Appetite For Destruction

Elon Musk is laying waste to our government, because he thinks it's funny and cool.

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When Barack Obama was elected president with the help of allies in Silicon Valley, his administration was eager for them to bring their technical knowledge and innovative spirit to government, which many of them did. When he left office in 2017, Wired magazine wondered if Donald Trump would ruin all the useful websites and efficiency-promoting digitization that had been created in the prior eight years: “The White House imported Silicon Valley’s best to transform government,” it wrote. “Will Trump undo it all?”

He didn’t — not then at least. But now an entirely different group of tech leaders and their flunkeys has come to Washington, with a mission not to create some interesting ways for people to interact with their government, but to destroy that government.

Not completely, of course — there will still be a thing called the U.S. government even if they have their way. But it will be significantly smaller, less capable, and less committed to serving the public. Some agencies will be wiped out, while others will merely be crippled; some purposes will be abandoned entirely, while others will be twisted to serve the whims and financial self-interest of the two malignant narcissists who now run the country.

We’re still only a few weeks into the second Trump term, and how much damage he and Elon Musk will ultimately do is unknown. But we cannot understand the crisis we now face without grasping the logic of destruction that has been brought to our government.

Like Musk himself, that logic is built on ignorance, cruelty, and self-aggrandizement, a corrupted form of the ethos that helped build Silicon Valley into the simultaneously remarkable and horrifying globe-bestriding entity it is today. It may be best summarized by the motto Facebook held in its early days: “Move fast and break things.”

The idea was that the hidebound systems and habits of the past were obstacles to be overcome with ruthless speed and force; only by barreling through them could this new generation of geniuses accomplish the great things of which they were capable. There would inevitably be damage along the way, to incumbent firms and industries and even some people, but that was a small price to pay when they were inventing the future.

That idea was embraced by the entire tech industry. To have the mojo they all sought, you had to claim to be a disruptor, a man (almost always a man) willing to smash the old order in order to remake the world, even if what you were promoting was as banal as a pizza-ordering app.

What happens when you bring your logic of destruction to government

It is that spirit, turned up to 11 through the Musk’s manic leadership, that is now assuming control of the United States government, an entity so vast — with a budget of around $7 trillion and 5 million employees (counting civil servants, uniformed military, and postal workers) — that it can be difficult to grasp just how many different ways it touches our lives every day. Much of what it does is invisible, sometimes because we don’t bother to think about it, and sometimes because it involves complex systems that ordinary people have no need to be aware of. Who thinks about the government building the road you drive on when you’re on your way to the store, or the fact that the government made it possible for you to have safe water every time you take a drink, or made sure your meat wasn’t poisoned, or funded the research that discovered that medication your mom is taking? Very few of us.

At an even less visible level, there are agencies doing work that almost no one knows about, like the Treasury Department office that processes trillions of dollars in payments to everyone from Social Security recipients to doctors billing Medicare to Head Start organizations caring for kids. We know about that office now though, because Musk and his 20-something dudebro cronies have seized control of it. They’re going agency by agency, trying to dismantle the ones that Musk personally dislikes, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has now been effectively dismantled and may never recover.

That’s just one of many examples. Here’s what has happened at the Office of Personnel Management, the HR department for the federal government and its millions of employees:

Records obtained by The Post show that several members of Musk’s DOGE team — some of whom are in their early 20s and come from positions at his private companies — were given “administrative” access to OPM computer systems within days of Trump’s inauguration last month. That gives them sweeping authority to install and modify software on government-supplied equipment and, according to two OPM officials, to alter internal documentation of their own activities.

The DOGE team’s demand for access to OPM files and networks came as Musk deputies arrived at the agency promising to wipe out 70 percent of its staff, officials said. A senior OPM official, during a team meeting Wednesday, said that core units focused on modernizing the agency’s network and improving accountability are “likely to go away,” according to a recording of the session obtained by The Post. Those who have been reassigned at the agency include the chief information officer and the chief financial officer.

As Wired reports, the same thing happened at the General Services Administration, which manages government property. “They are acting like this is a takeover of a tech company,” said a GSA employee.

Now we’re homing in on the precedent and the problem. The New York Times described Musk’s approach:

The quick takeover was similar to the playbook Mr. Musk has used in the private sector, where he has been a ruthless cost cutter, subscribing to the philosophy that it is better to cut too deeply and fix any problems that arise later. He routinely pushes his employees to ignore regulations they consider “dumb.” And he is known for taking extreme risks, pushing both Tesla and SpaceX to the brink of bankruptcy before rescuing them.

The part about regulations is vitally important: Like Trump, Musk believes that laws he doesn’t like simply don’t apply to him. This has been the cause of a great deal of conflict between him and the government up until now, though it’s likely that the multiple federal investigations of him and his company will now be dropped.

Musk and his team have almost certainly been violating any number of laws regarding security, privacy, and access to government information, but there’s something else to be worried about. Multiple lawsuits have been filed over his actions, and in many cases he will probably lose and be ordered by various courts to cease and desist in his lawbreaking. Now: Do you think he is going to obey those orders? Or is he going to have his lawyers tell the judges that he’ll comply, then instruct his people to keep doing what they’ve been doing? After all, you can’t keep moving and breaking if you’re going to be bound by what some judge tells you that you can’t do.

The destruction is real

The ethos of destruction can cause relatively little collateral damage if all you’re destroying is a company. But when you’re destroying the government, the effect on the lives of Americans, and even many people in other countries, will be sweeping and profound. Livelihoods will be ruined, communities will suffer, lives will literally be lost, all on a potentially huge scale.

As some have pointed out, Musk is going about his attack on the U.S. government in much the same way he did when he bought Twitter, firing most of the employees, making himself its main character, and turning it into a sewer of right-wing conspiracizing and hate speech, including an ample Nazi presence. But when Musk turned the old, fun Twitter into the odious new X, you could just leave, as so many of us did.

But you can’t opt out of having your government affect your life. None of us can. Which is why the fight against what he’s doing will have to happen in the courts, but it will also need to be about making sure the public knows what is under threat: their privacy, their medical care, their jobs, their kids’ safety, their schools, and just about everything they value about life in America, all because the richest man in the world thinks it’s funny and cool to wreak havoc.

He and the people who work for him plainly see causing as much destruction as possible as a good thing; it’s a feature, not a bug. That’s how you succeed — you move fast and break things. If you have doubts about what an agency does, just fire everyone there and shut it down, or come as close as you can. The workers who lost their jobs were probably just a bunch of pencil-pushers, not badass fast-movers and thing-breakers.

And the people the agency was serving? The HIV patients in Africa who won’t get their medication, the families served by Head Start whose local preschool will shut down, the elderly people who won’t get their Meals on Wheels, the National Science Foundation grantees who won’t get paid their salaries? Who cares?

The answer is that the rest of us care, and if not enough people do, then they have to be shown what’s being destroyed. Only then is there any hope of stopping this catastrophe.