In Elon Musk’s first two weeks in government, his lieutenants gained access to closely held financial and data systems, casting aside career officials who warned that they were defying protocols. They moved swiftly to shutter specific programmes — and even an entire agency that had come into Musk’s crosshairs. They bombarded federal employees with messages suggesting they were lazy and encouraging them to leave their jobs.

Empowered by President Donald Trump, Musk is waging a largely unchecked war against the federal bureaucracy — one that has already had far-reaching consequences.

Musk’s aggressive incursions into at least half a dozen government agencies have challenged congressional authority and potentially breached civil service protections.

Top officials at the treasury department and the US Agency for International Development who objected to the actions of his representatives were swiftly pushed aside. Musk’s efforts to shut down USAID, a key source of foreign assistance, have reverberated around the globe.

Musk, the world’s richest man, is sweeping through the federal government as a singular force, creating major upheaval as he looks to put an ideological stamp on the bureaucracy and rid the system of those who he and the President deride as “the deep state”.

The rapid moves by Musk, who has a multitude of financial interests before the government, have represented an extraordinary flexing of power by a private individual.

The speed and scale have shocked civil servants, who have been frantically exchanging information on encrypted chats, trying to discern what is unfolding.

Senior White House staff members have at times also found themselves in the dark, according to two officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions.

One Trump official, who was not authorised to speak publicly, said Musk was widely seen as operating with a level of autonomy that almost no one can control.

Musk, the leader of SpaceX, Tesla and X, is working with a frantic, around-the-clock energy familiar to the employees at his various companies, flanked by a cadre of young engineers, drawn in part from Silicon Valley. He has moved beds into the headquarters of the federal personnel office a few blocks from the White House, according to a person familiar with the situation, so he and his staff, working late into the night, could sleep there, reprising a tactic he has deployed at Twitter and Tesla.

This time, however, he carries the authority of the President, who has bristled at some of Musk’s ready-fire-aim impulses but has praised him publicly. “He’s a big cost-cutter,” Trump told reporters on Sunday. “Sometimes we won’t agree with it and we’ll not go where he wants to go. But I think he’s doing a great job. He’s a smart guy.”

Musk, who leads a cost-cutting initiative the administration calls the Department of Government Efficiency, boasted on Saturday that his willingness to work weekends was a “superpower” that gave him an advantage over his adversary. The adversary he was referring to was the federal workforce.

There is no precedent for a government official to have Musk’s scale of conflicts of interest, which include domestic holdings and foreign connections such as business relationships in China. And there is no precedent for someone who is not a full-time employee to have such ability to reshape the federal workforce.

Historian Douglas Brinkley described Musk as a “lone ranger” with limitless running room.

He noted that the billionaire was operating “beyond scrutiny”, saying: “There is not one single entity holding Musk accountable. It’s a harbinger of the destruction of our basic institutions.”

Several former and current senior government officials — even those who like what he is doing — expressed a sense of helplessness about how to handle Musk’s level of unaccountability. At one point after another, Trump officials have generally relented rather than try to slow him down. Some hoped Congress would choose to reassert itself.

The President has given Musk vast power over the bureaucracy that regulates his companies and awards them contracts. He is shaping not just policy but personnel decisions, including successfully pushing for Trump to pick Troy Meink as the air force secretary, according to three people with direct knowledge of his role.

Meink previously ran the Pentagon’s National Reconnaissance Office, which helped Musk secure a multibillion-dollar contract for SpaceX to help build and deploy a spy satellite network for the federal government.

Since Trump’s inauguration, Musk and his allies have taken over the United States Digital Service, now renamed United States DOGE Service, which was established in 2014 to fix the federal government’s online services.

They have commandeered the federal government’s human resources department, the Office of Personnel Management.

They have gained access to the treasury’s payment system — a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending.

Musk has also taken a keen interest in the federal government’s real estate portfolio, managed by the General Services Administration, moving to terminate leases. Internally, GSA leaders have started to discuss eliminating as much as 50 per cent of the agency’s budget, according to people familiar with the conversations.

Perhaps most significant, Musk has sought to dismantle USAID, the government’s lead agency for humanitarian aid and development assistance. Trump has already frozen foreign aid spending, but Musk has gone further.

“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk gloated on X at 1.54am on Monday. “Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”

Musk’s allies now aim to inject artificial intelligence tools into government systems, using them to assess contracts and recommend cuts. On Monday, Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who has been tapped to lead a technology team at the GSA, told some staff members that he hoped to put all federal contracts into a centralised system so they could be analysed by artificial intelligence, three people familiar with the meeting said.

The New York Times spoke to more than three dozen current and former administration officials, federal employees and people close to Musk who described his expanding influence over the federal government. Few were willing to speak on the record, for fear of retribution.

“Before Congress and the courts can respond, Elon Musk will have rolled up the whole government,” said one official who works inside an agency where representatives from Musk’s cost-cutting initiative have asserted control.

Musk says he is making long overdue reforms. So far, his team has claimed to help save the federal government more than $1 billion a day through efforts like the cancellation of federal building leases and contracts related to diversity, equity and inclusion, although they have provided few specifics.

Controlling the pipes

Workers in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which housed some operations for the United States Digital Service, arrived the day after Trump’s inauguration to find a sticky note with “DOGE” on a door to a suite once used as a workspace for senior technologists at the agency.

It was one of the first signs that Musk’s team had arrived. Inside, black backpacks were strewed about, and unfamiliar young men roamed the halls without the security badges that federal employees typically carried to enter their offices.

In his current role, Musk has a direct line to Trump and operates with little if any accountability or oversight, according to people familiar with the dynamic. He often enters the White House through a side entrance, and drops into meetings. He has a close working relationship with Trump’s top policy adviser, Stephen Miller, who shares Musk’s contempt for much of the federal workforce.

At one point, Musk sought to sleep over in the White House residence. He sought and was granted an office in the West Wing but told people that it was too small. Since then, he has told friends he is revelling in the trappings of the opulent Secretary of War Suite in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where he has worked some days. His team is staffed by engineers — at least one as young as 19 — who have worked at his companies like X or SpaceX, but have little if any experience in government policy and are seeking security clearances.

Officially, Musk is serving as a special government employee, according to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. This is a status typically given to part-time, outside advisers to the federal government who offer advice based on private sector expertise.

The White House declined to say if Musk had been granted a waiver that allowed him to get involved in agencies whose actions could affect his own personal interests. And even if he had been given such a waiver, four former White House ethics lawyers said they could not envision how it could be structured to appropriately cover the range of the work Musk is overseeing.

In a statement, Leavitt said: “Elon Musk is selflessly serving President Trump’s administration as a special government employee, and he has abided by all applicable federal laws”.

Musk has told Trump administration officials that to fulfill their mission of radically reducing the size of the federal government, they need to gain access to the computers — the systems that house the data and the details of government personnel, and the pipes that distribute money on behalf of the federal government.

Musk has been thinking radically about ways to sharply reduce federal spending for the entire presidential transition. After canvassing budget experts, he eventually became fixated on a critical part of the country’s infrastructure: the treasury department payment system that disburses trillions of dollars a year on behalf of the federal government.

Musk has told administration officials that he thinks they could balance the budget if they eliminate the fraudulent payments leaving the system, according to an official who discussed the matter with him. It is unclear what he is basing that statement on.

The push by Musk into the treasury department led to a months-in-the-making standoff last week when a top career official, David Lebryk, resisted giving representatives from the cost-cutting effort access to the federal payment system. Lebryk was threatened with administrative leave and then retired. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent subsequently approved access for the Musk team.

The treasury department’s proprietary system for paying the nation’s financial obligations is an operation traditionally run by a small group of career civil servants with deep technical expertise. The prospect of an intrusion into that system by outsiders such as Musk and his team has raised alarm among current and former treasury officials that a mishap could lead to critical government obligations going unpaid, with consequences ranging from missed benefits payments to a federal default.

Leavitt said the access they were granted so far was “read only”, meaning the staff members could not alter payments.

Democrats on Monday said they would introduce legislation to try to bar Musk’s deputies from entering the treasury system.

Another key pipeline is the government’s personnel database, run out of the Office of Personnel Management, where Musk has quickly asserted his influence. At least five people who have worked for Musk in some capacity now have key roles in the office, according to people familiar with their roles.

Last week, the personnel agency sent an email to roughly two million federal workers offering them the option to resign but be paid till September. The email’s subject line, “Fork in the Road”, was the same one that Musk used in an email he sent to Twitter employees offering them severance packages in late 2022.

Musk is also studying the workings of the GSA, which manages federal properties. During a visit to the agency last week, accompanied by his young son, whom Musk named “X Æ A-12”, and a nanny, he spoke with the agency’s new acting administrator, Stephen Ehikian.

After the meeting, officials discussed a plan to eliminate 50 per cent of expenditures, according to people familiar with the discussions. Ehikian told staff members in a separate meeting that he wanted them to apply a technique called “zero-based budgeting”, an approach Musk deployed during his Twitter takeover and at his other companies. The idea is to reduce spending of a programme or contract to zero, and then argue to restore any necessary dollars.

Inflicting trauma

Russell T. Vought, who served in Trump’s first administration and is his choice again to lead the Office of Management and Budget, has spoken openly about the Trump team’s plans for dismantling civil service.

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in a 2023 speech. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

Musk, who pushed Vought for the budget office role, for which he is awaiting Senate confirmation, has echoed that rhetoric, portraying career civil servants and the agencies they work for as enemies. USAID, which oversees civilian foreign aid, is “evil”, Musk wrote in numerous posts on Sunday, while “career Treasury officials are breaking the law every hour of every day”, he said in another post.

The tactics by Musk and his team have kept civil servants unbalanced, fearful of speaking out and uncertain of their futures and their livelihoods.

On January 27, members of the team entered the headquarters and nearby annexe of the aid agency in the Ronald Reagan Building in downtown Washington, US officials said.

The team demanded and was granted access to the agency’s financial and personnel systems, according to two US officials with direct knowledge of the activity and the agency’s inner workings. During this period, an acting administrator at the agency put about 60 senior officials on paid leave and issued stop-work orders that led to the firing of hundreds of contractors with full-time employment and health benefits.

By Saturday, the agency’s website vanished. When the two top security directors tried to stop members of the team from entering a secure area that day to get classified files, they were placed on administrative leave.

Katie Miller, a member of the Musk initiative, said on X that “no classified material was accessed without proper security clearances”. By Monday, USAID was effectively paralysed. In a live broadcast on his social media platform early on Monday, Musk said the President agreed “that we should shut it down”.

Culture of secrecy

Musk’s team has prioritised secrecy, sharing little outside the roughly 40 people who, as of Inauguration Day, had been working as part of the effort.

The opacity has added to the anxiety within the civil service. A number of the employees across the government said they had been interviewed by representatives of Musk who had declined to share their surnames. Musk’s aides have declined to answer questions themselves.

Some workers who sat for interviews were asked what projects they were working on and who should be fired from the agency, people familiar with the conversations said.

“My impression was not one of support or genuine understanding but of suspicion, and questioning,” one General Services Administration employee wrote in an internal Slack message to colleagues, describing the interview process.

New York Times News Service