“…
That’s why a team from Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency headed straight for O.P.M., dragging in sofa beds to sleep on so they could be there round the clock. O.P.M. is root access to the entire United States government.
With that kind of access, even a small team can
search the entire government for employees whose job titles
contain suggestions of wrongthink, or who might resist takeovers or wield bureaucratic tools to slow the pace of change.
In effect,
this small DOGE crew has become sysadmins for the entire government. Soon after O.P.M., they descended on the Treasury Department, where every payment the government has made is stored: root access to the economy (including many companies that are direct competitors to those of Musk). Their efforts expanded recently to
the I.R.S. and Social Security Administration, both of which hold
extremely personal, sensitive information: root access to practically the entire American population.
The Atlantic
reports that a former Tesla engineer appointed as the director of the Technology Transformation Services — a little-known entity that runs digital services for many parts of the government — has requested “privileged access” to 19 different I.T. systems reportedly without even completing a background check, making him less vetted than the person delivering pizza to that mine.
…All this has merged with and amplified another kind of insider threat brewing for decades on the political side: the expansion of unchecked executive power.
“With money we will get men, said Caesar, and with men we will get money,” Thomas Jefferson
once wrote, to warn against the ways that what he called elective despotism can become a self-feeding cycle.
He had feared that an elected authoritarian would not just pulverize the institutions meant to limit his power, but take them over to wield as weapons, thus further entrenching himself. …”
