Original source: TIME
Original translation: BitpushNews Mary Liu
The standoff at 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue didn’t get much attention. On Feb. 1, Elon Musk’s team arrived at the headquarters of the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, just blocks from the White House, and demanded full access. USAID staff refused their request. No guns were drawn, no physical altercations broke out, and the police did not intervene. But in these early days of the Trump administration, perhaps no other scene more clearly revealed the forces that are reshaping American government.
On one side is a 64-year-old agency with a $35 billion budget and a mission written into federal law. On the other is Musk’s political “wrecking crew” — members of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), as they call themselves. DOGE is an ad hoc group with no charter, no website, and no clear legal mandate. Its power comes from Musk, the world’s richest man, who has been given the power to untangle the federal government’s vast bureaucracy — slashing budgets, laying off civil servants, and stripping independent agencies of their ability to thwart the president’s goals.
USAID’s leadership acquiesced to Musk’s group—a group of young, enthusiastic followers—entering its headquarters over the course of several days in late January. Some USAID officials privately called them “DOGE kids.” Armed with clipboards, the young men patrolled hallways, inspected desks and questioned managers. As the weekend wore on, however, their demands—including access to sensitive facilities used to store classified information—were beyond the tolerance of USAID’s security chiefs. DOGE members threatened to call in U.S. Marshals to clear the building. They also reported the problem to Musk. “USAID is a criminal organization and it’s time for it to go away,” Musk later wrote to his 215 million followers on his social media platform X.
The reason for Musk’s crusade is unclear. But by the next morning, the agency that allocates billions of dollars worldwide each year to fight famine, disease and provide clean water to millions of people was almost shut down. Within a week, almost all employees were furloughed and its global offices were closed.
The message to other government agencies was clear, too. No private citizen, especially one whose wealth and business networks are directly subject to federal oversight, should have so much power over U.S. government agencies.
So far, Musk appears to be answerable only to President Trump, who has given his campaign backer a sweeping mandate to bend the administration to his agenda. DOGE referred all of TIME’s questions about its work to the White House, which declined to comment.
Musk’s team has taken control of the U.S. Digital Service and established a stronghold within the federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the federal human resources department. The Department of Education is on pins and needles, fearing an impending “self-castration” directive. It seems that few institutions are safe. Musk has shown that he will not tolerate dissent, no matter how justified. Just days before the “drama” at USAID, a Treasury official refused to give Musk’s team access to the U.S. federal payment system. The official was forced to retire, and the newly appointed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant met the demands of Musk’s team. After a group of current and former employees filed a lawsuit, the government agreed on February 5 to limit that access, at least temporarily.
These are just the first ripples in a massive anti-government tide. Budgets will be cut, worthy programs will be canceled, and civil servants with careers will be fired and replaced by political appointees whose main qualification is to demonstrate loyalty to the president, the path chosen by voters. To many, the idea of one of the world’s most accomplished entrepreneurs attacking a sprawling, ossified federal bureaucracy with the speed and resolve he would use to start a car or rocket company is a cause for celebration, not alarm. “The federal government is so big that there are certainly opportunities for significant savings and efficiencies,” said Robert Dole, president of the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank. “The president and his team are paying a lot of attention to this, and that’s a good thing.”
But a public backlash may be brewing, and the stakes go far beyond the size of the federal balance sheet, the number of employees at agencies in Washington, D.C., or the dangers posed by an unelected man with such unchecked power. Americans will soon find themselves interacting with the federal government in ways they didn’t realize or take for granted.
Companies exporting technology products to China may no longer have employees from the State Department or Commerce explaining for free how to avoid violating criminal laws. Farmers in the Midwest may soon find that buyers funded by USAID no longer pay for flour sent to refugee camps. And around the world, millions of people who rely on the United States for food, medicine and shelter are suddenly on their own.
Currently, millions of government workers find themselves at Musk’s mercy. One DHS employee described her team as being “on the defensive” as they waited for a visit from Musk’s team. To understand their fate, she added, her colleagues turned to a book called Character Limit, which chronicles the way Musk took over Twitter two years ago and fired 80% of its employees, causing chaos and lasting consequences.
His shakeup of the bureaucracy bears striking similarities to the above. On January 28, millions of government employees received an email offering eight months’ pay in exchange for their resignation. Musk had offered a similar deal to Twitter employees two years earlier, and he even used the same subject line: “Fork in the Road.”
Russell Vought, Trumps nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget, attends his confirmation hearing on January 15. Andrew Harnik—Getty Images
There’s a trace for everything. Among Musk’s friends in Silicon Valley, many understand that his acquisition of Twitter was in preparation for a greater cause. “The atmosphere right now is that hopefully Musk can do the same thing with the U.S. government,” a person familiar with the matter told Time magazine in November. Veterans of Trump’s first administration similarly laid out their plans long before the election, publishing a 900-page report called “Project 2025.” Russell Vought, one of the project’s lead authors, said in a speech two years ago that he hoped civil servants would be “traumatically affected” by the purge he envisioned. “We want their funding to be cut off,” he said. “We want to traumatize them.”
During the campaign, Trump swore he had nothing to do with the plan. “It’s inappropriate for them to come up with a document like this,” he told Time in November. “There are things that I disagree with very strongly.” But once in office, he chose Vought to run the White House Office of Management and Budget, which is now working closely with Musk to implement key parts of Project 2025. So far, according to a Time analysis, Trump’s frantic start to his presidency has met almost two-thirds of its mandate.
Musk has never hidden his intentions. Two weeks after the election, he co-wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal promising that his group would help Trump “hire a crack team of small-government crusaders” who would work to “massively cut the headcount of the federal bureaucracy.” The recruiting effort began soon after the election, picking up Musk’s followers in Silicon Valley, some of whom were fresh out of college, and scattering them across Washington.
Musk’s appointed DOGE personnel director is aerospace engineer Steve Davis, who previously led Musk’s cost-cutting efforts at Twitter. In late December, as the presidential transition unfolded inside the White House, Davis participated in a series of meetings with members of the Biden administration. Democratic staffers noticed that he was paying attention to an obscure branch of the White House, the US Digital Service (USDS). Davis wanted to know how it worked, who it reported to, and what it had access to.
The U.S. Digital Service was established in 2014 and works with federal agencies to improve computer systems and databases. It has a map of the governments technical infrastructure and has contact points with technical officials in almost every federal agency. This makes it a perfect place to host Musks team. By controlling USDS, Musks team is able to access key systems of the federal government, thereby implementing large-scale layoffs and budget cuts, like poison flowing through the vessels of the whole body, gradually weakening the operation of the entire government.
The powers of the U.S. Digital Service began on Inauguration Day. One of Trump’s earliest executive orders renamed it the “U.S. Digital Service,” cleverly retaining the office’s acronym. The order also ensured that the new entity would report directly to the White House chief of staff. Since then, the office has established offices at the State and Treasury departments. It began accessing personnel computer systems, firing contractors, and blocking payments to them for contracts.
Musk also sent a team to the Office of Personnel Management, which has records on 2.1 million workers, the email addresses of nearly every federal employee, and tracks $59 billion in annual federal health care premiums and $88 billion in annual federal pension payments. The push to make “massive buyout offers” to government employees originated from within Musk’s team at the OPM, according to a source familiar with the actions. (Musk’s team and the White House declined to comment.)
Next, Musk’s team began cutting funding for the OPM itself. Brian Beard, who most recently served as vice president of human resources at Musk Aerospace, told OPM career directors to aim to cut 70% of its staff, a move that would weaken its health care benefits and retirement plans teams, a current OPM official said.
Some senior leaders at the Office of Personnel Management were locked out of critical databases, the official said, and political appointees were given access to systems including corporate human resources integration without standard safeguards designed to protect the privacy of such information. The system includes information such as salary grade, years of service, Social Security numbers, dates of birth and home addresses.
Days after Trump took office, the White House ordered a freeze on federal spending — from foreign aid to public health programs and everything in between. The administration said the freeze would be lifted only if agencies aligned with the president’s agenda: cracking down on immigration, ending diversity efforts and halting investments that reduce the environmental impact of fossil fuels. Faced with a court challenge, the White House rescinded the order.
A protest outside the U.S. Treasury building in Washington, DC, on February 4.
Musk’s layoffs continue, and Trump continues to give his blessing. “Elon Musk can’t do — and won’t do — anything without our approval,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Feb. 4. “We’ll give him approval where it’s appropriate,” he added. “Where it’s not appropriate, we won’t.”
Some have suggested that Trump might constrain Musk’s actions and prevent him from being too aggressive, but civil servants aren’t waiting for that to happen. In northern Virginia, where tens of thousands of federal government employees and military personnel live, typical town hall meetings in the town of Leesburg, Virginia, draw dozens of people; hundreds gathered the night Musk shut down USAID. “We’ve heard strange stories,” said Suhas Subramanian, a local Democratic congressman who spoke at the event. As workers streamed into his office describing a takeover by Musk’s team, he directed staff to record the testimonies and assist whistleblowers. Subramanian insisted to TIME that much of what they witnessed was “simply illegal.” “We were almost put to the test and goaded into prosecuting or investigating.”
Some lawsuits have worked. The White House complied with a court order blocking its attempt to freeze trillions of dollars in federal spending. A judge delayed a deadline for buyout offers for government employees in a Feb. 6 ruling. Unions representing federal workers have filed suit against Musk’s team. Even Musk’s usual admirers warn that he’s gone too far. “The lawsuits are already rolling in,” a Feb. 4 Wall Street Journal editorial noted. “If Mr. Musk isn’t careful, the courts will derail projects before they get off the ground.”
On Capitol Hill, Musk’s attacks on the bureaucracy have set off a fight between him and Democrats that could determine the future of government and the balance of power within it. “We don’t have a fourth branch of government called Elon Musk,” Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, told a crowd outside USAID on the afternoon of February 3, as Musk’s team (DOGE) tried to impose their plans inside USAID.
Jamie Raskin was right. But the agency staffers listening to him on Pennsylvania Avenue, unsure whether they would keep their jobs, couldn’t tell how much power Musk had acquired and whether he would bend the rest of government to his will. One staffer seemed particularly skeptical. Yes, she told TIME, the Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse. But Musk had already demonstrated his power to take that away.
“There’s only so much the Democrats can do,” she said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid drawing more attention to DOGE. Her official email account has been shut down, and she no longer has access to her desk at the agency. Like thousands of her colleagues and millions of Americans, she can only watch Musk’s actions unfold, wondering: How far will he go? And what — if anything — can stop him?
