Private citizen Elon Musk has been given the ok to go into US GOVERNMENT computer systems without those departments official’s knowledge or oversight….
No one in Congress is objecting to this…
Musk wasn’t Elected by the America Voter’s….
He was picked by a convicted felon who happens to be President….
Americans don’t know the full extent of what Elon Musk is doing as he embeds alongside President Donald Trump at the top of the federal government.
What we know is that he’s the world’s richest man, the president’s largest campaign benefactor, and a person whose companies have grown fat on government contracts, so he has a greater financial interest in how the government operates than your average naturalized immigrant.
There are clues
With that context in mind, consider this startling passage from a report by CNN’s Katelyn Polantz, Phil Mattingly and Tierney Sneed about a standoff between career officials at the Treasury Department and employees of DOGE, the Musk-allied Department of Government Efficiency, which has morphed after the election from the out-of-government advisory panel Trump talked about to a rebranded technology unit inside the White House complex. Mattingly, Polantz and Sneed write:
Musk claims to be reclaiming government for you, the taxpaying voter
“This is the critical battle to restore power to the PEOPLE from the massive unelected bureaucracy!” he wrote on the social media platform he owns, pushing people to rally at events opposing the use of taxpayer dollars to fund NGOs, nonprofits unaffiliated with the government that are supposed to do good works.
Think Catholic Relief Services, the World Food Program and Save the Children. There can be a legitimate debate about whether the US should fund those programs in part because we know, thanks to transparency, that the US government is funding those programs.
But his method of taking over the bureaucracy is much less transparent than the bureaucracy itself.
When Bill Clinton offered buyouts to federal workers, in 1993, for instance, he did so after getting buy-in from Congress. Trump’s administration is banking on a slim majority of Republicans in the House buying in to his plan, assuming they get a chance to have a say….
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What are Musk’s conflicts of interest?
I asked Walter Shaub, the former Director of the Office of Government Ethics, who has raised warnings about Trump but also criticized Democrats, about the opacity of Musk’s role and why it should concern Americans.
“The Trump administration owes the American people a detailed explanation as to precisely how it hopes to manage conflicts of interest, as well as whether it deems Musk and each of the other participants in DOGE as a volunteer, a special government employee or a regular government employee,” he said in an email.
People are supposed to know about the people who run their government
That’s why Trump’s nominees to lead agencies have to undergo nomination hearings on Capitol Hill and why top officials are supposed to file paperwork with the Office of Government Ethics disclosing their financial interests and pledging to act ethically.
They’re supposed to know how their government is spending money and who is doing the spending. The mass resignation offer that caught everyone off guard was made under authority granted to the OPM director. Trump’s nominee, the venture capitalist Scott Kupor, has not yet been confirmed, so the agency is operating with an acting director….
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What’s not written is a public plan or a list of Musk allies now in the government. That is something everyone should want to take a look at…
Update…
“Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave representatives of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency full access to the federal payment system late on Friday, handing Elon Musk and the team he is leading a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending,” the New York Times reports.
“The new authority follows a standoff this week with a top Treasury official who had resisted allowing Mr. Musk’s lieutenants into the department’s payment system, which sends out money on behalf of the entire federal government. The official, a career civil servant named David Lebryk, was put on leave and then suddenly retired on Friday after the dispute.”
“The system could give the Trump administration another mechanism to attempt to unilaterally restrict disbursement of money approved for specific purposes by Congress, a push that has faced legal roadblocks.”
CNN: How an arcane Treasury Department office became ground zero in the war over federal spending.
Daily Kos …..
They may have been “only” wanting to download masses of data. (Masses so big IIRC, how many drives are we talking about? Or were they after sonething more specific, like certain people? )
They could also have messed with the systems’ functioning
They possibly could also have ERASED data
Or redirected funds
Or otherwise mucked these systems up, through ignorance, incompetence, or malice
— Musk’s people tried to steal data, or whatever their business was, clandestinely. Why? There are laws and regulations about protecting personal privacy. Most likely explanation, they were acting illegally and they knew it. How much Trump or White House staff knew, and whether there was any sort of formal or informal authorization, is an open question.
“were caught”
“were discovered”
–Civil servants resisted.
“His staff encountered resistance”
“Tensions escalated”
“employees speaking out”
[From other sources] one top non-political Treasury employee, David Lebryk, has chosen to leave government in response to the demands.
–And they responded to resistance aggressively:
“locked civil servants out of computer systems and offices”
” reports of personal items being searched”
More…
Of course WHO would actually STOP these intrusions which have to be ILLEGAL since Trump ‘OWNS’ the FBI and Justice Dept….