Musk's rats: It's worse than you think

Musk’s rats continue to burrow into sensitive government payment systems.

According to the best source I’ve found on this (Nathan Tankus’s Crises Notes), Musk and his rats have now gained unrestricted access to your Social Security number, your confidential bank information, your confidential medical information, and much more.

Musk boasts that his team is “rapidly shutting down” Treasury remittances.

They’ve tunneled into the health payment systems at the Department of Health and Human Services. They’ve begun to burrow into the Labor Department (I have no idea whether they’ve penetrated the Bureau of Labor Statistics as yet), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They’ve already penetrated the Veterans Affairs systems.

Yesterday, federal Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly temporarily barred the Treasury Department from handing data from its payments system to Musk and his rats, but it’s far from clear this will stop them.

Technically, Musk’s rats still retain “read and write” code access because Judge Kollar-Kotelly barred “read only” access. That means they can still stop or alter federal payments.

Note that even after another federal judge — George A. O’Toole, Jr. — blocked Musk’s buyout offer for federal employees until a full hearing Monday afternoon, Musk has continued to urge federal workers to voluntarily leave their jobs or brace for layoffs.

According to yesterday’s Wired magazine, some of Musk’s rats who have gained access to sensitive federal data couldn’t pass background checks required for such access.

Yesterday, one of them, a 25-year-old coder named Marko Elez, abruptly resigned after apparently racist comments from a dormant social media account were unearthed.

Another, a 19-year-old high school graduate now combing through sensitive government information, also runs a business that controls dozens of web domains, including at least two that are registered in Russia. One offers an AI bot for servers targeting the Russian market.

Hello?

Musk and his rats have nothing whatever to do with rooting out “waste and fraud.” Their real purpose is to usurp Congress’s authority over spending, under Article I Section 8 of the Constitution.

If Trump can turn off a spigot on what Congress wants, he has more power to get something back from Congress for turning that spigot on — say, the authority to close down the Labor Department or the EPA, or spend more on the border.

Sure, there’s some waste and fraud in government. That’s why every department had an Inspector General to find and stop it — until Trump fired most of them. In addition, before Musk’s rats tunneled into the General Services Administration, accountants oversaw every department’s and agency’s spending.

In other words, the coup continues.

Zoom out and the picture is even worse. You want waste and fraud? Look at what some big corporations and very wealthy people are getting away with.

Tesla’s annual financial report, released Wednesday, shows that although the corporation earned $2.3 billion in the United States in 2024, it reported to the IRS that it owed precisely zero in federal income taxes.

Or consider billionaire Scott Bessent, Trump’s new Treasury secretary (who’s been allowing Musk’s rats into the federal payments system). Turns out, Bessent paid no Medicare taxes on income he earned through his hedge fund (a practice the IRS has deemed illegal).

Oh, and Bessent fully exploited the “carried interest” loophole to lower his taxes even further.

Musk of course won’t recommend eliminating these and other tax loopholes — even though they caused the government to lose at least $1.8 trillion worth of tax revenue in 2023 alone.

I also doubt Musk will recommend cutting the billions in government contracts and subsidies his own corporations receive.

Or cutting America’s bloated military budget that’s bigger than the next nine countries’ military budgets combined — half of which goes to private defense contractors like Musk’s own SpaceX and Starlink.

And Musk of course won’t recommend that Republicans halt their plans to extend Trump’s tax cuts — which will add at least $5 trillion to the deficit and predominantly benefit billionaires, like him.

That’s more than twice the amount Musk initially said he’d cut in “wasteful” government spending, if you’re keeping track.

Instead, Musk wants to cut the government agencies that protect you but limit the profitability of his corporations.

The Labor Department, into which Musk’s rats are now burrowing (and which I once ran), protects workers from employers who want to scam them — as Musk has done to his own employees.

The Department of Labor also protects workers from employers who want to cut corners on safety and thereby expose employees to harms on the job — as has Musk at Tesla and SpaceX.

And the National Labor Relations Board — now rendered inoperable because Trump illegally terminated one of its members — protects workers from being fired for trying to form a union, as Musk has done to Tesla employees.

In addition, because there’s no other place to find anything close to the $2 trillion Musk is promising to cut from the federal budget, I expect he’ll turn to cutting Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, which together comprise roughly 45 percent of the federal budget.

The fundamental issue isn’t the size of the government or how to make government more “efficient.” It’s who our government is for.

Should it work mainly for big corporations and billionaires, including the richest person in the world — or for the rest of us?

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.