When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post almost 12 years ago, he went out of his way to assuage fears that he would turn the paper into his personal mouthpiece. “The values of The Post do not need changing,” he wrote at the time. “The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners.” For much of his tenure, Bezos kept that promise. On Wednesday, he betrayed it.

In a statement posted on X, Bezos announced an overhaul of the Post’s opinion section, expressly limiting the ideology of the department and its writers: “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” In response, the Post’s opinion editor, David Shipley, resigned.

This is the second time in the past six months that Bezos has meddled in the editorial processes of the paper—and specifically its opinion page. In October, Bezos intervened to shut down the Post’s presidential-endorsement process, suggesting that the ritual was meaningless and would only create the perception of bias. Many criticized his decision as a capitulation to Donald Trump, though Bezos denied those claims. Several editorial-board members resigned in protest, and more than 250,000 people canceled their subscription to the paper in the immediate aftermath. Some interpreted this week’s announcement similarly, saying that the Amazon founder is bending the knee to the current administration; the Post’s former editor in chief, Marty Baron, told The Daily Beast that “there is no doubt in my mind that he is doing this out of fear of the consequences for his other business interests.” Bezos did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

[Chuck Todd: Jeff Bezos is blaming the victim]

Whatever Bezos’s personal reasons are, equally important is the fact that he is emboldened to interfere so brazenly. And he’s not alone. A broader change has been under way among the tech and political elite over the past year or so. Whether it’s Bezos remaking a major national paper in his image or Elon Musk tearing out the guts of the federal government with DOGE, bosses of all stripes are publicly and unapologetically disposing of societal norms and seizing control of institutions to orient the world around themselves. Welcome to the Great Emboldening, where ideas and actions that might have been unthinkable, objectionable, or reputationally risky in the past are now on the table.

This dynamic has echoes of the first Trump administration. Trump’s political rise offered a salient lesson that shamelessness can be a superpower in a political era when attention is often the most precious resource. Trump demonstrated that distorting the truth and generating outrage results in a lot of attentional value: When caught in a lie, he doubled down, denied, and went on the offensive. As a result, he made the job of demanding accountability much harder. Scandals that might otherwise have been ruinous—the Access Hollywood tape, for example—were spun as baseless attacks from enemies. Trump commandeered the phrase fake news from the media and then turned it against journalists when they reported on his lies. These tactics were successful enough that they spawned a generation of copycats: Unscrupulous politicians and business leaders in places such as Silicon Valley now had a playbook to use against their critics and, following Trump’s election, a movement to back it. Wittingly or not, nobody embodied this behavior better than Musk, who has spent the past decade operating with a healthy contempt for institutions, any semblance of decorum, and the law.

[Read: The flattening machine]

Trump’s first term was chaotic and run like a reality-television show; as a policy maker, he was largely ineffectual, instead governing via late-night tweets, outlandish press conferences, and a revolving door of hirings, fallings-out, and firings. But it wasn’t until the 2020 election and the events leading up to January 6 that Trump truly attempted to subvert American democracy to retain power. Although he was briefly exiled from major social-media channels, Trump got away with it: The narrative around January 6 was warped by Republican lawmakers and Trump supporters, and he continued to lead the Republican Party. This, along with the success of Trump’s 2024 campaign—which was rooted in the promise of exercising extreme executive authority—was a signal to powerful individuals, including many technology executives and investors, that they could act however they pleased.

[Read: The internet is worse than a brainwashing machine]

Trump winning the popular vote in November only amplified this dynamic. CEOs including Mark Zuckerberg pledged to roll back past content-moderation reforms and corporate-inclusivity initiatives, viewed now as excesses of the coronavirus-pandemic emergency and an outdated regime of overreach. Bosses in Silicon Valley, who saw the social-justice initiatives and worker solidarity of the COVID crisis as a kind of mutiny, felt emboldened and sought to regain control over their workforce, including by requiring people to return to the office. Tech executives professed that they were no longer afraid to speak their mind. On X, the Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia (who now works for Musk’s DOGE initiative) described the late 2010s and the Joe Biden era as “a time of silence, shaming, and fear.” That people like Gebbia—former liberals who used to fall in line with the politics of their peers—are now supporting Trump, the entrepreneur wrote, is part of a broader “woke-up call.”

The Great Emboldening has taken many forms. At the Los Angeles Times, the billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong paved the way for Bezos, spiking a Kamala Harris endorsement and pledging to restore ideological balance to the paper by hiring right-wing columnists and experimenting with building a “bias meter” to measure opinions in the paper’s news stories. For some far-right influencers, this supposed MAGA cultural shift offers little more than the ability to offend with no consequences. “It’s okay to say retard again. And that’s great,” one right-wing X personality posted in December. Musk and others, including Steve Bannon, have taken this a step further, making what appear to be Nazi salutes while mocking anyone in the media who calls them out.

The DOGE incursion into the federal government is the single best example of the emboldening at work—a premeditated plan to remake the federal government by seizing control of its information and terrorizing its workforce with firings and bureaucratic confusion. It is a barely veiled show of strength that revolves largely around the threat of mass layoffs. Some of DOGE’s exploits, as with a few of Trump’s executive orders, may not be legal, and some have been stopped by federal judges. As my colleagues and I have reported, some DOGE staffers have entered offices and accessed sensitive government data without the proper clearances and background checks, and have bypassed security protocols without concern. But the second Trump administration operates as though it is unconcerned with abiding by the standards and practices of the federal government.

Bezos’s long-term plans for the Post beyond overhauling its opinion section aren’t yet known. But the timing of his decision to change the direction of its op-ed coverage tracks with the behavior of his peers, many of whom are adhering to the tenets of the Elon Musk school of management. When Bezos acquired The Washington Post for $250 million in 2013, its value to the tech baron was largely reputational. The purchase solidified Bezos as a mogul and, perhaps just as important, as a steward and benefactor of an important institution. Not meddling in the paper’s editorial affairs wasn’t just a strategy born out of the goodness of his heart; it was a way to exercise power through benevolence. Bezos could be seen as one of the good guys, shepherding an institution through the perils of an internet age that he profited handsomely from. Even if he stewed privately at the paper’s “Democracy dies in darkness” pivot in the first Trump administration, stepping in to influence coverage likely would have felt like too big a risk—an untenable mixing of Church and state.

But the DOGE era offers a permission structure. In a moment of deep institutional distrust, Trump 2.0 has tried to make the case that anything goes and that previously unthinkable uses of executive power—such as, say, dismantling USAID—may be possible, if executed with enough shamelessness and bravado. Bezos may or may not be turning the Post’s opinion section into a state-media apparatus for Trump and his oligarch class. Either way, the pivot is a direct product of the second Trump era and mirrors the president’s own trajectory with the United States government. Become the figurehead of an institution. Try to control it by the old rules. When that doesn’t work, take it by force, break it down, and rebuild it in your image.

If you have tips about the remaking of the federal government, you can contact Matteo Wong on Signal at @matteowong.52.

Late Friday night, the Trump administration, as part of its push to modernize the government with software, laid off roughly 90 people from the General Services Administration—all federal technologists whose role was to modernize the government with software. Employees on the 18F team, a group formed in the Obama era to build and improve software for other agencies, were notified around midnight that their roles are being eliminated, according to several former 18F workers I spoke with. Team members were emailed termination letters, copies of which I obtained, stating that their position “is being abolished as part of an agency reduction-in-force.” (Last month, Elon Musk hinted at the group’s demise when he wrote on X that 18F “has been deleted.”)

For some of the workers, it was their second time being fired in a month. At least some of 18F’s probationary employees, who typically have been in their government role for only one to two years, had previously been terminated in the Trump administration’s mass firings, then reinstated this week, and then fired again Friday night, according to former 18F staff I spoke with.

The role of 18F was to help federal agencies improve their digital services. The group has worked on federal and state projects used by millions of Americans. It was, in essence, an internal consulting group within the federal government, deployed to other agencies to solve technical problems. By acting, essentially, as an in-house contractor for the federal government, the team did not need to directly spend taxpayer dollars and was instead reimbursed by partner agencies. 18F worked on projects including IRS Direct File, a new service that allows citizens to file tax returns online; covid.gov, which allowed Americans to apply for and receive free COVID tests during the pandemic; weather.gov, which provides weather forecasts and alerts to the entire nation; and a new way to file civil-rights complaints with the Department of Justice, among others. Without 18F staff to continue the work, many of these projects are now in jeopardy, former agency workers told me; current efforts under way, such as with weather.gov, will likely cease or face delays, and completed services could degrade as they stop being monitored or updated.

The team was tailor-made for government efficiency and technology—something the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency and its allies might, in theory, uplift. But as Trump and his surrogates continue to centralize power over government operations, it makes sense that DOGE would want to reign in, or simply bulldoze, 18F. Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who is now the acting director of Technology Transformation Services, an IT division of GSA that houses 18F, lauded the team as a “gold standard” for improving federal technology at a team all-hands last month. But in the same meeting, Shedd also described TTS as a failing start-up. (I obtained a recording of the meeting.) That was the day that Musk, DOGE’s leader, reshared a post on X describing 18F as a “far left government wide computer office” and wrote that 18F “has been deleted.” This led to confusion for the team and its partner agencies; at the time, 18F persisted, but its X account vanished. At 1 a.m. Saturday, roughly an hour after employees were terminated, Shedd sent a message to TTS stating that 18F had been deemed “non-critical” as part of agency-wide downsizing.

The Obama administration initially formed 18F, alongside the United States Digital Service, in 2014 to help with healthcare.gov, a health-care marketplace established under the Affordable Care Act. These projects have cut costs for some federal agencies by as much as 50 percent, according to a 2016 GSA press release, although the team has struggled to recover its own costs in the past. Past federal audits also found that the team failed to comply with some IT regulations. Musk’s comment about deleting 18F referenced previous X posts alleging that the team was “a far-left agency that viciously subverted Trump during his first term,” and singled out TTS’s “Inclusion Bot,” which sent automated messages about inclusive language in Slack. (TTS removed the Inclusion Bot shortly after President Donald Trump’s inauguration this January, one employee told me.)  

Jeff White, a spokesperson for the General Services Administration, told me in a written statement that 18F was eliminated in accordance with several executive orders mandating a reduction in the size of the federal workforce. “GSA will continue to support the Administration’s drive to embrace best in class technologies to accelerate digital transformation,” he wrote.  

The lead-up to Friday’s layoffs was drawn out and harried, according to the former employees. TTS workers had already received numerous messages from the new administration that they told me resembled phishing attempts—from a new email server, without standard headers and footers, also sent as late as 1 a.m.—reminding them about the Deferred Resignation Program, an offer for federal employees to quit ahead of expected layoffs. Several federal employees described the emails, which I have reviewed, as pressuring them to resign. In one message, Stephen Ehikian, the newly appointed director of GSA, stressed that the offer “is real and EVERYONE has to” consider it seriously. He wrote twice that every GSA employee needed to “make the best decision for you and your families.”

Amid talk of termination, TTS workers were subjected to brief interviews with DOGE staffers—who frequently showed up late and without revealing their last name—asking about the federal workers’ responsibilities, with questions such as “What’s your superpower?” GSA employees were also told they would need to work from a federal office, but without specifications of where; much of 18F worked remotely. One former 18F worker told me, “It’s chaotic, and it feels like it’s chaotic on purpose.”

The experience of 18F echoes a pattern of chaos in DOGE’s actions across the federal government—at USAID, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Human Health and Services, and elsewhere. DOGE has exposed potentially sensitive data on its website, and fired and then tried to rehire nuclear-security, bird-flu, food-safety, and medical-device experts. As my colleagues and I have reported, DOGE has flouted cybersecurity protocol to access data and IT systems at a number of federal agencies—potentially including sensitive information on U.S. citizens, defense technologies, and infectious diseases.

DOGE’s actions have been widely compared with the playbook that Musk used to decimate and remake Twitter into X: The inefficiency is the point. Asking workers to resign or justify their work through scrambled, aggressive messages almost inevitably prompts exodus and collapse, voluntary or not. But another useful comparison might be the playbook that Musk follows from space programs for his company SpaceX. Government teams, their staff, and the citizens they serve are like test launches of rocket prototypes: Try a new ship design uncrewed, knowing it could well explode, and repeat. But in this case, people are aboard.

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