Turning the White House into a chop shop
Anand Giridharadas’s The Ink this morning announces:
Musk’s hostile takeover
It’s hard to know just how destructive this will be in the long run, but for now, this is arguably the most troubling development in a day of extremely troubling developments. Elon Musk appears to be trying to do to the federal government what he did at Twitter/X: massively disrupt its functioning and drive out experienced employees not on board with his transformations and his personality cult. [Tusk]
Musk bought his way into the White House complex and now means to, as they say, “have his way” with the federal government.
If you haven’t heard, Musk locked Office of Personnel and Management (OPM) civil servants “out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees” (Reuters):
The two officials, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said some senior career employees at OPM have had their access revoked to some of the department’s data systems.
The systems include a vast database called Enterprise Human Resources Integration, which contains dates of birth, Social Security numbers, appraisals, home addresses, pay grades and length of service of government workers, the officials said.
“We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems,” one of the officials said. “That is creating great concern. There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications.”
As Digby noted, some of Musk’s aides are barely out of high school. Here’s where we are:
OPM has sent out memos that eschew the normal dry wording of government missives as it encourages civil servants to consider buyout offers to quit and take a vacation to a “dream destination.”
Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove has ordered a massive purge of FBI agents beginning with “at least eight senior FBI executives” and extending it seemingly to anyone and everyone associated with investigations into Trump’s “very special” Jan. 6 insurrectionists and with Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s election plot and stolen classified documents:
“I do not believe the current leadership of the Justice Department can trust these FBI employees to assist in implementing the President’s agenda faithfully,” Bove wrote.
Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll wrote in an email that his orders include reviewing “thousands of employees across the country who have supported these investigative efforts.”
As news of possible firings spread Friday, bureau employees traded information and some sought legal advice.
One person who works at the FBI’s Washington Field Office relayed to a colleague that supervisors had told agents to prepare for the White House to publicly release the names of the agents who worked on the two Trump criminal cases on Monday, and that those agents would to be terminated that same day.
Rachel Maddow noted that the public release of the names of FBI employees who would no longer be agents as of Monday was a signal to MAGA minions and just-released Jan. 6 criminals to “have at ’em.” And since the Jan. 6 investigation was the largest in bureau history, virtually all agents touched it in some way. They too have targets on their backs (NBC News):
In a separate memo to the FBI workforce sent out Friday night, the bureau’s acting director, Brian J. Driscoll, Jr., informed employees that acting Deputy Attorney General, Emil Bove, had asked for a list of all FBI employees who worked on January 6 cases for “a review process to determine whether any additional personnel actions are necessary.”
“We understand that this request encompasses thousands of employees across the country who have supported these investigative efforts,” Driscoll wrote. “I am one of those employees.”
It was not immediately clear why the FBI and DOJ officials had been ousted. The FBI and DOJ declined to comment.
Trump is not only taking retribution against anyone who particpated in investigating his past crimes, but defenestrating federal law enforcement so that no investigations of his current and future criminal activities are even possible. The Roberts court has already preemptively shielded him from that.
Trump now gets to do the one thing many Americans know him for more than anything else: say “You’re fired!” “It’s our dream to have everybody almost working in the private sector,” Trump told reporters on Friday.
That’s been the Midas cult dream for decades. Any product or service provided by We the People on a not-for-profit basis is a crime against capitalism that has to be stopped. Middle men must take their percentage. Or else.
Here he is complaining about people in government working remotely not doing their jobs:
“You don’t know what they’re doing. And then at some point, we may ask them to certify that they didn’t have two jobs. Meaning, were they really getting a check from us, the government, and then were they also working a second job and a third job on government time?”
So says a government employee actively lining his pockets with money from “individuals, companies and foreign governments that want to curry favor with the president.”
Trump and the techbro oligarchy are here, active, and bent on turning the White House into a chop shop.
Friends have asked what people this rich want with the government.
Answer: They want it all.
Cartoonist First Dog on the Moon asks if China’s hyped Deepseek AI might save us “from the smug tech broligarchy.”
Answer: “Only a mass global insurrection against the dictatorship of capital will do that – in fact DeepSeek make it cheaper and easier to put AI in everything, but at least we got to laugh at some of the worst people in the world briefly.”