Meditations in an Emergency

It's good to be shocked, but don't be awed

So much is happening, so quickly. The purpose of shock and awe is to bewilder and overwhelm. It is important not to look away, or get discouraged. Try to discern the what is a big and real threat. Here is my best effort to do so.

Follow the Money, But Also the Data

The usual adage in these things is to follow the money, and see who benefits. But we should also watch for control over data. For tech bros, data is the means of control. At last count, Musk employees¹ have control over sensitive student aid data, small business administration data, federal employee data (including data from job applicants), social security and tax refund data, Department of Energy data, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services data, National Institutes of Health grantee data, Veterans Affairs, CFPB, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Data (weather data), and the Department of Labor (think the Bureau of Labor Statistics). At the same time that they are hoovering up this data, public data sources are being shut down.

More data for Musk, less for the public.

It is not just that they have access to data. Reports are saying that Musk employees can alter the code on the US payment system, and indeed have already done so without extensive testing. If you wonder why this is a big deal, Mike Masnick explains:

Let’s be clear about what we’re seeing: deliberately obscured payment-blocking capabilities being added to absolutely critical government infrastructure by an inexperienced developer with minimal oversight. In cybersecurity terms, that’s not just a backdoor — it’s flashing warning lights of an approaching catastrophe.

Trump wants to make it easier to put political appointees in the positions of Chief Information Officer. That means unvetted officials such Musk affiliates controlling the information, and greenlighting potential data abuses. We don’t know what they are doing with the data. One IT contractor said: “You can’t un-ring this bell. Once these DOGE guys have access to these data systems, they can ostensibly do with it what they want.”

Here are some basic questions that the media and Congress could ask:

• Should the public and private businesses trust Elon Musk with their data?

• How many of the officials accessing sensitive data have security clearance?

• Do older adults know that Elon Musk now controls payment of their Social Security and Medicare?

The Battle Over USAID is (Mostly) Not About Foreign Aid But About Power

The battle over USAID illustrates how much power Musk has accumulated, how his exercise of that power is driven by ignorance and conspiracy theories, and how the opposition needs to push back here rather than waiting for some more congenial opportunity.

It is remarkable the degree to which Musk is initiating a massive attack on government, and Trump seems to be a relatively passive actor. Musk announces he is shutting down USAID, and Trump later says he agrees. Shutting down an agency is a massive and illegal power grab by any executive branch officer, let alone one who is a 130 day temporary Special Government Employee who has not been confirmed by the Senate.

All overseas USAID employees have been recalled to return to office immediately. Almost all of its employees are now on paid administrative leave. This is what you see if you go it is website:

And just like that, the world’s largest provider of food aid has been shuttered at the whim of the world’s richest man. Does he understand what he is doing? Based on his public statements, the answer is plainly no. Musk as said that 90% of USAID spending never reaches communities. But this shows he does not understand the budget, and he has not listened to anyone that does.

Here is an explanation from Rachel Bonnefield and Justin Sandefur.

This is a wildly incorrect and misleading interpretation of a different statistic—that 10 percent of USAID payments are made directly to organizations in the developing world. The remaining 90 percent includes all the goods and services that USAID, American companies, and faith-based organizations deliver in kind, from HIV drugs to emergency food aid, malaria bed nets, and treatment for acute malnutrition.

Anti-democratic government are cheering Musk. And Musk knows this. As part of its throttling of democracy and civil society in Hungary, Viktor Orban blocked USAID or other pro-democracy funding. Musk reposted when Orban’s right hand man cheered Musk shutting down America’s capacity to use soft power.

Why did Musk go after USAID? Maybe because foreign aid is unpopular. But it may also because Musk is seeped in far right online conspiracy theories, which have made USAID a target. Musk claimed that $50 million was spent to send condoms to Hamas. Sounds bad! Trump repeated this claim, as did members of Congress. But it’s a lie. The organization that receives the funds does provide family planning, but its USAID funds were providing emergency health support to refugees in Gaza. And without that support, more people will die. This not a one-off. Musk constantly repeats conspiracy theories he has found online: that USAID helped to create COVID, is singlehandedly rigging elections and manufacturing media consent. There is no reasoning with this level of lunacy.

The Acting Director of USAID is an alleged January 6 insurrectionist. It is not just that those who prosecuted January 6 have been punished, and the insurrectionists set free. Some have been given another opportunity to destroy American democracy by the White House.

Even if you disagree with all foreign aid, or want to see USAID changed, is this really the means to do so? Government shutdowns led by the richest man in the world, fueled by lies, with no credible review of the process.

Centrist Dems like David Axelrod and Rahm Emmanuel have urged their party to not pick a fight over USAID. But this is not a fight about a particular policy or even agency. It’s a fight about presidential power. Does Trump have the power to fire all employees, and shut down an agency, without Congressional input? The answer is an ambiguous no. But if Dems concede this power to Trump now, they don’t have a leg to stand on when he goes after other agencies, such as the Department of Education.

The Aggressive Push for Deferred Resignation Reveals Weakness

Public employees are being pushed hard to resign by the new administration. They are seeing memos from their agency leaders and OPM to explain that this is a wonderful deal, and definitely legal. Also, they can't spell "employees” but their legal counsel is solid. Trust them.

The tone of these missives is hostile. One National Park Service employee told me: “Each late-night unofficial "OPM HR" email has had the clear tenor of a threat, coming after hours and always unsubtly hinting that they hate us all and want us gone.” Others have said the the emails are backfiring, as they look desperate. Certainly many will resign — workplace conditions are increasingly toxic — but I’m skeptical that it will be more than otherwise would have occurred.

The degree of politicization of OPM is a measure of how much Trump is depending on this agency to gut the bureaucracy. Both the Chief Information Officer and Inspector General at OPM were booted. The new OPM General Counsel claiming its actions are legal is a self-described raging misogynist. They are eliminating any internal legal checks on their efforts to politicize the bureaucracy.

The Credibility of DOGE is Gone

There was a real desire among centrists (including me!) to see the best version of DOGE. That best version would have involved a group of very smart technologists looking at concrete problems and solving them, e.g. on procurement and software across government. This assumed that DOGE was interested in government capacity, and there are no shortage of real problems to solve. A little disruption might be good!

This desire involved a fair degree of faith, and no small amount of squinting. You had to ignore what the DOGE sponsors like Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk were saying. Maybe once they were in government, they would drop the conspiracy theories and act like grown-ups. They haven’t and even DOGE-curious Dems are backing away.

At some point well-intended optimism becomes naiveté. This from Gillian Tett at the Financial Times is as good an example as any. Published on January 31, there is no real excuse for not seeing what DOGE was, or for breathlessly reprinting its claims — deferred resignations will save $100 billion! (no, they won’t).

Musk continues the be the person he was before, prone to anti-government conspiracy theories, whose only goal is to make government smaller rather than better. There are no shortage of examples, but here is one.

GSA runs federal property. It’s regional managers were told by a Musk employee to end all of its 7,500 offices leases nationwide. Meanwhile, Trump is telling employees that have to return to office! What offices? Federal employees were already worried about having enough space with existing leases. So what explains the contradictions? Both actions are centered on zeroing out federal employees. But what happens when the leases are broken and the federal government still have lots of employees who lack office space. I’m sure career officials have asked this question, and been ignored.

There is a grand tradition of technologists and businessmen landing in government and not knowing how it works. Musk employees are pushing “zero-based budgeting” forcing career civil servants to justify all spending to their bosses who don’t understand either basic government functions or rules. This assumes that DOGE gets to decide which spending is legitimate or not. They don’t, that is the job of Congress. How many of these guys know about the Impoundment Control Act? Zero-based budgeting failed when Jimmy Carter tried it in the 1970s. How likely is it that they know about that?

Another example: Thomas Shedd, a Musk employee at Technology Transformation Services, who told federal employees about the potential for using AI by connecting data. This is a perfectly legitimate way of improving government services. But Shedd appeared to be unaware of the constraints of the 1974 Privacy Act when an employee pointed out the limits on data sharing. Shedd said: “If we had a roadblock, then we hit a roadblock. But we should push forward and see what we can do.” In government, you can’t just move ahead and ignore the roadblocks. The roadblocks are the fundamental difference from the private sector. The roadblocks are what makes your actions illegal, and subject to nullification down the road. Learning about the roadblocks is part of what it means to be in government.

Things are Starting to Break

The OMB order on putting grants on hold, halted by a federal judge, is still creating chaos. Even organizations who think they have money may be reluctant to spend it. Head Start programs across the country are not able to access federal funds

Even before all of its field staff were recalled, it is clear that life-saving USAID programs were not operating, despite an order to exempt them from any spending freeze. Aid workers have been laid off. Thousands of preventable deaths, including hundreds of infant deaths, have already occurred as a result of the attacks on USAID. Clinical research has halted, including on a vaccine for HIV-AIDS.

USAID is also a big purchaser of US farm goods. Purchases and shipments of this food — worth over $340 million — have stopped, with hundreds of tons of food not being shipped.

Career Civil Servants Pushing Back Against Illegality Deserve Our Support

It is incredibly easy to bash bureaucrats, and both parties have done it. But public servants are now the front line against government abuses. The Washington Post has documented how such officials have raised raising the red flags about illegal behavior at the Treasury Department, the Education Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the General Services Administration, the Office of Personnel Management, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the White House budget office. Some career officials have been put on administrative leave or forced to resign when they pointed out the illegality of Musk’s takeover of data. The DOGE people can't say plead ignorance. They were warned.

A good example is the takeover of the Treasury payment system. Think of this as the governments checking account. Agencies incur costs for previously approved obligations, and ask Treasury to send out the payment. It is a) not the job of Treasury to engage in a secondary approval, b) it is disastrous for the credit of the US government to not make payments it has agreed to, and c) ex post withholding of payments for ideological reasons violate the Impoundment Control Act.

Musk and Trump are businessman whose have refused payments to contractors and employees, and done just fine, and so the emphasis on protecting the credit of government might be foreign to them. Two former Treasury officials explained the stakes for the government, and ultimately the public:

The government’s failing to make payments doesn’t amount to cutting spending; it’s a default on our obligations. It would have ripple effects for our nation’s credit rating, borrowing costs, and the Treasury markets. Ultimately, it would destabilize the global financial system.

David Lebryk, the career official who was acting Treasury Secretary, pushed back against the Musk official (Tom Krause) who demanded control over the payment system and specifically to pause UA AID payments. Lebryk told Krause that Treasury could not legally stop payments, and recommended to instead work through USAID. Krause then threatened Lebryk: “I would also recommend you consider an equal alternative liability.” By the next week Lebryk was gone, and Musk announced he was shutting down the agency. It was later revealed that the other DOGE official who had sought to shut down foreign aid spending was a self-avowed racist with a record of making disparaging remarks about foreigners, including “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.”

Without external support and protections, career officials cannot keep this up. What does this support look like?

Courts: The lawsuits are happening A class-action lawsuit by FBI officials opposes their potential purge for being involved in January 6 investigations. The AFGE is suing that the Deferred Resignation program is illegal. The Trump administration very much seems to want these court battles, figuring, perhaps that this is their best moment to get unitary executive judgements out of SCOTUS. Judges must issue injunctions against potentially illegal action if they want it to stop. Musk et al will simply move ahead otherwise.

Media: There has been great investigative reporting, and it is clear that federal employees are providing information that is allowing the public to understand what is happening to their government. But too often, the framing of the stories reverts to bothsidesing the law or constitution. Every headline that does not say “illegal” or “unconstitutional” is a failure to convey to the public the stakes of what is going on. To do otherwise is an editorial choice to normalize the abnormal. More of this please:

Congress: Hold hearings to put DOGE and other officials under oath. Call them to account for trying to evade basic records and security processes. Stand with government employees in public. Hold public events that add salience to the fights (as some Democratic lawmakers did by going to USAID).

The Success of the Shock And Awe is Tenuous

Where can we find some hope right now? Things are grim. Here are a couple of things to remember. Musk and at least some of his crew are Special Government Employees, who are only supposed office for 130 days in a given year. Their window for change is now, and so any delay is meaningful.

Republicans have a tiny minority in the House, which they could feasibly lose even before the midterms if there are competitive special elections. They will have to work with Democrats. The need for Dem co-operation to pass budget bills, and the ability of Democratic Senators to slow everything down in the Senate are about their only points of legislative leverage. Use them as if we are in the middle of crisis, because we definitely are.

Lawyers are suing. People are waking up. They are starting to protest. The sense of inevitability is crumbling.

1. I use the term Musk employees, because in many cases it is unclear what position these individuals have: are they part of a specific agency, or of DOGE? What is clear is that they regard Musk as their boss.