Tech is power in Musk’s campaign to roll over federal civil servants

In recent days, extraordinary street protests have cropped up at the headquarters of the Treasury Department, Office of Personnel Management and U.S. Agency for International Development—protests targeting not President Donald Trump so much as his unelected, unconfirmed billionaire sidekick, Elon Musk. 

The demonstrators, including Democratic members of Congress, have decried perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the historic Trump disruption: the displacement of career civil servants who implement congressionally approved government policy by a secretive coterie of 20-something-year-old Silicon Valley engineers and coders. 

We have seen nothing like this in Washington — ever.

Central to the chaotic, multi-front campaign to play havoc with the ordinary functioning of government is Musk’s insight that controlling the tech — and intimidating the bureaucrats who normally manage it — is a potent means to undermine the ordinary functioning of the executive branch.

Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian of tyrannical movements, has noted that ordinary coups are carried out by brigades of men with guns who storm government buildings and take orders from military generals intent on overthrowing civilian leaders. The so-far nonviolent infiltration of Washington agencies now underway is being executed by a relative handful of former Musk employees armed with zip drives, following directions from a corporate mogul who understands that, as Snyder puts it, 21st century “power is more digital than physical.”

In a further twist, Musk is pursuing his vigilante attacks on government functions that offend his personal sense of “efficiency” or anti-wokeism with the tacit blessing not of a military junta but a democratically elected president who seems intent on sowing chaos as a means of enhancing his own authority. To accomplish these goals, Trump-Musk have to push aside civil servants, some of whom are trying to resist but so far without much success. 

Consider some representative snapshots (though hardly a comprehensive slideshow):

• Career Treasury official David Lebryk refused to give Musk’s youthful minions with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency access to the computer system of the Bureau of Fiscal Service, which channels about 90% of the nearly $7 trillion that the federal government spends on an annual basis. Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, granted the access, and Lebryk resigned. It’s not clear yet what exactly the Musk squad is doing at Treasury, but at a minimum, they now can see personal data such as Social Security numbers and bank account information of federal benefit recipients and could gain the ability to unilaterally stop payments to congressionally mandated programs that Musk and/or Trump disfavor.

• At USAID, DOGE personnel who reportedly attempted to improperly access classified information and security systems were initially stopped by top agency security officials, but those officials were subsequently put on leave. The Associated Press reported that the DOGE team then accessed the classified material they were seeking, even as the agency’s activities around the globe were being shut down.

• Musk aides have turned up even at the relatively obscure National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA employees were ordered to grant a young DOGE engineer access to all of the agency’s Google sites. Project 2025, the conservative policy blueprint helping to shape the Trump agenda, calls for NOAA to be broken up and downsized, and for the work of the National Weather Service, a NOAA component, to be largely privatized.

In these and many other situations, career government employees have little leverage within their agencies to defeat the tech-savvy DOGE attack. But government worker unions are starting to fight back by filing lawsuits that will test whether federal judges have the backbone to resist what appears to be an unabashed assault on the rule of law and long-established norms of governance. 

But litigation raises yet other questions — not least whether Trump-Musk would obey potential court rulings ordering them and their underlings to stand down.     

Paul Barrett, deputy director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University’s Stern School of Business, writes frequently about technology and democracy.