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Musk’s digital coup in Washington: Effects and prospects
The digital coup that Elon Musk launched to capture the U.S. government started on January 20 (though it had been prepared for many weeks before then.) On January 20, shortly after Pres. Trump took the oath of office and briefly dropped by a lunch at which tech billionaires mingled closely with Supreme Court justices and senior legislators, he signed an Executive Order that stated,
This Executive Order establishes the Department of Government Efficiency to implement the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.
We could think of this as “Communiqué Number 1” of the Musk-Trump coup that we’ve seen playing out ever since.
On January 20, Musk and his digi-goons were ready. By the next day, civil servants arriving in the White House-adjacent Eisenhower Executive Office Building found the door to the space there that had long housed the White House’s Office of Digital Services (ODS) sported a note describing it as now housing “DOGE.” DOGE, the non-governmental body that Musk had been running for some time out of the DC office of his Boring company, had already burrowed itself deep into the core of the U.S. federal apparatus.
ODS was established by Pres. Barrack Obama back in 2014, as a way for the techies in his White House to repair the digital chaos that had accompanied his roll-out of “Healthcare.gov”, a website crucial to the working of the Affordable Care Act. Obama’s goal was for his pretty tech-savvy White House team to now extend their own tech-savviness to any and all of the many other arms of the federal government- or even, of state governments, if they requested such help.
By capturing the centralized command post of ODS on january 20–21, Musk’s goons could then immediately reach straight into the computer systems of every U.S. government body. Crucially, these included the federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS), the mechanism through which the Treasury Department makes thousands of disbursals every day to governmental programs, government employees, and government-supported programs administered at the state level, such as Medicaid, food stamps, or Head Start.
