Elon Musk Has Plunged America Into a Constitutional Crisis. He Must Be Stopped.
The world’s richest man, unelected and unvetted, has taken physical control of US government departments, funding, and secrets.
We are in a constitutional crisis. The richest man on Earth is attempting to seize physical control of government payment systems and use them to shut down federal funding to any recipient he personally dislikes. Elon Musk is directly usurping Congress's most important authority, the power of the purse.
Over the years, many people have tried to envision what a constitutional crisis in the United States might look like. But this scenario is so extreme that no one could have possibly envisioned it. Most of those imagined crises have involved a standoff between two equal branches of government. Instead, what has happened is that a third party – the world's wealthiest man – has sought to simply commandeer, with the acquiescence of the president, the technical systems that make the federal government function. In doing so, he has interposed himself between Congress and the control panels of government.
An astonishing number of laws are seemingly being broken here. Serving as head of the newly-invented body known as DOGE (the so-called Department of Government Efficiency), a loose representative of the president without any clear role or official title, Musk has been granted access to highly restricted government computer systems. A private citizen with immense corporate interests and many business competitors now appears to have access to every bit of data the government owns. That includes personal data like names, addresses, social security numbers, health information, and welfare information. It also includes business data, such as data about the contracts and work of his direct competitors. It may be the vastest data breach in the history of the world – an industrial tycoon being handed the entire data repository of the United States government.
But this violation, appalling as it is, pales next to the greater constitutional harm. In the US, like any other functioning country, the government gets to control the government's own spending. This power is assigned to Congress. There is an elaborate political process of primaries and elections through which we elect senators and representatives. Those elected representatives then conduct negotiations – often difficult and acrimonious – and decide how to allocate vast sums of money every year. The allocations include trillions of dollars of taxpayer money and additional trillions of dollars of debt. The totals here are literally beyond the human capacity to envision, which is one reason why we have a long, specific process for determining how they're used. Congress's authority is paramount, and no one else – no government agency, no branch, not even the president – can simply overrule Congress and use the money for its own purposes.
Until now.