[“This is a real picture”— Elon Musk]
Michael Scherer, Ashley Parker, Matteo Wong, and Shane Harris at the Atlantic have a great inside look on what Musk’s raiders are up to (“This Is What Happens When the DOGE Guys Take Over“). The tech team’s approach: “Radical action was the only responsible course. The improperly fired could be rehired. The confusing memo could be withdrawn and replaced. The courts might overturn their actions, but that is a problem for another day. Make change happen, and rebuild the smashed shards later, if necessary.”
And long before Musk convinced Trump to let him loose, Project 2025 co-author, Russell Vought, now director of OMB, explained the plan:
Vought called for a return to a pre-Watergate mindset—“a radical constitutional perspective to be able to dismantle that bureaucracy in their power centers.” There would be three prongs of the attack, he told Tucker Carlson during a November 18 podcast.
First, “the whole notion of an independent agency should be thrown out,” Vought said, giving the president complete control of the executive branch to impose his will. Second, the courts must be provoked to smash the idea that Congress directs spending. “Congress gets to set the ceiling. You can’t spend without a congressional appropriation, but you weren’t ever meant to be forced to spend it,” Vought said, dismissing the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which basically decrees the opposite. Third, the protections of the civil service must end, making nearly all of the federal workforce at-will employees.
This is where Musk entered under the banner of cost reduction, a useful side effect of the larger project.
Yes, cost reduction is a false flag, though “a useful side effect of the larger project” from the point of view of rich folks who don’t wish to pay taxes and disdain entitlement expenditures — except, of course, they often have outstretched hands when government is dishing out funding. (Musk’s companies have received north of $20 billion from the feds in contracts, subsidies, and tax breaks.)
Inspired by the 500 accounts Musk follows on X
Vought is the big picture guy. Musk and his young techies, in contrast, are just racing this way and that. Jeffrey Goldberg asks how DOGE decides which agencies to target. “This seems to be being done on the fly“– as though Musk is taking direction from accounts on X.
Teddy Schleifer of the New York Times confirms this: “I think that’s literally true. I mean I think that Elon Musk literally is driven by the 500 people that he’s following on Twitter. … And some of these people are pseudonymous accounts.”
“The people who — I know it sounds ridiculous. The people who Elon Musk follows on Twitter are some of the most important people in American culture.”
Drawing on his observations during the transition, Schleifer offers evidence of the perceived influence of the 500. And he describes this scenario: one of the 500 accounts tweets something crazy and unverified; Musk responds, Interesting.
Fine. But in the present day, one of the 500 tweets an idea … and “suddenly the democratically elected president is doing whatever that guy said was interesting.”
Postscript
The images in this post are of Musk at CPAC 2025. Sarah Jeong provides a transcript of “a strange and often inarticulate onstage interview” of Musk by Rob Schmitt (of Newsmax).
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