This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/keep_track by /u/rusticgorilla on 2025-02-11 12:09:42+00:00.
If you are in the position to support my work, I have a patreon, venmo, and a paypal set up. Just three dollars a month makes a huge difference! These posts will never be paywalled.
Subscribe to Keep Track’s Substack (RSS link) or monthly digest. Also on Bluesky.
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.
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.
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 staff…
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/Keep_Track/comments/1imx4pv/the_coup_is_underway_elon_musks_playbook_to/