Can anyone stop him?
Is Musk Really Wanting to Give Up His Personal Feasibility? What do I Really Need to Know About Trump and What He Can Do About It?
Musk’s team, which includes a small gaggle of young aides, reportedly ages 19 to 24 — have taken control of the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration. They also have access to the Treasury Department’s payment system, which provides a direct line to sensitive information about tens of millions of Americans, including Social Security numbers and bank accounts. Musk could use his access to the system to effect a kind of line-item veto, using his own account. If he does not believe that a program is effective, then he will leave it to starve on the vine and he will cancel its funding.
Donald Trump, Musk’s wholly owned puppet, has said Musk won’t do anything without his approval. Yes. Okay. I don’t see what difference that makes. We all remember executive time. This man only wants to golf and watch TV.
We are supposed to pretend this is happening in order to not make Musk want to pursue his personal feuds. I think one of the more important questions is how posting to X at all hours of the day is efficient. I mean when I say “this scenario” that Musk is going to do whatever he wants, and post through it, and threaten anyone who tries to stop him.
The Last Two Years: Musk and the Delaware Chancery Court: Why we can’t afford to let the rich get richer, but we can do better
He writes about tech, money, and human behavior. She joined The Verge in 2014 as science editor. She used to be a reporter at the company.
Elon Musk has an uncanny ability to sort out which of America’s rules are real. The National Labor Relations Board, FAA, and NASA all have punishments that aren’t real. The Delaware Chancery Court is very real. Based on the past two weeks, the Delaware Chancery Court may be the only real thing in the entire American government.
Did I get everything? It’s probably not. For instance, Musk has made statements that he “deleted” a department, for instance, but since he’s a known liar, that may not be true. It’s not possible to give a complete account of events between Musk’s statements on X and the confusion amongst government employees. Perhaps between the time this is published and you read it, there will be more bullshit.
The current Trump administration doesn’t know or care about checks and balances or civics class. First, it tried to freeze spending with a legal pronouncement. Several courts halted that. Musk decided to start ripping out wires in order to solve a legal problem.
Does that sound like liberal hysteria? Okay, here’s Brian Riedl, an economist who works for the conservative Manhattan Institute, and before that, the Heritage Foundation and Republican Senator Rob Portman: “I see a lot of people want to throw out 230 years of constitutional government and replace it with an authoritarian dictator because they have big feelings about the budget and can’t be bothered to work through Congress.”
The consequences of the efforts to care for HIV patients in Africa by George W. Bush have been the most immediate. There is a building that houses the US Agency for International Development. An email explaining the move attributed it to agency leadership and a response should be sent to an email address that appears to be associated with a special adviser to the Director of the Office of Personnel Management.
Social Media vs. Government: What Has Musk Learned from Working for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)?
It’s just the beginning, so consider again the use of the social networking site. Let’s say Musk gets direct access to treasury payments, which seems very likely to be his aim. Will he stop paying bills, as he did with Twitter’s leases? Might be fun to discover what the military does when they don’t get their paychecks, or how many grandparents get evicted when the Social Security checks don’t go out. How many of Musk’s unsecured servers do you think foreign spies have penetrated already? All of them, maybe?
I would be nervous if I was a government contractor that didn’t have SpaceX. I mean, if you upset Musk, do you think he’s going to pay out your contracts on time?
The first casualty that we know of is the United States Agency for International Development, or U.S.A.I.D. Musk seems to hold a vendetta against the agency. It has been described by him as a radical-left political psy op, criminal organization and a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America. On Monday, shortly before 2 a.m., he bragged that he and his allies had spent the weekend “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” In addition to wreaking vengeance on an agency he hates for still undisclosed reasons (although it may be worth noting that U.S.A.I.D. supported the efforts of Black South Africans during and after apartheid), Musk believes that cutting government spending is the only way to reduce inflation and put the U.S. economy on firm footing.
Musk has been given control of important levers of power within the federal government that he can use to destroy federal agencies at will.
The last week would go down as one of the worst examples of executive branch malfeasance in American history if anyone had elected Musk.
