Friday Night Musk-acre

Friday saw some very serious attacks on democracy and the rule of law

Friday was a busy day in national politics, with the media fixated on two plane crashes, a tariff order that sparked vows of retaliation and a stock market selloff, embarrassing Senate confirmation hearings for a number cabinet appointees, and more. But we need to talk about the massive assault on democracy and the rule of law that occurred this day. It occurred across several steps.

Musk’s Maneuver

It’s hard to know just how destructive this will be in the long run, but for now, this is arguably the most troubling development in a day of extremely troubling developments. Elon Musk appears to be trying to do to the federal government what he did at Twitter/X: massively disrupt its functioning and drive out experienced employees not on board with his transformations and his personality cult.

After a week of trying to push civil servants out of jobs all over the federal government, Musk set his sights Friday on the U.S. Treasury’s payment systems. As the Washington Post explains:

Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses and more nationwide. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients, and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.

Musk was particularly pushing Acting Treasury Secretary David A. Lebryk, who has a long history of nonpartisan service at Treasury, for access to these payment systems. This led to Lebryk resigning this morning. As the New York Times explained, “Mr. Musk has tried to deploy his engineers to find ways to turn off the flow of money from the Treasury Department to things that Mr. Trump wants to defund.”

This comes on top of Musk fundamentally taking over the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), where numerous former X employees have literally moved in with sofa beds to work around the clock and take over the agency. According to Reuters, many career senior civil servants at OPM have had their access to computer systems there blocked by Musk and his team. Musk and his team have no oversight nor transparency in this effort.

There are many disturbing aspects of this. But perhaps the most fundamental is that Elon Musk is not a federal employee, nor has he been appointed by the President nor approved by the Senate to have any leadership role in government. The “Department of Government Efficiency,” announced by Trump in a January 20th executive order, is not truly any sort of government department or agency, and even the executive order uses quotes in the title. It’s perfectly fine to have a marketing gimmick like this, but DOGE does not have power over established government agencies, and Musk has no role in government. It does not matter that he is an ally of the President. Musk is a private citizen taking control of established government offices. That is not efficiency; that is a coup.

The Data Purge and Attack on Trans People

Trump demanded that government agencies remove all website information suggesting that there were more than two genders or promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts. In attempts to comply with these demands, several government websites went dark at 5pm on Friday afternoon. This included the U.S. Census Bureau, several sites of the National Park Service (including those of historical sites for Japanese Americans, the Tuskegee Airmen, and the Stonewall Uprising for gay rights), a great deal of public health information and data at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and more.

US Census website as of Friday evening

Additionally, following Trump’s demands, other government websites have changed their contents. A State Department website including information for transgender, queer, and intersex travelers was altered to exclude all mention of those populations, a Bureau of Prison website was altered to excise mention of transgender prisoners, and more.

The Justice Purge

Trump is orchestrating the firing or forced resignations of hundreds or thousands of employees at the Department of Justice who were involved in the investigation of the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Additionally, Trump has demanded that several senior officials at the FBI resign now or be fired next week for the same reason.

To be clear, the Department of Justice has a longstanding culture of nonpartisanship and a well-established system of firewalls to prevent partisan retribution and to plausibly give people confidence that the justice system is not targeting people for their beliefs or political behavior. The reason former Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith as a special counsel to investigate Trump’s alleged federal crimes was to give that investigation distance and independence from the Department of Justice. Trump is completely inverting that, specifically targeting people for their past political actions and associations. Trump has not offered any reason for wanting these people terminated except that they investigated him and his most ardent supporters.

We need to be clear about what this is. Trump sought to overturn the 2020 election, and when he couldn’t do so through legal means, he invited thousands of people to storm the Capitol violently to prevent Congress from confirming Biden’s victory. This was a massive attack on the Capitol and on democracy. And now that he’s returned to power, Trump has freed those convicted and fired those who investigated them.

What Should Be Done?

Trump and Musk have asserted a great of power here, not nearly all of which is legally or constitutionally theirs. It is difficult to constrain the President and the world’s wealthiest man, but it is not obviously impossible. Musk, in particular, is quite plausibly committing crimes right now as a private individual controlling parts of the federal government.

The opposition Democrats, with just a handful of exceptions, have been remarkably silent through all this, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has come off as staggeringly tone-deaf. The political media have been a mixed bag at best. And I’m concerned that much of this story will be lost this weekend, particularly as Trump launches a trade war with our North American neighbors and investigations into the plane crashes continue.

Julia Azari had a very helpful post Friday morning focusing on categorizing Trump’s executive actions as (1) pretty normal/standard; (2) expansive but evolved into a normal practice; (3) not really normal at all; and (4) illegal/unconstitutional. It’s hard to know how these things will be evaluated in the long run, and I don’t want to overreact to them nor underreact. But I believe much of what I’ve delineated above fall into categories 3 and 4. They are extremely troublesome and very deserving of our attention.