Nearly twenty years ago, the Washington Post’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran wrote a classic account of the shambolic American takeover of the Iraqi government, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City.” Most memorably, he described what a Times reviewer called “the lethal combination of official arrogance and ineptitude” that plagued the foreign occupiers from Washington who, after the 2003 U.S. invasion, moved into the Green Zone—the walled-off compound that had once belonged to Saddam Hussein. Young conservatives were favored, heedless of experience. Some job seekers were asked their views of Roe v. Wade. Others were hired after sending their résumés to the right-wing Heritage Foundation back in D.C. While Baghdad spiralled into out-of-control violence, the G.O.P. ideologues who reported for duty in the desert worked to privatize Iraqi government agencies, revamp the tax code, and launch an anti-smoking campaign. A clueless twenty-four-year-old found himself in charge of opening an Iraqi stock exchange. It didn’t work out well.
I was reminded of this gloomy chapter in American history while reading accounts this week of Elon Musk and his small army of anonymous intern-hackers, who have been deployed on Donald Trump’s behalf inside an array of agencies to take control of computer payment systems and government H.R. functions. A nineteen-year-old high school graduate who now has access to sensitive government information is known online as “Big Balls.” A former intern at Musk’s SpaceX, who dropped out of the University of Nebraska, is now working out of the General Services Administration. Scenes of low comedy and spy-movie drama have been reported throughout the federal government—an unclassified e-mail listing all recent C.I.A. employees was sent to the White House to comply with a Musk decree; workers at NASA were ordered to “drop everything” in order to scrub the space program’s Web sites of offending references to banned phrases such as “diversity,” “Indigenous People,” and “women in leadership.” Musk and his command team at the Department of Government Efficiency, a made-up agency with no legal power that Trump established by executive order on his first day back in office, have been sleeping at the Office of Personnel Management.
In its short existence, Musk’s small occupying force has gained access to the entire U.S. Treasury federal payments system—to what end, no one yet knows—and has seemingly orchestrated the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D., the decades-old federal agency in charge of distributing American foreign aid around the world. Upcoming targets reportedly include everything from the Department of Education to the government weather-forecasting service and the U.S. aviation system. Federal employees were given a deadline of Thursday at midnight to accept Musk’s offer of a government-wide deferred-resignation “buyout.” A federal judge has delayed the move, which was expected to yield more than forty thousand takers—well short of the five per cent or more of the federal workforce that Musk hoped to purge, but still an enormous upheaval whose repercussions will echo for years.
In a series of posts on X, the social-media site that Musk owns, the world’s wealthiest man bragged of feeding U.S.A.I.D. to “the wood chipper,” claimed the agency was a “criminal” enterprise, and crowed about “dismantling the radical-left shadow government.” This seemed like a far cry from his initial mandate of serving as an “outside volunteer” to advise Trump on possible budget cuts. Let the record show that, at 3:59 A.M. on day sixteen of the Trump restoration, as Democrats sputtered ineffectually about an unelected billionaire’s illegal power grab, Musk openly proclaimed his project as nothing less than “the revolution of the people.”
A day later, I spoke with a Republican who worked closely with the architects of America’s botched Iraq invasion. I asked whether he had been surprised by anything so far in a Trump Administration designed to shock. Yes, he replied—Musk’s sneaky takeover of the apparatus of the vast U.S. executive branch was something entirely new in the annals of global coups. “Elon figured out that the personnel, information-technology backbone of the government was essentially the twenty-first-century equivalent of the nineteen-fifties television tower in the Third World,” he observed, and “that you could take over the government essentially with a handful of people if you could access all that.” My friend, incidentally, chose to speak on background despite his years of public criticism of Trump, noting that a think tank with which he is affiliated receives government contracts. Fear, in this revolution, as in all revolutions, is perhaps the most effective weapon of all.
Two decades ago, Bush’s Republican Party chose to topple the far-off regime of Saddam Hussein. It’s worth taking a second to reflect that, only a short political lifetime later, the government that Trump’s G.O.P. has chosen to go after is our own.
Trump and Musk have pushed out a steady stream of propaganda and lies to justify their claims for why a revolution wholly outside established laws, procedures, and norms is now necessary. According to a Thursday morning post on Trump’s own Truth Social network, U.S.A.I.D.—which, as far as I can tell, Trump never mentioned on the 2024 campaign trail—is one of several agencies where “BILLIONS OF DOLLARS HAVE BEEN STOLLEN,” including as a “PAYOFF” to the “FAKE NEWS MEDIA” for promoting Democrats. This conspiracy, he warned, might be “THE BIGGEST SCANDAL OF THEM ALL.” In the run-up to the all-out assault on U.S.A.I.D., Trump’s White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, spread the absurd tale, via Musk’s team, of fifty million dollars that the agency supposedly earmarked for condoms to be sent to the Gaza Strip. By the time Trump later repeated the story, he had elevated the nonexistent bequest of condoms to a hundred million dollars. Think of this as the information-war equivalent of covering fire from the artillery before the ground assault begins. Days later, the U.S.A.I.D. Web site, with the report proving that there were no condoms for Gaza, had been taken offline. By midweek, that Web site was back up but stripped of all content except a curt message informing readers that “all USAID direct hire personnel” were being placed on “administrative leave globally,” effective at midnight on Friday. In the end, the Trump Administration apparently plans to keep only about two hundred of the agency’s more than ten thousand staff.
We don’t yet know to what extent this brazen ploy will succeed, of course. Congressional Democrats and others have mobilized to defend various embattled agencies; lawsuits have been filed; protests have been convened. But for now, the politics may even be working for Trump and Musk. The Democratic strategist David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel, the former White House chief of staff for Barack Obama, have both warned that they fear their party is falling into a trap in defending U.S.A.I.D. “My heart is with the people out on the street outside USAID, but my head tells me: ‘Man, Trump will be well satisfied to have this fight,’ ” Axelrod told Politico’s Rachael Bade. “When you talk about cuts, the first thing people say is: Cut foreign aid.”
It’s also true that, if cutting the federal government is what this is all about, then Trump and Musk would not be bothering with tiny U.S.A.I.D., whose estimated budget of some forty billion dollars is less than one per cent of the federal government’s. The point is not a policy fight; it’s an execution. They are killing one agency to terrify a thousand others. Congress should be one of the main aggrieved parties here, given that it passed the laws authorizing U.S.A.I.D. and other departments under attack and appropriating the funding for them, but this is the Republican-controlled Congress in the age of Trump. Speaker Mike Johnson, on Wednesday, dismissed the furor over Musk’s power play as “gross overreaction in the media.” Perhaps the most perfect distillation of where elected Republican officials are at right now came from the North Carolina senator Thom Tillis. Asked about what Musk is doing on Trump’s behalf, he replied, “That runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense.” But, he added, “nobody should bellyache about that.”
The message here is loud and clear: the revolution will not be stopped on Capitol Hill. And indeed, on Tuesday, two of Trump’s most controversial nominees, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Tulsi Gabbard for director of National Intelligence, were voted out of Senate committees after key Republican senators abandoned their objections to them. On Thursday evening, despite an all-night Democratic filibuster against the nomination of Russell Vought to be Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, the Senate was expected to go ahead and confirm him. Vought is an intellectual architect of the attack on the federal government who helped write the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda for the new Administration, and he has made little secret of the pain he is hoping to inflict. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said at a conference in 2023, a tape of which was later obtained by ProPublica. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work. . . . We want to put them in trauma.”
Earlier this week, I spoke with one of Vought’s millions of targets, a career prosecutor who’s spent decades in the Justice Department’s environment division. The purge of her corner of the bureaucracy hadn’t yet made headlines, but it had arrived nonetheless. “They’ve already come,” she told me. Four of the division’s eight section chiefs had been removed and reassigned to a task force on combatting so-called sanctuary cities. Multiple employees whose roles involved “diversity” had been placed on administrative leave. The division’s “law and policy” section attorneys were told their entire office would be eliminated. And all that was before the incoming Attorney General, Pam Bondi, was confirmed by the Senate. “It’s just basically like we’re in a black hole, where our leadership has been eliminated but no political leadership has come in,” she said.
If trauma is the goal, Trump and his minions have already succeeded. But my source also offered up an eloquent rebuttal to the mindless cutting, an approach that she compared to an elementary-school principal deciding that, rather than trim the budget a few per cent, she’d just go ahead and eliminate the entire third grade. Should we get rid of air-traffic controllers and FEMA and E.P.A. testing for lead in your kids’ water, too? She asked. Frankly, her defense of the federal government was better than just about anything I’ve heard from the beleaguered Democrats. The revolution, however, will get the last laugh: after more than thirty years of public service, she already planned to retire later this year. Congrats, Elon Musk. ♦
