System Failure
It’s admittedly anecdotal evidence at this point, but it appears that Elon’s death march through the administrative state has finally created the first signs of systemic breakdown within the federal government. It is occurring across a wide swath of the executive branch and the ripples outward are starting to get real for everyday Americans. This goes beyond the funding freezes that have already impacted tens of thousands of federal workers and are now being felt across our entire civil society, from farmers to research scientists.
After this weekend, it is unclear who exactly is in charge of the federal government. Musk has given his order to have every federal employee basically justify the reason for their employment or face termination. Individual agency heads have told their employees to refuse to comply; other heads are recommending employees provide very generic responses; and still others are expecting their employees to fully comply. Trump is too busy playing reality TV president and playing golf to resolve the issue. Right now, it is unclear to most federal employees who is actually running the country. Furthermore, Musk appears to be running his own foreign policy, not necessarily in conflict with Trump (yet) but not necessarily aligned with him either, making it difficult to know whether he represents Trump’s interests or his own. It is near certain that neither represent America’s interests.
The uncertainty is compounded by the questions of legality surrounding the “firings”, the freezing of funds, and shuttering of agencies that has already occurred. There are numerous court orders either temporarily restoring those fired and releasing those funds, but they often over cover only certain jurisdictions and/or certain plaintiffs, creating even more confusion. In addition, it appears that the administration is ignoring, or at least slow-walking compliance with, those court orders. Today, the DOJ told a federal court that it did not know who the administrator of DOGE was or even the official name of the department. Of course, the law itself is meaningless at this point when the US Attorney in DC is investigating the media for refusing to submit to compelled speech and Democrats for criticizing the Dear Leader while protecting criminal Republican congressmen because Mike Johnson needs the votes.
The firing of the Inspector Generals, the neutering of the Merit Systems Protection Board that shields civil servants from unjustified disciplinary action, and the elimination of whistleblowers’ protections have left federal employees with little recourse. Accordingly, we may be seeing the beginnings of internal resistance, if not actual sabotage, from federal employees. Replies to Elon’s missive have been described as full of pranks and rude language. At the offices of Housing and Urban Development, an AI-generated video ran on all the TV screens within the agency that showed Trump kissing Musk’s bare feet with the caption “Long Live the King”. Over the weekend, National Park workers hung a large upside-down American flag, a sign of distress, from the top of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park.
There is now a possibility that the “firings” at the USDA may jeopardize the production of some March commodity reports that are critical data for agricultural commodity traders. With the expectation that we may be seeing some of largest rises in unemployment since Covid and an increasing likelihood of an economic slowdown, the administration may opt to make critical economic reports impossible to produce rather than tampering with the numbers which would likely lead to the leaking of the actual data. Making the reports impossible to produce would allow the Trump/Musk/right-wing propaganda machine to characterize the situation in a more positive light – think of Barr and the Mueller report. Many of those reports, included the March commodity reports mentioned above, are required by law to be produced.
Lastly, Musk’s minions may be doing more than just stopping payments and sucking confidential data out of federal systems. We know that they have been given sysadmin access to some of these systems and introduced code into them. Although it is still unclear from press reports, it appears that they may have removed code or otherwise incapacitated the USAID payments system. This goes beyond merely stopping payments or even an orderly shutdown of the system. The AP describes the system as being “disabled earlier in the shutdown, and it remains nonfunctioning” and the New York Times reports the system “had been rendered defunct, meaning partner groups could not get funds”. I know political reporters are not the most tech-savvy, but those words seem to imply something beyond just a simple shutdown and more along the lines of system incapacitation. If that is true, it is a remarkable escalation by Musk and perhaps puts him in position to use the threat of the incapacitation of other federal systems his Musketeers have already penetrated to extort Congress, agency heads, and even the President to do his bidding.
Meanwhile, bird flu continues to run rampant, driving egg prices up to levels not seen in generations and creating massive shortages. The government’s response is simply to cull the flocks where bird flu appears, with little attempt at mitigation, much less prevention. The chances of the virus spreading to humans is rapidly increasing, with around 70 cases already reported and probably many more assumedly unreported because the symptoms were not serious. In addition, the measles outbreak in West Texas has spread over to neighboring New Mexico and now an outbreak is feared in San Marcos, midway between two of Texas’ larger cities, Austin and San Antonio. Again, there is no federal effort to educate the public or promote vaccination, nor do we have detailed information on the efficacy of the measles vaccine for people who received it decades ago.
As I noted at the start, much of this remains anecdotal at the moment and I have done a fair bit of speculation about what is actually occurring. Hopefully, we can get more detailed reporting, and the coming days and weeks will assuredly provide more clarity. Most of this chaos is intentional. It creates trauma and impossible working conditions for federal workers, as Russ Vought promised. It protects Elon from legal accountability for the role he is actually playing. And it just delays any minimal accountability the courts might be able to impose. The destruction of the administrative state is the administration’s end goal, and it does seem as though we are beginning to see the start of at least a partial systemic collapse of the federal government. Once systems start breaking down, they also get harder and harder to control, even for the administrators nominally in charge of them, and the chances of it spiraling totally out of control increase. The people are starting to notice.