Elon Musk must be corralled

The chief of the Department of Veterans Affairs last week had to scramble to quickly restore essential programs, including those that provide chemotherapy, imaging diagnostics and burial services for veterans. All were targeted to be casualties of Elon Musk and his surreptitious DOGE team who have been given unprecedented power by President Donald Trump to slash government programs and drastically reduce the federal workforce.

What happened at the VA was just one wave in the flood of reckless, dangerous, and in some instances, likely illegal behavior by DOGE, the increasingly misnamed Department of Government Efficiency. Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, believes the federal government should be run by engineers to achieve technical efficiency in its day-to-day operations. And government is surely in need of modernization. Musk represents the return of a Silicon Valley ethos that only an elite group of techies knows best how to run the nation, and all of our democratic institutions are standing in the way.

Trump is on board and it's not jus t  because Musk is the world's richest man and Trump's biggest campaign donor. Musk promises to deliver $2 trillion by rooting out waste and fraud, money Trump would need to balance a federal budget full of huge tax cuts that mostly will benefit the wealthy and corporations. He and Musk even tout the improbable possibility of sending a $5,000 check to every taxpaying household.

LET AGENCIES CUT WASTE

Certainly, there is waste and fraud in Washington's massive bureaucracy. But carrying out Trump's mandate to eliminate it should be the responsibility of agency leaders he has put into place. Likewise, policy decisions about how to spend money should be made by Congress. Picking winners and losers must be transparent and done by those who can be held accountable. Instead, Musk and his stealth crew are using artificial intelligence on their rampage, software that somehow told them that contracts that provide burial services and maintenance at military cemeteries were a waste of money.

Distracting proclamations flow daily from the White House about culprits stealing taxpayer dollars, such as the preposterous claim that 200-year-olds are receiving Social Security checks. Or that no workers can be found in government office buildings. Trump's own cabinet members rebelled against Musk’s Valentine's Day email that all federal employees had 48 hours to reply with the details of what they did the previous week. On Thursday, a federal judge said the first effort to thin the ranks, the mass firings of probationary workers, was illegal. 

March 13 is the next bloodletting date to eliminate workers who are "not producing results for the American public." Even if Trump and Musk try to fire a good chunk of the 2.3 million civilian workers — although Civil Service rules and collective bargaining agreements will stand in the way — the pay of that federal workforce is barely 4% of the $7 trillion federal budget. Moreover, DOGE's ballyhooed $65 billion savings from cutting contracts was inflated; the itemized receipts on the DOGE website totaled around $10 billion last week.

Is finding a few billion here or there what’s really motivating Musk? There are real concerns about self-dealing by him and those on his team who are being granted unparalleled access to federal data which holds critical operational secrets as well as information about practically every person in America. Musk, whose goal is to colonize Mars, also has access to all federal government contracts which gives him and his team insights into how the competition operates. 

SECRETIVE OPERATION

Musk might know it all, yet the public knows little about what is being done and who is doing it. Primarily, that information trickles out because federal judges handling more than two dozen lawsuits filed against DOGE demand answers from government lawyers about what is taking place. Since DOGE is lodged in the White House, Justice Department lawyers say it is exempt from Freedom of Information laws.

Right now, the entire DOGE crew rummaging through the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the nation's richest trove of housing information, have connections to the real estate industry and specialize in innovative data collection, according to a report in Wired Magazine. Having the keys to every door in the agency gives them the ability to use AI to mine valuable information about real estate markets, as well as the personal data of anyone who's dealt with the agency for housing, an FHA mortgage, or other services.

Musk, who is particularly focused on the Federal Aviation Administration, which has jurisdiction over his rocket launches, seeks to cancel a $2.4 billion Verizon contract to modernize communications in the nation's air traffic control system awarded in 2023 and ready to be implemented. Musk is demanding it be turned over to the Starlink division of SpaceX, an egregious display of conflict of interest.

After Musk's reply-or-resign email, top leaders at the departments of State, Energy, Health and Human Services, and Homeland Security, and the directors of the FBI and national intelligence initially told their employees not to reply. Trump then asked Musk to attend last week's cabinet meeting, where his top adviser acknowledged that DOGE "accidentally canceled" efforts to prevent the spread of Ebola. Later, the president signed an order requiring agencies that handle government contracts to embed a DOGE staffer to "implement the president's DOGE agenda" in case anyone didn't get the message about who was in charge. On Friday, the Defense Department told employees to respond to a new email Musk will send them on Monday.

At that cabinet meeting, Trump praised and defended Musk.

"Is anyone unhappy with Elon?" he asked. No one spoke up. The answer should have been: Yes, we are.