Split screen

From close up, here in Washington, D.C., as someone who regularly covers the U.S. federal government, the sweeping assault that unelected billionaire Elon Musk and his unvetted DOGE team are committing on U.S. government agencies and personnel is alarming.

Alarming, not because there should not be reforms or cuts to federal agencies’ budgets, programming or staffing; but because their anti-government jihad is being conducted without any oversight, legal mandate, organizational plan, knowledge of the workings of the government, or security vetting of the Musk/DOGE staff barging into federal agencies and demanding access to sensitive government payment and IT systems and personnel databases. In short, without any respect or accountability for the damage they could wreck on systems that American citizens and federal workers rely on to protect their security, privacy, and functional governance.

And there is growing evidence today that the DOGE team infiltrating these systems was not properly vetted.

To wit, the Wall Street Journal reports today that Marko Elez, a 25 year-old DOGE/Musk “staff member who gained access to the Treasury Department’s central-payments system, resigned Thursday after he was linked to a deleted social media account that advocated racism and eugenics.”

“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” the account [linked to Elez] posted on X in July….

After the Journal inquired about the account, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said that Elez had resigned from his role.

In recent days, Elez had emerged at the center of a legal battle over access to sensitive payment information and systems the Treasury Department uses to process trillions of dollars in payments annually.

Another Musk/DOGE aide, 19 year-old high school graduate, Edward Coristine, operates multiple websites, some in Russia; worked at a startup that hired convicted hackers, and is linked to a Telegram account that solicited a cyberattack, Wired magazine reported today.

Coristine “is now listed in Office of Personnel Management records as an ‘expert’ at that agency, which oversees personnel matters for the federal government,” Wired wrote. “Employees of the General Services Administration say he also joined calls where they were made to justify their jobs and to review code they’ve written.”

Meantime, the Washington Post reports that several members of Musk’s DOGE team were given administrator access to OPM computer systems, giving them “sweeping authority to install and modify software of government-supplied equipment….and to alter internal documentation of their own activities.”

The data that the DOGE team can access includes a massive trove of personnel information for millions of federal employees … The level of access granted to DOGE agents means they could copy the social security numbers, phone numbers, and personnel files for millions of federal employees. […]

“They could export all that data about people who are currently or formerly employed by the government, they could export it to some nongovernment server, or to their own PC, or to a Google Drive. Or to a foreign country,” [one OPM official said]. …

The risks would multiply with every new user and new machine plugged in at OPM.

“It’s highly likely they’re improperly accessing, transferring and storing highly sensitive data outside of the environments it was intended to be contained within,” [cybersecurity expert Marcus Hutchins] said. “If I were a nation like China, Russia or Iran, I’d be having a field day with a bunch of college kids running around with sensitive federal government data on unencrypted hard drives.”

CNN reports that the Energy Secretary has granted Luke Farritor, a 23 year old former SpaceX intern working for DOGE, access to the IT system for the Energy Department, which oversees the National Nuclear Security Administration.

“Members of the general counsel and chief information offices ‘said this is a bad idea’ because Farritor hadn’t had a standard background investigation needed to access the department’s system, one of the people told CNN. ‘He’s not cleared to be in DOE, on our systems. None of those things have been done.’”

Pro Publica has compiled a running “DOGE tracker” of members it has identified, and continues to update it as it receives new information.

While “efficiency in government should be a goal for every administration, agency, and federal employee, how we achieve it also matters,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), wrote on Twitter Wedneseday, seemingly in reference to Musk/DOGE.

“By circumventing proper channels and procedures, and creating the potential to compromise the sensitive data of Americans, we create a tremendous amount of unnecessary anxiety,” the Alaska Republican wrote. “That is wrong. Good governance is based on trust, not fear.”

What are the stakes?

The entire staff of the US Agency for International Development “will be imminently reduced from 14,000 to 294 people,” Atul Gawande, the former head of USAID’s global health program, wrote on Twitter tonight.

“We already see the shutdown’s cost,” Gawande continued. “Kids with drug-resistant TB, turned away from clinics, are not just dying—they’re spreading the disease. People around the world with HIV, denied their medicine, will soon start transmitting virus. The damage is global.”

The Trump/Musk stop-work order of USAID-funded research “has left thousands of people with experimental drugs and devices in their bodies, with no access to monitoring or care,” the New York Times reported today.

The paper identified more than 30 frozen studies that left volunteers already receiving treatments abruptly in the lurch, including those in trials of malaria treatment for children under 5 years old in Mozambique, tuberculosis treatment for children and teenagers in Peru and South Africa; and for an HIV vaccine in South Africa.

The abrupt shuttering of USAID programs in Colombia could “destabilize Colombia’s delicate security,” Elizabeth Dickinson, a Latin American expert with the International Crisis Group, wrote on Twitter.

“Colombia will now face a massive deficit in funding the 2016 peace agreement,” she wrote. “The way in which US officials in DC ordered local staff to freeze USAID projects was downright irresponsible, and poses immediate and long term risks to civilians.”

So what’s the split screen?

It appears many Trump voters are glad to see the cuts, and indifferent to the chaos, dubious legality and security concerns about the sensitive data and IT systems the DOGE team have seized.

“Despite the chaos and confusion some of Trump’s early actions have caused in Washington, there was a collective shrug among his supporters here in northeast Pennsylvania, several of whom argued that no actual damage had been done by the new orders to freeze spending,” the Washington Post’s Natalie Allison reported from Luzerne County in northeastern Pennsylvania today.

“In interviews with nearly 20 people in the region in recent days, most Trump supporters were in favor of his efforts to scale back the federal workforce, to stand by controversial Cabinet nominees and to slash foreign aid,” the paper wrote.

“’I like the fact that they’re trying to cut stuff,’ Brian Williams, of Dickson City, Penn., told the Post. “He wasn’t the only local resident who struggled to recall the specifics of the Office of Management and Budget’s order to freeze federal loan and grant programs in an effort to weed out diversity and equity. But in conversations here, that kind of initiative was well received.”

Photo: People protested Wednesday against the so-called Department of Government Efficiency outside of the Department of Labor in Washington, D.C., as concerns grow about the unprecedented power that President Donald Trump has handed over to Elon Musk, the world’s richest man.DREW ANGERER/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

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