The institutions of the American government are under siege by the president of the United States. Donald Trump claims that he is fulfilling campaign promises to slash the bureaucracy and reduce waste. But what he is in fact doing is weakening potential obstacles—especially the federal civil service—that might stand in the way of his accumulation of wide and unaccountable power.

No one likes bureaucracies, even if they must acknowledge that modern states cannot function without them. But Trump’s contempt for government employees is not driven by some sort of noble, reformist instinct: He distrusts public service because he does not understand it. The president has a solipsistic and binary view of the world in which everything revolves around him, and other people either support him or oppose him. He is unable to comprehend the principle of an apolitical service that must obey the Constitution and the law over the wishes of Donald J. Trump.

In Trump’s world, service—including military service—is for suckers and losers. Only saps forgo personal benefit and miss out on a chunky payday in order to be part of something bigger than themselves. The president and his MAGA allies, accordingly, have portrayed diligent government employees as schemers who are part of some nefarious ideological project. In a titanic act of projection, Trump has convinced millions of Americans that their fellow citizens are scammers just out for themselves.

I retired from the federal workforce in 2022 with more than 25 years of service in the Defense Department and on the staff of the U.S. Senate. I agree that plenty of agencies and deadwood employees should go gently into that good night, and sooner rather than later. But folding up federal agencies and firing their employees is a complicated business, requiring a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer. Only someone with profound hubris would be willing to make such changes in a matter of weeks (especially if they lack any experience in the public sector), which may explain why Trump tapped Elon Musk for the job.

[Read: Elon Musk is president]

Trump’s project began with an executive order empowering DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, to “implement the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” This is stilted hooey, but in any case, the unelected, unconfirmed, and unaccountable Musk took up the cause with gusto, barging into government offices, attempting to access classified facilities, and seizing control of information assets such as the Treasury’s payments system.

Some of this is constitutionally sketchy and probably illegal, as my colleague Jonathan Chait wrote yesterday. Some government employees may, of course, one day prevail in civil lawsuits, but with Trump now in control of the Justice Department and immunized for “official acts” by the Supreme Court, no one in his administration is going to stop him or Musk at this point.

Musk’s role in Trump’s efforts creates significant conflicts of interest. (He is a government contractor, after all.) His motives are somewhat opaque but likely come from both practical and ideological interests, especially because these days he sounds like a late-night caller to a MAGA talk-radio program. (The U.S. Agency for International Development, he posted on X, was “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.”) And if Musk can seize control of the federal payments system—as he seems to be in the process of doing—perhaps he thinks he is a step closer to fulfilling his dream of replacing the national financial system with some galactic payment app that handles everything.

But, like Trump, Musk also appears to just detest people who work in public service. Both men resent government agencies for two important reasons: They do not own these public institutions, and the employees do not instantly obey their orders.

Federal employees answer to their departments and to the president, but within the constraints of the law and the Constitution. Trump’s supporters will argue that the machinery of the federal government should, in fact, answer directly and completely to the president, but they’re trying to revive a settled argument: America already had the debate over cronyism and the spoils system in the 19th and 20th centuries, which is why the United States has laws specifically meant to prevent the abuse of public institutions for personal or political gain, including the Pendleton Act of 1883, the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, and various iterations of the Hatch Act.

Indeed, even this administration seems to realize that what it’s asking is completely alien to the modern American credo of professional and apolitical national service. Trump has resurrected an order he issued back in 2020 (which was immediately rescinded by Joe Biden) with some careful edits. But the new language about “accountability” does not change the fact that Trump’s order reclassifies many civil servants as functionally equivalent to political appointees, removing their civil-service protections and making them fireable at will by the president. In other words, Trump is redefining public servants as presidential servants.

Trump learned the hard way during his first term that bureaucrats and other federal employees, with their pesky insistence on outdated concepts such as “the rule of law,” could be a consistent obstacle to his various machinations. When Trump tried to strong-arm the Ukrainians into investigating Biden by withholding U.S. aid, for example, federal whistleblowers sounded the alarm. Other federal agencies and appointees—including leaders of the United States military—were impediments to Trump’s most dangerous and unconstitutional impulses.

[From the November 2023 issue: The patriot]

The president appears to have learned his lesson. This time, he has prepared the ground for his attack on government institutions by demonizing the people who work in them at almost every level. He may not be able to disestablish entire organizations (although he might well try), but even short of that, he can make their employees so hated by the rest of the country that they can be terrorized into obedience or resignation. Trump’s campaign against the civil service, as one manager working in the federal government told NBC News, is “psychological warfare” on a daily basis.

Trump’s suspicion of the government he leads is also why he has sent shockingly unqualified nominees to head the Defense Department, the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and other agencies. Think of it as a kind of political pincer attack: At the top, Trump decapitates important organizations and removes their professional staff. He replaces them with people who do not know or care about what they’re doing other than carrying out Trump’s orders. At the bottom, Musk and the president’s new hires at the Office of Personnel Management ensure that whoever is left is either a loyalist who will support such orders or someone too scared to object to them.

President Trump regards people who take their constitutional oath seriously as, by definition, his political enemies. If he is going to rule as the autocrat he wishes to be, he knows he must replace career civil servants with flunkies and vassals who will serve him and his needs above all else. His attack on public service is not about reform; it’s a first strike against a key obstacle to authoritarianism.

As Elon Musk set out to upend the federal bureaucracy on behalf of Donald Trump, he reached out to Trump’s team with an unusual request: U.S. law generally prohibits noncitizens from working for the federal government, but Musk was hoping to make an exception for Baris Akis, a Turkish-born venture capitalist with a green card who had become a close ally.

The answer, delivered privately by Trump’s advisers, was an unequivocal no, two people familiar with the decision told us.

Trump’s White House is in the business of deporting people, and bringing in a foreign national to help shrink the government’s American workforce would send a confusing message, one of these people said. (Neither Akis nor the White House responded to a request for comment.)

Musk and his team accepted the rejection and moved on, but the previously unreported exchange offers a glimpse into the complex dynamics of the Musk-Trump relationship, arguably the most consequential partnership in Washington. This story is based on interviews with six people who have worked closely with Trump or Musk or are directly familiar with their relationship, all of whom requested anonymity to describe private interactions.

The world’s richest man has established himself as a singular force in the administration’s effort to slash government programs, agencies, and federal employees. Yet as an unelected “special government employee,” Musk still relies on the president for his authority. Since sweeping into Washington alongside Trump, Musk has wielded enormous power. He has pressured federal employees into deferred resignations; dug into government data and financial systems; used his massive social-media platform, X, to pick fights and bully opponents; and fed the U.S. Agency for International Development “into the woodchipper,” as he boasted yesterday on X, or at least helped get the agency folded into the State Department. He believes that understanding and mastering the government’s computer systems is the key to overhauling and fixing the government. But he does so at Trump’s behest, at least for as long as he has the president’s blessing.

Trump has made a point in recent days of making clear his supremacy over Musk, and Musk, for all his influence, has found himself bending to the strictures of the White House. Musk’s private security team, for instance, must wait in the parking lot at the 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue campus when he goes to work in a conference room at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building because of the building’s own security protocols, one of the people familiar with the arrangement told us.  

“Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval. And we will give him the approval where appropriate, and where not appropriate we won’t,” Trump said yesterday during a signing event in the Oval Office. “Where we think there is a conflict or there’s a problem, we won’t let him go near it.”

On Sunday, Trump exited Air Force One after arriving in Washington from Palm Beach, and praised Musk as a “cost-cutter” who was “doing a good job,” before establishing the hierarchy: “Sometimes we won’t agree with it, and we’ll not go where he wants to go.”

Trump’s somewhat pointed comments on Musk “are important,” a longtime Trump confidant told us, explaining that “there’s one president.” This person said that Trump had learned about how to work within the government during his first term, but “that’s not true of Elon.”

But Musk nonetheless has threatened to steal the spotlight from Trump in recent days, becoming the public face of the administration’s most disruptive moves, including an effort to force thousands of voluntary resignations from the federal workforce. Inside the West Wing, he has found many allies, having ingratiated himself with mid-tier Trump aides early in the transition, when he moved down to Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club and established himself as an accessible, if quirky, presence. He regularly shared his cellphone number, including with younger staff, and spent his days sending around memes and ideas about overhauling the government, according to a person who saw the texts but who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Musk has a group of loyalists he often brings with him to each of his various government projects—a cadre Trump today praised as “smart people.” But, unlike many people with his net worth and renown, Musk “travels pretty light,” one person told us. Two people told us that, during the time he spent at Mar-a-Lago, they most regularly saw him with his young son X—“just that kid on his shoulders,” one of the people said—and sometimes X’s nanny.

Musk preempted Trump shortly after midnight Monday in a live broadcast on X with the announcement that the Trump administration would seek to shutter USAID based on his own team’s investigation of the agency. “As we dug into USAID, it became apparent that what we have here is not an apple with a worm in it,” Musk said. “What we have here is just a ball of worms.”

And he has continued to pick public fights with Democratic leaders despite his new day job as a government employee. He accused House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of wanting to continue “waste fraud and abuse” after Jeffries attacked Musk’s leadership of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, which operates as a part of the Executive Office of the President. Musk also wrote on X that Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer was mad about his work “dismantling the radical-left shadow government.”

Musk’s decision to seek a special dispensation for a noncitizen adviser came after the Tesla CEO’s views on immigration policy became a flash point inside the president’s circle late last year. When Musk defended the practice of giving H-1B visas to highly skilled foreign workers, Trump allies including Steve Bannon attacked Musk as part of a group of “techno-feudalists” undermining American workers. Trump had previously been critical of the H-1B visa system, but eventually sided with Musk in the dispute. Musk also moderated his stance, calling for “major reform” to how the visas are granted.

Democrats, who have struggled to respond effectively to Trump in the first weeks of his second term, have become more focused on Musk as a potential weak point for the president, as polling has shown significant public concern about Musk. A late-January poll by Quinnipiac University found that 53 percent of voters disapproved of him playing a prominent role in the Trump administration, compared with 39 percent who approved. About one in five Republican voters disapproved of Musk’s role.

Because of his special-government-employee status, Musk’s time in government is expected to be limited. Employees under this status, who do not have to divest from outside conflicts of interest, are permitted to work no more than 130 days in a single year. Other members of Musk’s team, including Katie Miller, a Department of Government Efficiency adviser, are also working for the government under the temporary designation. (Musk is also close to Miller’s husband, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.)

Musk’s preferred work habits before entering the federal bureaucracy could provide a window into how he might continue to feed “into the woodchipper” programs and spending that he views as Washington bloat. During his time in the private sector, Musk tended to burrow into each of his companies on different days, a person familiar with his routine told us. Monday was for SpaceX, Tuesday was for Tesla, and Wednesday was for X.

This week, Sunday and Monday were clearly for USAID. By tomorrow and Thursday, however, he might be ready to turn his buzz saw elsewhere.