How Elon Musk Executed His Takeover of the Federal Bureaucracy

The operation was driven with a frenetic focus by the billionaire, who channeled his resentment of regulatory oversight into a drastic overhaul of government agencies.

Author

Matt Davis
March 02, 2025

Hey, friends. For those of you who are new here, I read the top story in the New York Times every morning so that you don’t have to. If you were forwarded this, you can subscribe here. Thanks for your interest in the newspaper. Please do talk about it with your friends and family.

Has anybody seen Kermit? Did he get crushed under a CyberTruck?

Good morning. The paper today has an in-depth investigation based on interviews with more than 60 people about how Elon Musk DOGE’d the federal government. It’s a 30-minute listen and probably 3,000 words long but fortunately I’m here to read the newspaper so that you don’t have to.

The headline in the paper version focuses on how the idea for DOGE came about at a fundraiser for Vivek Ramaswamy. Musk, at the time, was cautious about being seen to endorse either political party, but joked that he could do to the government what he’d done to Twitter if only someone gave him access to the servers.

“Just give him the passwords, he said jocularly, and he would make the government fit and trim.”

My copy of the article now looks like the crazy wall in “A Beautiful Mind”. I started ringing the bits in red that gave me particular concern…but pretty much every paragraph towards the end of the story is ringed in red, now;

The red bits are the paragraphs that made me think, “oh, Gosh…”

If you’ll excuse me for a moment I’m off to LinkedIn Live where as I mentioned, I deliver a daily five-minute video version of this newsletter. I’ll be right back after that to tell you here, what I thought of the piece. Hopefully I’ll manage to hold it together on the live broadcast without coming across too much like Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison in “Homeland.”

Just because her character had a few issues, didn’t mean Claire Danes wasn’t onto something…

Incidentally I just came across a Tumblr account called “Crazy Walls.” But who’s really crazy? Is it me? Or, you know, is it Elon Musk? I’ve started to think a lot about the end of George Orwell’s “1984” recently where the lead character decides he “loves” Big Brother. There’s something horrific about living under a constitutional takeover where you begrudgingly say to yourself, “yes, if I didn’t respect the law, that’s probably how I’d do it, too.” But that’s a red flag, that sort of Stockholm syndrome. In fact it’s a few red flags in a row. Are you feeling the red flags, too?

🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩.

The piece evolves into setting up how Mr. Musk managed to penetrate so many government agencies at once. For our purposes I think it’s best read in reverse. It ends by describing how “a swarm of young aides were brought on board as part of the staff of the former White House digital office. Their entry alarmed U.S.D.S. employees, many of who said it felt like a hostile takeover.”

At multiple points the story focuses on Mr. Musk’s attitudes to laws and the constitution. When urged to move more slowly, for example, by Brad Smith, a one time aide to Jared Kushner, Musk described such plans as “classic consultant stuff” and wanted to move more quickly.

“Mr. Musk had scant interest in constitutional law. He was constantly pushing the team to be ‘radical.’”

“They discussed the likelihood of litigation and welcomed the idea that the Democrats would sue them. They liked they chances with a Supreme Court that Mr. Trump had transformed in his first term, with a majority that now favored an expansive vision of executive power. The planning mirrored Mr. Musk’s tactics during his takeover at Twitter, when his lieutenants rushed layoffs and said they were willing to risk lawsuits from former employees.”

Musk became focused on the idea of “shutting down an entire agency,” with all this in mind, and Mr. Ramaswamy raised the idea of functionally shutting down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That’s what has effectively happened since, although they’re still running it in name only, and picking directors for what Senators have described as “the Titanic,” the bureau is also dropping lawsuits against big banks.

As a reminder, the CFPB was established during the financial crisis and has returned more than $21 billion to families cheated by Wall Street since then. Of course, when you’re cutting costs to return money to billionaires, it’s one of the first agencies you’d cut. But I think I’m a fan of the CFPB, personally. How about you?

Musk has kept his moves secret, “obsessed with confidentiality and fearful of leaks.” He’s an adviser to Mr. Trump and the White House, not technically the administrator of DOGE, which means “if people filed lawsuits seeking disclosure of his emails or the operation’s records under the Freedom of Information Act, the arrangement would set the administration up to argue that such documents were exempt.”

He has recruited people via X, writing there, for example, that they were looking for “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.” They hired Luke Farritor, a “23-year-old former SpaceX intern from Nebraska. He resembled the ideal Musk candidate: libertarian and a precocious coder who dropped out of college to receive a grant from Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor and Trump supporter.”

Luke Farritor: He looks a lot like my godson, who recently started a high frequency crypto trading company. Clearly I failed in my duty to keep him on the straight and narrow.

Mr. Farritor applied to work for the digital office of the Biden administration on December 17, with only one sentence:

“Super passionate about serving my country in the U.S.D.S.,” he wrote.

Here’s the really squirrelly bit:

“His outreach confused some staff members at the digital services unit. It was not clear to them why someone would be applying with just weeks left of the Biden administration, and with such a lackadaisical submission.”

They rejected the application just before Mr. Trump was sworn in, and then under Mr. Trump’s people, the decision was reversed. The day after Trump’s swearing in, “Mr. Farritor was scheduled to be outfitted with a new laptop at the General Services Administration. The next week, he showed up at U.S.A.I.D. as part of a group that worked to dismantle the agency from within.”

“Mr. Farritor would also have roles at the Energy, Education and Health and Human Services Departments, as well as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, where he would seek access to a database that controls contracts and more than $1 trillion in annual payments.”

Musk was initially given offices in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House. He also filed paperwork to become a “special government employee,” which means he can keep his financial disclosure form secret. And then the ego comes out.

“Mr. Trump’s aides cleared a space for Mr. Musk to use on the second floor of the West Wing. But he founds White House office cramped and unimpressive, dismissing it as a “hovel.” He abandoned it for the Secretary of War Suite in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, a gilded set of rooms more to his taste. There, he installed a gaming computer with a giant, curved screen and blinking LED lights, and decorated his desk with a DOGE sign and a MAGA hat. He also had a DOGTE T-shirt emblazoned with a quote from one of his favorite movies, “Office Space”: “What would you say you do here?”

The piece is disturbing, to say the least. In other news, some colleagues and I just started the “Department of Nonprofit Efficiency,” to help protect nonprofits and foundations against federal funding risk. We probably won’t be hiring my godson:

Say, that’s some timely branding…

Now, if you know anyone who might benefit from talking to us, be my guest!

Thanks for being here with me in this dark time. If you’d do me a favor and talk about the news with your friends and family, I think you’ll be doing us all a favor! I appreciate your readership.

Matt Davis lives in Manhattan with his wife and kid.