Musk’s Goals

I’m not a great fan of critiquing press coverage of The Trump Show, but this article (gift link) got so many things wrong that it seems like a missive from another planet. It’s an example of what’s wrong with press framing and stenography.

Oh no no no, you four reporters! We’re much too early into it to figure out Musk’s goals, let alone his ultimate goal. That may be to get to Mars or to find someone who loves him and is irrelevant anyway. I think, given his involvement in German politics and his buddy-buddy phonecalls with Vladimir Putin, he’d like to be King Of The World. That’s a little more relevant.

I’ve been using ProPublica’s listing of people they’ve identified as part of Musk’s attempted takeover of the US government to try to map things out. One thing that is obvious is that we need the names and positions of quite a few more people. Musk is spreading into the Department of Education and, he says, the Department of Defense. What seems to be happening in the others, too, needs at least ten more people than ProPublica has identified. Unless Musk is lying.

And that’s part of the problem. He is somewhat less accurate than an LLM, which may be deliberate lying or self-delusion. He is grandiose. He wants to intimidate. So taking his word at face value is a mistake.

Those four reporters say this is his playbook:

Install loyalists in leadership. Hoover up internal data, including the sensitive and the classified. Gain control of the flow of funds. And push hard — by means legal or otherwise — to eliminate jobs and programs not ideologically aligned with Trump administration goals.

That is what he’s done at Treasury and OPM. But he has people at NOAA (we need to know who they are), and I haven’t seen any reporting on what is happening there. Likewise Department of Energy. There was a feint at the CIA, but that seems to have been rebuffed, as at the FBI.

He hit the data-rich departments first: OPM and Treasury. Early on, I was thinking about how Trump might consolidate control and remembered my friend who was in charge of the check-writing operation at a major university. That evidently occurred to Musk too. But he misunderstood what that operation could do. They set up the checks and run the printers. They don’t decide on the payees or amounts.

I should maybe put this in a banner across the top of all posts like this:

IT IS NOT UP TO THE PRESIDENT OR HIS DESIGNEES TO DECIDE HOW MUCH MONEY

OR TO WHOM IT GOES. THAT IS CONGRESS’S DUTY.

So Musk shouldn’t be doing this at all.

The departments he hit first are some that conservatives are convinced are wasting our taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars. USAID, although curiously not the State Department. University support. And resign, resign, resign, because we don’t need no unelected bureaucrats deciding. Just unelected billionaires.

It would have been good of the reporters to find out under what terms Musk and his merry band are employed by the government. There are sketches of special employment arrangements under what used to be the US Digital Service. At least three of his employees have pasts that would raise questions about security clearances, and all this is taking place too fast for the normal clearance process. Trump has written an executive order that allows him to grant clearances without the process. Has he even done that?

Musk has already damaged USAID seriously by his extraconstitutional actions. He has made noises about other programs, but, like so much else, it’s not clear what he’s mucking with. USAID has been a conservative target for some time, and they have convinced Trump that it is evil, but it is a tiny drop in Musk’s $2 trillion goal.

Random people skimming through lists of dollar amounts is not the way to cut $2 trillion. Many articles have noted that the big budget items are Social Security, Medicare, and Defense. They say they are now getting to those areas.

The only apparent rhyme or reason to his choices is his and Trump’s prejudices.

I think that one of Musk’s goals is to make the government smaller. The way he is going about it is consistent with that, if boneheaded. But it’s not necessary for his minions to download government information. What information are they downloading and what are they doing with it? And what code have they slipped into the systems, with what purpose?

His goals are more than cutting budgets. But we don’t know and can’t even guess until we have some answers to those questions.