And yours
Adding to reports that billionaire Elon Musk is making the lives of Donald Trump’s inner circle a living hell with his freelancing, Wired’s Jake Lahut reported on MSNBC that some are looking to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles to step in and right the ship.
That would be the same Susie Wiles who, when her boss spoke this week of the U.S. ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip to occupy and develop the prime beachfront property, looked like this:
Lahut spoke with MSNBC’s “Way Too Early” this morning on the tensions Elon Musk’s Agents of DOGE are generating inside the White House.
By the kids the South Africa-born boy genius enlisted to take a wrecking ball to the federal government — like 19-year-old hacker “Big Balls” and the racist-eugenecist Marko Elez — Musk means to wreak as much havoc as he can without considering or caring about the consequences for others. Much like the Narcissist-in-Chief who’s letting him trash federal personnel and policy infrastructure unsupervised. This is the plot of a Superman movie.
Four federal-government IT professionals The Atlantic spoke with are “terrified” about incursions into federal computer systems by Musk’s Agents of DOGE wannabe supervillains:
“This is the largest data breach and the largest IT security breach in our country’s history—at least that’s publicly known,” one contractor who has worked on classified information-security systems at numerous government agencies told us this week. “You can’t un-ring this bell. Once these DOGE guys have access to these data systems, they can ostensibly do with it what they want.”
There is a level of danger in the untrained tinkering with complex systems built up over years.
The four experts laid out the implications of giving untrained individuals access to the technological infrastructure that controls the country. Their message is unambiguous: These are not systems you tamper with lightly. Musk and his crew could act deliberately to extract sensitive data, alter fundamental aspects of how these systems operate, or provide further access to unvetted actors. Or they may act with carelessness or incompetence, breaking the systems altogether. Given the scope of what these systems do, key government services might stop working properly, citizens could be harmed, and the damage might be difficult or impossible to undo. As one administrator for a federal agency with deep knowledge about the government’s IT operations told us, “I don’t think the public quite understands the level of danger.”
By the way, DOGE wants to tinker with the air traffic control system computers and make “rapid safety upgrades”:
The National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) told FLYING it would welcome any serious initiative to modernize the ATC system, but not without a seat at the table.
“It is critical that the experts who know and understand the intricacies and have detailed knowledge of the very complex system—the dedicated aviation safety professionals represented by NATCA—are involved in the process from design to testing and to implementation,” the union said in a statement.
Musk is trying to reimagine the federal government they way he mismanages a software company. The approach echoes the “move fast and break things” culture of Silicon Valley (elsewhere in The Atlantic):
Here’s the problem: The federal government is not a software company. “The stakes are wildly different,” a former senior Twitter executive told me recently. This person, who requested anonymity because they worked closely with Musk during his takeover and fear retribution, argued that Musk seems incapable of recognizing the limits of his own knowledge. When I asked them to describe Musk’s managerial strategy, they borrowed a term of art from SpaceX’s own rocket mishaps: “This is a rapid unscheduled disassembly of government services.”
Listen. I am/was a mechanical engineer. The ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code books I used fill 4-5 ft of shelf space. There is a lot of materials science in them. But also a lot of trial and error. The code has built up over a century-plus. A lot of it, like airline design, comes from forensic analysis of boilers, etc., that failed or blew up. Some killed people. Oh, let’s not build them THAT way again. Better update the code.
Like a friend’s observations about legacy computer code — cuneiform by 21st-century standards — deep below the surface of programming Big Balls and Marko take for granted, there’s stuff in the boiler code that no one alive knows why it’s in there. That doesn’t mean it’s useless and that ripping it out will do no harm. It means the reason it’s in there has been lost to time, but there was a damn good reason for it. And likely still is.
Musk and his brigands haven’t a clue about that. Even while Musk is having to learn through trial and error how to fly his rockets, he’s standing on the backs of government-funded research with rockets that blew up for years before they got the science and engineering right. (There are 20 min. reels on YouTube.) But he’s having too much fun breaking things.