOGE.” DOGE, the non-governmental body that Musk had been running for some time out of the DC office of his Boring company, had already burrowed itself deep into the core of the U.S. federal apparatus.
ODS was established by Pres. Barrack Obama back in 2014, as a way for the techies in his White House to repair the digital chaos that had accompanied his roll-out of “Healthcare.gov”, a website crucial to the working of the Affordable Care Act. Obama’s goal was for his pretty tech-savvy White House team to now extend their own tech-savviness to any and all of the many other arms of the federal government– or even, of state governments, if they requested such help.
By capturing the centralized command post of ODS on january 20-21, Musk’s goons could then immediately reach straight into the computer systems of every U.S. government body. Crucially, these included the federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS), the mechanism through which the Treasury Department makes thousands of disbursals every day to governmental programs, government employees, and government-supported programs administered at the state level, such as Medicaid, food stamps, or Head Start.
The Musk goons captured OPM very early. On January 21, acting through the network that connects the heads of HR of all U.S. government agencies, OPM sent out a broad and threatening memo to the heads and acting heads of all those agencies instructing them to close their DEIA offices, “No later than 5:00 pm EST on Wednesday, January 22, 2025.”
And just in case anyone in those agencies was tempted to try to “re-brand” or re-describe their DEIA-related projects in some even slightly misleading way, rather than close them, the January 21 memo instructed agency heads to provide their employees with a special, centralized email address at OPM.gov through which they could– indeed, should– snitch on any colleagues suspected of planning such obfuscatory rebranding.
What a classic authoritarian tactic, to work to sow distrust in the workforce by encouraging– or even mandating– such snitching.
Capturing BFS took a little longer. On January 28, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced that BFS was halting just about all the outward payments that OMB had previously authorized– most of them on a longterm, continuing basis. That announcement spread panic nationwide. But that same evening, U.S. District Court Judge Loren AliKhan temporarily halted the OMB order, in response to a lawsuit filed by the non-profit coalition Democracy Forward. (Further, weightier lawsuits are expected to come soon, from a coalition of state attorneys-general.)
On the evening of January 31, one of the veteran career Treasury officials who had tried to hold out against Musk, David Lebryk, announced his resignation. And today, Wired reports this:
A 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who previously worked for two Elon Musk companies, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the US government, three sources tell WIRED.
Two of those sources say that Elez’s privileges include the ability not just to read but to write code on two of the most sensitive systems in the US government: The Payment Automation Manager (PAM) and Secure Payment System (SPS) at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). Housed on a top-secret mainframe, these systems control, on a granular level, government payments that in their totality amount to more than a fifth of the US economy.
In the two weeks since January 21, we’ve seen how extensively throughout the many sprawling arms of the federal government Musk’s digital coup has already reached, from his DOGE lair within its Eisenhower EOB bosom.
This is a type of governmental coup that we have never seen before.
It’s true that in “classical”– nearly always military-initiated– coups, securing control of communications systems within governments, as well as of the governments’ outward facing media, has always been a crucial goal of the coup-makers. We are certainly are seeing that playing out here in the Musk coup– and undertaken very speedily through DOGE/ODS’s capture of the digital systems of apparently all of the arms of the federal government.
But Musk’s ongoing digital coup against the U.S. government has many very novel components:
- Firstly, this is obviously not a military-launched coup. It is not being manifested by columns of tanks rolling in to seize control of the White House, or USAF planes strafing the approaches to the national capital. (Indeed, many potential targets of these coup-makers may well lie within the U.S. military itself.)
- It is, rather, a coup organized by a close ally of the recently elected president who has been acting with– until now– the president’s full support.
- Its main goals seems to be to break down and dismantle many portions of the federal government apparatus, and to ensure that those portions that remain have unquestioning loyalty to this president.
The speed, and until now the near-total success, of this coup raise many questions. Among them:
- Are there constitutional protections that can be effective in stopping it?
- What kind of popular mass action might be effective in stopping– or at least slowing– it?
- What effects might this coup have– on communities throughout the United States, on this country’s whole federal system of government, and on U.S. relations with the rest of the world?
On the matter of constitutional protections, Trump’s bullying and swagger have already helped him to win real, though slim, majorities in both houses of Congress and to take over the U.S. Supreme Court. He retains considerable ability to rally popular outrage among his nationwide MAGA base, against targets like “woke-ism”, “criminally minded immigrants” or “the wasteful federal bureaucracy and the effete elites that run them”, and he has shown himself able and eager to use the threat of that MAGA outrage against any Republican legislator who might be tempted to hew to a less confrontational line. Personally, I’m not placing my faith in either the legislative branch or, at the end of the day, the courts.
(There is, of course, some non-trivial possibility that Trump and Musk might part ways. How happy is Trump to share the limelight with anyone?)
As for popular mass action– one of the problems in relying on this is the sheer size of this country. If a coup like the present Musk coup in Washington had been launched in, say, any West European country, then people affected by funding cutoffs could be expected to rally in person, speedily and in great numbers, in the two or three key cities in that country, and to have a good chance of rebuffing the coup that way. In this country? It’s not so easy to do, given its sheer size. And with Musk now capable of controlling the country’s whole nationwide communications systems, it would be hard even to plan such any such in-person action.
Regarding the possible effects of this coup: We have already seen that the speedy success of what I think of as the more Trumpist part of the duo’s agenda– the part that targets immigrants, is deeply dedicated to raising tariffs on trading partners, and is opposed to inter-governmental bodies like the World Health Organization– has had very serious real-world consequences.
Regarding another broad and speedy Trump decision, the corporate media have made a big deal about the bad effects that will flow from his abrupt cut-off of funding for USAID . I’m not so sure. A huge proportion of AID funding has always gone to contractors and suppliers based in the U.S., rather then to the proclaimed beneficiaries in low-income countries. And while there may be some serious consequences in those low-income countries, those will most likely be only temporary as funders from elsewhere in the international system will be able to pick up most or all of the slack within weeks or months. (What suffers over the longer term is, of course, Washington’s ability to project and use “soft power” around the world.)
Meanwhile, the more Muskite agenda of tearing down the federal government and bringing its remnants sternly to heel has had some of its component parts briefly stayed by the courts. But (a), that stay is unlikely to be very lengthy, and (b) the actions of Trump/Musk’s first ten days in office have already spread fear and panic throughout many parts of federal workforce. So his digital coup may end up having much greater consequences than those less-digital parts of Trump’s agenda.
The success that this private, unelected individual and the corporations whose digital talent he has drawn on in undertaking his coup have had– and will continue to have for some time now– in radically undermining the “democratic” governance system here in the United States also raises other questions about the historical relationship between privately owned corporations and the emergence and development of “democracy” in West European-origined nations.
Corporations have always wielded a disproportionate degree of power in Western democracies. “One person, one vote” and the civic equality of all human persons have always been proclaimed aspirations, and never the reality. Plus, historically, as “democracy” emerged as a norm and saw some formal development in practice in Western nations, that very often occurred in tandem with those countries’ societies profiting very handsomely from large-scale settler-colonial takings. Indeed, back in the 16th and early 17th centuries CE, “England” and “Netherlands” emerged as sustainable independent polities only because the privateers (in England) and the privateers and infant joint-stock companies (in Netherlands) were able to fill the coffers of their investors back home and keep things humming economically in that way. And here in the United States, as the White colonial settlements spread ever further westward, the story was the same.
The “one person one vote” norm that undergirds any true democracy– rule by the demos, the people–only very slowly and very imperfectly became the practice in the Anglophone (or other Western) countries. Private, profit-making corporations retained considerable power. Here in the United States, wealthy individuals have long been able to pour money into swaying elections at all levels; and in 2010, in “Citizens United” the U.S. Supreme Court explicitly allowed corporate bodies of all kinds to claim that making private donations to political campaigns somehow constituted constitutionally protected “free speech.” Hence, Elon Musk and the $277 million he reportedly spent backing Trump and other Republican candidates in the November elections.
For Musk, that was chump change. But it bought him a truly mind-boggling capability to remold American governance and society to his liking.
Where all this might lead is anyone’s guess. But with Musk and his bands of eager 25-year-olds having already poked their spokes deep through the wheels of federal governance, it seems impossible to conclude that those wheels can ever again be returned to the smooth turning they saw prior to January 20. Some form of collapse of the entire U.S. federal system of governance feels like a live possibility.
