The coup is underway: Elon Musk's playbook to destroy the federal government

Where we are and where we're heading

The playbook

Elon Musk, a private citizen, has infiltrated multiple federal agencies, aided by a cadre of 20-something-year-old engineers and interns (some with racist and possibly criminal pasts) imported from his companies. Unconstrained by oversight or limits, the world’s richest man is conducting what can only be described as a coup to hollow out and control the entire governmental apparatus. How he intends to do this is now becoming clear through examining his operations inside the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and other departments.

Step one: Decimate the federal workforce through a combination of so-called “buyouts,” layoffs, and firings. Make conditions so unbearable that employees voluntarily resign, and maintain control of those who remain through fear and anxiety. As Russ Vought, the architect of Project 2025 and now-head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), said: “We want to put them in trauma.”

Step two: Seize control of essential systems. Use confidential employee data to inform and enable firings and pressure resignations. Install DOGE loyalists in positions of power who can deny access to internal servers, scrub public information, and—most importantly—terminate funding streams at will. According to Wired, at least one DOGE employee has already made “extensive changes” to code within the Treasury system, and another was installed as the head of the payments system (after firing a career staffer who refused an illegal order).

Step three: With no constraints from career civil servants and unlimited access to sensitive systems, unilaterally shut down and de-fund any disfavored programs and departments, regardless of congressional mandates or appropriations. Install automation throughout the government as a tool to identify alleged “waste” and as a way to replace federal workers. Musk is already deploying AI in the Department of Education and “plans to replicate this process across many departments and agencies”:

The DOGE team’s AI-fueled campaign to winnow the Education Department has already identified dozens of contracts as targets for cuts, two of the people familiar with the group’s work said. They have indicated their intention is to eliminate every contract that is not essential to operations or required by law, according to one of the people.

“That’s the way you kill an agency, is you remove all [of] their ability to perform their role,” the person said.

The end result will be a government whose only remaining functions exist to serve a privileged few: the wealthiest Americans and corporations.

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USAID

We can look at how Trump and Musk have decimated USAID, an independent agency enshrined in law by Congress in 1998, to see this playbook in action. USAID, one of the world's largest official aid agencies, funded programs in over 100 counties to educate children, fight epidemics, administer emergency medical care, provide clean water, support democratic governance, and conserve delicate ecosystems. Established in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy to counter Soviet influence during the Cold War, USAID has been America’s foremost tool of soft power. Its destruction is a gift to autocrats everywhere, like China’s Xi Jinping, who will step in to fill the aid vacuum and gain the influence abandoned by the U.S.

USAID sign removed from its HQ

Jan. 20: Trump signed an executive order directing a 90-day pause on foreign aid.

Jan. 24: Elon Musk’s “top lieutenants” pressured acting Secretary of the Treasury, David Lebryk, to “immediately shut off all USAID payments using the department’s own ultra-sensitive payment processing system.” Lebryk replied that he did not believe “we have the legal authority to stop an authorized payment certified by an agency.”

Jan. 26: Marco Rubio, who the Senate unanimously confirmed as Secretary of State, implemented Trump’s executive order, issuing a stop-work order for existing grants and contracts at USAID.

Jan. 27: The administration put about 60 senior career officials at USAID on leave, at least some of whom resisted Trump’s order to freeze humanitarian aid. USAID’s director of employee and labor relations, Nicholas Gottlieb, was also put on leave for attempting to rescind the “illegal” purge:

“DOGE instructed me to violate the due process of our employees by issuing immediate termination notices to a group of employees without due process,” wrote Nicholas Gottlieb, the director of employee and labor relations at USAID, referring to the budget-slashing commission known as the “Department of Government Efficiency.” “I was notified moments ago that I will be placed on administrative leave, effective immediately. It has been an honor working with you all.”

Jan. 31: Acting Secretary of the Treasury David Lebryk announced his retirement after being put on administrative leave for resisting DOGE’s efforts to illegally terminate USAID’s funding through the Treasury’s payment system. At some point the same day, acting USAID administrator Jason Gray directed USAID’s IT department to “hand the entire digital network to Musk’s engineers.”

Feb. 1: Both the director of security and deputy director of security at USAID were put on leave after refusing to give DOGE employees access to internal systems containing classified material. Shortly after DOGE took control of the computer systems, the USAID website went offline and employees were locked out of the network.

The tension at USAID headquarters came to a head on Saturday evening, when DOGE employees demanded access to the Scif on the agency’s sixth floor. They were stopped by the agency’s top security officer, John Voorhees…The argument over access to the Scif had grown verbally heated and senior Doge staff threatened to call in US marshals to gain access to it. During that standoff, according to one account made to the Guardian, a call was again made to Musk, who, as Bloomberg first reported, repeated the threat to involve the US Marshals Service.

Shortly after, Voorhees was placed on administrative leave and the Doge staffers entered the Scif. They took over the access control system and employee records. Within hours, the USAID website went down. Hundreds of employees were locked out of the system that weekend, and many still don’t know their status. (The Guardian has seen emails in which USAID administrators admit they do not know the employment states of current USAID officials.)

Feb. 2: Elon Musk said that he checked with Trump “a few times” and confirmed that the president wants to shut down USAID. “With regards to the USAID stuff, I went over it with (the president) in detail and he agreed that we should shut it down,” Musk said in an X Spaces conversation.

In the X Spaces conversation early Monday, which he co-hosted with Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa and Vivek Ramaswamy – who was initially named co-chair of DOGE with Musk but has since left – the X owner called USAID “incredibly politically partisan” and said it has been supporting “radically left causes throughout the world including things that are anti-American.”

Feb. 3: The administration closed the USAID building and told personnel not to come into the office. Democratic lawmakers were denied entry to the building.

Feb. 4: The administration announced it is placing all direct-hire employees, including Foreign Service officers, at USAID on administrative leave starting on Feb. 7.

Feb. 6: The administration announced it will only keep 294 of USAID’s 10,000 global staff.

Feb. 7: Unidentified officials removed and covered up signs identifying USAID's headquarters in Washington, D.C. Elon Musk tweeted that the building will now be used by Customs and Border Protection staff.

Feb. 7: Later that day, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, issued a limited temporary restraining order blocking the government from putting roughly 2,000 USAID employees on leave and reinstating 500 staffers who had already been placed on administrative leave for one week. However, Nichols declined to issue an order to reopen the building and restore USAID funding, finding that the plaintiffs (two unions representing USAID employees) failed to demonstrate irreparable harm.

Feb. 10: The two federal unions informed Judge Nichols that the administration is not complying with his order to reinstate employees and cease putting additional employees on administrative leave.

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What is next

The abolition or disabling of agencies that limit the rich and protect the poor

We are seeing the beginnings of this in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an independent agency created by Congress to protect consumers from unfair, deceptive, or abusive practices and take action against companies that break the law. Since the agency’s inception, the CFPB has returned more than $21 billion to consumers who have fallen victim to abusive and illegal activity—while only costing taxpayers $729 million a year, less than 0.01% of the total federal budget.

On Feb. 1, Trump fired CFPB director Rohit Chopra. A week later, DOGE staffers were reportedly given access to CFPB servers. And, just this weekend, Trump installed Project 2025 architect Russ Vought as acting director of the CFPB. Vought immediately issued a stop-work order, told all employees the building would be closed this week, and took down the CFPB homepage. Meanwhile, Musk tweeted “CFPB RIP” accompanied by a tombstone emoji.

• It is worth noting that Musk is about to enter the financial services business, which CFPB regulates, by partnering with Visa to turn X/Twitter into a digital wallet and peer-to-peer payments service.

Corrupt handouts to friends and allies of the Trump administration

Some of this will come from Congress in the form of massive tax breaks for the wealthy. If Republicans in Congress get their way, the cost of extending Trump’s tax cuts will be paid for by slashing what they call “entitlements,” like Medicaid and SNAP.

Wealthy businessmen, like Elon Musk, will also benefit from billions of dollars in government subsidies and contracts. Without any inspectors general, because Trump fired them all (including the one investigating SpaceX over national security concerns), there will be no oversight of these awards. In fact, Trump has already awarded $30 million of contracts to a software company, owned by billionaire Craig Abod, currently under investigation for a price-fixing scheme to overcharge the government.

The prioritization of a Christian nationalist worldview wherein white heterosexual Christian males are at the top of the hierarchy

The administration has already begun targeting women and people of color in positions of power under the guise of ending “DEI,” and is attempting to erase transgender and nonbinary people from society with policies banning gender-affirming care and gender changes on passports.

Last week, Trump created the “White House Faith Office” and appointed televangelist and prosperity gospel adherent Paula White-Cain as its leader. As part of the executive order, all agencies will now be required to staff a “Faith Liaison” to ensure compliance with goals like “protecting women and children”—e.g., curtailing reproductive rights like abortion access and criminalizing LGBTQ+ expression—and “strengthening marriage and family”—e.g., restricting contraceptives like Plan B and supporting states that seek to ban no-fault divorce.

Crackdowns on dissent, including First Amendment protections

Trump’s FCC chief, Brendan Carr (who contributed to Project 2025), is spearheading the administration’s war on the media by threatening the broadcast licenses of stations that he perceives as being unfair to Trump, persecuting CBS for—in Trump’s words—“doctoring” a Kamala Harris interview, and opening an investigation into a radio news station for its coverage of immigration enforcement actions. At the same time, Interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin, who coincidentally happened to represent many Jan. 6 insurrectionists, pledged to Elon Musk to “pursue any and all legal action” against journalists who published the identities of DOGE employees.

Open violations of court orders that try to maintain constitutional guardrails

The administration is already flouting judicial orders, like Judge Nichols’ mandate to reinstate USAID employees who were put on administrative leave (above). Additionally, a federal judge in Rhode Island found that the administration has not complied with his order to resume disbursement of appropriated federal funds.

Meanwhile, Vice President VD Vance is publicly advocating for the administration to ignore a court order barring DOGE employees from accessing the Treasury’s payment system. This is not a new position of his; Vance said very plainly in 2021 that Trump should defy any limits the judiciary branch tries to place on the executive:

“I think that what Trump should, like, if I was giving him one piece of advice, [is] fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,” he said in 2021 on a podcast. “Replace them with our people. And when the courts — because you will get taken to court — and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

And that is where we are ultimately heading: A potential constitutional crisis on a scale we haven’t seen since the Civil War. When the president flagrantly disobeys a legal court order, the judiciary—whose only method of enforcement is the U.S. Marshals, which is under the control of the Department of Justice, which is headed by a Trump loyalist—will not be able to stop him.