There has been a lot to be concerned about the moves by Trump and his cronies with shaking up the government. But perhaps the most disturbing is Elon Musk demanding, and getting access, to the government’s Office of Personnel Management as well as the Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service. These are not policy-making bodies. They are like the Human Relations and Accounting departments of a business. They hold important and confidential information but work in the background and if things are running smoothly, you don’t even know they exist.
As one of the people who works for the federal government writes:
Those of us within the ranks of the federal workforce looked on in horror at all of this. Those outside the federal government might not understand the gravity of this situation. Think of OPM and the Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service as the valet sheds of the federal government. They’re not flashy or big, but they hold all the keys. OPM maintains the private information of federal civil servants—bank codes, addresses, insurance information, retirement accounts, employment records. The Treasury’s system processes every payment to everyone from grandmothers waiting for their Social Security check to cancer researchers working to crack the cure. Now there’s a ham-fisted goon in an ill-fitting valet attendant’s coat rummaging in broad daylight through all of the keys—all of that private information, previously given in trust, handled with care, and regulated by law.
Because of the sensitivity of this information, only a few trusted people are given access to it. It now appears that Musk, who does not have security clearance (as far as we know) has access to it and presumably can give access to anyone he likes. And they can do a lot of mischief, either deliberately by (say) stopping payment to individuals and groups that they disapprove of or by accident by screwing up the system due to their incompetence.
But that is not all. They have thrown the entire government into confusion by issuing directives that are ambiguous or even illegal, such as the buyout offer to over two million government employees.
And in between the syrupy overtures of the buyout effort, federal workers are peppered with caustic memos containing head-spinning inconsistencies. One moment, our work is derided as extremely “unproductive,” a waste of money that should be scrapped. The next, it’s apparently so productive as to be a threat to the American people. The next, everyone needs to drop what they’re doing right now to take their preferred pronouns off their signature blocks.
The stream of implementation emails is so whiny and ridiculous it should be funny. But it’s not funny. It’s exhausting. Because sometimes those emails announce the immediate departure of friends and colleagues without explanation. And because, between the existential questions about our agencies and their missions, press the daily concerns of life under such a mercurial employer:
I don’t know anyone in the federal government who is seriously thinking about taking Musk’s ill-conceived buyout offer. But everyone I know has polished their résumé and started scanning job postings.
The buyout offer is really a threat because people might wonder if they will be fired if they do not accept it. And if large numbers of people do accept it, what will that do to the working of government, since it will be impossible to maintain normal services and the wheels of the machinery will start losing cogs and slipping gears and slowly grinding to a halt?
People in the tech sector may boast about their desire to move fast and break things, but government is not a like a business and you break it at your peril.
I think you need to look at this as a hostile takeover. They’re engaged in asset stripping. The objective is not to maintain normal services. In fact, it looks to me like the objective is to smash normal services, so that the bits which can be used to extract profit can be seized by the oligarchy, and the rest…Well, who cares about the rest?
I’m starting to think that these people looked at the collapse of the Soviet Union, saw how the failure of the state enabled the growth of oligarchy (and organised crime, as two sides of the same coin), and thought, “Hey, that looks like a great idea! Let’s do that here!”
Dunc @ 1
Disaster capitalism.
Also, for fiction, see the concept of The Jackpot in William Gibson’s ‘Agency’ and ‘The Peripheral’.
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How it feels getting news updates in America.
.https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1AAJYMLCCf/
Dunc@1: Yeah, I’ve also been wondering if post-soviet Russia is what the US oligarchs aim for.
Do they really think their lives would be better in a system like that?
“Hey Mr. Musk, why don’t you take a look out of this conveniently open window and we talk about what you said last week about Mr. Trump?”
@Dunc #1,
I was thinking yesterday that these activities somewhat remind me of the end of Atlas Shrugged where the government assets were being looted by the non-productive parasites right before the final collapse.
Mind you, I doubt that Musk thinks of himself as a parasite. I’m pretty certain his mental image of himself is that he is like John Gault.
birgerjohansson A comment at your link mentioned trumps firing the inspectors general, obviously to make corruption easier.
Now trumps development plan for Gaza makes opposition to things like HR23 ( This bill imposes sanctions against foreign persons (individuals and entities) who assist the International Criminal Court ) more important.
To track bills or topics like this go to fastdemocracy.com. My topics are abortion, birth control, gender, immigration and climate change. Those lead to too much to follow, I intended to just watch Iowa.
The government was already broken since it allowed a convicted felon to become President.
Judd Legum on the buyout offer: Update: The “deferred resignation” scam
I’m glad that you are publicising the potentially disastrous fall out from all the changes being instituted at break-neck speed in DC.
All one sees in some places is admiration for Trump’s crew cutting back government ‘waste’ and ‘fraud’, and shock-horror stories about purported money laundering via USAID.
It’s standard republican playbook: “LOOK! SOCIALISM does not WORK because we interfered with every socialist government and made sure it failed. Only a CAPITALIST economy in which a small number of oligarchs are the people who matter, that’s what we want to try next!”
Standard response: “Oh you mean absolutism like Louis XIV and Kaiser Wilhelm. Yeahhhh that didn’t even work for them.”
[I have to confess that current politics in the US are pushing me toward aristocracy -- not hereditary aristocracy but in the sense Socrates meant: rule by the best. Right now, we are trying rule by the worst and it’s not working great. [Call me a class traitor, go ahead]
All one sees in some places is admiration for Trump’s crew cutting back government ‘waste’ and ‘fraud’, and shock-horror stories about purported money laundering via USAID.
I have said before, and will no doubt say again — nobody can claim to be serious about the US budget unless they are willing to talk about ‘defense’ expenditures. Right now we’re spending more on our military than any other country on Earth, in fact we are spending more than all the countries on Earth. It’s our empire, I get it, but you cannot saw “we don’t want to spend $1mn on condoms shipped to Africa” while spending $100bn/year just on nuclear weapons. FFS, the Air Force’s F-35 programme Mmmm!! ! GHey (cough) /sounds of struggle as other bloggers haul Marcus off and kick him down a hole.
Suggested further reading:
FT Alphaville: State capture by South Africans: a comparative history [Registration may be required]
Wikipedia: State Capture
BBC: State capture: Zuma, the Guptas, and the sale of South Africa
Correction: THEY break our government at OUR peril.
Marcus: The LAST thing we need is $Trump and #QElon getting “serious” about our defense budget.
One of the Musk minions sent in to take over the Treasury payments system has resigned after the WSJ (!) revealed his stinkingly racist social media posts, from a recently deleted account. Why Marko Elez has had to resign, while the Nazi-saluting crime boss who sent him on his mission does not, has not been revealed.
@Dunc #11
Good reference points. One of the things noted by BBC on how it can be stopped is through media reporting. This has already been prevented in the US through the inclusion of media in corporations participating in the corruption. Propaganda has won out over accurate information, and the oligarchy controls both the traditional media with the largest audience and the social media with the largest audient. These oligarchs have already demonstrated they are happy to go along with this.
I see a lot of comparisons to fascism in the media around Trump et al. I think too few people are noticing the real goal is the simple looting of the country for cash. I think the fascist tendencies are just a convenient way to exert power and distract, rather than being the key feature US oligarchs are trying to enact,