Government run a-Musk: How Elon Musk used his Twitter playbook to disrupt the federal government

Donald Trump saying the quiet part out loud on the free reign he has given to Elon Musk to dismantle our federal government. But one federal judge early this morning pushing back, blocking Musk and his, quote, Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, from accessing sensitive Treasury Department records. But the move may just end up being a speed bump for the Tesla CEO, who, along with his clown car of DOGE bros, are in the process of accessing, or frankly, have already accessed, several other government agencies' sensitive data, including Veteran Affairs, the Department of Transportation, and the EPA. Musk moves in government, mirroring actions that he took when he bought Twitter, and he laid off thousands of people, got sued for paying less in severance than what they were promised, and he stopped paying the rent. Or, as the former head of Twitter's policy communications describes Musk's MO, quote, take it over, ruthlessly purge anyone who he sees as opposition, and crash operations to remake it in his worldview. Joining me now is McKenna Kelly, politics reporter at Wired. McKenna, my hat off to Wired. You guys have been the tip of sphere on some incredible breaking news, such necessary coverage. Before we came into your segment and we were talking, Wired didn't even have a politics team before. So, talk about why we are now having this collision of an intersection between politics, tech, and frankly, all things Elon Musk. Sure. So, I think I was hired in November 2023, so just a little over a year ago, to cover the election. And why would you bring a tech journalist from The Verge, right, to cover the election? And it's because there's so much going on with all of these big tech CEOs, the influence that they have, the money that they spend on lobbyists, the money that they donate to campaigns. And then, last year, what we saw, soon after the first assassination attempt on Trump, was Elon Musk coming out, you know, full-throated, the support for Trump, throwing, I think what the number used to be, last time I checked, was like $250 million supporting Trump's campaign. So, tech has really come out of the woodworks to say, we have money, we have power. The Biden administration, of course, spent, what was it, four years, yeah, trying to, presumably, regulate these companies and nothing really happened. And I think they got a little scared. They found a savior in Trump, in many ways, and now they're here in all support. Well, Trump, of course, loves hearing that idea that he is some type of, you know, Christ figure for them. But I want to talk about some of the reporting you guys did on Wired this week, including you, about Marco Alez. So, the journal, the Wall Street Journal, was the first to talk about his racist, his eugenic posts on Twitter. But then you guys said that he actually got fired, right, or, excuse me, he got, he resigned because of what he posted. But then he got rehired by Elon Musk. But I think what's happening is, you see this, and you have that he worked at a startup that hired convicted hackers and was fired from an internship for leaking company secrets. These are the people, right, McKenna, that Elon Musk has. And they've had access, and I want to say, even though there may be injunctions right now, they've had access to our sensitive data. How would we even know, McKenna, if they've changed stuff and they've seen our stuff and they've done stuff, things with our sensitive data? At this point in time, we have no idea. And I think that's the scariest part of this all. With the access that they have, what we've been told is that it's like read access on basically any system that they want. They're coming into agencies in the middle of the night. I know last night, a bunch of Doge people, at least three of them were at the CFPB looking for additional access to systems there. People are out of the loop. There are people, there was the union met last night at CFPB, an emergency meeting, trying to figure out what was going on. So even the employees who work at these companies, who are career civil servants, they have no idea what's going on inside either. And they're being told that they have to comply with whatever these tech bros coming in are trying to do. Yes. They're getting supplied this memorandum of understanding from the White House, being told that this is the authority that Musk's team, Doge, is getting for these systems. And the union, these people have a lot of institutional knowledge on how these systems and these agencies work. So they're trying to push back as much as they can, poking holes at, oh, well, maybe someone is emailing them, telling them to do something from OMB or the White House. So maybe they don't have to follow these specific rules. The thing is, right now, what we're in is a huge state of flux, where even us reporters at Wired, all of the reporting that we're doing, all the people that we're talking to, it is very, very difficult to figure out what it is that is exactly going on, because there is a few group of people who have this access, who have this knowledge, and they aren't talking, and they're very, very close to Musk. So there's a lot of litigation going on. We've talked about these injunctions that are being entered to stop these Doge bros from having access to this information. Are you guys at Wired looking at this litigation carefully to kind of see what evidence is coming out, what representations are being made in terms of, yes, read only, but then we find out later on they actually had the ability to change code? Yes. That was just a bomb of a report from my colleagues, Vittoria and Tim Marchman and Leah Fiker, some of our fearless leaders at Wired right now. And what they found was that, yes, we had reported previously that these Doge people had write access on these important, sensitive Treasury systems, allowing them to make changes to the code and to the database. The White House, of course, said—there was mixed reports at the time when we first reported this. We had The New York Times saying that the White House said that they only had read-only access. But according to my colleagues and the discussions that they've had with their sources, even that write access was available to these workers, but they quietly rolled it back to be able to say, well, no, they didn't, when we do have— To give them plausible deniability. Yes. Yes. So what are you guys looking for now? I mean, how are you guys staying on top of all of this? It's a firehose of info for us in journalism, trying to cover it all, but what are you guys looking at right now? Yeah. So my—last weekend, when we first started hearing about interviews between Doge people and workers at agencies like the General Services Administration, these very tech-heavy agencies, it seemed as if Musk's first focus was going to be these two pillars of technologists within the government. So that is USDS, which has now been renamed Doge. USDS was created in the first Obama administration in order to save healthcare.gov. So this is a team of people who often come in from Silicon Valley to work on infrastructure, work on projects for the U.S. government to make government work more efficiently. That's what they've been doing for 10-plus years. So there's that group of technologists, and then there's the technologists at GSA, who do something similar, but they have different mandates and things like that. So Musk focused on those two agencies at first because they have so much technological expertise. And so that is where the Musk bomb landed initially, and it's helped give them additional access to agencies across our government. And so we've seen that blast radius expand further and further outside, from the White House to agencies like the EPA and everything down the line. There are some that haven't been touched. I've heard that the FTC has not really been touched just yet. But it does feel as if this is continuing and continuing to expand as days go on. McKenna Kelly, again, my hat off to you and the other fearless reporters at WIRED, your editors. You guys are really just keeping us informed, but we're simultaneously terrified, because I don't trust Musk and his Doge bros to not continue what you say, which is such an accurate way of describing it. The blast radius continues to expand from the damage that's been done, and I'm fearing that they're not honest about the damage and the access that they've had. Wow. McKenna, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate it.