If you have tips about the remaking of the federal government, you can contact Charlie, Ian, and Matteo on Signal at @cwarzel.92, @ibogost.47, and @matteowong.52.

DOGE has achieved “God mode.” That’s according to an employee in senior leadership at USAID, who told us that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency now has full, unrestricted access to the agency’s digital infrastructure—including total control over systems that Americans working in conflict zones rely on, the ability to see and manipulate financial systems that have historically awarded tens of billions of dollars, and perhaps much more.

The employee’s account, along with the accounts of several others across federal agencies, offers the clearest portrait yet of just how deep DOGE has burrowed into the systems of the federal government—and the sensitive information of countless Americans.

In the coming weeks, the team is expected to enter IT systems at the CDC and Federal Aviation Administration, and it already has done so at NASA, according to sources we’ve spoken with at each of those agencies. At least one DOGE ally appears to be working to open back doors into systems used throughout the federal government. Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who was recently appointed director of the Technology Transformation Services, requested privileged access to 19 different IT systems administered by teams within TTS, according to two federal workers we spoke with who are familiar with his request. With this level of control, Shedd would be able to not only view and modify federal data, but also grant and revoke access to other people. (In a written statement, Will Powell, the acting press secretary for the General Services Administration, of which TTS is a part, said Shedd needs this level of access to rapidly identify “areas for optimization and efficiencies” and insisted that he is working with “appropriate GSA officials” to follow established protocols.)

[Read: The government’s computing experts say they are terrified]

Over the past few days, we’ve talked with civil servants working for numerous agencies, all of whom requested anonymity because they fear what will happen if they lose their job—not just to themselves, but to the functioning of the federal government. Their observations reveal the abnormal degree of power that DOGE has already achieved. Federal agencies are subject to various forms of administrative and legal oversight, but they operate separately from one another for good reasons: to support a specialized purpose and to insulate them from undue outside influence. Now they effectively roll up to Elon Musk. (Neither the White House nor DOGE responded to requests for comment for this story. Earlier this week, a White House official claimed that Musk is not the head of DOGE. He is clearly the group’s functional leader.)

Among the federal agencies we reported on, USAID is the only one where we could confirm that DOGE has acquired God-mode access across the entire digital system. (The Trump administration has sought to effectively shut down USAID since the inauguration.) But as Musk and his acolytes enter a growing number of federal databases and IT systems, their unfettered access at USAID offers a sense of what they might be able to do elsewhere. At NASA, for example, it could mean access to knowledge about sensitive government technologies used for defense. At the CDC, such ability could expose millions of Americans’ health data and allow DOGE to access labs that store deadly pathogens. At Treasury, such access would allow Musk’s employees to view Americans’ names, Social Security numbers, and financial information. “It is not ridiculous to think they’d have bank-account and routing numbers for every single person in the United States,” the senior USAID source said. “What do you do with this information? I had to ask myself, Do I file my taxes this year or not? I had to sit and debate that.”

The federal government does not typically grant such wide-ranging access to a single entity, let alone one that is effectively under the control of an unelected, erratic, and politically extreme actor such as Musk. The group is working on behalf of Donald Trump, but sources we spoke with emphasized that the level of access DOGE possesses means that the organization may already be able to siphon data that Musk or his agents could hold on to forever, long after his time as a government liaison, or even after a potential falling-out with the president.

One experienced government information-security contractor offered a blunt response to the God-mode situation at USAID: “That sounds like our worst fears come true.” The purpose of DOGE’s incursions remains unclear to employees at these agencies. Musk was supposed to help improve the workings of the government—that is DOGE’s stated purpose. But in the offices where the team is reaching internal IT systems, some are beginning to worry that he might prefer to destroy it, to take it over, or just to loot its vaults for himself.

“Once they’re in, they’re in,” the USAID employee told us. And this is a big part of the problem in a nutshell: Access is everything, and in many cases, DOGE has it.

At USAID and other agencies whose employees we spoke with, leaders explained that Musk’s team could copy and remove information from government servers without anybody knowing. The team could then feed this classified information into AI tools, either for training purposes or to mine the data for insights. (Members of DOGE already reportedly have put sensitive data from the Education Department into AI software.) Within USAID, DOGE has full access to human-resources information—Social Security numbers, addresses, reputational data such as performance reviews, plus classified information and disciplinary information. The USAID source noted that DOGE can also control USAID systems that help with disbursement of funds, building-access tools, and payroll: “If they wanted to change how much a person is making, they could modify that, given their access in the system.” According to the employee, DOGE is also inside of an internal system for managing contracts and grants, which functions like a high-security online marketplace where USAID plans and approves billions in government spending.

Inside NASA, according to one agency employee we spoke with, DOGE workers already have access to contracts, partnerships, performance reviews, classified national-security information, and satellite data, among other materials. The NASA worker told us that such knowledge could erase generations of advantage in aerospace and defense capabilities if it falls into the wrong hands. Agency technologies such as propulsion systems, novel materials, and satellites overlap with Department of Defense projects. Someone with information about NASA’s thermal-protection or encryption technologies could take advantage of vulnerabilities in aerospace vehicles, for example.

[Derek Thompson: DOGE’s reign of ineptitude ]

USAID employees have felt more acute effects of DOGE’s operations. Employees there say they have been rattled by the demands of DOGE engineers: “They have walked in and said to senior staff, You have 15 minutes to do this or you’re fired,” the USAID senior leader told us. Now USAID staff are “operating in a zero-trust environment.” With its God-mode IT control at the agency, DOGE can read emails and chats, plus see who’s attending which meetings. The source described employees in a recent meeting growing alarmed when transcription services seemed to turn on without warning. An employee at NASA reported similar concerns, after unfamiliar messages appeared on workstations. “We’re operating believing our systems are completely bugged,” one person told us.

The senior USAID official fears that DOGE could terminate somebody working in a conflict zone like Ukraine, Sudan, or Ethiopia from an agency system. “If they lose access to their USAID laptop, phone, and accounts, for a lot of them that’s their only means of communication. We are putting their lives on the line,” one said.

For those who have watched DOGE storm into their workplace, what is perhaps most terrifying is its attempts to scale. If DOGE were to acquire God-mode administrative access across many systems, several sources told us, that level of control could affect every citizen at home, and many American interests abroad: personal financial data, defense secrets, and more, all in the palm of Musk’s hand.

There’s reason to believe that health information may be next. The Trump administration fired roughly 700 people at the CDC last weekend. As in other agencies, the firings will hollow out expertise but also remove obstacles to further changes. A CDC employee told us that the agency’s Office of the Chief Information Officer is expecting DOGE, but “no one has seen anyone yet.”

The individual, who has knowledge of how CDC information systems work, fears that DOGE could gain access to an abundant store of sensitive information about health and disease. This year, the CDC is supposed to roll out a central data platform for public-health surveillance and emergency response to better address new threats such as H5N1 bird flu and old ones such as measles. The new system, called the One CDC Data Platform, promises to aggregate all of the CDC’s public-health data, including hundreds of thousands of daily anonymized lab tests, data from emergency-room visits, and measurements from wastewater disease-reporting sites.

The design and rollout of this system were already controversial inside the agency, our source said, even before Trump and Musk came on the scene. Putting everybody’s health data in one place carries risks. Although the health data the CDC houses are usually de-identified or aggregated, “people with very stigmatizing illnesses could be identified by certain characteristics” if the data are exposed or misused, the CDC worker said. What’s more, plenty of health data contain information that, when correlated with other data outside the system, could pinpoint specific individuals. Given all of the data that DOGE appears to be capable of siphoning from all over the government, such identification could become much easier. The CDC collects electronic health-record details from all over the country, meaning that this could affect just about everyone—including us, and you too.

CDC systems control more than mere information about disease. At the agency’s facility in Atlanta, the CDC stores the microbes that cause disease and can hold secrets to treatment. Some are relatively benign, such as strains of E. coli. Others are intrinsically dangerous, including the Ebola and Marburg viruses, and bacterium that causes tuberculosis. These materials are housed in labs with associated biosafety levels. The highest level, BSL-4, applies to only a small number of labs around the world containing “dangerous and exotic” microbes, as the CDC describes them, that pose a high risk of spread.

Access to such labs is managed by computers, and management of those computers is local to the CDC. If DOGE got the same kind of access to CDC IT systems as it has elsewhere, would that give the group direct access to CDC facilities? “Yes, those are all out of CDC level,” our source at the agency told us. Does that mean that DOGE could gain direct access to BSL-4 labs? we asked. “It’s definitely possible,” the employee said.

[Read: If DOGE goes nuclear]

Our source hoped that such a prospect would be averted. (To repeat, DOGE hasn’t taken control of CDC IT systems yet, at least as far as our source knew.) But the employee also explained that the recent layoffs will reduce the agency’s ability to defend against IT or security errors, on top of diminishing morale. The CDC did not respond to requests for comment about whether someone with full, local IT control could indeed grant entry to, or control over, BSL-4 labs and their contents.

The risk of harm, abuse, or political revenge is clear. But simple, brazen corruption is also a concern among the federal workers we spoke with. The CDC staffer wondered if DOGE’s unelected and seemingly unaccountable leadership, including Musk, might simply want to sell the public-health data the CDC collects. Democratic leaders have also expressed the worry that Musk’s interest in SpaceX, which has received billions of dollars in contracts from NASA over the years, creates an untenable conflict of interest. The NASA employee worried that Musk would end up “reaping all of the profits of the investment that the American public put into NASA’s research, which was being shared with the country.” NASA holds technical specs and research data for SpaceX competitors, and insiders fear that such information will soon be compromised, too. They also worry that classified NASA R&D in areas such as quantum, biotech, and astrobiology could be stolen for private gain.

A number of lawsuits have been filed seeking to limit DOGE’s access, with mixed results. Meanwhile, Trump and Musk have both attacked judges who have ruled against their interests; Musk has said they should be impeached. Trump has also indicated that he might just ignore the courts—an act that would be challenging to counter, providing plenty of opportunity for the administration to get its way. Across agencies, leaders have started to step aside voluntarily. Jim Jones, head of the Food and Drug Administration’s food division, resigned this week. Michelle King, who ran the Social Security Administration, stepped down too rather than carry out DOGE’s wishes. The resignations may be principled, but they open the door for more compliant replacements.

The request from Shedd, the former Tesla engineer, in particular, illustrates the variety of avenues and back doors that DOGE and Musk’s allies may have available to enter the government’s systems. According to the two federal workers we spoke with about Shedd’s efforts, such access typically is not granted to TTS leadership and requires a specific reason and the permission of each system’s owner. Shedd initially issued a blanket request, the sources told us, and is now attempting to bypass the individual system owners by seeking permission from other officials, circumventing standard security procedures. He also had not completed a background check, which is usually required for such access, at least as of when he first made the request, according to our sources. How much access Shedd has been granted remains uncertain.

This is the DOGE playbook: There are no norms to be respected, and everything is up for grabs. Once the damage is done, it will be difficult to remedy, especially if DOGE staffers can themselves grant or remove access to others at their discretion.

Musk and DOGE’s first month has been so chaotic, their incursions so haphazard, that assessing what has even happened is difficult. DOGE claims to be improving the government, but the agency workers we spoke with feel that they are being hacked instead. So it is worth stepping back to note the most basic fact: No good reason or case can be made for one person or entity to have this scope of access to this many government agencies containing this much sensitive information. Even in one government office, full administrative access to all systems is the rarest privilege. In the aggregate, across the whole of the government, it would be unfathomable.

Republican senators have confirmed a onetime Bernie Sanders supporter to lead the nation’s intelligence community and a member of America’s most famous Democratic family as its health secretary. This morning, however, they saved some of their sharpest questions for a Cabinet nominee who, until last month, served alongside them as a GOP member of Congress.

President Donald Trump’s pick for labor secretary, former Oregon Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer, knew she’d face a skeptical Republican audience during her Senate confirmation hearing. Last year she supported a major pro-union bill known as the PRO Act, a decision that has scrambled ideological alliances and thrown her nomination into doubt. The idea that a pro-union candidate might lead a Republican labor department was once unthinkable. But Trump’s nomination of Chavez-DeRemer comes at a time when the party’s base includes an unusually large number of union members. Her supporters have hailed her as a bridge between that new constituency and the GOP’s traditional business wing. Now, her fate could show how much Trump’s GOP is willing—or able—to bend Republican orthodoxy on organized labor.

[Read: The one Trump pick Democrats actually like]

When Trump picked her in November, Chavez-DeRemer initially won praise from Democrats while drawing criticism from conservative lawmakers. This morning, those Republican holdouts began grilling her right away. They pressed her to explain why, as a member of the House, she co-sponsored a bill that would make unionizing easier and undermine the GOP’s longstanding opposition to the labor movement. “Yes or no: Do you still support the PRO Act?” asked Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, the chair of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, which is overseeing her nomination process.

Chavez-DeRemer didn’t answer directly. Instead, she distanced herself from the PRO Act without completely repudiating it; she had signed onto the bill, she maintained, in order to be “at the table” to help write labor laws that would affect her constituents. “The bill is imperfect,” Chavez-DeRemer said.

Her nomination has earned an unusual mix of endorsements. Sean O’Brien, the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, is an enthusiastic backer of Chavez-DeRemer. So is Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin of Indiana, who once challenged O’Brien to a fight. The two have since bonded over their support for Chavez-DeRemer. Mullin told the committee this morning that she was “uniquely positioned in the center” of labor policy. “If Sean and I can come together on this, then if nothing else that should set some type of example.”

Chavez-DeRemer, whose father was a member of the Teamsters for decades, co-sponsored the PRO Act in July during her only term in the House. She was only the third House Republican to do so. Conservatives saw the move as an election-year ploy by a moderate trying to save her seat. (If it was, it didn’t work; she lost in November.) Democrats were pleasantly surprised by her nomination over conventional anti-union alternatives, and they signalled they might vote for her confirmation.

But Republicans such as Cassidy and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky made clear that Chavez-DeRemer’s support for the PRO Act was a problem, even though the bill stands little chance of becoming law whether or not she gets confirmed. Both represent states with so-called right-to-work laws that would be threatened by its enactment. Chavez-DeRemer could win confirmation without their votes if Democrats provided some support, but not if Republicans decide to prevent her nomination from reaching the Senate floor. A few conservative advocacy groups, including one founded by former Vice President Mike Pence, urged the GOP to reject her. And Democratic backing is not guaranteed: Some in the party have vowed to oppose all Trump nominees to protest Elon Musk’s assault on the federal government, and others wanted to see whether Chavez-DeRemer would stand by her pro-union record.

[Annie Lowrey: The rise of the union right]

At this morning’s hearing, Chavez-DeRemer’s answer on the PRO Act initially didn’t seem to satisfy either party. Both Sanders, the committee’s top Democrat, and Paul repeated Cassidy’s question nearly verbatim. “Do you support the PRO Act?” Sanders asked her. “I support the American worker,” Chavez-DeRemer replied. “I am gathering that you no longer support the PRO Act,” Sanders said in response.

Paul, who had previously said that he would oppose her nomination over her support of the PRO Act, got an answer more to his liking. When he asked Chavez-DeRemer whether she opposed a specific provision in the bill that would overturn anti-union laws in states such as Kentucky, she said yes. Paul later told reporters the response might make him reconsider her nomination.

By the end of the hearing, Chavez-DeRemer appeared to have solidified her chances at confirmation. Democrats had not turned en masse against her, and Republicans showed little indication that they were prepared to defeat a Trump Cabinet pick for the first time. “You did very well,” Cassidy told her. And with that, Chavez-DeRemer’s supporters in the room erupted in applause.

On the afternoon of Friday, February 7, as staff members were getting ready to leave the headquarters of the National Institutes of Health, just outside Washington, D.C., officials in the Office of Extramural Research received an unexpected memo. It came from the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, and arrived with clear instructions: Post this announcement on your website immediately.

The memo announced a new policy that, for many universities and other institutions, would hamstring scientific research. It said that the NIH planned to cap so-called indirect costs funded by grants—overhead that covers the day-to-day administrative and logistical duties of research. Some NIH-grant recipients had negotiated rates as high as 75 percent; going forward, the memo said, they would now be limited to just 15 percent. And this new cap would apply even to grants that had already been awarded.

The announcement was written as if it had come from the NIH Office of the Director. It also directed all inquiries to the Office of Extramural Research’s policy branch. And yet, no one at the NIH had seen the text until that Friday afternoon, several current and former NIH officials with knowledge of the situation told me. “None of us had anything to do with that document,” one of them said. But the memo was dressed up in a way clearly intended to make it look like a homegrown NIH initiative. (Everyone I spoke with for this story requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal from the Trump administration. HHS did not respond to requests for comment.)

Over the next several days, the memo sparked confusion and chaos at the NIH, and across American universities and hospitals, as researchers tried to reckon with the likely upshot—that many of them would have to shut down their laboratories or fire administrative staff. A federal judge has since temporarily blocked the cap on indirect costs. But the memo’s abrupt arrival at the NIH, and the way it bulldozed through the agency, underscores how aggressively the Trump administration is exercising its authority and demanding compliance. “Their approach seems to be We go in; we bully; we say, ‘Do this; you have no choice,’” and shows little regard for the people or research affected, one former official told me.

Typically, a memo communicating a major decision related to grants would take months or years to put together, sometimes with public input, and released six months to a year before being implemented, one current NIH official told me—earlier, even, “if the impact will be more substantial.” In this case, though, Stefanie Spear, the HHS principal deputy chief of staff, told officials in the Office of Extramural Research, which oversees the awarding of grants, that this new memo needed to be posted to the NIH website no later than 5 p.m. that afternoon—within about an hour of the agency receiving it. Soon, the timeline tightened: The memo had to be published within 15 minutes. “It was designed to minimize the chance that anyone within an agency could even have time to respond,” another former NIH official told me.

Substantial changes are generally vetted through HHS leadership, and NIH officials have always “very much abided by the directives of the department,” the former official said. But in the past, drafting those sorts of directives has been collaborative, a former NIH official told me. If NIH officials disagreed with a policy that HHS proposed, a respectful discussion would ensue. Indirect-cost rates are controversial: The proportion of NIH funding that has gone to them has grown over time, and proponents of trimming overhead argue that doing so would make research more efficient. A cut this deep and sudden, though, would upend research nationwide. And to grant recipients and NIH officials, it seemed less an attempt to reform or improve the current system, and more an effort to blow it up entirely. Either way, a unilateral demand to publish unfamiliar content under the NIH’s byline was unprecedented in the experience of the NIH officials I spoke with. “It was completely inappropriate,” the former official told me.

But Spear and Heather Flick Melanson, the HHS chief of staff, insisted that the memo was to go live that evening. Officials immediately began to scramble to post the notice on the agency’s grants website, but they quickly hit some technical snares. Fifteen minutes passed, then 15 more. The two HHS officials began to badger NIH staff, contacting them as often as every five minutes, demanding an explanation for why the memo was still offline. The notice went live just before 5:45 p.m., and finally, the phone calls from HHS stopped.

Almost immediately, the academic world erupted in panic and rage. At the same time, the news was blazing through the NIH; staff members felt blindsided by the memo, which appeared to have come from within the agency but which they’d known nothing about. The notice’s formatting, tone, and abruptness also led many within the agency to suspect that it had not originated there or been vetted by NIH officials. “I’ve never seen anything so sloppy,” the current NIH official, who has written several NIH notices, told me. “We also don’t publish announcements after 5 p.m. on Friday, ever … I checked multiple times to be sure it was real.”

The NIH had already been caught in the Trump administration’s first salvo of initiatives. On January 27, a memo from the Office of Management and Budget froze the agency’s ability to fund grants. (In the following week, multiple federal judges issued orders that should have unpaused the funding halt, but many grants remained in limbo.) And in 2017, during Donald Trump’s first term, his administration went after indirect costs, proposing to cap them at 10 percent. That prompted the House and Senate Appropriations Committees to introduce a new provision that blocked the administration from altering those rates; Congress has since included language in its annual spending bills that prevents changes to indirect costs without legislative approval. On February 10 of this year—the Monday after the memo restricting those rates went up—yet another federal judge issued yet another temporary restraining order that again instructed the NIH to thaw its funding freeze.

Last week, the NIH told its staff to resume awarding grants, with prior indirect-cost rates intact. But “the damage is done,” the former NIH official said. Scientists across the nation have had their funding disrupted; many have had to halt studies. And at the NIH—where roughly 1,000 staff members recently received termination notices, amid a mass layoff of federal workers that stretched across HHS—those who remain fear for their job and the future of the agency. The nation’s leaders, NIH officials told me, seem entirely unwilling to consult the NIH about its own business. If the administration remains uninterested in maintaining the agency’s basic functions, the NIH’s purpose—supporting medical research in the United States—will crumble, or at least deteriorate past the point at which it resembles anything that the people who make up the agency can still recognize.

President Donald Trump escalated trade tensions Tuesdayby threatening to impose new 25% tariffs on automobiles, pharmaceuticals, and semiconductors, heightening concerns over a potential trade war. The announcement has sent ripples through financial markets, with investors bracing for potential volatility.

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In the months after the 2024 election and before President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, healthcare executives paid million of dollars to get the ear of the president.

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American global leadership is ending. Not because of “American decline,” or the emergence of a multipolar world, or the actions of U.S. adversaries. It’s ending because President Donald Trump wants to end it.

Just about all of Trump’s policies, both at home and abroad, are rapidly destroying the foundation of American power. The main beneficiary will be the Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who has been planning for the moment when Washington stumbles and allows China to replace the United States as the world’s superpower. That Trump is willing to hand the world over to Xi—or doesn’t even realize that’s what he’s doing—shows that his myopic worldview, admiration for autocrats, and self-obsession are combining to threaten international security and, with it, America’s future.

Trump is choosing to retreat even though the U.S. has its adversaries on the back foot. President Joe Biden’s foreign policy was working. By supporting Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion, Biden weakened Moscow so severely that President Vladimir Putin had to turn to North Korea for help. His backing of Israel in its war with Hamas in Gaza undercut Iran’s influence in the Middle East. And Biden’s strengthening of the U.S. global-alliance system pressured and unnerved China as the world’s advanced democracies banded together against Xi and his plans to upset the world order.

[David Frum: How Trump lost his trade war]

Now Trump is voluntarily throwing away this hard-won leverage. The supposed master negotiator is signaling his willingness to sacrifice Ukraine to Russia before formal negotiations even start. Last week, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called a restoration of Ukraine to its borders before Russia snatched Crimea in 2014 an “unrealistic objective,” indicating that the administration would accept a peace deal that allows Putin to keep part of the independent nation he invaded. Hegseth also rejected NATO membership for Ukraine—the possibility of which was Putin’s pretext for invading in the first place. That wouldn’t be a bad outcome for Putin after starting a brutal war and effectively losing it.

But the big winner from such a settlement will be China. Because China is Russia’s most important partner, any gains that Putin can salvage from his disastrous war forwards the two dictators’ global agenda. That’s why Xi is egging Trump on. Beijing has reportedly proposed holding a summit between Trump and Putin to resolve the Ukraine war. Then Chinese construction companies would try to swoop in and earn a fortune rebuilding a shattered Ukraine, which Xi helped Putin destroy by supporting Russia’s sanctions-plagued economy.

More than that, Xi certainly realizes that Trump’s pandering to Putin offers Xi a chance to break up the Atlantic alliance and entrench Chinese influence in Europe. Vice President J. D. Vance blasted European allies at last week’s Munich Security Conference for marginalizing extremist right-wing political parties, and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi took the opportunity to present Xi as the anti-Trump. “China will surely be a factor of certainty in this multipolar system and strive to be a steadfast constructive force in a changing world,” he told the attendees.

European leaders are not likely to have forgotten that Xi enabled Putin’s war in Ukraine. But if Trump won’t guarantee European security, Xi may well seize the opportunity to expand Chinese power by offering to step into the breach. Xi could make the case that he is able to rein in Putin, protect Ukraine, and preserve stability in Europe. That promise could well be an empty one; Xi may not be willing or even able to restrain an emboldened Putin. Still, abandoned by Washington, European leaders may hold their collective noses and look to Xi to keep the peace.

China “would start replacing the U.S. in the role of keeping Russia out of the Eastern Flank,” Gabrielius Landsbergis, the former Lithuanian foreign minister, recently posted on X. European Union members “in the East would be dependent on China’s protection and the racketeering would spread West.”

Trump is handing Xi other opportunities, too. By withdrawing from the World Health Organization and the United Nations Human Rights Council, the U.S. is clearing the field for China to make the UN system an instrument of its global power. Dismantling USAID makes China all the more indispensable to the developing world. Trump’s bizarre plan to deport Palestinians from Gaza will be a boon to Xi in the Middle East, a region China considers vital to its interests. Even the U.S. suspension of federal financial support for electric vehicles helps Xi by hampering American automakers in a sector Beijing seeks to dominate. China may see American retrenchment as an invitation to take more aggressive actions in pursuit of its interests—in Taiwan, but also toward other U.S. allies in Asia, including Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines.

Trump apparently assumes that he can keep Xi in check with tariffs. He imposed new duties on Chinese imports earlier this month. But Xi doesn’t seem particularly bothered. Beijing retaliated, but with little more than a face-saving gesture. The reciprocal tariffs covered a mere tenth of U.S. imports. Why fuss about a few shipments of stuffed toys when you can take over the world?

The damage to American global standing could be irreparable. The hope now is that the major democracies of Europe and Asia—France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom—will stop up the power vacuum Trump is creating and keep China out of it. European leaders do not have to abide by whatever deal Trump cooks up with Putin for Ukraine. They could hold firm, continue the war, and wait for a new administration in Washington to reaffirm U.S. security commitments. But the course is risky, because erstwhile U.S. allies can’t assume that Washington will ever reestablish global leadership, or that if it does, the promises of future presidents will endure. That uncertainty may compel the allied democracies to make accommodations with China as best they can.

[Quico Toro: Trump’s Colombia spat is a gift to China]

Trump’s administration may be seeking to settle matters with Putin in order then to concentrate limited U.S. resources on confronting China. But this course may succeed only in making China more difficult to contend with, because America will be forced to do so without its traditional allies by its side.

Trust, once lost, is difficult to restore. Trump’s premise seems to be that what happens in Europe and Asia is of little consequence to the United States. Vance invoked Catholic theology (erroneously, according to Pope Francis) to justify a hierarchy of concern that places caring for U.S. citizens ahead of the rest of the world. But what, exactly, is best for Americans?

Trump may be right that other powers should do more to take care of their own affairs. But Americans know as well as anyone that what happens in the far-flung corners of the world—whether in Europe in the 1930s and ’40s or in Afghanistan at the turn of the 21st century—can and often does affect them, even dragging them into conflicts they do not want to fight. That doesn’t mean Washington must police every dispute. But by ceding global leadership to authoritarian China, Trump is creating a world that will almost certainly be hostile to the United States, its prosperity, and its people.

By reputation, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are builders. Musk has grown two of the largest hardware-innovation companies in the world, Tesla and SpaceX. As for Trump, he once told Golf Digest: “I own buildings. I’m a builder; I know how to build. Nobody can build like I can build.”

But now, united in Washington, the duumvirate of Trump and Musk has made its mark not by building, but by the opposite: demolition.

With the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk has claimed for himself an extraordinary amount of power: Serving as the iron fist of the White House, he’s rooting out what he sees as the plague of wokeism in government, halting grants, freezing payments, lighting fires in various departments, and generally firing as many people as he can get away with. On Monday, DOGE claimed to have already saved the government more than $50 billion. Meanwhile, federal judges have ruled that Trump and Musk have violated the law, typically by exceeding the powers of the executive branch and attempting to defund agencies that were initially funded by Congress.

In theory, DOGE exists to promote efficiency. And the need for efficiency is real. The federal government is deeply in debt. Its interest payments now exceed what it spends on defense. Even if the United States had no issue with its debt, it would still be a mitzvah to find ways to make government work better—to take the same tax dollar further, to do one more unit of good. But judging by DOGE’s early returns, the only objective conclusion one can reach about the agency seems to be that it’s out of control. What we’re witnessing in government right now—across the Departments of Energy, Veterans Affairs, Education, and beyond—is not only a bonfire of cruelty but a reign of ineptitude.

[Read: It’s a model of government efficiency, but DOGE wants it gone]

Let’s start with the Department of Energy, which recently faced the brunt of massive DOGE layoffs. Among those who lost their job were dozens of staff members at the National Nuclear Security Administration—scientists, engineers, and safety officials responsible for safeguarding and assembling nuclear warheads. Roughly 100 people were reportedly laid off from the Pantex Plant, in Texas, the most important nuclear-assembly-and-disassembly plant in the country, before they were called back to the office. As Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the nonpartisan Arms Control Association, said: “The DOGE people are coming in with absolutely no knowledge of what these departments are responsible for.”

Next, there’s Veterans Affairs, where the Trump administration offered buyouts to tens of thousands of employees before realizing that, once again, they’d made a mistake. Far from the typical impression some might have of government workers just moving paper around all day, the VA provides health and psychiatric care to millions of U.S. veterans. That means if you offer buyouts to the VA, what you’ll get is a lot of underpaid doctors, nurses, and psychologists taking up offers to leave offices that are already understaffed—which is exactly what happened. Days after the buyout offer, thousands of doctors, nurses, psychologists, and other essential staff got a notice that they were exempt from the offer.

At the Department of Education, which the Trump administration seems to want to destroy, DOGE terminated $1 billion in contracts. But rather than end ideological programs that Musk says he wants to eliminate, these cuts decimated the Institute for Education Sciences, which funds many of the longest-running and most famous studies in education research, including several longitudinal studies on student achievement and school effectiveness. It’s hard to think of a better nonpartisan role for government than data collection. But Musk and his team have gutted some of the best education-data tools we have. Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, told The Washington Post: “There’s a lot of bloat in IES. There’s a lot of problems to be solved. These are problems you solve with a scalpel and maybe a hatchet, but not a bulldozer.”

[Read: The government waste DOGE should be cutting]

DOGE’s cuts will go much further. At the FDA, the Trump administration has fired hundreds of employees, including those involved in testing food and medical devices. At the CDC, more cuts have reached the Epidemic Intelligence Service, which pays disease detectives around the world and stops epidemics in other countries before they spread. At the National Institutes of Health, the administration is set to slash personnel and funding in a variety of ways. If you’re a fan of Musk and Trump, your hope is that these cuts will be all fat and no bone. But remember: This is the same administration that, in an attempt to refocus the Department of Energy on nuclear security, initially gutted the division with the words nuclear security in it.

So far, few DOGE actions have received more attention than the agency’s attack on USAID, which is responsible for foreign aid and global-health spending. Musk seems to be on a gleeful and personal mission to destroy USAID, placing most of its employees on leave, closing its headquarters, and moving what’s left of it to the State Department. According to one report, the administration says that it plans to reduce USAID staffers from 10,000 to about 600. As Musk recently posted on X, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”

There is irony here. And there is tragedy. The irony is that, when he was a U.S. senator, Marco Rubio was one of the most outspoken defenders of global aid. In February 2017, he called foreign aid “critical to our national security.” In 2019, he said: “Anybody who tells you that we can slash foreign aid and that will bring us to balance is lying to you.” Today, however, Rubio is in the morally compromising position of overseeing, as secretary of state, the dismantling of the very aid agency he once praised.

[Read: DOGE is failing on its own terms]

The tragedy will be felt at the individual level, with immense human costs. Unless the administration course-corrects and immediately replenishes our global-health grants, there’s just no getting around the fact that a lot of people around the world are going to suffer and die in order to save the typical American taxpayer a negligible sum. The U.S. pays for insecticide sprays in Uganda, for pregnancy services in Zambia, for health-care clinics in the poorest parts of the world. Most notably, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief has saved an estimated 25 million lives and prevented more than 5 million babies from being born with HIV. It’s not yet clear whether PEPFAR will be spared or left to wither away. This wrecking-ball approach to reform has astonished even the most famous critics of U.S. aid programs. William Easterly, an economist who has written that much of American aid props up dictators and goes to waste, told The New Yorker that Trump’s USAID-demolition plan is “horrific,” “illegal,” and “undemocratic.”

Musk has hinted, amid rising criticism, that DOGE will simply reverse any measures that go too far. This sounds good in theory. Move fast; cut stuff; add back whatever you miss. But in practice, you can’t just slash 10,000 programs at once and then reinstall them on a one-by-one basis depending on whether the volume of criticism passes some imaginary threshold. Whatever you think of the failures of progressive governance, “mess around and find out” is not a suitable replacement. Unfortunately, it does appear to be the current methodology of the executive branch.

The president of the United States is demanding that American citizens use only the words that please him, and he is punishing those who refuse to do so. This is the essence of his attacks against the Associated Press, which he has barred from the White House for referring to the Gulf of Mexico as “the Gulf of Mexico.” He is now demanding that the news agency acquiesce to his renaming of the body of water. “We’re going to keep them out until such time as they agree that it’s the Gulf of America,” Donald Trump said to reporters earlier this week.

This is not how it works in the United States of America. In our nation, free speech is a God-given right. It is not something that Trump, Elon Musk, or anyone else can grant or take away. Americans are born with the right to speak freely, and to publish freely. In America, as I have written previously, we are free to criticize the government, which is accountable to the people, not the other way around.

Americans for years have confused the power that techno-authoritarians exercise over the social-media platforms they operate with the responsibilities of government. This confusion in many ways presaged our present moment, and the question of who is in fact running the country—the richest man in the world or the man who was elected president. In the past, some of those who have railed against censorship on privately held platforms, such as Facebook and X, may have had good cultural reasons to gripe, but they didn’t really have a classical free-speech argument. (Mark Zuckerberg, who complained about the White House apparently pressuring him to edit and moderate his platform in accordance with its wishes, did have a reasonable free-speech complaint.)

Trump may wish to run the United States like a business, but there are key differences between what a government can do and what a private company can do. A private-business owner can kick people out of his establishment for saying things he doesn’t like. The government cannot. And while it may be Trump’s prerogative to grant access to the Oval Office only to people who will say the words he wishes for them to say, no American, no one who believes in principles established by the First Amendment, should tolerate Trump’s exceedingly un-American reaction to our most sacred freedom.

Call the Gulf of Mexico whatever you want. Call it the Gulf of America, or the Gulf of Steve Martin, or the Gulf of Flying Spaghetti Monsters. This isn’t about a single body of water, or even politicization of language or the naming and renaming of landmarks. It is about basic American principles. The president is floating a great big test balloon, looking to see just how much of an encroachment on freedom Americans will tolerate. Some Americans, like the leaders of the news site Axios, have preemptively acquiesced. (The explanation they offered—that it would use “the Gulf of America” because “our audience is mostly U.S.-based”—was conspicuously illogical and painfully embarrassing for its cowardice.) Many more Americans still remember what their freedoms mean, and what it means to fight for them.

Memorize these words: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Donald Trump may believe he has the authority to do whatever he wishes, the legislative and judiciary branches be damned. But he still has to answer to the people. Freedom of speech makes this country great. It keeps power in check. It brings truth to light. Trump has tried repeatedly to classify Americans who happen to work as journalists as “enemies” of the people. But they are the people. And it’s none of the government’s business what any of its people choose to say.

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