Elon Musk Is Leading an Electronic Coup D’État

Elon Musk, the multibillionaire and advisor to President Donald Trump who now heads a team called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has been taking over U.S. government agencies—the Treasury Department, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), General Services Administration (GSA), and the United States Agency for International Development, and perhaps others—a process that at least in some cases appear to be illegal. Where officials have resisted, Trump has removed them from their positions. Musk’s take-over is tantamount to a coup, and far more effective, serious, and dangerous than the insurrection that Trump organized on January 6, 2021.

Controlling the executive branch, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court, Trump apparently believes that he and Musk have the power to carry out a coup with impunity. With Trump having purged the Justice Department, the FBI, the Inspectors General, there is, in fact, no one to call out and stop these attacks on the government bureaucracy from within. The Democrats and groups such as the ACLU have been filing suit in various courts with some success, but if they end up at the Supreme Court, given that the Supreme Court ruled in July 2024 that the U.S. presidents have absolute immunity for their official actions and broad immunity for most other actions, Trump is likely to win.

Trump and Musk, who have been calling for reducing the size and cost of government, now have the power with the push of a computer key to stop the two trillion dollars in payments made by Treasury each year affecting tens of millions of people from children to the disabled to the elderly, local and state governments, and private contractors. They now have their hands on the computers at OPM that handles the records of virtually all 2.5 million government employees. And have taken over the computers at the GSA oversees government real estate, land and buildings. Musk’s team now had its hands on computer that mange almost $43 billion in foreign aid for foreign economies, education, and health, such as for HIV programs.Trump and his pliant Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth already control the U.S. military’s $820 billion budget.

We are witnessing a tech coup d’état. The Democratic Party has failed to stop Trump and Musk, and at the moment has no plan to do so. The social movements and the left are too weak and distant from power to do anything immediately and are only likely to develop a strategy when Trump’s attack on the lives of millions of Americans forces them to act.