What is Elon Musk doing?

And can he be stopped?

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Elon Musk is doing some really shady stuff.

When Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was first talked about, it was difficult to imagine what it was actually going to do in practice. Its stated mission was to cut the budget, but there’s already a body inside the White House in charge of that - the Office of Management of the Budget (OMB). After he is confirmed by the Senate, OMB is going to be headed by Russell Vought, who is no shrinking violet and frankly knows about 1,000x as much as Elon Musk about the federal budget. Vought apparently thought DOGE would be an advisory body feeding ideas to OMB, which would then be free to accept or ignore them depending on how Vought was feeling.

That hasn’t turned out to be what has happened. Perhaps taking advantage of the fact Vought hasn’t yet been confirmed, Musk has been dispatching DOGE personnel all over the federal government to get access to sensitive data and systems. These personnel - many of whom appear to be extremely young software engineers with no government experience - are focused on seizing control of agencies that will allow them to influence hiring, firing and spending across the whole government. This includes an office in the Treasury which distributes trillions of dollars a year in government spending, the government’s human resources office, and its real estate management office.

It’s important to say that we don’t actually know why Musk is doing this. The pretext is that DOGE is going to reduce government spending by investments in software and hardware, but these actions aren’t necessary to do that.

They look more like what you might do if you wanted to unilaterally cancel a swathe of government spending. But doing that would be illegal, and the Trump administration has already surrendered in the face of court challenges to an earlier executive order that did the same thing. So at the moment Musk has his fingers on a bunch of triggers which he cannot actually push without being swamped in litigation and ordered to stop.

Of course, it may be that Musk plans to go ahead anyway and defy the courts. Various security personnel have already tried to stop DOGE from accessing sensitive systems and been forced to go on leave or into early retirement as a result. But ignoring court orders would be another matter entirely and would plunge the administration into a political and constitutional crisis which it seems to want to avoid.

Another explanation for Musk’s behavior is that it is purely in the service of corruption. Musk is incredibly rich, holds a vast array of government contracts, and has businesses which are influenced by the actions of all kinds of U.S. government departments. It benefits him hugely to get a look under the hood of these departments and access classified information about government policy and his competitors. The conflict of interest involved in letting the president’s billionaire donor get this intimately involved in day-to-day government operations is staggering.

But I also wonder how long this can go on for.

Here it becomes relevant to ask if any of this is what Donald Trump really wants. It’s hard to say if Musk’s obsession with cutting government spending is real, but even if it is then we can safely say that it’s an obsession that Trump has never really shared. In his first term, Trump oversaw an expansion of government spending and showed little interest in the inner workings of most departments. This time around, he is certainly keen to consolidate control of law enforcement and security agencies, because they give him the power to persecute his enemies and protect his friends. But is he really going to drive his administration off a cliff in order to slash administrative costs at the Department of Energy?

Nor is this what Russell Vought and his acolytes had in mind. They certainly have some illegal plans of their own. But their goal is to challenge the law in a controlled way and then win court battles which will significantly expand presidential power over spending. They’re studious ideologues who have dreamed of this moment for decades, not manic businessmen looking for profit and adventure. From their perspective, Musk’s bull-in-a-china-shop approach risks muddying the water, making it much harder to win cases in court.

All of this probably explains why Musk has come to focus his energy on the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which he has said is a “criminal” organization which needs to be destroyed. As an agency whose mission is to hand out American cash to foreigners, it’s easy to see how an attack on it could be cast as part of Trump’s “America First” agenda and how Musk might think it could be kept politically insulated from the fate of domestically-oriented departments.

Musk claims that Trump has agreed that USAID needs to be shut down, but that can’t legally be accomplished without an act of Congress. And again, when the difficulty of trying to go down this route becomes clear, it’s not at all clear that Trump will want to shoulder the legal and political consequences of doing it. But USAID is now the test case to see how far DOGE will go, whether Trump will acquiesce, and whether they’ll get away with it.

So we’re left basically waiting to see what happens. Will the president let his billionaire donor continue to use the U.S. government as his plaything? Or will be eventually slam on the brakes? No-one knows - but in the meantime, the USAID website has gone completely dark.

Thanks for reading America Explained. This post is free. If you haven’t already, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription, which allows you to read every post and access the full archive. We only need a few dozen more paid subscribers to get into the “hundreds of paid subscribers” category, which means Substack will promote the newsletter more and hopefully bring even more readers our way. Having more paid subscribers enables me to put more time and energy into the newsletter - a virtuous circle!

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