The Economist: Elon Musk is shredding America’s government as he did Twitter

Key topics.Musk shuts down USAID, locking out 600 staff and deleting its online presence.DOGE workers access government offices, running code reviews and data purges.Legal challenges arise as Musk's drastic federal downsizing faces resistance.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here..The seventh BizNews Conference, BNC#7, is to be held in Hermanus from March 11 to 13, 2025. The 2025 BizNews Conference is designed to provide an excellent opportunity for members of the BizNews community to interact directly with the keynote speakers, old (and new) friends from previous BNC events – and to interact with members of the BizNews team. Register for BNC#7 here..If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up for the BizNews channel here..From The Economist, published under licence. The original article can be found on www.economist.com© 2025 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved..The Economist .Some of his operatives are barely out of their teens___STEADY_PAYWALL___.Just past midnight on February 3rd, Elon Musk appeared on X to explain what he is doing to the federal government. He had to speak over the patter of his four-year-old son, also called X. The bureaucracy, Mr Musk argued, constitutes "a fourth branch of government" which is "arguably the most powerful branch". He then came to the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which he denounced as little more than a device to funnel taxpayers' money to Marxists and criminals. He had, he claimed, the full support of Donald Trump and is "shutting it down", notwithstanding that the agency's existence is mandated by Congress. Later he posted that he had spent the weekend "feeding USAID into the woodchipper"..Even as Mr Musk was speaking, workers at USAID's headquarters in Washington were being told not to come in the next day. Some 600 of the agency's staff seem to have been locked out of their emails. That followed a weekend in which the agency's website went offline; its X feed was deleted; and workers from Mr Musk's new government unit, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, reportedly tried to enter the agency and were initially stopped by senior staff from downloading classified data. Later on February 3rd Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, announced he had been made acting head of the agency while it faces "reorganisation"..The takedown of USAID is the most dramatic example of what seems to be Mr Musk's plan for the whole of government. It is drawn from his playbook as a corporate boss. Just over two years ago Mr Musk took over Twitter in a messy $44bn deal. Within a few months, much of which he spent at the company's headquarters in San Francisco, he had reduced headcount by around four-fifths. A third of the staff accepted buyouts; many of the rest were fired. They included senior executives who were sacked instantly to stop their stock options vesting. Every decision, such as those about which Twitter accounts to ban, was put directly into Mr Musk's hands..Now he is trying to do the same thing with over 2m federal employees, in an attempt to cut $1trn—more than half of all discretionary spending—out of the federal budget. It is, says Donald Kettl, of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, like nothing that has ever happened before. "On a scale of one to ten, this is about 145. It's so far off the charts," he says. Richard Nixon was the most recent American president to govern as if the laws of the land did not apply to him, but "this is far beyond anything that Nixon even attempted.".The first hints of Mr Musk's seriousness came on January 28th, when more than 2m federal employees were sent an email by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the closest thing the government has to a human-resources department. The message offered "deferred resignation". It had the subject line "fork in the road", the same as in the email sent to Twitter employees when Mr Musk took over there. Lots of federal employees have been sent two more emails affirming the offer since. One went out to air-traffic controllers less than a day after a plane crash in Washington, DC, which has raised questions about short-staffing at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport..DOGE is technically embedded in the US Digital Service, an organisation created by Barack Obama to spread the use of new technology across government. But DOGE seems to be an entirely new thing. Many of its employees seem to be junior workers pulled in very recently from Mr Musk's many private firms. Their names have not been made public. But Wired, a magazine, has identified six engineers now working with DOGE. The one who sent the email shutting down USAID, Gavin Kliger, graduated from high school in 2017. The youngest of the six, Edward Coristine, is 19; his relevant work experience consists of a few months interning at Neuralink, Mr Musk's brain-implant firm. On his now-deleted LinkedIn profile, he took the moniker "bigballs"..These engineers—and it is unclear how many more there may be—now seem to be able to enter just about any government building they like. They have apparently installed sofa beds in the office of the OPM. Under an executive order that Mr Trump signed on his first day in office, they are promised "full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems." Some DOGE workers may also have been issued interim "Top Secret" clearances, which would allow them access to classified data..Government employees in various agencies report that staffers from DOGE are turning up at their offices, plugging in servers and running "code reviews". In the past week many government websites have gone offline, including vital ones, like that of the Census Bureau. Services like the passport-application website also disappeared. This may be linked to the purging of all "DEIA"-related material. What the DOGE people seem most keen on is access to personnel records and as much information as possible about what employees actually do. According to one civil servant interviewed by DOGE personnel, the questions include, "Which of your colleagues are most expendable?".Here, too, Mr Musk seems to be applying lessons from his takeover of Twitter, where a small group of trusted acolytes combed through records such as the company's Slack channels and email accounts to decide whom to fire. Yet the federal government is a much larger beast than Twitter, which at its peak had just 6,500 workers. And Mr Musk has been touching some extremely sensitive parts of it. On January 31st it emerged that David Lebryk, a senior career Treasury official, retired after clashing with officials from DOGE. They may have obtained access to the government payments system, which pays the government's bills and makes almost 90% of its bank transfers..Mr Musk suggested in a tweet that he has direct control, claiming that his team is "rapidly shutting down" government payments to contractors. On his midnight X talk, he claimed that a large share of government spending is being stolen by charities. Already some with government contracts—to ferry elderly patients to medical appointments, for example—report that payments they expected have not turned up..Is any of this legal? The belated appointment of Mr Rubio as acting administrator of USAID suggests a recognition that agencies established by Congress cannot simply be shut down by fiat. Meanwhile, laws about the handling of government data remain in force. Few legal experts think that the offer of "deferred resignation" is legal. Nick Bednar, of the University of Minnesota's law school, notes that there are laws for severance packages for federal workers—and they cap payments at $25,000. Mr Musk's deferred-resignation offer would also seem incompatible with laws intended to reduce waste and corruption, says Mr Bednar. Workers who accept the offer—which has a deadline of February 6th—"could very much be left high and dry", he adds..Lawsuits are being filed, and a few workers are resisting forced downsizing. But protest has been notably limited. On February 3rd, as USAID's Washington office was shut down, a few demonstrators milled outside. One, Kristina Drye, a USAID speechwriter, says that she "signed a contract to serve the American people" and, despite getting the email, decided to go into the office anyway. She retrieved some books, as well as a pair of beloved high heels. She says she does not expect to ever go back in. What Mr Musk is doing is "sheer, blatant disregard" for important work, she says. For now, nobody is stopping him..Read also:.🔒 Musk and Trump Target USAID: Billions in aid Frozen, agency on brink of collapse🔒 Elon Musk and today's robber barons hiding in plain sight: Max Hastings🔒 Elon Musk's DOGE initiative explores blockchain for government efficiency

The Economist: Elon Musk is shredding America’s government as he did Twitter

Related Stories

SpaceX at $1.75tn: Musk’s Wall Street moonshot — or science-fiction risk for investors? | FT Unhedged

Why Musk’s brilliant corporate playbook has stalled in politics

Elon Musk testifies he’s suing OpenAI to top CEO Altman’s ‘looting’

BizNews portfolio: Elon Musk is betting his business empire on AI