During Tulsi Gabbard’s confirmation hearing, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, both Democrats and Republicans, repeatedly asked the soon-to-be director of national intelligence whether Edward Snowden was a traitor for releasing thousands of classified documents that revealed clandestine U.S. sources and methods. And repeatedly Gabbard declined to condemn Snowden beyond the tepid acknowledgment that he’d broken the law. Even at that, she praised him for exposing a secret program.

All nine Republicans on the Intelligence Committee, and every Republican senator except Mitch McConnell, nonetheless voted to confirm her to lead America’s 18 intelligence agencies. Among her responsibilities, she will be delivering a daily brief to the president that curates analysis of the country’s most urgent problems.

Gabbard has hardly demonstrated the judgment necessary for the task. In 2013, overwhelming evidence, including expert U.S.-intelligence analysis, showed that the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons on his people. Gabbard was unwilling to believe it, perhaps because the conclusion did not accord with her preconceived ideas about the Syrian civil conflict. This is the stance of someone likely to either miss or reject warnings of emergent threats. And it’s not the only sign that the Trump administration is putting American security at risk.

Gabbard’s appointment is just one factor leading American allies, including but not limited to the “Five Eyes” states (the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, in addition to the U.S.), to worry about whether they can securely share intelligence with the Trump administration. The Five Eyes extend the geographical reach of U.S. intelligence coverage and provide assessments that can increase or even usefully challenge U.S. findings. This input plays a part in calibrating the confidence that U.S. agencies have in their own conclusions. Australia’s intelligence services, for example, were the first to understand the risks that Huawei components posed for Western telecommunications networks. Their findings drove investigations in the U.S. and U.K. that led allied countries to strip Huawei hardware out of their 5G networks.  

[Shane Harris: Elon Musk is breaking the national-security system]

Without allied cooperation, Washington will soon be operating on a fraction of the insight it once had into foreign threats. And the U.S. will need that supplemental intelligence more than ever, because the Trump administration has hobbled its own premier intelligence-gathering agency by offering career-terminating buyouts to all CIA employees. Those who leave will take with them decades of experience running agents, understanding how foreign governments operate, building trust with international counterparts, and spotting meaningful anomalies.

Turning over the entire intelligence workforce will set the United States back incalculably in terms of its ability to both understand the world and act effectively against its adversaries. Consider Iran, an opaque, authoritarian foe whose powerful supreme leader is 85 years old. When Ayatollah Ali Khamenei dies, events will unfold quickly on the ground: internal power struggles in Tehran, opportunistic maneuvers in the region. The U.S. government will not want to be on a learning curve at that moment—it will need experienced hands who can penetrate, analyze, and influence developments in real time. Instead the Trump administration is choosing to put the United States at a deficit.

The same is true in the global influence stakes. U.S. adversaries, including Russia and China, are engaged in information operations that actively seek to polarize and inflame American society. The new U.S. administration appears to be ceding that ground to them. The State Department office that combats foreign state-sponsored disinformation had already closed. Now the Department of Homeland Security has put staff members who work on foreign influence operations on administrative leave. The FBI has closed its foreign influence task force. The National Security Agency will likely be next: Gabbard has evinced both a flawed understanding of its governing legislation and a deep suspicion that the agency endangers civil liberties. But hostile governments will be the ones endangering America’s civil liberties, and manipulating its public discourse, if the U.S. allows them to participate unrestrainedly in its domestic political space.

America’s foes are surely observing the chaos in Washington and looking for espionage opportunities. They will find them. Four weeks into Donald Trump’s new administration, lax security practices have created all manner of risk. The CIA has provided employee data on unsecured systems. Staff members from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency are downloading onto private servers information that foreign governments would pay dearly for (or use other espionage techniques to obtain). DOGE is apparently cavalier about exposing American citizens to danger—and about the government’s duty of care in protecting the identities of those who protect the country. The Bureau of Fiscal Services recommends that DOGE’s access to Treasury’s payments system be monitored as an insider threat.

[Charlie Warzel and Ian Bogost: The government’s computing experts say they are terrified]

This administration is still in its early days. The courts or Congress could reassert their constitutional prerogatives and slow or stop some of these actions. But the upheaval that has already occurred in the departments responsible for national security, together with the deficiencies of judgment displayed by some of the president’s Cabinet appointees, has already made America more vulnerable and less equipped to understand the threats it faces.

The Onion has headlined a satirical article “FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot to Just Sit Back and Enjoy Collapse of United States.” Americans will be lucky if that’s all their adversaries do.

As the Trump administration widened its campaign against the civil service, my mind kept turning to an old source, Max Stier, who has earnestly devoted his life to making government work better. Like his great passion, the bureaucracy, he’s relatively anonymous. In 2001, he founded an outfit called the Partnership for Public Service, a name that suggests an almost lyrical devotion to the gritty stuff of government. His organization is a font of ideas for making bureaucracy more effective. Over the years, it has trained thousands of government employees and helped agencies devise modernization plans.

Hoping to understand the damage that President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency have managed to inflict, I called Stier this past weekend. What was he telling the civil servants who were calling him in a state of panic? Because he is levelheaded and committed to a nonpartisan agenda, I trusted him to deliver a measured assessment. That he seemed so profoundly alarmed was itself terrifying. The following conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Franklin Foer: I’m sure your phone is constantly buzzing. What are you hearing?

Max Stier: I’ve fielded calls from Forest Service workers in Idaho and health-care workers in Georgia. It’s important that people know that the bulk of civil servants are not in D.C. Eighty percent of the feds are outside of D.C. They’re in every community in our country—and they used to be in a lot of communities globally too. Some people have been chased away. Some people have been directly fired, largely illegally, or put on administrative leave or sidelined. But there is no part of the workforce that is immune from this profound distraction and fear.

[Read: It’s time to worry about DOGE’s AI plans]

Foer: Okay, survey the totality of the wreckage for me.

Stier: There is just a series of hammer blows that have been wielded against the civil service. The so-called deferred-resignation offer is their attempt to create a stampede out the door, to make it easier for them to get rid of the apolitical expert civil service. And then, on the other end, they’re creating a system that enables them to politicize the hiring and the management of the workforce. Certainly there are parts of our government—and most obvious ones, like USAID and the Department of Justice and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—that are taking it on the chin even harder. Some of the most frightening things are happening at the FBI.

Right now, we’re seeing the destruction of infrastructure, but also a culture that focuses on the public good and the commitment to the rule of law. What we are going to see next is the use of government authority that is possible because that culture has been eradicated—the use of government authority for improper purposes. And so when you think about what’s happening, for example, with prosecutors who were fired because they investigated or prosecuted January 6 rioters or the president himself, these events foretell the use of government authority to pursue a personal agenda and to go after perceived enemies.

One other point: Sometimes even the media describes this as an effort to cut costs. This is not an effort to cut costs. This is going to cost the American taxpayer and the American public in huge ways.

Foer: Wait, explain that to me.

Stier: If you really wanted to reshape the federal workforce, you would start with an actual investigation of all the talent that you have—and then all the talent that you need. You would develop a plan. But what they’ve done is a random exercise. They are going after people without any sense about whether they’re the best performers or the poor performers. It’s probably a little worse than that: The people who may be the most talented have a larger propensity to leave, because they’ll have more options.

And the administration is creating liabilities. It will now owe money to people who are put on the sideline for no reason, and it will have to fill gaps that are created that they don’t even understand, which will mean eventually going out to hire contractors. There will be lawsuits—and lawsuits that are meritorious. Guess who pays for that? The American taxpayer is going to be funding the defense in those cases and will pay the payoff. If your intent were to shrink the workplace in a cost-effective way, this is a crazy way to do it.

Foer: But that’s the Silicon Valley way—moving fast and breaking stuff.

Stier: That may or may not be a smart strategy in Silicon Valley. It is not in the government, because there are real consequences. People get hurt in a different way when public capability is broken. One of the challenges in our government is that when it tries to modernize technology, it has to build up a new system alongside the legacy system. That’s how it manages to keep functioning.

Our government is about creating good outcomes; it’s not about throughput. So the objective is wrong here. The public sector has accountability, transparency, reliability issues that are simply not the same as in the private sector.

Foer: All the focus has been on DOGE, understandably. But what does the focus on Musk leave out?

Stier: Most democracies count their political appointees in the tens, not the thousands. We have a government where there are 4,000 political appointees that a president makes. That’s a vestige of the spoils system that actually creates a lot of grief. Only 1,300 of them require Senate confirmation. The remaining appointees are a bit invisible. The public isn’t seeing that they are the ones doing a lot of the damage right now.

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

Foer: Trump’s are qualitatively different from the appointees who show up in every administration?

Stier: It is qualitatively different. In modern times, there’s never [before] been a collection of political appointees where personal loyalty to the president has been the paramount value that has been used to select them. They swear an oath of office, when they take these jobs, to defend the Constitution. So they should be following the policy direction of the president within those constraints, but that is not how they were selected and not how they have begun to operate so far.

Foer: What do you make of DOGE’s efforts to gain access to government databases?

Stier: I cannot tell you how many conversations I have had with the community of chief information-security officers. They’ve never seen anything like this, and it terrorizes every bone in their body. These are not just people who are trying to protect the status quo. These are people who would have been good allies for reform.

Foer: What are some of the scariest risks that you’ve heard described that these actual practitioners see as plausible?

Stier: Chinese control over vital assets of our government and our country, because DOGE has opened the door for that to happen. Selective attacks on enemies lists. Breakage of systems that have consequences for vulnerable Americans. And it’s not like, Oh, here’s a mistake. They are engaging in the same practice everywhere—and they are not asking for advice or help from people who know what those risks are.

Foer: What would a responsible government-reform agenda look like now?

Stier: Ask Americans what they think about our federal government, and they think about bickering politicians in Washington. They don’t actually think about civil service. And that’s part of the challenge here. The opportunity is hopefully they will begin to understand who those folks are and appreciate what they have, even if we can do better.

But a place to begin is tapping into the very best technologists in Silicon Valley to modernize government systems. We need to have a reorientation toward the customer. In the private sector, we’ve seen improved customer service that is created by the digital universe we live in. Our government needs to be much more customer-focused.

And at the end of the day, we need to see the reform of leadership. We have too many political appointees. The folks chosen for these jobs are chosen and rewarded for a policy announcement, not actual policy execution. We have short-term leaders aligned to long-term organizations. Take the Veterans Health Administration, which is a hospital system run by a political appointee. Much of the time, there’s no one in that job. And when they’re there, they’re there for two years. And you can’t run an operationally complex system with short-term leaders.

[Read: If DOGE goes nuclear]

Interestingly, every career civil servant has a performance plan that they have to commit to. We need to hold political leaders responsible for real performance.

Foer: When civil servants ask you for advice about staying or going, what do you tell them?

Stier: The first thing I say is, this is a personal choice. No judgment from me.

A third of the civil service are veterans. Coming out of the military, they want to continue to serve. That is the dominant ethos in our government. So I say: Remember the sense of purpose that you carried into government. The longer you can stick it out, the longer you will continue to be able to help the American people. Systemically, we need the civil service committed to stay as much as possible—to ensure that the rule of law and the Constitution are actually followed.

Our government is the only tool for collective action that we have as a society. We live in a phenomenally dangerous world that has gotten scarier. Harms have metastasized. Our government needs to actually get better at meeting the set of risks that we face. Civil servants are the best tool we have for actually making our government better.

THE SPEED OF THE CRUELTY has been stunning.

In a matter of a few weeks, the Trump administration, led by Elon Musk, has decimated America’s main provider of global humanitarian aid, the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Founded in 1961, USAID has, until now, worked in more than 100 countries, promoting global health, fighting epidemics and starvation, providing treatment for people with HIV/AIDS, educating children and combatting child sex trafficking, resettling refugees and supplying shelter to displaced people across the globe, and supporting programs in maternal and child health and anti-corruption work.

USAID accounts for less than 1 percent of the federal budget. With those funds, it has been responsible for building field hospitals in war-ravaged Syria and removing land mines in Cambodia, funding vaccination programs in Nigeria and access to food, water, electricity, and basic health care for millions of people in eastern Congo. It contained a major outbreak of Ebola a decade ago and prevented massive famine in southern Africa in the 1990s. More than 3 million lives are saved every year through USAID immunization programs.

[Read: America can’t just unpause USAID]

People who have worked in international development for decades will tell you that there is not a single area of development and humanitarian assistance USAID has not been involved in.

On the day of his second inauguration, Donald Trump instituted a 90-day freeze on foreign assistance. Almost all USAID contractors and staff have since been fired or put on administrative leave, the website taken down and signage removed from its headquarters in Washington, D.C. On Friday, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order, enjoining the administration from placing 2,200 USAID employees on leave, but the chaos has already generated a global humanitarian crisis.

Many small organizations that relied on USAID have shut down; even the largest ones have been severely weakened. One survey reports that about a quarter of nonprofits said they might last a month; more than half said they had enough reserves to survive for three months at most.

The New York Times reports that funding for treatment for infants born in Uganda with HIV has been stopped, while in South Africa, researchers were forced to end an HIV-prevention trial, leaving women with experimental implants inside their bodies and without ongoing medical oversight. A cholera-treatment trial has been abandoned in Bangladesh. Patients have been told to leave refugee hospitals in Thailand. Soup kitchens that feed hundreds of thousands of people in Sudan have been closed.

As Mitchell Warren, the executive director of the HIV-prevention organization AVAC, told the Times’ Apoorva Mandavilli, “You’ve gotten rid of all of the staff, all of the institutional memory, all of the trust and confidence, not only in the United States but in the dozens of countries in which U.S.A.I.D. works. Those things have taken decades to build up but two weeks to destroy.”

A humanitarian worker in Sudan told The Washington Post that their organization received a stop-work order for grants covering hundreds of millions of dollars. “It means that over 8 million people in extreme levels of hunger could die of starvation,” said the aid worker. “What’s next? What do we do?”

IT WAS NOT ENOUGH for Trump and Musk, the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, to unleash mass suffering and death with the stroke of a pen. They had to slander USAID and spread lies about the agency in the process.

Musk has called USAID “evil” and a “criminal organization.” It is, according to Musk, “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.” The agency, Musk added, isn’t “an apple with a worm in it” but “a ball of worms.”

“Time for it to die,” Musk posted on X.

[Read: Paranoia is winning]

For his part, Trump said USAID is a “tremendous fraud” and claimed that the people in the agency “turned out to be radical left lunatics.”

In order to promote this calumny, Trump, Musk, and their acolytes have unleashed an avalanche of falsehoods and disinformation. Not that USAID should be above criticism: As the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff has argued, it can be overreliant on contractors, endlessly bureaucratic, and prone to paying consultants with money that could be better used elsewhere. But none of that matches up with the way Musk and Trump have described it. And authoritarian leaders from around the world are now celebrating the destruction of one of the most important humanitarian organizations in the world.

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing,” George Orwell wrote in 1984.

Six years ago, my colleague Adam Serwer wrote of Trump and his movement that “the cruelty is the point.” That has never been more clear than in the president’s decision to demolish USAID. The cost savings will be minimal; the carnage will be massive. And all of the agony that will be unleashed by this decision—the cries of pain that Trump will never hear, the tears of grief Musk will never see—is not accidental. It was done with malice. This is what Trump and MAGA represent, what lies at their moral core. To be silent in the face of this is to be complicit in what they are doing.

FOR THE PAST six years, Anne Linn has worked for the President’s Malaria Initiative, another U.S. program. But she lost her job earlier this month because of Trump and Musk’s actions. Her contract with PMI was canceled.

She’s proud of her work, and proud of the fact that in the 30 countries where PMI has been operating, the malaria mortality rate has been reduced by half since President George W. Bush launched the initiative, in 2006. (Malaria still kills more than half a million people each year, about three-quarters of whom are children under 5.)

Linn is aware that foreign assistance improves America’s image in the world and helps economies prosper. But that’s not why she’s doing what she’s doing.

“As a Christian,” Linn wrote in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, “I was compelled by the Gospel, the words of Jesus, to use my life to try to diminish suffering for the world’s most vulnerable.”

She was doing that until Trump and Musk set their sights on USAID. Now, she wrote, “children, children of God, will die unnecessarily.”

In an interview with Time, Linn put it this way: “I’m here to do what I can, to be the hands and feet of God in this world. Like, what can I do to alleviate the suffering of others, of my neighbors?”

She’s worried that their suffering will increase because bed nets used to protect people from malaria are still in the warehouse and the people contracted to deliver them have a stop-work order. She spoke of her fears for the pregnant mothers and the children under 5, whom malaria can kill. “Who can read the words of Jesus Christ and think this is okay?” she asked. “That is baffling to me. If we say that we are pro-life, we cannot be okay with this.”

Linn’s question—Who can read the words of Jesus Christ and think this is okay?—haunts me and many others like me. No group is more responsible for the reign of Trump than white evangelicals. In 2024, for the third time, they voted in overwhelming numbers for Trump. Most white evangelicals will not, under any circumstances, break with him. They are beholden to him.

[Read: Trump’s assault on USAID makes Project 2025 look like child’s play]

They read the same words of Jesus as Linn does, but whereas those words have led her to relieve suffering for the world’s most vulnerable, many white evangelicals have ended up in a different place. They are in lockstep with a man who is taking delight in destroying an agency whose decimation will dramatically increase suffering for the world’s most vulnerable.

It is a remarkable thing to witness. There are tens of millions of men and women who are regular churchgoers, who attend Bible studies and Sunday-school classes and listen to Christian worship music, and who would raise a ruckus if anyone in Church leadership interpreted the Bible in a way that deviated even slightly from their doctrine on any number of issues.

And yet, many of these same people insist that their faith commitments have led them to support a president for whom the cruelty is the point. As a result, there is, somewhere in Kenya right now, a mother of three asking, “If I die, who will take care of my children?” Donald Trump and Elon Musk don’t care. It turns out that millions and millions of people who claim to be followers of Jesus don’t, either.

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.

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Over the first two weeks of the second Donald Trump presidency, the narrative has swung back and forth abruptly. A flurry of executive orders to start the term: proof of a newly disciplined, regimented administration. The quick retreat from a federal funding freeze: evidence of the same chaos that dogged Trump’s first stint as president. Elon Musk’s blitzkrieg against USAID: Who can even be sure?

The first Trump administration conditioned many people to discount the seriousness of any effort. No matter what Trump promised, he was too mercurial a president and ineffective a manager to make it happen. He really did want to repeal Obamacare and build a border wall, but he just didn’t have the attention span to execute, and his staff was too consumed with internecine feuds to be useful. The result was perpetual disorder and underachievement.

More recently, Trumpworld has cultivated an impression of greater control. Trump’s 2024 campaign co-manager Susie Wiles was credited with keeping him on track during the lead-up to the election (with some notable exceptions), and she’s now White House chief of staff. Project 2025, an outside effort led by past, current, and likely future White House staffers, also demonstrates careful thought about how to better execute during a second term. When Trump signed a series of executive orders along many fronts on January 20 and 21, it seemed to prove that something had changed, although sharp rebukes from federal judges and sloppy drafting errors have raised doubts since then.

But chaos versus strategy is a misleading and unhelpful binary for understanding this presidency. Chaos certainly helps Trump, because it makes coordinated resistance from Congress, outside advocates, or the public challenging. Many White House actions appear to be usurping legislative authority, but the speed of the moves has left members of Congress in both parties looking stunned and indecisive. His goal, however, is not simply to create confusion. Trump likes keeping his aides siloed—it allows him to play them off one another, and prevents any one faction from getting too strong. (His appreciation for checks and balances does not appear to extend to Congress and the courts.) Internal feuding isn’t a downside for Trump: It’s his way of settling disputes.

Moreover, the chaos does not evince a lack of strategy. As I wrote last week, the grant freeze by the Office of Management and Budget wasn’t some ad hoc move, but instead part of a long-running plan by conservative ideologues to challenge the law that prevents the president from withholding money that’s appropriated. That’s also why the White House’s retreat from the freeze is almost certainly only temporary.

Elon Musk’s moves, through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, appear to be more improvisational. Unlike the OMB wonks, Musk has little knowledge of how the federal government works and little interest in the risk of his actions; his team reportedly includes inexperienced aides as young as 19. Nonetheless, the transformation of Twitter into X serves as a good model for how this might play out. After Musk’s aggressive takeover, refugees from the company made dire warnings about it collapsing entirely. More than two years later, the site is overrun with racist trolls, but it is still functional and has become a powerful political weapon for Musk.

If Musk is left to his own devices, we might expect something similar from DOGE. He’s already gotten nearly 1 percent of the federal workforce to resign, almost single-handledly brought USAID to the verge of death, and reportedly acquired access to reams of government data. As my colleague Charlie Warzel wrote yesterday, “It is nothing short of an administrative coup.” A Muskified federal government might not serve the public very well, but it could become an effective political tool for Musk and his allies.

And that might not be the only administrative coup in action. New staffers are joining the administration every day, and many of them have ties to Project 2025, the scheme to overhaul the federal government. Russell Vought, the intellectual leading light of Project 2025, passed a procedural vote yesterday and could be confirmed to lead OMB this week. Adam Candeub, another Project 2025 contributor, was just named general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission. This group is far more methodical than Musk, preferring a careful and quiet plan to his blunt, noisy tack.

What unites Musk and the ideologues is a commitment to do whatever they can, and see what they can get away with it. If that looks like chaos, so be it. They know what it is they’re trying to do.

Related:

There is a strategy behind the chaos. Trump’s campaign to dismantle the government

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The “rapid unscheduled disassembly” of the United States government The constitutional crisis is here. Elon Musk is president, Jonathan Lemire writes. The last days of American orange juice

Today’s News

China announced retaliatory tariffs on U.S. gas, coal, and other products, which will go into effect next Monday. Chinese regulators also began an anti-monopoly investigation into Google. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard passed key committee votes to advance their Cabinet nominations to the Senate floor. Several FBI employees sued the Justice Department over its order for the bureau to turn over a list of names of employees who worked on investigations related to the January 6 insurrection.

Evening Read

Chronicle / Alamy

What’s Up With All the Sex Parties?

By Xochitl Gonzalez

In the course of my research, I did not—I would like to be clear here—participate in any sex parties. I think it’s wise not to get that close to your sources. I learned that “play parties” can take place in people’s homes, but many happen under the auspices of private clubs. I reached out to a number of prominent ones, wondering if the sex-club boom was real, and what actually goes on at them. One of my major findings: People, especially rich people, come up with extremely elaborate justifications for getting laid.

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He did not receive a single vote. He did not get confirmed. He does not receive a government paycheck.

The world’s richest man has declared war on the federal government and, in a matter of days, has moved to slash its size and reach, while gaining access to some of its most sensitive secrets. He has shaped the public discourse by wielding the powerful social-media site he controls and has threatened to use his fortune to bankroll electoral challenges to anyone who opposes him.

Elon Musk’s influence appears unchecked, triggering cries of alarm from those who worry about conflicts of interest, security clearances, and a broad, ill-defined mandate. But the Republican-controlled Congress has shown no desire so far to rein Musk in. There has never been a private citizen like him.

“I think Elon is doing a good job. He’s a big cost-cutter,” Donald Trump told reporters last night after stepping off Air Force One returning to Washington from Palm Beach. “Sometimes we won’t agree with it and we’ll not go where he wants to go. But I think he’s doing a great job. He’s a smart guy. Very smart. And he’s very much into cutting the budget of our federal budget.”

Musk’s assault on the government unfolded rapidly in recent days, as he used his role as the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to slash spending. His stated goal: cut $500 billion in annual spending. DOGE has limited powers. It is not an actual government agency—one can only be created by an act of Congress; Musk’s task force was set up through a presidential executive order. And Congress has the authority to set spending.

[Read: Elon Musk has appointed himself king of the world]

His own role remains murky: A White House official told me today that Musk is working for Trump as a “special government employee,” formalizing a position in the administration but allowing him to sidestep federal disclosure rules. Musk is not being paid, the official said.

Musk lacks legal authority, but he is close to power. At times working from the White House campus, Musk plainly enjoys his position as the president’s most influential adviser. Trump famously turns on aides he believes eclipse him. But by his own account, he remains enamored of Musk, seeming to relish the fact that the world’s wealthiest person is working for him, the White House official told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity to relay private conversations. Trump, the official said, also believes that Musk has shown a willingness to take public pushback for controversial actions, allowing the president himself to avoid blame.

Over the weekend, Musk set his sights on the U.S. Agency for International Development, declaring in a series of tweets, without evidence, that USAID is “a criminal organization” that is “evil” and “must die.” The Trump administration, adopting a transactional, “America First” view of global engagement, has subjected the agency—the world’s largest provider of food assistance—to aid freezes, personnel purges, and mass confusion. Musk in recent days became the would-be executioner. In an X Spaces live chat early this morning, he said he had discussed USAID’s future with Trump “in detail, and he agreed that we should shut it down.”

“And so we’re shutting it down,” Musk said.

Hours later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he was assuming the role of acting director of the agency, which he said the White House wants to fold into the State Department. USAID’s proponents have long seen it as a useful tool of American soft power that acted as a bulwark against China and Russia; its apparent demise was cheered by former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who wrote on X that Musk was making a “smart move” to “plug USAID’s Deep Throat. Let’s hope notorious Deep State doesn’t swallow him whole.”

Musk might not succeed in kneecapping the agency. Several Democrats denounced the plan to move it to the State Department, arguing that Congress established USAID as a separate agency and that moving or closing it would take a subsequent act of Congress. But Republicans on the Hill were muted, seemingly willing to sacrifice their power as a co-equal branch of government to appease Musk and Trump.

[Read: What Elon Musk really wants]

GOP lawmakers also do not seem to object to Musk’s installation of former staffers from Tesla, X, and the Boring Company at several agencies, including the Office of Personnel Management, which essentially handles federal human resources, and the General Services Administration, which manages government real estate. Some of Musk’s lead aides, according to Wired, are between 19 and 24 years old. (When a user on X later posted the names of those aides, Musk replied, “You have committed a crime,” and suspended the account.)

Over the weekend, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent granted DOGE staffers access to the system that sends out money on behalf of the entire federal government, ceding to Musk—whose wealth is estimated at more than $325 billion—a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit federal spending. That move ended a standoff with a top Treasury official, a career civil servant named David Lebryk, who was put on leave and then suddenly retired after he had tried to prevent Musk’s lieutenants from getting into the department’s payment system.

“The only way to stop fraud and waste of taxpayer money is to follow the payment flows and pause suspicious transactions for review. Obviously,” Musk posted today on X. “Naturally, this causes those who have been aiding, abetting and receiving fraudulent payments very upset. Too bad.”

The department, in a process run by civil servants, disbursed more than $5 trillion in fiscal year 2023. Access to the payment system is tightly held because it includes sensitive personal information about the millions of Americans who receive Social Security checks, tax refunds, and other payments from the federal government. Moreover, two of Musk’s companies—Tesla and SpaceX—have more than $15 billion in government contracts, and according to some Democrats, he might now have access to information about competitor businesses, creating conflicts of interest. Musk also has business interests overseas, including in China.

A group of Senate and House Democrats has vowed a court battle over Musk’s access to the payment system. “Elon Musk, you may have illegally seized power over the financial payments systems of the Treasury, but you don’t control the money of the American people,” Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland said at a news conference today outside of USAID headquarters in Washington. “The U.S. Congress does that under Article 1 of the Constitution. We don’t have a fourth branch of government called ‘Elon Musk.’”

[Read: Purging the government could backfire spectacularly]

But this morning Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., released a letter he wrote to Musk declaring that his office would “pursue any and all legal action against anyone” who tried to impede DOGE’s work.

Last week, Musk was the driving force behind an email from the Office of Personnel Management with the subject line “Fork in the Road,” demanding that millions of federal employees accept massive workplace changes or resign. The White House official told me that Musk came up with the email subject line, which was also the language he used in an email to Twitter employees shortly after he purchased the company in 2022.

After taking over Twitter and rebranding it as X, Musk demolished the company’s value and sparked a mass exodus of users. But it gave him a powerful political platform—which he is also now using to try to influence European elections—and there are signs that business is improving. The site brought in $25 million in political advertising revenue in 2024, mostly from Republicans, and The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Amazon—owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns the dominant newspaper in the nation’s capital—was increasing its spending on X.

Last week, the only news story that competed with Trump’s takeover of the nation’s capital was the collision between a military aircraft and a civilian jet that killed 67 people. The National Transportation Safety Board took the lead on the investigation, as it always does. But as the nation looked for news on the devastating tragedy, the first major airline crash in the United States in 15 years, the government agency made clear where the American people would need to turn: “All NTSB updates about news conferences or other investigative information will be posted to this X account. We will not be distributing information via email.”