Henry Farrell, Abraham L. Newman, Elon Musk Weaponizes the Government, Lawfare, February 5, 2025.
It’s hard for politicians and journalists to grasp what Musk and his team are doing, still less to explain it to the public. These efforts involve technical systems that are incomprehensible and boring to outsiders, few of whom even know that the Office of Personnel Management exists, let alone what it does. But even if no one pays much attention to these systems, they are the sinews of government—key parts of the infrastructure that hold the federal state together and manage its relationship to the outside world.
We are highly familiar with such systems and how they can be used. Our academic research, and our recent book, “Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy,” explain how the U.S. quietly took control of similar technical systems that hold the world economy together and used them to exercise domination over allies and enemies alike. Now, Musk is seemingly doing to the U.S. government what the U.S. government once did to the rest of the world: refashioning the plumbing of the federal government into a political weapon against his adversaries.
Fifteen years ago, few people outside financial institutions paid much attention to SWIFT, a global system that banks use for messaging, or the “dollar clearing” system, both of which are central to global financial transactions. Everyone used the internet, but only systems administrators and engineers really cared about how it worked. Specialized trade publications might have cared about the global supply chains that allow complex manufacturing to happen, but no one else did. These systems provided the basic institutional infrastructure that made sure money, information, and goods got to where they were supposed to go in an orderly and efficient way.
Now, everybody who reads the news recognizes how important these systems are. The plumbing became political. During the Obama administration, the Snowden leaks revealed how the U.S. had turned the internet into an enormous system for global surveillance—waking people up to the role of dollar clearing and the SWIFT system. But these changes had begun several years before, even if many did not then understand their systemic consequences. [...]
Nearly exactly the same thing is happening now—except that this time the U.S. federal government is having done unto it what it used to do to others. Musk’s strategy has not been a coup so much as a takeover bid, aided and abetted by other parts of the Trump administration and the tacit acquiescence of the Republicans who control both houses of Congress.
The U.S. identified key choke points that allowed it to weaponize the world’s payment, information, and physical infrastructure to achieve its ends. Musk’s DOGE is weaponizing the U.S. government’s payment, information, and physical infrastructure in highly similar ways, carrying out an end run around the political structures that are supposed to restrain unilateral executive action. Just as when the U.S. weaponized the world economy over two decades ago, it is hard for those at the receiving end to understand exactly what is happening to them.
However, there's a bit of hope:
However, throughout all of this, it is important to realize some important facts. Not very many people work for DOGE. Reports suggest that they are technically skilled, with engineering backgrounds, but have little experience of government or understanding how it works. Equally, the gnarly complexities of existing government information systems will mean they may be harder than Musk’s engineers anticipate to subvert wholesale for political purposes. The gross inefficiencies and “technical debt” documented by experts like Jennifer Pahlka may turn out to be an accidental immune system against those who might like to turn government technical systems into smoothly functioning systems of coercion.
There's more at the link.
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