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Follow Net Worth and Chill wherever you listen to podcasts. Your bank account will thank you later. What's up, y'all? It's Kenny Beecham. On this week's episode of Small Ball, we get into maybe the wildest, craziest, most shocking week in NBA history. The trade deadline came and it did not disappoint. Some trades I love, some I hate it, and some made absolutely no sense at all.
The league has been shaken up, and I'm here to break it all down with you. Man, what a time to be an NBA fan. You can watch Small Ball on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes drop every Friday. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, it's going to be problems. Actually, one problem with extremely far-reaching consequences.
How dysfunctional has the federal government in the United States become and how much of it has been handed over entirely to Elon Musk? If you've even glanced at the news over the past week, you've come across some alarming headlines about Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and how it's begun commandeering control of some pretty important government agencies.
Ostensibly, Elon's goal with this not a department department is to slash spending and reduce waste across the government. But what's actually happening is a lot more destructive than that. Elon and the Doge team have gained access to the entire Treasury Department payment system, they've frozen life-saving foreign aid programs, and they're systematically locking out entire chunks of the federal workforce. And I do mean locking out, they can't access the buildings.
If you followed Elon's takeover of Twitter, this is familiar stuff. Musk moves in, he breaks things faster than anyone can keep track, and generally causes chaos and dares the market and the legal system to stop him. And at government scale, it aligns perfectly with the Trump 2.0 strategy of shock and awe, moving so fast and so relentlessly that it's impossible to figure out what to focus on, what's actually changed, what's been broken forever, and what's merely noise.
In many cases, Doge operates literally when everyone else has left the building. At night and on the weekends. On Monday morning at 1.54 a.m. Eastern, Musk tweeted what feels like an already infamous line about the nature of his work in the government, writing, quote, We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.
Could have gone to some great parties, did that instead. Obviously a big issue here is transparency. Doge is operating without any meaningful oversight, and it's actively resisting attempts to reveal information as simple as the names and work histories of who's on the staff. When Wire reported the names of six Doge employees, the new right-wing in Silicon Valley called it doxing, even though Elon himself has directed massive amounts of harassment at government workers over the past few months.
On top of that, efforts to impose transparency on Doge have caught the attention of at least one hardcore MAGA federal prosecutor who now claims that he'll go after anyone that attempts to impede Musk's work. Of course, the whole point of transparency is to have accountability, which is the other big problem here. It seems like a lot of what Elon and Doge are doing is simply illegal.
There have already been dozens of lawsuits filed challenging this Trump administration, including Doge's approach to headcount reduction, agency funding freezes, access to sensitive agency data, and the controls surrounding them. But these lawsuits will take time to work their way through the courts. And there's no telling how much damage Doge will do before that happens. And as it stands right now, Congress does not seem equipped in any way to check the actions of the world's richest man.
That leaves us with some big, frankly scary questions about where power is now concentrating in Washington, and whether any of the institutions we thought of as steady and resilient to chaos are truly as safe as we thought.
For this episode of Decoder, I didn't simply want to go through all the things that have happened. I wanted to know how these changes are affecting the people who have been the most newly supportive of Trump because they have the most to gain and the most to lose. The billionaires. Money.
So I invited New York Times reporter Teddy Schleifer on the show. Teddy has been covering Elon Doge and the new Trump administration as part of a group of reporters at the Times pretty much every hour since inauguration. They just published a blockbuster story on Elon's first wave of Doge actions. And Teddy himself specialized. in the intersection of money and politics, and how the political influence that money buys you has evolved pretty dramatically in the past few years.
So I wanted to ask Teddy what Elon and Doge are up to, how the government is responding to that. And then most importantly, is this what all the billionaires wanted? Did Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg really want Elon Musk in charge of the government? What are they saying about it, and how much farther is it going to go? The answer might surprise you, but not in a good way. I think over time, that part of the story might become the most complicated of all.
Okay, President Elon in the state of the federal government. Here we go. Teddy Schleifer, your reporter at The New York Times. Welcome to Decoder. Thanks for having me. There's a lot to talk about. You and a bunch of your colleagues published a blockbuster story on Elon Musk and Doge and what's happening with the federal government.
Whether or not we still have one seems like an open question. Give me the basics. Elon obviously donated a lot of money to the Trump administration, said he was doing Doge. There's an executive order that made it sound like an IT consultancy and now he's – sending an army of young men into federal contractors to take over the servers. What's happening here? The gist here is that Elon Musk and about 40 people who work for him are kind of on a march across.
Washington to make the federal government, in their view, more efficient. We're seeing flare-ups every day, right? Here's what's happening at USA Today, or here's what's happening department of education tomorrow but the general shape of this is you know they are trying to dramatically reduce the federal workforce and they're trying to kind of get their hands
on the wheel of federal spending. The Musk team, I think, has, I don't want to say shocked because we knew this was coming, but to the extent that, you know, the entire... kind of blitz uh was not so well foreseen um i think there's a point there because they're moving very very quickly and us in the media are
behind, right? We're still trying to figure out what happened at USAID the other day. We're trying to get ahead of what they're doing tomorrow. But so many of these things are also happening simultaneously. You know, a lot of these aides who are working for Elon wear multiple hats at once. They could be, you know, working for HHS, but also for USAID and also, you know, they're part of a SWAT team at
the GSA or OPM or all these other acronyms that people had never heard of a couple days ago. The speed is overwhelming, and, you know, this is going to be slowed down eventually because there's going to be a lot of legal follow-up on all this stuff, but we're still catching our breath.
Tell me about the team a little bit. Dojo is created inside the United States Digital Service. I actually had the former head of the USDS on Decoder a while back, Mina Sheng. She described it as a software consultancy. They're PMs. They're product managers. They go into various agencies. They help them build the Veterans Administration website. They leave. Doge inside of USDS is not that, right? It's actually seizing power, actually taking over.
Little is known about the people who are doing it. Who are these 40 people? There definitely is very little disclosure. In fact, even the head of DOJ, the administrator, which is part of the executive order, has not been publicly identified. People assume it's Elon. It might be this guy, Steve Davis, who's one of Elon's longtime aides, but even the person in charge of this operation has not at least been publicly stated.
I think a lot of the headlines are being generated by like the youngest people. And I understand why, but you know, this includes a software CEO. It includes people who work at McKinsey. It includes folks who have some government experience. But a lot of the people are folks who have either a direct or indirect connection to Elon. There are people who are a banker on the Twitter deal.
is a senior advisor at the Office of Personnel Management. You know, a longtime HR executive at SpaceX is also, you know, a senior advisor at Doge. And then you have kind of these worker bees, people who are, you know, as young as 19 years old, who, you know, us does not know these people personally or did not know these people personally but they're
Elon fans, and they, you know, if you look at their personal social media, you know, they retweet him all the time. You know the type. And they have sort of, are sort of the foot soldiers here, right? They're the people who are coding and trying. to learn as much as they can
the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services, right? I mean, and then the bull case here, right, is this belief that because they're outsiders, because they're inexperienced, they have fresh eyes. And frankly, maybe that's part of the entire premise of USDS in the first place, right? is that it's a way to get people from Silicon Valley into Washington, approaching things.
differently and teach them how to build websites, right? I mean, it's sort of the idea. I think Elon has taken it to an extreme where he's now bringing in people who have zero government experience and are total outsiders. And, you know, he promised change and disruption and we're getting it. I would say that the premise of USDS before was you're going to be a big tech.
engineer you're going to come do a two-year rotation inside the government to make it work better and leave this is much more you will operate the government Like just in the headlines over the weekend the past few days, they've taken over the U.S. Treasury payment system. They've taken control of other servers. They've set up their own email servers and told everyone to quit.
The difference here and I think some of the legality here comes down to Elon is – he's using the power of the state or taking control of the power of the state. As expressed in software. I think that's actually the insight. I don't think most members of Congress realize the government operates in a bunch of software and servers. They just say stuff and they assume that some machinery will do what they say. Elon –
And he's very good at identifying the point of biggest leverage and just hitting that button as hard as he can. And he's like, oh, I'm just going to take over the payment system. That's the difference, right? That's why he's sending engineers into these.
agencies and taking over their computers, because that's where the stuff happens. I'm wondering, and you and your colleagues at the Times have reported on this, I'm just wondering, as you've had those conversations, as you've done that reporting, why did everybody roll over so readily? Why do the people running those systems get out of the way so quickly? It's too early to say that that's happened. I mean, we know, for instance, in the Flashpoint has been the biggest source of tension.
at the Department of Treasury, where Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, has been flummoxed by how to handle the situation with the Elon crew. There's been a lot of... fair to say, conflicting reporting about whether or not this Elon crew that's running the payments server has what's called read-only privileges, essentially meaning they can just figure out what's going on or whether or not they have the ability to actually stop payments. And you could see Scott Besson
having a different opinion depending on which of those two things are true. Actually, can we actually sit on read only for a second? There's nothing more fun for the editor-in-chief of The Verge to do than point out that the New York Times and Wired disagree and then ask. It's the Times are reported that it's a read-only access, right? The White House is set on record.
That is, it is read-only access for the first time. And then Wired had like a 1 a.m. report that a single 25-year-old engineer actually has direct access to these systems. Are those reconcilable? Is it the White House just lying? What's the story here? I think it is possible that things are changing in real time. We're still reporting this out, but I think that some evidence has emerged that the rights have been evolving over time.
think any of us take anyone at their word here. In our story published this week, the White House said for the first time on record that it was read-only, which is something they had not said previously, and Treasury officials had declined to do so for a while. so the clarification on record i think is very helpful you know i'll let wire defend what they have and you know but i i think that at this at this moment that's why i feel like you know all of us here
that worked on that story are pressing for on record information. So if people are lying about it being read-only, you know, you can... blame the person who lied who's named the story or not but yes it is a very evolving situation these things are moving very quickly and to some extent when we published on saturday of last week that the elon team had access you know i do wonder
what sort of things happened in the immediate aftermath of that story that could then impact what we're talking about today on Tuesday. So this is a very, very... evolving dynamic situation. And, you know, last night, Scott Besson reportedly emphasized to Congress that it was read-only, but that's something that Treasury has not said on the record. Only the White House has said on the record. And, you know, Elon has certainly acted like it's not read-only.
Or that they have the ability to stop payments, which has massive legal differences and consequences because this is congressionally authorized spending. And we'll see whether or not Trump... wants Elon to be carrying out spending decisions on his own, or if Trump believes that, like, hey, I'm the president, this should be my decision. I want to come to that.
the Trump relationship in a second here, just to focus on the payments issue. I think it's just illustrative of kind of the whole story in a way. I only asked you about it not to pit the Times against Wired, although... I'm not so petty that I wouldn't do that. I asked you because the chances that Elon is lying to Scott Besant and Elon is not telling Trump what he's doing and they have more than the access they say they have, those chances seem quite high to me.
Like that's the heart of this whole story is no one actually knows. And it's not clear that if Elon is lying that any of these people could hold him accountable. And that feels like it is threaded through this entire – situation in the realest way. Are you getting the sense that if Scott Besson got really mad, he could actually stop it?
I think Besant is an interesting such person here because he's actually been Senate confirmed. I feel like part of the reason why the Elon team has had such success right off the bat is that sometimes they're fighting these bureaucratic battles against agencies that don't have a Senate confirmed leader. The Office of Personnel Management, you know, it's an acting leader who's been appointed. And that gives kind of the renegades more ability because they're not fighting a, you know.
famous person who's been established and has their own priorities and has been Senate confirmed who Trump chose. So we'll see. I don't think we have all the answers right now to know whether or not the Elon team is going to win. I mean, I do think the legal questions and, you know, to see how the democratic resistance fights Elon on these things.
I mean, that's going to take a long time. Like, I don't think the USAID story is done just because now they've put it as part of the State Department. You know, it's an act of Congress that authorized USAID. And there's going to be tons of lawsuits about all this stuff. But in the interim. You know, it feels, I mean, just to really dumb this down and this is, you know, yes, if you read the news, it feels like Elon is winning.
It feels like he is accomplishing everything and his people are running roughshod over the system and the bureaucracy is losing. But we'll see what happens. I don't think it's final. You know, there's also the possibility that Elon does a lot of stuff that is seems active and seems like he is winning, but Trump doesn't actually like. Right. I think a huge question on the politics of this stuff is it looks cool when, you know, Elon is, you know.
tweeting, you know, we got rid of $20 trillion today and $30 trillion tomorrow. But lots of budget cuts that are proposed by technologists or by, frankly, just like kind of Paul Ryan-style Republicans are often pretty unpopular. And, you know, I think part of why Trump has been successful in the Republican Party is he's opposed unpopular budget cuts, right?
modification to Social Security or Medicare. And if Musk is going to be saying, you know, we're cutting waste, fraud and abuse at Social Security, like you better be damn sure it's waste, fraud and abuse and not like someone's medical benefits. And then we'll see whether or not Trump wants to kind of rein it on it. So I understand why. It feels like he's winning, but I just, we're so early in the story. We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.
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Hey, this is Peter Kafka. I'm the host of Channels, a podcast about technology and media. And maybe you've noticed that a lot of people are investing a lot of money trying to encourage you to bet on sports right now, right from your phone.
That is a huge change, and it's happened so fast that most of us haven't spent much time thinking about what it means and if it's a good thing. But Michael Lewis, that's the guy who wrote Moneyball and The Big Short and Liar's Poker, has been thinking a lot about it.
And he tells me that he's pretty worried. I mean, there was never a delivery mechanism for cigarettes as efficient as the phone is for delivering the gambling apps. It's like the world has created less and less friction for the behavior when what it needs is more and more. You can hear my chat with Michael Lewis right now on channels wherever you get your podcasts.
Health and Human Services Secretary nominee Robert Floride Kennedy Jr. went before the Senate today in fiery confirmation hearings. Did you say Lyme disease is a highly likely... Militarily engineered bioweapon. I probably did say that. Kennedy makes two big arguments about our health, and the first is deeply divisive. He is skeptical of vaccines.
Well, I do believe that autism does come from vaccines. Science disagrees. The second argument is something that a lot of Americans, regardless of their politics, have concluded. He says our food system is serving us... And that garbage is making us sick. Coming up on today explained a confidant of Kennedy's. In fact, the man who helped facilitate his introduction to Donald Trump on what the Make America Healthy Again movement wants.
Today Explained, weekdays wherever you get your podcasts. We're back with New York Times reporter Teddy Schleifer discussing Elon Musk's takeover of the federal government. Before the break, we were talking about the structure of Doge, who's actually working on it, and how this group of 40-odd people are going about evaluating government spending and taking actions to supposedly address it.
We also talked a bit about who's answering to who here, and whether Elon is in fact reporting to anyone within the Trump administration, or if he's just gone rogue and obfuscating how much control he actually has. Look, I know some of you are already reacting to this because I'm making these sound like normal questions, but yeah, take a step back.
This all feels pretty illegal, right? It's wild when you lay it all out. We've never before seen the President of the United States simply step back and deputize a private citizen to take these kinds of actions on his behalf. And there is a whole lot of legal implications to having unnamed, unaccountable citizens, some of whom are literal teenagers, accessing sensitive government data and controlling the flow of billions, and in some cases trillions, of government dollars.
So Teddy and I spent some time talking about what the boundaries on Elon even are. Eventually, the courts might impose some amount of transparency and accountability, but what other guardrails are there on Elon and Doge right now? Or have they just been given the keys to the federal government? Or are we just hoping that Trump himself gets so annoyed with Elon that this all just comes to an end?
The thing that might stop him fastest of all is a bunch of lawsuits, right? The USAID is an ongoing legal situation. There are undoubtedly going to be more lawsuits to get filed by various parties. There's the entire notion that... The executive branch unilaterally stopping payment violates the Impoundment Act, which is where Congress delegates money and the executive has to spend it.
If he is indeed holding the keys to the treasury payment system, stopping stuff just because he doesn't like it, that feels illegal on many levels. Is that going to happen faster than the – personality conflict with trump or an appointed cabinet official or john thune or whoever else in congress that's a great question i don't know i mean it partially depends on how quickly the democrats and kind of opponents here can move i mean it does feel like democrats are just are
and not just Democrats, I'll just say critics. It does feel like people are just moving so slowly, like us in the media, right? We're reacting to what happened yesterday, and at the same time, you're trying to... figure out, you know, what's happening tomorrow. So that's really a question for, you know, the critics here, if they can move quickly enough. It's tough, right? And that's sort of the point of shock and awe is to do so many things at the same time that...
You know, you're just overwhelmed. And I think this is obviously a very challenging time for the resistance to Trump because, yes, people feel energized by the Elon moves and they're upset and they're incensed. But Republicans have.
power across Washington. And, you know, a lot of these things are playing out in executive agencies where Trump can do whatever he wants and or seems to think he can do whatever he wants. And we'll have to see whether courts agree with him, the courts which have been stacked by Donald Trump. So that's the challenge. Elon has significant business in front of these same agencies that he's taking over.
The conflicts of interest are massive, right? He runs SpaceX. That's a federal contractor. He pushed out effectively the head of the FAA just before there was a plane crash.
It seems like the conflicts of interest here alone should cause some pause from someone. But it also seems like he's reveling in them at this point in time. Is that going to turn into a problem or is it just – we live in a corrupt gilded age the conflict is like the point right it's like the whole point here is you know elon has
is almost I mean, this is a flattering way to put it, but that, you know, he's almost so many conflicts and is so involved in everything that like, you know, why even bother trying to police that? I mean, I honestly think the conflicts are so vast.
potentially that like i don't really know how like what is a job you could describe where he would be involved but like the conflict you if you carved out you know a role that is not a bridge by conflicts like what would that role even look like at this point you know like is he not going to be involved in anything having to do with like trade because you know he like or anything having to do with transportation or manufacturing or
You know, this is not just a guy who's the CEO of one company, right? So... That feels kind of hopeless. I think the best you might hope for is just disclosure, but I don't know if you're really going to get that. You know, Trump did say yesterday, and I thought it was interesting that he even broached the topic of limits because other times, you know, Trump has seemed even to this day.
statuated with Elon in a way that it makes you wonder if he's even thinking critically about this at all, the possibility of conflict. So if you're hoping there to be some... disclosure or, frankly, just care to this topic, I mean, I think you should be encouraged by what Trump said last night. Elon can't do and won't do anything without our approval. And we'll give him the approval where appropriate. Where not appropriate, we won't. But he reports in and he...
It's something that he feels very strongly about, and I'm impressed because he's running, obviously, a big company. It has nothing to do with there's a conflict that we won't let him get near it. But he does have a good natural instinct. He's got a team of very talented people. We're trying to shrink government, and he can probably shrink it as well as anybody else, if not better. Does that hearten you?
It doesn't, to be honest with you. I mean Trump himself is loaded with conflicts, right? The question I have like really and truly is, is there a split between the Trump administration? and the Elon administration. Elon taking control of the computers of the government in the most reductive, vergy way is taking control of the government, right? Like he's the one who can –
make the money go or not go, and that means he has an enormous amount of power. At some point, you wonder if the Trump administration is going to wake up and say, actually, we're in charge. Donald Trump is the president. And we're the ones who get to tell you what to do. You're just supposed to propose cost cutting. And I don't see that daylight reflected yet. Maybe we're going to be monitoring him as the first little bit of the daylight between the two men. But it doesn't seem like...
Trump is paying attention to what's happening inside of his agencies. He's doing trade wars and that might be fine for everybody. Does Trump really care about these things? Right. I mean, like, you know, does Trump really care about what's happening at HUD? Right. Or just. Does Trump care about some of these kind of very, very, very inside baseball bureaucracy? I mean, you know, Trump likes press releases. He likes big numbers. He likes the ability to...
you know, feel like you have the appearance of action. Elon is giving him that. And, you know, I think what we're getting at is, like, how successful will Elon be at navigating Trump world, right? I mean, you could obviously... Paint a scenario where Elon, with his ego and penchant for kind of headlines, you know, starts outshining the boss or, you know, starts acting like he's kind of, you know, a co-president. That's obviously...
To be clear, that's something that tons of Trump aides have had to navigate, obviously, and that's not unique to Elon and how he does. We'll see. People are so... confident that it's going to blow up that i've now have adopted the contrarian opinion that it's not going to blow up but i mean it's obviously tough right i mean and and elon is there's this take a 30 000 80 000 100 000 foot step back here i mean
This is unusual, right? And the ability for Elon to play such a big role in government is untested. And we'll see whether or not... It has longevity, but you can't really compare this to like Steve Bannon or Kellyanne Conway or Corey Lewandowski. I mean, this is just a different relationship that maybe Trump has ever had in his entire life. Like I don't know if he's ever been with someone like Elon Musk, even though Trump.
you know, is wealthy and grew up around other wealthy people. Let's talk about the other billionaires in the mix here, which is, you know, really where your coverage focuses, just the influence of money in politics and the flood of money, particularly from tech. towards Trump as he ended his campaign, as he got inaugurated, was pretty substantial. All the billionaires were at the inauguration, met a –
settle the First Amendment lawsuit that they really should not have settled for $25 million and agreed to build him a library. There's all kind of weird stuff going on here. All of those billionaires are not necessarily aligned with Elon Musk.
In fact, some of them are an open competition. Some of them hate each other. How does that play out here? Right? You got Elon Musk running the government, but I'm pretty sure Jeff Bezos would like Blue Origin to get – some nasa contracts i'm pretty sure mark zuckerberg has a lot of opinions about where government money should go and a lot of opinions about
content moderation on his platforms. In fact, he changed it to appease Trump in some meaningful ways. He has a lot of opinions about how the United States government should go fight EU regulation, for example. I'm pretty sure that he hates Elon Musk and Elon Musk hates him. How does that play out? Is the money getting what they want out of this or are they just watching it happen?
There's definitely a concern among very, very wealthy people that they've been outboxed by Elon here, right? And suddenly, you don't only have to hire lobbyists to... appease Donald Trump, you might have to hire lobbyists to appease Elon Musk, right? This is a euphoric time in American capitalism. It's the beginning of an administration. People are always happy, and the stock market is excited, blah, blah, blah. I don't know if there's really the...
the controversy that typically comes in a couple months in the administration. We'll see whether or not the billionaire class feels like they've gotten what they wanted. I think right now, the sense is that wealthy people and corporations have to survive. A lot of people learned a lot of lessons from the first term. We saw what happened last time. It's the same president. The corporations that got into these fights felt bruised by the end of it.
I think there's a desire to not have the same thing happen again. But Elon is the new force here. And there was obviously no one like him in 2016. If you're Sam Altman, imagine a world where you could just... lobby donald trump that's it's more easy than having to lobby the two-headed monster that is trump and elon and i don't know whether or not they have a strategy but for now you just kind of hope that
The kumbaya between the tech industry and Washington can last long enough to maybe outlast Elon, frankly. We need to take another quick break. We'll be right back. Thank you. We're back with New York Times reporter Teddy Schleifer, who's been covering Elon, Doge, and the new Trump administration nonstop since the inauguration. And we've come to the part of our story where it's time to take a step back and simply ask, is Elon doing a coup?
Are we witnessing a true constitutional crisis? Or is this just an extreme interpretation of executive power, one that enough lawsuits and judges and adults in the room will eventually put a stop to? A whole lot of Democratic messengers are starting to say the word coup outright, and Republicans and right-wing operatives are saying that's pure hysteria. Never mind, of course, that in the same breath, these politicians will talk about how revolutionary this moment is.
and how overdue we are to put the world's richest man in charge of rooting out the evils of government bureaucracy, with which he also contracts his private companies. But you can't call it a coup. That's too much. Unless it isn't. But at a certain point... It is worth asking whether Trump has in fact handed vital parts of the American government over to Elon Musk while he goes off and does trade war theatrics and photo ops.
There are serious academics, journalists, and Democratic politicians really sounding the alarm here. I don't know if any of those groups have the power or the will to create change, especially the current class of Democratic politicians.
But I do know that if American business leaders start to see instability in the market or worry about trading with the government, well, they might actually gain the courage to speak out. They just did it with tariffs and they pulled those back. So I wanted to know, where's the business community at right now?
Are they just trying to weather the storm and hope the worst parts of it are just for show? Or are they gearing up for a fight? Put it simply as I can, is the money worried? I don't know is the answer, honestly. I mean, we'll see. We'll see whether or not there's, you know. There's certainly not much public conversation about it from these people.
I really think right now it's very vibes-based and a belief that we should support the new administration, Trump will be good for the economy, maybe he'll be good for the stock market, even if they're concerned about... tariffs or any other kind of economic policy that they narrowly disagree with. We have not seen corporate America or Silicon Valley leaders critique this administration at least two weeks in, and people can do whatever they want.
I think privately people are aware of the fact that, you know, Trump could have controversial economic policies, but, you know, publicly, we're just not seeing it. We're just not seeing people talk about this in a way that reflects kind of that point of view. As you go through the reporting, is there the sense that this is actually a takeover by Elon and Doge, that this is a coup? I mean, a bunch of federal workers will tell you this is a coup. A bunch of members of Congress are.
inching to that line and maybe over it and saying this is a coup inside of a government. There's a takeover happening here. Let's pause here and think about what is a coup? I mean, look, I mean, the anti-coup argument is Donald Trump was democratically elected president of the United States. He has chosen to rename a federal, USDS is not an agency, but a federal team that has the power to make it to Doge. Doge is going out and...
finding inefficiencies and doing things and, you know, the courts have not ruled. They've certainly not been ruled against yet. I know the lawsuits are only being filed now. And, you know, I'm sure if, you know, there are ways that the Musk team is found to have done anything illegal.
A court of law can decide that, and then, you know, we'll see whether or not they stop it or not. That's the way the system works. Is that a coup? I mean, I don't think that word applies to what we've seen from the Musk team so far. We've seen a democratically elected president put in place an ally who has made a blitz across the federal government. They believe, and let's just try this on for size here, I mean, they believe the real coup is done by the bureaucrats.
The people, a common kind of thing in conservative media is to talk about there only being three branches of government, not four. That, like, the bureaucracy or, you know, the deep state, as the phrase became known during the Trump administration, that they're the unelected people, you know, that kind of... your standard middle manager at the Department of Homeland Security should not be thwarting the democratically elected president's policy on immigration and that
bureaucrat has less democratically derived power than Elon Musk, who has been appointed by the president of the United States to do something, just like he can appoint anyone else, you know, the White House chief of staff or, you know, his personal butler. And this is the way the system works. Yeah, I can make the other argument. You know, the court saying this is illegal is not the point at which the law is broken. The law is broken when you break it.
Right. And so I'm going to go into this agency and then tweet that I fed it into the wood chipper, which is what Elon tweeted about USAID. That's just straightforwardly illegal. Right. That's an agency that's created by Congress. The executive branch can't just stop it. It can't just not do a law. You could even make the argument that Trump just generally declining to not ban TikTok or not enforce the law as opposed as.
as it applies to TikTok right now, is right on the boundary of executive authority, right? It's right on the boundary of like, I directly control the Department of Justice, so I will tell them not to prosecute. And that steps into the independence of that agency. But you can see this in a number of places, right? There are laws governing classified information in the government. It appears – we don't know, but it appears by all the reporting, including some of yours at the Times.
The Doge people have access that they should not have. They have access to information that they should not have. They have direct control of these systems. They're publishing, if they in fact do have right access, they're publishing code to production that might destabilize this.
systems in a way that's illegal. They've had to get rid of officials who've stood in their way of that access, and they put those people on administrative leave in order to gain the access they desire. That stuff, right, I don't think you need... Some judge to say you're way over the boundary of the executive authority is laid out in the constitution, right? You've just – you've taken power you don't have. You've used power you have not been granted to take control of.
agencies and organizations that were created by Congress. And actually, Congress should seize this power back. Even the, I think conceptually, I will take control of the Treasury's payment system to stop payments. That is a step on Congress's power of the purse, right? Congress determines what spending is because that's the most democratic institution we have. So I don't know that you need –
You need to get all the way to someone declared it to be legal. I think you can look at something and say, well, he definitely broke the window and he's definitely in the back of the store. He's definitely taking the stuff and putting it in the bag and walking out. Like, I know that's illegal. I don't have to wait all the way into the end.
And he's doing it very publicly, right? He's tweeting about it. He's talking about it constantly. There's a part here that I think is super fascinating where I don't – Elon didn't go to law school. I don't think he's done the reading. And he keeps saying various things are illegal. Right? Like things that straightforwardly are not illegal. He said, you know, that's the most galling thing, at least as a reporter, was, you know, this idea that disclosure of the people involved in Doge is a crime.
Which was interesting. Right. Like Mr. Free Speech Absolutist is saying if you even say who these people are, this is a crime. And now there's a random U.S. attorney who seems very sketchy saying I will ask you those people. That is coup level territory.
I think you can make the argument. I agree with you that I don't know how it will play out. I don't know that it will be successful in the long run. But I think you can make the argument that if you just squint at it, if you look at it, you say, well, these are the things you would do. If you were to say, where is the power actually organized? It's in the computer systems of the federal government. We need to take control of those. And now we have the power.
Now we can just shut down an organization. Now we can just stop paying people. Now we can email everybody, reply to this email with the word resign, and you will be fired. Those are authoritarian moves. They're an expression of power that usually our government does not do. Elon Musk, the incoming CEO of Twitter, does them, right? And a lot of this is very familiar to all of us who covered his takeover of Twitter.
but twitter was a small failing social media company and this is the united states government like at the end of the day the united states government can launch nuclear weapons like it can destroy the world and so we're generally pretty careful with how we run it and i that's the part where it's The flickers of recognition from the money in America, like, oh, this is very destabilizing, right? Like this is – planes might fall out of the sky at higher rates than we want them to.
because we fired all the air traffic controllers right like that's the part where i'm wondering if there's a glimmer like oh someone should be more careful here yeah I agree with a lot of that, that there needs to be some kind of least disclosure of what the hell's going on. I'm in the disclosure business right now, trying to figure this stuff out. And it's not easy, obviously, even though I... I'm coming to this as fairly as I possibly can. They are operating largely...
in the shadow and in the dark and the public is only seeing the consequences. Like Elon is being very transparent in some ways, but not transparent in other ways. We're just trying to figure it out, man.
Yeah, I think all of us are. I'm glad that you joined to talk about it. It's a great story in The Times. I think all of us are going to be competing for this story. It seems like the story of our age, especially because it's this cast of characters that has... run some companies well and run some companies not so well and applying those moves to the government it's actually pretty fascinating
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, run government like a business is such a such a, you know, cliche, but not that every CEO, you know, runs their business like Elon Musk runs his businesses. But here we go. You know? Yeah. All right, Teddy, thank you so much for the time. You got to come back on Decoder as the next four years unfold. You bet.
I'd like to thank Teddy Schleifer for joining me on the show today, and thank you for listening. If you have thoughts about this episode, I'm sure you do, or really anything else, you can email us at decoderatheverge.com. We really do read all the emails. You can also hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky, and we have a TikTok for...
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