Elon Musk’s campaign to cut Washington’s bureaucracy is aiming at a very specific, very sensitive digital power center: the federal IT infrastructure. Musk and his allies have gained access to the Treasury Department’s payments systems, and they’ve commandeered enough control at the Office of Personnel Management to send a mass email offering federal employees early buyouts. Unnamed federal officials told The Washington Post today that they’re now concerned about DOGE access to student loan data. The overall effect has been to turn once banal-seeming federal IT systems into an ideologically driven bulldozer for removing programs deemed — by, apparently, Musk — as either unnecessary or excessively “woke.” Musk’s approach is revealing just how much the day-to-day operation of government has come to depend on technological systems that can, in theory, be turned on and off with the flick of a switch. He’s also exploring the limits of how much power a lone official can wield if he has White House approval to take them over. “They've done their homework,” Ann Lewis, former director of Technology Transformation Services (TTS) under the General Services Administration, told DFD. “Going where the majority of the volume of government transaction data is seems very strategic.” On the surface, Musk’s goals track with generations of previous good-government reformers, who have long imagined revamping the cumbersome federal hiring and procurement processes that have built up over years and decades. It is also, notionally, within DOGE’s mission: In his order establishing the department, officially with a mere renaming of the existing U.S. Digital Service, Trump directed it to “implement the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” Trump also issued a separate executive order calling on DOGE, OPM and the Office of Management and Budget to “integrate modern technology,” with DOGE providing advice on “specific best practices for the human resources function in each agency.” In practice, however, many governance experts have watched the launch of DOGE with alarm bordering on horror. As DOGE has advertised on Musk’s platform X, the office is using its access to federal data to mark for death diversity, equity and inclusion-related programs specifically, amounting to an ideological program far from the goals of productivity and efficiency. There are also deep cybersecurity concerns about how his teams are operating. A lawsuit alleges that a Musk ally installed a private email server at OPM in order to send direct mass emails to civil servants. DOGE spokesperson Katie Miller has denied the allegations about the server, pointing DFD to an X post where she said “There’s nothing illegal and no server, just more made up tall tales from uniformed career bureaucrats who probably telework.” Based on her grasp of how the government’s underlying technology works, Lewis says that by setting up DOGE within USDS, and installing close allies like Thomas Shedd in crucial tech positions — Shedd now holds her former job as director of TTS — Musk is setting himself up to expand his digital powers further through the technical machinery of the bureaucracy, rather than through higher-profile, and more accountable, top-level appointments. Lewis suggests that if DOGE insinuates itself within the General Services Administration, which houses TTS, it could have access to the GSA’s tech talent and the multi-billion-dollar acquisition services fund — a pot of money earned by contract acquisition fees that it alone controls and can be used for further hiring and procurement. It could also, if it wanted to, find allies with the technical know-how to further DOGE’s mission. “They found the two organizations [USDS and TTS] in the federal government where a lot of formerly private-sector tech talent lives,” Lewis said. (404 Media reported this afternoon on a meeting between Shedd and TTS employees where he offered praise, and asked their help in implementing AI throughout the government.) Those reforms aside, the manner in which DOGE is going directly into the “pipes,” as it were, of the federal government seems possibly off-mission to many experts, rousing already high suspicions — especially if they have the power to get into the actual code, as Wired reported in one story. “There’s no good reason they should be able to directly edit code and stop or change payments, and to ignore the most basic controls around them,” Robert Gordon, a deputy assistant to former President Joe Biden and assistant secretary for financial resources under Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services, told DFD. Gordon echoed comments from other technocratic government reformers who have said that, while the federal bureaucracy is badly in need of reform, DOGE’s blunt-force approach could be counterproductive — and could even backfire if lawsuits over its constitutionality force a rollback of its changes. Musk and DOGE’s fusion of political decision-making with literal “admin privileges” is, in a way, the purest distillation of the Silicon Valley ethos that defines Trump 2.0: “We’ve always said that we could run the government more efficiently than the government, and now we’re going to do it, existing regulations or constitutional authorities be damned.” Gordon expressed bafflement that anyone involved in governance and administration would even need direct access to sensitive IT systems. “Normally political appointees like me want to stay 100 miles away from these processes,” Gordon said. “I can imagine wanting access in some circumstances, to see them yourself … but the idea of monkeying with the actual payments, and having the authority to change them, is mind blowing. It’s a key thing that normal politicals stay the hell away from.” The key difference, of course, being that Musk and his gang of 20-something wünderkinds are anything but “normal politicals” — and while legal challenges loom on the horizon, for now politics have seemed to shift to the level of the sysadmin.
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