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.

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.

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.

Like many Americans lately, I am seized with curiosity about who is actually running the government of the United States. For that reason, I watched Sean Hannity’s Fox News interview tonight with President Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

But I am still not sure who’s in charge. If there is a headline from the interview, it is that the president of the United States feels that he requires the services of a multi-billionaire to enforce his executive orders. Trump complained that he would write these “beautiful” executive orders, that would then languish in administrative limbo. Musk, for his part, explained how the president is the embodiment of the nation and that resisting his orders is the same as thwarting the will of the people. Hannity, of course, enthusiastically supported all of this whining about how hard it is to govern a superpower.

In other words, it was an hour of conversation among three men who have no idea how American democracy works.

The goal of the interview, I assume, was to calm some of the waters around Trump’s relationship with Musk, and especially to present Musk as just another patriotic American who is only trying to help out his government in a time of crisis. Hannity deplored how shamefully the richest man in the world is being treated despite trying to create technologies to “help the blind to see.” Trump and Musk bemoaned how the world is trying to drive them apart, but affirmed that they like each other very much. “I wanted to find somebody smarter than him,” Trump said in one of his classic insult-praise combination punches, “but I couldn’t do it.”

[Jonathan Lemire: Elon Musk is president]

They may have even been telling the truth: Trump loves people who publicly love him back, and Musk seems to be grateful to be in a place—in this case, the White House—where people aren’t judging him for supporting Trump, a new social opprobrium that clearly stings him. “The eye-daggers level is insane,” he said, after recounting that people at a dinner party reacted to Trump’s name as if they’d been hit with “a dart in the jugular that contained, like, methamphetamine and rabies.” (This, from a man whose social media feed is a daily exercise in trolling.)

The interview was arduous both for the viewer and for Hannity, because everyone who interviews Trump must always contend with the president’s apparent inability to hold a single thought for very long. Hannity, as usual, tried to throw softballs; Trump, as usual, missed every pitch. Hannity at one point noted that Trump has “become a student of history” and then asked how the Framers of the Constitution would view his efforts to rein in the bureaucracy. Trump verbally wandered about before returning to his talking points about Musk, who he said is “amazing” and “cares.” So say James Madison and the other Founders, apparently.

And so it went, with Trump digressing into various riffs drawn from his rally speeches, ranging from immigration to the money he saved on contracts for Air Force One to hurricane damage in North Carolina. (He was trying to praise Musk for providing Starlink access to stricken areas, but it was evident that Trump has no idea what Starlink is or does.)

A few other news flashes from the interview: The president of the United States thinks that the government should not pay its bills in full. It should lowball its contractors and force them to accept half payment, he said. Former President Joe Biden was going to leave two American astronauts marooned in space for “political reasons” according to Musk. Also, Biden wrecked America in every possible way, but they’re fixing it. Musk said he has never seen Trump do anything “mean” or “wrong,” while Trump claimed that he’s always respected Musk. Musk added that he’s never asked Trump for anything, ever, and that if a conflict should arise in his DOGE efforts, he’ll recognize it and recuse himself.  (Earlier today, when asked why DOGE and SpaceX employees are working at the FAA and DoD, agencies where Musk has contracts or regulatory relationships, Trump said: “Well, I mean, I’m just hearing about it.”) Finally, Trump and Musk expect to find a trillion dollars of fraud and waste in the government.

Musk did generally behave himself, instead of stealing the show as he did a few days ago in the Oval Office. When prompted by Trump, he said he very much liked “Bobby”—Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. —who he said was demonstrating the scientific method by questioning science.  And in an interesting moment of inadvertent candor, Musk also defended some of the people working for DOGE, noting that they were taking much lower pay to help the government rather than the salaries they could command in private industry—much like the people he’s working to get fired.

[Tom Nichols: Trump and Musk are destroying the basics of a healthy democracy]

Hannity at one point brushed away Musk’s status as an unelected functionary by noting that no one votes for the Cabinet, either, which returns us to the problem that this conversation took place among people who do not understand the basic structure of their own government. (Cabinet officials, unlike Musk, are confirmed by the Senate and impeachable; the days when Republicans objected to Hillary Clinton’s task force on health care because she was unelected and unaccountable are now only of blessed memory.)

After an hour of this rambling and sometimes weird conversation, all I could think of was George W. Bush’s reported reaction to Trump’s first inaugural address: “That was some weird shit.”

This low-key fandango was probably good enough for MAGA fan-servicing purposes, but seems unlikely to reassure the millions of Americans doubtful that the president and the plutocrat know what they’re doing. The president seems only dimly aware of the details of Musk’s adventures, but he’s certain a smart guy like Musk is furthering his agenda—whatever it is. Musk, who answers to no one, is full of fervor to kill off government agencies he does not understand, because unelected rich men firing probationary federal employees is apparently how true Jeffersonian democracy is restored to an ailing America.

How long this chaos can go on is anyone’s guess. At some point, Musk might cross one of Trump’s other officials, or he might bring enough bad press that Trump himself could end up throwing Musk off the ship of state, as he has done to so many other of his loyal subordinates. But no matter how it ends, Trump will still be president, and Musk will still be rich. The rest of us, unfortunately, will be living with the damage done.

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Last week, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene called the national debt “one of the biggest betrayals against the American people,” suggesting that Americans’ anger about debt “gave birth to the concept of DOGE.” The idea that Elon Musk and his band of government-efficiency crusaders can bring down the debt is a tidy one. But DOGE’s current plans would hardly put a dent in the deficit.

Musk has lamented that America is “drowning” in debt, which has indeed ballooned over the past decade: As of this month, the federal debt is $36 trillion, about $13 trillion higher than it was five years ago. Debt has not been a priority of either major political party for some time, my colleague Annie Lowrey, who covers economics, told me. And despite Taylor Greene’s claims about American anger over the debt, it’s not a top-of-mind issue for people at the polls, either, Annie argued.

If Musk’s team were serious about reducing the deficit, it could explore some unpopular but effective options: reduce spending for the military and the entitlement programs that make up the bulk of the federal budget—Medicare and Social Security—or simply raise taxes, Annie suggested. Instead, what Musk and DOGE have done thus far is ravage government agencies and departments (USAID, for example, which makes up a tiny portion of the budget, and the destruction of which won’t lead to major savings). They’ve also focused on slashing the federal workforce by offering buyouts to 2 million federal workers (and, over the weekend, axing thousands more federal-agency employees); so far, salaries for the workers who have accepted the buyout offer make up a minuscule portion of the national budget in total.

Musk, Trump, and their allies have also turned to a bit of magical thinking, claiming that rooting out fraud in the government is the key to saving money. In a meandering address from the Oval Office last week, Musk claimed without evidence that USAID workers were raking in millions in kickbacks, and that people as old as 150 were claiming Social Security benefits. He wrote on X last week that “at this point, I am 100% certain that the magnitude of the fraud in federal entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, Disability, etc) exceeds the combined sum of every private scam you’ve ever heard by FAR.”

Stumbling upon, and reclaiming, trillions of fraudulently spent funds would be rather convenient, and crying “fraud” is a useful way for Musk and his defenders to cast DOGE’s actions as in service of the American people. Trump has touted this same shaky logic, asserting that uncovering a bunch of fraud could mean America has less debt than previously thought. Fraud does exist in parts of the government: Some people intend to defraud government programs; others accidentally sign up for benefits they’re not actually eligible for. And the government does sometimes make payment errors—federal agencies estimated that more than $200 billion was lost in fiscal year 2023 because of such mistakes, and in past years fraud losses accounted for 3 to 7 percent of the budget. But there is no evidence that lowering the deficit is as simple as tamping down on fraud—or that fraud exists to the extent Musk claims.

Plus, by whacking the bureaucracy, Musk and his team are weakening programs that are already working to tamp down fraud. All federal programs have fraud-detection mandates. The Treasury, for example, announced in October that it had recovered or prevented $4 billion in fraud losses in the prior fiscal year, in part from employing AI machine-learning. And as he rails against what he calls fraud, Musk and his associates have effectively shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose mandate is to crack down on fraud in businesses (and which might have regulated Musk’s own companies).

The rhetorical trick of politicians referring to unpopular or disliked government spending as fraud isn’t new. But in an era of rampant scamming, claiming that the American government is swindling its own people hits on a salient national fear. Musk’s first few weeks running DOGE don’t bode well for his ability to solve the debt crisis. He may succeed, however, in further eroding trust in government, which could give him and his team even more leeway in their attempts to dismantle it.

Related:

The hidden costs of Musk’s Washington misadventure The government’s computing experts say they are terrified.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

How MAGA is reimagining foreign policy January 6 still happened. Want to change your personality? Have a baby. Frozen food’s new wave

Today’s News

Top representatives from Russia and the U.S. met in Saudi Arabia to discuss strengthening economic and diplomatic relations between the two countries and assembling a team to start peace negotiations in the Ukraine war. The Trump administration fired thousands of probationary federal workers over the weekend in departments including the FAA, Health and Human Services, and Energy. The acting head of the Social Security Administration resigned after DOGE requested access to sensitive personal information about millions of Americans.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Derek Thompson explains how COVID pushed a generation of young people to the right.

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Evening Read

NBC

Saturday Night Live Played the Wrong Greatest-Hits Reel

By Esther Zuckerman

Fifty years is a long time. But you wouldn’t necessarily know that from large portions of SNL50: The Anniversary Special, the much-hyped celebration of the long-running sketch show that aired in prime time last night. SNL50 was meant to commemorate the program, created and executive-produced by Lorne Michaels, for achieving five decades of cultural relevance. But the evening’s rundown suffered from a severe case of recency bias, with sketches that were more inclined to play it safe than honor the show’s extensive, complicated, and fascinating history.

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Culture Break

Marvel Studios

Watch (or skip). The newest Captain America movie (out now in theaters) seemed set to explore much-needed fresh ground for the Marvel franchise. But the movie quickly wastes any of that potential, writes David Sims.

Read. Robert Frost wasn’t always good, James Parker argues. Before he became America’s most famous poet, he wrote some real howlers.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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