What we know about President Elon’s government takeover

In today’s episode of DecoderWe are discussing a very big problem with very long -term consequences: How defect is the federal government in the United States, and how much was it delivered to Elon Musk?

If you have taken a look at the news during the past week, you will likely encounter some concerned headlines about the Ministry of Government Efficiency in Musk, or Doge, and how it has started to meet the control of some very important government agencies. Ostensibly, the goal of musk is to reduce spending and reduce waste throughout the government. But what is really happening is much more destructive than that. Musk and Doge Team managed to reach the entire payment system for the Treasury, and they freezed the life -saving foreign aid programs, and they systematically closed full pieces of federal workforce. I mean lock – they cannot reach the buildings.

If you follow the Twitter acquisition process, this is a familiar book – moving Musk, breaking things faster than anyone can follow, generally lead to chaos and dare to stop the market and the legal system. On the government scale, it fully corresponds to the Trump 2.0 strategy of shock and awe, moving very quickly and unabated so that it is impossible to know what to focus on, what has already been changed, what has been broken forever, and what is just noise.

In many cases, Doge works literally when everyone left the building – at night and at the weekend. On Monday morning, 1:54 am, musk Tweet What appears to be a notorious line already about the nature of his work in the government, he writes, “We spent the weekend in feeding the US International Development Agency in wooden pieces. He managed [have] He went to some great parties. I did so instead. “

It is clear that there is a big problem here that is transparency – works without any meaningful supervision, and it resists active attempts to detect simple information such as names and the date of work for those on employees. when Wireless I mentioned the names of six Doug employeesIt is called the new right in the Silicone Valley, although Musk itself has directed huge amounts of harassment of government workers over the past few months. Moreover, the efforts made to impose transparency on Duj are at least the Attractive Public Prosecutor’s attention He now claims that he will track down anyone This tries to hinder Music’s work.

The complete goal of transparency is to have accountability, which is the other big problem here. It seems that much MUSK and Doga are simply illegal. There were already dozens of lawsuits that were made to challenge this Trump administration, including Doug approaches in reducing the number of appointments, freezing financing, and accessing sensitive agency data and controls. But these lawsuits will take time to work on their way through the courts, and there is no damage that will happen before that. As, Congress does not seem equipped in any way to verify the actions of the richest man in the world.

This leaves us with some big – frightening questions – about the place where the authority is now focused in Washington and whether any of the institutions that we thought was fixed and flexible on the chaos really safe as we thought.

For this episode of DecoderI did not simply want to go to everything that happened. I wanted to know how all these changes affect the people who have yet been the most recently supportive of Trump because they have more than others and they lose: money, billionaires. So I called New York Times The reporter, Teddy Schifer, is in the show.

Teddy was covering musk, Doug, and the new Trump administration as part of a group of correspondents in Times To a large extent every hour since the opening. Publish a A great story on the first Musk wave of Doge works Earlier this week, Teddy himself specializes in intersection of money and politics and how the influence he buys has evolved greatly in recent years.

So I wanted to ask Teddy about what is Music and Doug, and how does the government respond to that, and most importantly, is this what Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and all the other billionaires wanted? Elon Musk, responsible for the federal government? What do they say on this topic, and how much will it go? The answer may surprise you, but not in a good way. I think, over time, that this part of the story may become the most complex ever.

If you want to read more about what we talked about in this episode, check the links below: