Trump, Musk and DOGE Are Tearing Apart the Government

It is, so far, worse than I feared. Last Friday, at the end of a week in which a vaccine skeptic and sometime conspiracy theorist auditioned to lead the country’s nearly $2 trillion, 80,000-person public health apparatus, much of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website went dark — its weekly mortality reports, its data sets, certain guidance for clinicians and patients, all taken offline. C.D.C. researchers were ordered to retract a huge raft of their own, already-submitted research. Next to go dark was the website of U.S.A.I.D., which Elon Musk announced that he would be working to shut down entirely, after several staffers resisting agency takeover by the billionaire were abruptly put on leave. (When the agency website later popped back online, it featured an announcement that all overseas personnel would be placed on leave and ordered to return.).

This is after the new administration had already suspended the country’s most successful global-health initiative, PEPFAR, which has saved millions of lives globally. The State Department later issued a PEPFAR waiver, but the program appears to have been rendered effectively inoperative by staff cuts; if the pause holds for even 90 days, it would result in over 135,000 additional children being born with H.I.V. The Famine Early Warning System Network was shut down, too.

Sometime between Jan. 6, 2021 and Nov. 5, 2024, many American liberals came to feel that “the resistance” — the reflexive mobilization against President Trump, after his first victory, on behalf of American institutions — had been embarrassing, pointless or even counterproductive, and that it might have been a touch hysterical to worry in grandiose terms about the threat posed by Trump rule. At the moment, it is hard to see it but hysterically: a blitzkrieg against core functions of the state, operating largely outside the boundaries set by history, precedent, and constitutional law, and designed to reduce the shape and purpose of government power to the whims, and spite, of a single man.

Or perhaps two men. The news about U.S.A.I.D. wasn’t delivered by President Trump, for instance. Instead the case against the agency was mounted on X by Musk, who this weekend called it a “criminal organization” saying that it’s “time for it to die”; the email telling staff that the agency’s headquarters would be closed appeared to come from one of Musk’s 20-something government “efficiency” groupies, who had somehow acquired a U.S.A.I.D. email address. Both the manner and the target of the attack offered the same lesson: that soft power was not real power, at all, and that only the hard kind truly counted.

Musk eventually won access to payment systems at the Treasury Department after a similar fight — after an official protesting the move was seemingly pushed out of the agency. “There are many disturbing aspects of this,” the political scientist Seth Masket wrote over the weekend. “But perhaps the most fundamental is that Elon Musk is not a federal employee, nor has he been appointed by the president nor approved by the Senate to have any leadership role in government.” Indeed, to the extent he enjoys any formal authority, at the moment, it is through a loose executive order broadly understood to authorize the initiative only to upgrade government I.T. systems and protocols. “Musk is a private citizen taking control of established government offices,” Masket went on. “That is not efficiency; that is a coup.” Other relatively sober-minded commentators have called it “ripping out the guts of government.” Still others a “Caesarist assault on the separation of powers” and a “constitutional crisis.”

Is it? Well, T.B.D. Much or all of this will be adjudicated in court, in the coming weeks and months, and maybe, ultimately, overturned or undone. Some initiatives have already been halted in the courts, though it’s nevertheless grim to see researchers celebrating that their ability to gain access to data on respiratory illness has been restored. (Even more so to scroll through the long list of “forbidden words” now being purged from C.D.C. research) And trusting that there remain checks and balances sufficient to block what my colleague Ezra Klein called the president’s longstanding desire to be king — or to block Musk’s effort to rip apart the government of the world’s most powerful country, as he did to Twitter — invests a lot of hope in state attorneys general, federal judges and the Supreme Court, not to mention advocacy groups like the A.C.L.U.