For all the norms Donald Trump flouted in his first term, his approach to filling out his administration was familiar. He rooted around the same sets of professions as his predecessors, hiring lawyers, CEOs, academics, and military leaders, among others. Liberals may not have liked his picks—Jeff Sessions for attorney general, say, or Michael Flynn for national security adviser—but regardless of ideology, most of his top advisers had recognizable credentials. In his second term, Trump has found a new talent pool to draw from: podcasters.

In the past week, Trump has tapped two podcasters, Dan Bongino and Graham Allen, for high-ranking jobs in his administration. Bongino, who hosts one of the most popular right-wing podcasts in the country, will become the deputy director of the FBI. Allen, of the Dear America Podcast, will serve as a top communications official at the Defense Department. Even accounting for their unconventional backgrounds, their appointments are surprising. Each has used his platform to trade in extreme conspiracist beliefs. On his show, Bongino has claimed that the pipe bombs found near the Capitol on January 6, 2021, were actually an “inside job,” that the results of the 2020 presidential election were false, and that checks and balances in the government matter less than “power.” (Though a former Secret Service agent, Bongino has no previous experience at the FBI—a departure from those who have held the role in past administrations.) Allen has reportedly claimed that climate change is part of a liberal plot to control people and has called Taylor Swift “a witch and a devil.”

Bongino and Allen, neither of whom responded to requests for comment, are part of a cohort of right-wing media figures who have been assigned top roles within the administration. That includes Darren Beattie, the founder of the conspiracist website Revolver News, who joined the State Department, and Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host who is now secretary of defense. Many, if not most, of these figures earned Trump’s loyalty by using their platforms to be obsequious stewards of MAGA—in effect, creating a quasi–state media. But as these figures make the move to government, the Trump administration is also now becoming a media-run state.

[Read: The white nationalist now in charge of Trump’s public diplomacy]

It’s hardly unprecedented for media journalists to make the jump into politics—especially in communication roles. In his first term, Trump picked Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News, as his chief strategist, and then–CNBC host Larry Kudlow as the head of the National Economic Council. In 2008, Jay Carney left Time to join Barack Obama’s administration, eventually becoming the president’s press secretary. But something odder is going on now within the Trump administration: a breakdown of the barriers between media and government.

Trump’s recent appointments are only part of the melding. Consider the likes of Charlie Kirk, who doesn’t have an official government position but still seems to hold influence. In November, Politico reported that Kirk, the Turning Point USA founder and right-wing media figure, advised Trump on whom he should select for significant roles in his then-forthcoming administration. Jack Posobiec, a right-wing influencer who rose to prominence by pushing conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate, was invited by Pentagon officials to travel on Hegseth’s first trip overseas. He then claimed to have joined Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on a trip to Ukraine, meeting with the country’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky.

The right-wing media’s formal and informal roles in the administration mark a new kind of singularity. The podcasters now do policy and dabble in politics. And some right-wing politicians, including Ted Cruz and Dan Crenshaw, have their own podcasts. So do some politicians on the left, such as California Governor Gavin Newsom, who announced a new show this week. But on the right, politicians and media figures more explicitly mingle and work toward the same goals.

That is especially the case now that the Trump administration has barred media outlets including the Associated Press from covering many White House events, while welcoming in right-wing media figures such as Lara Logan. Although Fox News and Newsmax have cut ties with Logan for her extremist views, she was recently included in a State Department listening session. Similarly, yesterday, the Department of Justice chose to first give documents regarding the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein to right-wing influencers—including Posobiec and Chaya Raichik, who runs Libs of TikTok, a high-profile right-wing account on X—instead of actual journalists. (The documents reportedly contain little new information.)

This blurring is indicative of a substantive shift in how the contemporary right operates. The conservative media ecosystem has long functioned as the id of the right wing. But in the media-state singularity, there is not even the pretense of space between the two worlds. President George H. W. Bush hosted Rush Limbaugh overnight in the White House, in a likely attempt to ingratiate himself with the radio host. Trump doesn’t need to do such a thing, because the modern equivalents of Limbaugh are inside his administration as high-ranking staff members. (After Limbaugh’s death, in 2021, Bongino took over his slot on many radio stations.)

The practical effect of this union is an ongoing rightward lurch. That the conservative media has infiltrated the White House explains some of the current administration’s policies—proposed mass deportations, vindictive tariffs, attempts to gut entire federal agencies. The new direction of the executive branch is a far-right podcaster’s fever dream. As Bongino posted in November: “We are the media now.” Since the election, the phrase has become popular among an online right distrustful of legacy news outlets. It’s only partially correct. Right-wing influencers such as Bongino are the media to swaths of America. They are also now the government itself.

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.