Elon Musk is pulling all of the strings in the US government, so it seems only right that he answer some questions about DOGE's shady tactics.
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Fresh off purchasing himself a president, Elon Musk, the mercurial illegal immigrant-turned billionaire (according to his own brother) has moved quickly to fashion a country more to his liking.
Through the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), which isn’t a department at all but rather an excuse to make the US a haven for billionaire tech bros like himself, Musk and his minions have done some really shady and quite possibly illegal things.
For example, allies of Musk, who holds no government position and has not been elected to anything, locked career civil servants of the Office of Personnel Management out of computer systems containing the personal information of government workers, including their Social Security numbers.
Furthermore, two security chiefs of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) were placed on leave after refusing to turn over classified information to one of Musk’s teams because they lacked the sufficient security clearances.
Musk, perhaps the world’s greatest individual spreader of misinformation, called USAID a “criminal organization” on Sunday in response to a post from one of his hangers-on who relayed news of the incident (while leaving out the part about the DOGE members having insufficient security clearances).
However, Musk, who is not eligible to be president himself, has not only purchased himself considerable influence in the executive branch.
Through a mix of threats and lies, Musk got congressional Republicans to reject a bipartisan spending compromise even before Trump was sworn in.
He frequently uses his social media platform X, which he purchased for $44 billion in 2022 and has been using to support far-right governments and candidates across the globe, to pressure GOP lawmakers to do his bidding.
For example, on Sunday, he initially referred to Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) as a “deep state puppet” amid reports that the lawmaker would not support Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick to become director of national intelligence.
Musk later deleted the post and wrote in another that he “just had an excellent conversation with [Young]. I stand corrected. Senator Young will be a great ally in restoring power to the people from the vast, unelected bureaucracy.”
It sounds as though the billionaire reminded the lawmaker who runs the United States. However, that conversation is also a testament to the unprecedented influence he has.
All of this begs one question: Who, exactly, is Musk accountable to?
It’s not Trump, whom he got elected by spending a quarter billion dollars and using X as a MAGAphone. It’s not congressional Republicans, who are already cowed in fear of him funding primary challengers. It’s not the “journalists” of X, who are just shills for Musk and his fellow tech bros.
And it’s not actual reporters. However, in that case it’s not for lack of trying. After all, they broke those stories of the thuggish and potentially illegal behavior of Musk’s DOGEtroopers.
Rather, it’s because he is dodging real journalists.
But the American people deserve answers from this South African-born entrepreneur who has amassed unprecedented wealth and power.
Musk claims to be all about honesty and transparency, but he is not living up to those claims.
But perhaps he will get around to holding a press conference once he is done creating his own deep state and lining his pockets with government contracts while getting rid of the regulators who (used to) have the authority to hold him to account.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
