Elon’s Twitter Destruction Playbook Hits The US Government, And It’s Even More Dangerous

Failures

from the twisting-the-chaos-knob-on-the-levers-of-power dept

Remember how Elon Musk destroyed Twitter by ripping apart its infrastructure without understanding it? Now imagine that same playbook applied to the federal government. It’s happening, and the stakes are exponentially higher. When reviewing Kate Conger and Ryan Mac’s book “Character Limit” last fall, I highlighted two devastating patterns in Musk’s management: his authoritarian impulse to (sometimes literally) demolish systems without understanding them, and his tendency to replace existing, nuanced solutions with far worse alternatives (even when those older systems probably did require some level of reform). Those same patterns are now threatening the federal government’s basic functions.

Let’s be crystal clear about what’s happening: A private citizen with zero Constitutional authority is effectively seizing control of critical government functions. The Constitution explicitly requires Senate confirmation for anyone wielding significant federal power — a requirement Musk has simply ignored as he installs his loyalists throughout the government while demanding access to basically all of the levers of power, and pushing out anyone who stands in his way.

The parallel to Twitter is striking and terrifying. At Twitter, Musk’s “reform” strategy transformed a platform used by hundreds of millions for vital communication into his personal megaphone, hemorrhaging somewhere between 60-85% of its revenue in the process. But Twitter was just a private company. Now he’s applying the same destructive playbook to the federal government, where the stakes involve not just user experience or advertising dollars, but the basic functioning of American democracy.

The constitutional violations here dwarf the Twitter debacle. Where Musk merely broke a social media platform through incompetence last time, he’s now breaking the actual mechanisms of governance —  and doing it with the same reckless playbook that turned Twitter into a ghost town. As Conger and Mac, who documented the Twitter disaster, point out, even the specific tactics are being recycled:

The email landed in employees’ inboxes with the subject line: “Fork in the Road.” The message in the email was stark: Accept a sweeping set of workplace changes or resign.

That was the note that millions of federal employees received around 5 p.m. on Tuesday. It echoed a similar message that thousands of workers at Twitter got from Elon Musk in late 2022 after he bought the company.

[….]

Mr. Musk, who also leads Tesla and SpaceX, has enlisted the help of a team of loyalists to assess agencies and make cuts, the same thing he did during the Twitter takeover.

Steve Davis, the head of Mr. Musk’s tunneling startup, The Boring Company, helped oversee cost-cutting at Twitter and now leads DOGE. Brian Bjelde, a longtime human resources executive at SpaceX who also helped during the Twitter takeover, is now an adviser to the Office of Personnel Management.

Michael Grimes, a top banker at Morgan Stanley who helped lead Mr. Musk’s Twitter acquisition, is expected to take a senior job at the Commerce Department.

One of Mr. Musk’s software engineers at Tesla, Thomas Shedd, was named the head of “Technology Transformation Services” at the General Services Administration, which helps manage federal agencies. Mr. Shedd promptly employed a Musk tactic: asking for proof of engineers’ technical chops.

Mr. Shedd asked for engineers to sign up for sessions in which they could share “a recent individual technical win,” according to an email sent to more than 700 employees on Tuesday night and viewed by The Times.

Wired, which has also noted the obvious parallels between Musk’s takeover of Twitter and the federal government (written by Zoe Schiffer, who also wrote an insightful book about the Twitter disaster) has an even more terrifying article about just how unqualified Musk’s goons are:

Sources say that Riccardo Biasini, formerly an engineer at Tesla and most recently director of operations for the Las Vegas Loop at the Boring Company, Musk’s tunnel-building operation, is also at OPM as a senior advisor to the director. (Steve Davis, the CEO of the Boring Company, is rumored to be advising Musk on cuts to be made via DOGE, and was integral in Musk’s gutting of Twitter, now X, after his takeover of the company in 2022.)

According to the same sources, other people at the top of the new OPM foodchain include two people with apparent software engineering backgrounds, whom WIRED is not naming because of their ages. One, a senior advisor to the director, is a 21-year-old whose online resume touts his work for Palantir, the government contractor and analytics firm cofounded by billionaire Peter Thiel, who is its chairman. (The former CEO of PayPal and a long-time Musk associate, Thiel is a Trump supporter who helped bankroll the 2022 Senate campaign of his protege, Vice President JD Vance.) The other, who reports directly to Scales, graduated high school in 2024, according to a mirrored copy of an online resume and his high school’s student magazine; he lists jobs as a camp counselor and a bicycle mechanic among his professional experiences, as well as a summer role at Neuralink, Musk’s brain-computer interface company.

Among the new highers-up at OPM is Noah Peters, an attorney whose LinkedIn boasts of his work in litigation representing the National Rifle Association and who has written for right-wing outlets like the Daily Caller and the Federalist; he is also now a senior advisor to the director. According to metadata associated with a file on the OPM website, Peters authored a January 27 memo that went out under acting OPM director Charles Ezell’s name describing how the department would be implementing one of Trump’s executive orders, “Restoring Accountability To Policy-Influencing Positions Within the Federal Workforce.” This has to do with what’s sometimes known as Schedule F—a plan to recategorize many civil service jobs as political appointees, meaning they would be tied to the specific agenda of an administration, rather than viewed as career government workers. The order would essentially allow for career certain civil servants to be removed in favor of Trump loyalists by classifying them as political appointees, a key part of the Project 2025 plan for remaking the government.

For all of Musk and fans whining about the hiring of “unqualified” people (which has been very clearly coded to mean non-white, non-male, non-cisgender), the fact that he’s hired a kid whose experience is “camp counselor” into a high-level position is fucking insane.

But this isn’t just about personnel changes. It’s about systematically dismantling government institutions from the inside out.

And it’s only getting more and more dangerous. It’s been reported (and a lawsuit has been filed over it) that the “fork in the road email” was sent via a hastily setup on-premises server that these idiots needed to do the email blast, even though that almost certainly violates federal law.

On top of that, there are multiple reports of Musk basically taking over various parts of the government. He apparently showed up at the General Services Administration on Thursday, just after his right-hand man in the Twitter shakeup, Steve Davis, told them they were ending a bunch of leases on government buildings (another thing that Twitter also did). Even worse, Wired reports that Musk’s friends are using the GSA to try to get access to a variety of systems, including remote access to laptops, and even reading emails of government employees.

There also appears to be an effort to use IT credentials from the executive office of the president to access GSA laptops and internal GSA infrastructure. Typically, access to agency systems requires workers to be employed at such agencies, sources say. While Musk’s team could be trying to obtain better laptops and equipment from GSA, sources fear that the mandate laid out in the DOGE executive order would grant the body broad access to GSA systems and data. That includes sensitive procurement data, data internal to all the system and services GSA offers, and internal monitoring software to surveil GSA employees as part of normal auditing and security processes.

The access could give Musk’s proxies the ability to remote into laptops, listen in on meetings, read emails, amongst many other things, a former Biden official told WIRED on Friday.

Then, on Friday morning, there were even scarier reports of him fighting with the longest tenured non-political employee at the Treasury Department, David Lebryk, leading Lebryk to resign after Musk demanded access to the US Treasury’s payment system.

Typically only a small number of career officials control Treasury’s payment systems. Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses and more nationwide. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.

But Musk demanded that he get to control it, apparently.

The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department is departing after a clash with allies of billionaire Elon Musk over access to sensitive payment systems, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks.

And it’s not that Lebryk had ideological disagreements. As the WaPo story notes:

“I could not, to this day, tell you his politics,” Faulkender, who served as an assistant secretary at Treasury during Trump’s first term, told The Washington Post at the time. “He always seemed to be relaxed and under control.”

But he got pushed out because Elon’s team wants control over the money spigot.

Then, later today, Reuters reported that Musk’s aides have locked career civil servants entirely out of government computer systems.

Aides to Elon Musk charged with running the U.S. government human resources agency have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees, according to two agency officials.

[….]

The systems include a vast database called Enterprise Human Resources Integration, which contains dates of birth, Social Security numbers, appraisals, home addresses, pay grades and length of service of government workers, the officials said.

“We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems,” one of the officials said. “That is creating great concern. There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications.”

Officials affected by the move can still log on and access functions such as email but can no longer see the massive datasets that cover every facet of the federal workforce.

Again, Elon has not been nominated as an officer of the US, and the Senate has not even been given the ability to review any such nomination. Instead, he’s basically acting like he runs the government and is slashing and cutting with wild abandon.

There are all sorts of laws that have been broken in the process, forcing courts to jump in. Earlier today, for example, a judge in Rhode Island had to stop the Musk/Trump administration from carrying out their attempt to stop spending money apportioned by Congress. A judge having to use this kind of “talking to a five-year-old language” to the Presidential administration is crazy:

The Executive’s statement that the Executive Branch has a duty “to align Federal spending and action with the will of the American people as expressed through Presidential priorities,” (ECF No. 48-1 at 11) (emphasis added) is a constitutionally flawed statement. The Executive Branch has a duty to align federal spending and action with the will of the people as expressed through congressional appropriations, not through “Presidential priorities.” U.S. Const. art. II, § 3, cl. 3 (establishing that the Executive must “take care that the laws be faithfully executed . . .”). Federal law specifies how the Executive should act if it believes that appropriations are inconsistent with the President’s priorities–it must ask Congress, not act unilaterally. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 specifies that the President may ask that Congress rescind appropriated funds.3 Here, there is no evidence that the Executive has followed the law by notifying Congress and thereby effectuating a potentially legally permitted so-called “pause.”

While just at the district court level, this judicial smackdown echoes historic rebukes like Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, where SCOTUS reminded Truman that “the President’s power to see that the laws are faithfully executed refutes the idea that he is to be a lawmaker.” Musk’s shadow administration represents a constitutional crisis orders of magnitude greater than Twitter’s blue check chaos.

When Elon took over Twitter, he certainly had the right to go in and destroy the place through ignorance and overconfidence.

But this is the US government. He doesn’t own it. He wasn’t elected. He wasn’t officially appointed. And there are laws that are being broken left and right. Even worse, the impact of all this nonsense is way more significant and way more serious than any of the shit he pulled at Twitter.

Millions of people actually depend on the US government functioning. You can’t just have some random jackass show up and rip out fences and assume shit won’t go south. They went completely south with Twitter, but that was just a random social media site people could move on from. This is the most powerful country in the world, and it’s being ripped apart by someone with no concern or care for the actual damage he’s doing.

I would be among the first to say that the federal government needs massive reform, just as I thought that Twitter needed a major overhaul (one of the reasons I wrote my Protocols not Platforms paper was to try to inspire that kind of overhaul). But there are smart ways to do it and then there’s this: which is just utter destruction while looking over his shoulder to see if the nihilistic kids who worship his every move are finding it entertaining.

There’s a crucial lesson here about thoughtful reform versus destruction: Musk’s approach to institutions resembles a toddler “fixing” a grandfather clock by removing its pendulum. Yes, the clock needed maintenance — but now it can’t tell time at all. The federal government absolutely needs reform, but what we’re seeing isn’t reform — it’s vandalism dressed up as innovation. And unlike Twitter, where users could move to Mastodon or Bluesky (or just log off entirely), there’s no backup government waiting in the wings when Musk’s wrecking ball finishes swinging.

Those who care about functional institutions must demand adherence to constitutional processes, not billionaire whims. Because if we don’t, we might find ourselves longing for the days when Musk was only breaking social networks instead of the basic machinery of democracy.

Filed Under: donald trump, elon musk, governance, government, omb, power, treasury
Companies: twitter, x