Elon Musk Is Leading a ‘Hostile Takeover of the Federal Government’

President Trump has empowered Elon Musk, one of the richest men in the world, to fire government employees, eliminate federal agencies and run roughshod over both federal law and the Constitution.

In an unparalleled delegation of executive branch authority, Trump has chosen Musk — who is at once an entrepreneur whose companies have won billions of dollars in federal contracts and an open supporter of far-right political parties in Europe — to conduct a radical reconfiguration of the American government in conformity with the ideological agendas of both Trump and Musk.

The two men have at least one thing in common. Both grew up in white enclaves during periods when racial strife was emerging — Trump was born in 1946 and grew up in the affluent Queens neighborhood of Jamaica Estates in New York City; Musk was born in 1971 and grew up in the suburbs of Johannesburg and Durban, in South Africa, at a time when whites still ruled the country under apartheid.

The elevation of Musk marks a major reversal of Trump ideology from the angry working class, anti-elitism of his first winning campaign, in 2016, under the guidance of Steve Bannon, to the explicit privileging, this time around, of elite tech oligarchs — rich beyond the imagination of ordinary people — to guide government policies.

It is no easy task to grasp the scale and magnitude of Trump’s appointment of Musk to run the Department of Government Efficiency, better known by its acronym, DOGE. Musk’s declared goal is to cut federal spending by $2 trillion. According to the Congressional Budget Office, government expenditures totaled $6.75 trillion in 2024.

“I can think of no precedent in American history of such enormous power being entrusted to a private citizen,” Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, wrote by email in reply to my inquiry:

Musk and others in the Trump administration have a very different view. Musk considers what he is doing to be the embodiment of democracy in action.