Welcome to the United States of Oligarchy.
I don’t know what else to call it when you have the richest man in the world running the federal government.
Oh, yes, Donald Trump was elected president and took the oath of office January 20.
But he has apparently given all power over the government to Elon Musk, who in turn has turned lose his minions to remake the government in his image.
That is an oligarchy if there ever was one.
Trump seems content to sit in the Oval Office while Musk spreads fear and loathing throughout the federal government, even gaining access to vital systems which support senior citizens, the poor and the Defense Department, as well as the CIA. They are after FBI agents who did nothing more than the jobs they were assigned.
And the Republicans who control Congress have shown no appetite to reign in Musk.
The actions of Musk and his acolytes are facing numerous court challenges. The question is: If they lose, will they stop? Or will they just ignore the courts?
One of the things which really bothers me is that many of Musk’s people, apparently most, if not all, are computer programmers. They are demanding and gaining access to sensitive information about hundreds of millions of Americans. They are invading the offices of Medicare and Medicaid as well as the Veterans Administration. All this is in the name of routing out fraud and other crimes, let alone wasteful spending.
Years ago, the Republican Party advised its candidates to run against government waste but not to specify what that waste was. The problem is that everyone is against government waste, but what is wasteful spending to one person is a vital service to another.
These 20-somethings Musk has unleashed to dismantle the federal government have no life experience and no experience in the agencies they are invading. What they don’t know is dangerous because they don’t know what they are looking at outside of their own assumptions. Or Musk’s assumptions.
There is a fundamental difference between a business which is out to make a profit and a government, any government, which is out to provide a service. The result is that a business person who goes in with a profit motive attitude is not the right person to judge whether a service provided by a government, say Social Security, Medicare, defense, law enforcement, is being efficiently run.
Then there is the problem of Musk himself and his companies in China and his business connections with Chinese banks. How will those ties, crucial for his business empire, impact what he does in his attack on the federal government? And will China be able to gain back-door access to U.S. secrets through his Chinese companies? Is Trump good with that?
On top of that, when these 20-something computer wizards gain access to government system can they really know what they are looking at? They are not accountants. They are not the people who provide the services.
An example of what can happen is the newspaper industry in the 1970s which started using computers instead of typewriters. The early programs were written by that era’s computer wizards. The problem was that they had never been in a newsroom and had no idea who reporters and editors worked. They just wrote programs the way they always did—for other computer workers. The result was computer coding that editors and reporters had to deal with was cumbersome and, for the most part, confusing. If someone was writing a five-inch story it could take as long or longer to put in the coding than to write the story,
That finally changed when one of these computer wizards decided to spend months in a newsroom talking to reporters and editors, and watching how they worked. He came up with a system that was easy and efficient to use.
The key was he listened and watched.
Musk’s minions are going in with the arrogance of preconceived notions, not knowing what they don’t know.
So while Trump sits in his office and the Republicans in Congress on their hands, the federal government dissolves. The cost to the country could be a lot higher than any “waste” and “fraud” these inexperienced people find.
Welcome to the United States of Oligarchy.
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