Elon Musk’s presidency is just getting started

On today’s episode of Decoder, we’re discussing a very big problem with extremely far-reaching consequences: how dysfunctional has the federal government in the United States become, and how much of it has been handed to Elon Musk? 

If you’ve even glanced at the news over the past week, you’ve likely come across some alarming headlines about Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and how it’s begun commandeering control of some pretty important government agencies. Ostensibly, Musk’s goal is to slash spending and reduce waste across the government. But what’s actually happening is a lot more destructive than that. Musk and the DOGE team have gained access to the entire Treasury Department payment system, they’ve frozen lifesaving foreign aid programs, and they’re systematically locking entire chunks of the federal workforce out. And I do mean locking out — they can’t access the buildings. 

If you followed the Twitter takeover, it’s a familiar playbook — Musk moves in, breaks things faster than anyone can keep track, and generally causes chaos and dares the market and the legal system to stop him. At government-scale, it aligns perfectly with the Trump 2.0 strategy of shock and awe, moving so fast and so relentlessly that it’s impossible to figure out what to focus on, what’s actually changed, what’s been broken forever, and what’s merely noise.

In many cases, DOGE operates literally when everyone else has left the building — at night and on the weekends. On Monday morning, at 1:54AM, Musk tweeted what feels like an already infamous line about the nature of his work in the government, writing, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could [have] gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”

Obviously, a big issue here is transparency — DOGE is operating without any meaningful oversight, and it’s actively resisting attempts to reveal information as simple as the names and work histories of who’s on staff. When Wired reported the names of six DOGE employees, the new right in Silicon Valley called it doxxing, even though Musk himself has directed massive amounts of harassment at government workers over the past few months. On top of that, efforts to impose transparency on DOGE have caught the attention of at least one hardcore MAGA federal prosecutor who now claims he’ll go after anyone that attempts to impede Musk’s work. 

The whole point of transparency is to have accountability, which is the other big problem here. It seems like a lot of what Musk and DOGE are doing is simply illegal. There have already been dozens of lawsuits filed challenging this Trump administration, including DOGE’s approaches to headcount reduction, funding freezes, and access to sensitive agency data and controls. But these lawsuits will take time to work their way through the courts, and there’s no telling how much damage DOGE will do before that happens. As it stands, Congress does not seem equipped in any way to check the actions of the world’s richest man. 

That leaves us with some big — frankly scary — questions about where the power is now concentrating in Washington and whether any of the institutions we thought of as steady and resilient to chaos are truly as safe as we thought. 

For this episode of Decoder, I didn’t simply want to go through everything that’s happened. I wanted to know how all these changes are affecting the people who’ve so far been the most newly supportive of Trump because they have the most to gain and to lose: the money, the billionaires. So I invited New York Times reporter Teddy Schleifer on the show. 

Teddy has been covering Musk, DOGE, and the new Trump administration as part of a group of reporters at the Times pretty much every hour since the inauguration. They published a blockbuster story on Musk’s first wave of DOGE actions earlier this week, and Teddy himself specializes in the intersection of money and politics and how the influence that buys you has evolved pretty dramatically in recent years. 

So I wanted to ask Teddy what Musk and DOGE are up to, how the government is responding to that, and more importantly, is this what Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and all the other billionaires wanted? Elon Musk in charge of the federal government? What are they saying about it, and how much further is it going to go? The answer might surprise you, but not in a good way. I think, over time, that part of the story might become the most complicated of all.

If you’d like to read more about what we talked about in this episode, check out the links below:

• Inside Musk’s aggressive incursion into the federal government | NYT
• ‘The biggest heist in American history’: DC is just waking up to Musk’s takeover | The Verge
• ‘Scared and betrayed’ — workers are reeling from chaos at federal agencies | The Verge
• Treasury Department sued over DOGE takeover | The Verge
• Can anyone stop President Musk? | The Verge
• Elon Musk’s team now has access to Treasury’s payments system | NYT
• Elon Musk’s bureaucratic coup | The Atlantic
• Trump: Elon Musk won’t do anything ‘without our approval’ | NBC News
• The young, inexperienced engineers aiding Musk’s government takeover | Wired
• USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech to help fix government (2023) | Decoder