And he’s got his hands on your personal and financial information.
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Okay, as far as I know, Elon Musk is not literally in your underwear, but it seems that he is in your tax, Social Security, and Medicare records. This probably also means that Musk has access to your banking information, since tens of millions of people pay their taxes through a bank transfer and get Social Security checks through direct deposit.
This is not some far-out conspiracy. Trump and/or Musk forced a long-time career government employee at the Treasury Department to resign because he would not turn over control of the government’s tax and payment system.
To be clear, this has nothing to do with a normal political agenda. David Lebryk, the person they had fired, simply oversaw the sending out of checks and payment of bills as required by the law. There was no issue that Lebryk had acted improperly or had somehow failed at his job. The issue was simply that Musk and his DOGE team wanted direct access to the payment system.
There are two plausible reasons why they might want access to personal information that no prior administration had ever requested — neither of them very good.
The first is that Trump intends to break the law and selectively make the payments mandated by Congress.
The point here is that, under the law, the president does not have the discretion to decide which payments they want to make. The president has the option to veto bills that include spending they don’t like, but once spending has been approved and signed into law, they legally must spend it. That is the clear wording of the Constitution as affirmed repeatedly by the Supreme Court.
If Trump plans to ignore the law, and possibly even a Supreme Court ruling, then it would be useful to have direct control over the system of payments. This would effectively make him a dictator, he could do whatever he felt like with our tax dollars, with or without congressional approval.
The other reason why Elon Musk might want control over the system of payments is that it gives him access to an enormous amount of financial information about almost every person in the country.
Musk has said that he wants to turn his Twitter/X social media platform into an all-purpose financial service operation. Having access to detailed information on hundreds of millions of people would give Musk a huge leg up in this effort.
Would Musk use his political ties to Trump to illicitly advance his business operations? Do we really need to ask? Just this past Saturday, Musk got the brilliant idea of making his platform the exclusive distributor of National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) information about the recent plane crashes. The information is not posted on the NTSB website or shared in e-mails with reporters covering the topic.
Taking control of NTSB statements is trivial compared to prying into all of our tax and banking records, but it shows Musk’s contempt for the law and his willingness to nefariously use government information to enrich himself.
Let’s just stick to the facts as we know them. Elon Musk now has access to a vast trove of personal information that can be used to enrich himself and he shows zero concern about the laws that would stop him.
So is Musk in our underwear as we speak? Use your own judgement.
Reprinted from Dean Baker’s Beat the Press, with the author’s permission.
Dean Baker is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), and is author of several books, including Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better Bargain for Working People (with Jared Bernstein); The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive; Taking Economics Seriously; False Profits; Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy; and The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer.
