This is because journalists have discovered the names of the young boys who are now running roughshod over the US government at Elon Musk’s behest.
Wired revealed the name of one last night who appears to have been given way beyond “read only” ability and he’s changing code. Josh Marshall has more on that today:
I’m told that Elez and possibly other DOGE operatives received full admin-level access on Friday, January 31st. The claim of “read only” access was either false from the start or later fell through. The DOGE team, which appears to be mainly or only Elez for the purposes of this project, has already made extensive changes to the code base for the payment system. They have not locked out the existing programmer/engineering staff but have rather leaned on them for assistance, which the staff appear to have painedly provided hoping to prevent as much damage as possible — “damage” in the sense not of preventing the intended changes but avoiding crashes or a system-wide breakdown caused by rapidly pushing new code into production with a limited knowledge of the system and its dependencies across the federal government.
Phrases like “freaking out” are, not surprisingly, used to describe the reaction of the engineers who were responsible for maintaining the code base until a week ago. The changes that have been made all seem to relate to creating new paths to block payments and possibly leave less visibility into what has been blocked. I want to emphasize that the described changes are not being tested in a dev environment (i.e., a not-live environment) but have already been pushed into production. This is code that appears to be mainly the work of Elez, who was first introduced to the system probably roughly a week ago and certainly not before the second Trump inauguration. The most recent information I have is that no payments have as yet been blocked and that the incumbent engineering team was able to convince Elez to push the code live to impact only a subset of the universe of payments the system controls. I have also heard no specific information about this access being used to drill down into the private financial or proprietary information of payment recipients, though it appears that the incumbent staff has only limited visibility into what Elez is doing with the access. They have, however, looked extensively into the categories and identity of payees to see how certain payments can be blocked.
What could go wrong?
Meanwhile, it appears that the Treasury Secretary is either out of the loop or lying to Congress:
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent privately reassured Republican lawmakers Monday that Elon Musk and his team do not have control over a sensitive government system that manages the flow of trillions of dollars in payments, according to five lawmakers in the room for a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill.
Not that they care anyway. They want to be lied to. I’ve read dozens of articles in the last 48 hours about … all of this, and it’s clear that Republicans in Congress are absolutely fine with everything that’s happening. I honestly don’t think Musk’s little boys crashing the entire US government system and destroying the economy would move them. They know it’s lunacy. They are either just as crazy or so cowardly that they won’t say a word against it.
At this point I’ve lost the capacity to imagine what can stop what’s happening.
Update —
Rolling Stone reports that Elon and Trump are very upset about leaks but their plans to stop it are “ham-handed”
Among the ideas internally kicked around the Trump and Musk teams was the thought of planting younger informers or “spies” in different parts of the federal government to gain the trust of offices and teams suspected of anti-MAGA sentiments. (The Trump administration has already sought in other ways to erect a snitch network across the federal bureaucracy, encouraging staffers to anonymously tip off their superiors if they see any hint of hush-hush diversity programs operating in the shadows.)
Other ideas include potentially accessing, via virtual back-door access, some staffers’s government emails or communications to see if there’s any recent evidence of leaking to the media, though sources generally concede that it is unlikely career officials would be using their work accounts for these kinds of sensitive and unauthorized conversations. Other plans focus on Trump administration officials sending different staffers different internal messages or pieces of disinformation, to see what does or doesn’t leak — in the hopes of isolating where some of the leaking could be stemming from.
Trump and Musk allies have also discussed compiling dossiers of various federal staff and creating shortlists of suspected leakers by scouring their social media accounts to see who is friendly with certain reporters and who is “clearly a liberal,” in the words of a Trump administration official. One Musk ally says they have already asked trusted Trumpists installed in multiple agencies and departments for “brief rundowns” of names of their immediate coworkers or underlings who are the likeliest to be blabbing to the press over the past several days.
These are the people yammering about the Deep State…