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Guest Essay
Feb. 5, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ET
By Tyler McBrien
Mr. McBrien is the managing editor of Lawfare.
On Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly granted aides of Elon Musk access to the department’s payments system, which handles more than $5 trillion and sensitive data on Social Security and Medicare benefits and grants. The system also contains data on government contractors in direct competition with Mr. Musk’s own companies.
It was the latest troubling report of the administration’s interventions into practically every corner of the federal government that also include President Trump’s firing, sidelining and encouraging civil servants to quit.
The full picture of the government overhaul has yet to come into focus, and the contours of Mr. Musk’s role and mission in that transformation remain sketchy. (On Monday, President Trump tried to offer some clarity, saying that “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval.”)
But the cumulative effect of these stories offers at best a complicated answer to what should be an uncomplicated question: Who exactly is running the federal government?
It’s troubling enough not to be able to answer emphatically with “democratically elected leaders.” Even more troubling is the possibility that the actual answer is Mr. Musk — the world’s richest man — and other unaccountable, unelected, unconfirmed allies cozy with the president.
Political economists have a name for that: state capture. State capture occurs when wealthy private interests influence a government to such a degree that they can freely direct policy decisions and public funds for their own benefit or for the benefit of their ideological fellow travelers (or both).
