What Illegal Autocouping Is Elon Musk Up To Today?
I hate him, you hate him, but guess we gotta talk about him.
Since Donald Trump’s inauguration two weeks ago, the Order-Signer’s junk drawer of an administration seems to have divided into three factions: the Steve Bannon/Stephen Miller immigrant-hater squad; the Project 2025 God-botherers who stay up all night trying to think of new ways to punish anybody who isn’t a cis white man or skinny blonde lady performing gender to specifications; and immigrant Elon Musk, that un-elected, not-Senate-appointed, not-even-a-government-employee troll.
But the factions do have things in common! Racism, sexism, wanting more white babies, and a desire to destroy the government and make Trump king, with a kill-’em-all-and-let-God-sort-’em-out attitude. And Elon is particularly hot to reduce the earth to rubble so he can rebuild it like a reset game of Minecraft.
El Muskrat’s latest hijink is financial junta: pushing the Fiscal Assistant Secretary of the Treasury David Lebryk out of his position so that Musk can have direct control over the $6 trillion managed by the nation’s various payment systems. What for? No one knows yet. So he can loot it and put his competitors on the Do Not Pay list, and turn on the money spigot for himself and companies that have been blacklisted? So he can cut off funds to programs Congress has authorized? All of the above? Reportedly he has already directed his engineers to find ways to turn off the flow of money to agencies and programs he and the Executive-Order-signer oppose, starting with USAID.
And he’s brought in a bunch of teenagers and 20-somethings who worked on his brain-messing enterprise and other ventures to run the Office of Personnel Management, where they have locked career civil servants out of computer systems containing the personal data of millions of federal employees, including dates of birth, Social Security numbers, appraisals, home addresses, pay grades and the length of service of government workers. Fucking great! And they are now trying to do the same to the General Services Administration, using White House credentials to access laptops. This an autocoup.
Saturday night, two top officials at the US Agency for International Development were put on administrative leave, Director of Security John Voorhees and his deputy Brian McGill, after doing their jobs by refusing to give Musk’s goons access and classified information that they’re in no way entitled to. Why and how did Musk win that fight?!
Then, 60 senior USAID staff were put on leave after being accused of attempting to circumvent the ILLEGAL executive order on foreign aid. USAID has about 10,000 employees, and distributes billions of dollars every year to about 130 countries to treat diseases and respond to famines and natural disasters. It can only be dismantled by an act of Congress, if the word “legal” means anything anymore. The USAID website has been deleted. “Burning records with just the push of a button, what we could have done with THAT!” marveled the Nazis and Stasi from the grave.
Musk Tweet:
Criminal is whatever they say it is, but criminal is as criminal does, Elmer.
Musk also recently forced out FAA administrator Michael Whitaker, mad that the FAA fined SpaceX for not following safety rules. Now the official explanation is that two plane crashes in three days were probably from a man pilot getting distracted by the boobs on some lady DEI hire in the cockpit.
Also, now all National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) announcements MUST be posted on “X,” with no more emails sent, because Musk needs to turn his hellsite into official government media to force users to quit fleeing his rat’s nest of aspiring mass shooters, Russian bots and dropship/crypto scammers.
The busy Mr. Freeze Peach has added more companies to his wah wah nobody will advertise on Xitter anymore lawsuit: Nestlé, Abbott Laboratories, Colgate, Lego, Pinterest, Tyson Foods, and Shell are being accused of “systematic illegal boycott” for not paying him to put their ads for their toys, candy and toothpaste next to some Groyper’s Holocaust-denial screeds.
Then he looked into the mirror and sang “You Must Love Me” a la Madonna as Eva Peron.
Nobody elected this guy. Nobody in government approved the appointment of this guy. Nobody likes his skipping-dipshit bitter-divorced-dad energy, not even his own kids, and not even Trump’s staffers. Nobody wants to hang out with him unless they’re paid to, and even his Sieg Heils won’t get him an invite to whatever kind of gin orgy parties Steve Bannon throws, we don’t know. Musk reportedly bragged that he’d been given the Lincoln bedroom to work in, but then Susie Wiles kicked him to the Eisenhower office building instead. Here’s a crowbar to the money vault and some classified files, now run along and play.
Sooo, anybody going to shut this down? Democracy Forward, Public Citizen and the public-interest firm National Security Counselors have all filed lawsuits against the fake-government agency DOGE for violating the Federal Advisory Committee Act of 1972 (FACA) and employees’ privacy. So hopefully some judge will stop him before he loots the Treasury and/or shares federal workers’ private information with the teenagers he’s trying to impress on the Diablo IV Discord server. That would be nice.
And Sen. Ron Wyden has written a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent demanding to know what Musk is doing crawling around in databases that he has no authority to be around in. Oh wait, what? Scott Bessent let them in? Fuck.
This will not end well!
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[Wired “Elon Musk Lackeys Have Taken Over the Office of Personnel Management” / Wired “Elon Musk’s Friends Have Infiltrated Another Government Agency” / New York Magazine / The Verge / CNN / Just Security / The Desk / Democracy Docket]
All USAID employees based in DC were ordered to stay home today, and it truly sounds like Elno is going to smear them as treasonous radicals.
Meanwhile, the Democratic response has been...to form a "bipartisan" discussion group to raise concerns about the behavior. I have heard *nothing*, even from official comms, about how blatantly illegal and unconstitutional this is or how these civil servants (some of whom are just file clerks and data entry clerks) are being destroyed because they don't have the "right" ideology.
I don't expect duels on the Senate floor. But for God's sake SAY SOMETHING!
Is there any point in yelling at my (Democratic) legislators to resist this bullshit? I generally assume there isn’t right now, but this is so egregious.