Experts Say a Coup Is Underway as Musk Seizes Control of Government Agencies

Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and unelected adviser to President Donald Trump, is asserting control over much of the federal bureaucracy and sensitive government computer systems despite lacking clear authority. The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department was pushed out after refusing to hand Musk’s team the keys to the government’s entire payment system and the $6 trillion in payments the system processes annually, including Social Security checks, tax refunds and Medicare benefits. Musk and his team have also seized control at the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration, key institutions that function as the central nervous system of the U.S. government. “In any other situation, this would be called state capture, and people around the world would be condemning it,” says Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid, who writes in a new blog post that Elon Musk is staging a coup. We also speak with Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, who warns that Musk could be laying the groundwork for major tax cuts Republicans have promised that will disproportionately benefit corporations and wealthy people like him. “Elon Musk is going to pay for his tax cut with your Social Security,” says Owens.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

The top-ranking career U.S. Treasury Department official, David Lebryk, has been forced out of the agency after he resisted a demand by Elon Musk and his associates at DOGE to gain access to the government’s vast payment system, which disburses trillions of dollars in federal payments each year. Trump’s new Treasury secretary, the billionaire Scott Bessent, ended up giving Musk access to the system, which includes sensitive information about taxpayers, Social Security recipients, government contractors, including Musk’s rivals. Musk is also accused of waging a takeover at the Office of Personnel Management, where career civil servants have been locked out of computer systems.

For more, we’re joined by two guests. Waleed Shahid is a Democratic strategist. His new piece on Substack is headlined “Elon Musk is staging a coup.” Waleed was previously the spokesperson for Justice Democrats and former senior adviser for the campaigns of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman. We’re also joined in Washington, D.C., by Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, who says, “There are several reasons Musk wants to control Treasury payments. None of them are good.”

OK, Waleed Shahid, let’s begin with you. What do you mean that Elon Musk is staging a coup?

WALEED SHAHID: So, if this story was taking place somewhere in Central Asia or in Africa, the United States media, the United States State Department, international institutions would likely refer to this as a coup. A billionaire industrialist who donated $300 million to a campaign is installing his personal loyalists in key parts of the federal bureaucracy. This is essentially Viktor Orbán’s playbook.

And we need to know: Why does a billionaire industrialist, with millions in government contracts, military contracts for his private companies, need the Social Security numbers of every American, needs to know what every single check that the U.S. government gives out to businesses, to charities? Why does this billionaire need to know this information?

He was not vetted or approved by the U.S. Senate. He has a history of corruption, for using public resources for private gain. He’s one of the wealthiest men in the world. In any other situation, this would be called state capture, and people around the world would be condemning it. But in the United States, we are not used to this kind of level of creeping authoritarianism, of plutocracy, of oligarchy so explicit.

And we need to — as Representative Ocasio-Cortez said last night, this is a five-alarm fire. Senate Democrats need to be communicating to the American people. And last night, there was a call by Indivisible Action for people to visit their local — their senators and call for them to grind the Senate to a halt, to call for investigations and to know why does Elon Musk need to know this information. Why is he showing up on Saturday to the offices of the federal government demanding the private information of citizens all around the country?

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Lindsay Owens, you say none of the reasons are good. Lay those out.

LINDSAY OWENS: Yeah, absolutely. So, for most Americans, this is the first time that they’ve ever heard of the Treasury payment system. So, what is the Treasury payment system? This is, effectively, the piece of the federal government that cuts the checks. And they cut a lot of checks. This is $6 trillion a year — money that goes to individuals as Social Security payments for seniors; money that goes for organizations like Meals on Wheels to deliver lunches; foreign aid; as well as the funding that the government sets aside for key programs, paying its debts, making sure that we don’t breach the debt ceiling and default on our obligations.

So, this is really unprecedented that Elon Musk has grabbed control of the keys of $6 trillion in payments infrastructure. There are a few reasons this could be happening. The first is, as your viewers know, last week, President Trump tried to end federal spending, just stop federal payments altogether. This was so outrageous and in violation of the Constitution that the courts intervened and said that he couldn’t do that. What may be happening here is that Musk may be doing an end run around the courts, going straight to the source so that he can continue to stop those payments that the courts said needed to keep staying online.

The second thing that may be happening here is this could just be a good old-fashioned cyberattack. Elon Musk could be interested in the Social Security numbers, the tax ID numbers of tens of millions of Americans. We know that he has partnered with Visa and is considering spinning out a payment system of his own. What we may have here is Elon Musk’s attempt to get the private information for his own financial gain.

The other thing that is incredibly worrying here is $6 trillion in spending is not just a lot of money, it’s a macroeconomically significant amount of money. If Elon Musk starts tinkering with the code, you know, the underlying technology that makes sure these payments go out seamlessly and effectively, he could inadvertently, or on purpose, bring the macroeconomy to a halt. I mean, this is an incredibly concerning seizure of government infrastructure, but it is also an economically significant moment in the country.

So, I couldn’t agree more with Waleed more. I mean, the word “coup” is the right word to be thinking about here. And Congress must intervene. I mean, if I was a senator, I think the most important thing to do is bring the secretary of the treasury to the Senate today to answer questions about what Musk has access to.

AMY GOODMAN: So, the Treasury Department’s inspector general, who could monitor DOGE’s activities, was among the 15 watchdogs who were purged by President Trump. Who’s now in charge of or overseeing Musk’s team?

LINDSAY OWENS: Yeah, Musk is in charge. So, that’s exactly right. Some of the key chokeholds here to make sure that something like this doesn’t happen have been moved out of the way, studiously, exactingly moved out of the way. So, President Trump fired the inspector general of the Treasury, and the top civil servant of the Treasury Department, the man who was the acting treasury secretary between the time that Janet Yellen stepped down and Scott Bessent was confirmed by the Senate, has also been pushed aside, resigned over the fact that he didn’t want to give Musk, a private citizen, a billionaire, the keys to the Treasury payment system. So there is very little stopping Musk from taking this over. You know, Trump and Bessent have really given him a glide path.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Waleed Shahid, where is the Democratic Party on this? Where are the Democratic senators and congressmembers on this? I mean, you have Hakeem Jeffries, who holds an emergency meeting of the Democrats after a judge stops the federal payments from going out to — you know, stops the ban on federal funding.

WALEED SHAHID: So, the Democratic Party in Washington is largely asleep at the wheel. They are acting as if they’re kind of a librarian shushing noise in a crowded room. They are still believing in the normal procedures, normal decorum, normal — that everything here is the normal transition of power. And they still believe that what Elon Musk and Donald Trump are doing is just a libertarian reform of the government, not an oligarchic, plutocratic takeover of a private billionaire who is seeking to know — potentially seeking to know what his competitors might be doing with government contracts. He has private information that — Elon Musk has contracts with international governments all across the world. But the Democratic Party is not able to put forward an opposition message right now, because they are — they feel like this is normal.

And that’s why it’s so important for concerned citizens all across the country to twist the arm of your Senate Democrat. Go to their office. If you go to Indivisible.org today, you can find a way to join your local chapter all around the country, whether your senators are Republican or Democrat or independent. They need to hear from concerned citizens, because the Democratic Party doesn’t move on issues of oligarchy, of plutocracy, of taking action, unless their constituents show up in person and demand that they hold hearings, take the bully pulpit in the media and also grind the Senate to a halt until we know why does Elon Musk have this information, someone who was not elected.

AMY GOODMAN: So, the Democratic National Committee on Saturday elected the moderate political insider Ken Martin as chair, despite calls from voters to urgently switch gears and respond to working people’s needs following the party’s crushing defeat, though it wasn’t a major numbers defeat, but it was a defeat in November. What do you think of Ken Martin? Where do you think it’s going?

WALEED SHAHID: So, the DNC is largely, at this point, a fundraising vehicle for the presidential campaign. I hope that Ken Martin reforms the party to do things like what I’m describing. The Democratic Party should be holding daily press conferences every morning to explain to working-class and middle-class Americans why it might hurt their pocketbooks for Elon Musk to have this information from the Treasury Department and from the OPM, that Elon Musk has a history of wanting to use public resources for private gain, that Elon Musk is someone who is live-tweeting that he wants to cut the federal government’s debt every day by billions of dollars, and one of the only ways to do that would be to begin to privatize Social Security. This is what the DNC should be doing.

Now, Ken Martin, we had lots of members of the “uncommitted” movement at the DNC who were being personally bullied by their DNC state parties, and Ken Martin, thankfully, did intervene to make sure that that didn’t happen. And so, that was my only personal interaction with him, and he went out of his way to make sure that our uncommitted delegation was treated with respect. Other than that, I don’t know that much about him, but I’m looking forward to — hopefully he can put together a working-class, populist agenda for the party that isn’t just a fundraising handoff.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Lindsay Owens, DOGE is not a formal government agency, right? Which means that it doesn’t fall into any category.

LINDSAY OWENS: Yeah, look, I think when President Trump announced that Elon Musk was going to be running the Department of Government Efficiency, there was a sort of tempting fantasy that maybe Musk, a tech but successful businessman, could come in and restore some efficiency in government, maybe modernize some aspects of government that could use some updating. I mean, I think with this weekend’s seizure of the Treasury payment system, we can be crystal clear in putting that fantasy to bed. This is Musk determining who is going to get funding in this country, what programs are going to be funded in this country. And remember, Musk isn’t a disinterested party here. As we’ve talked about, he has many federal contracts himself, billions of dollars this year alone to his companies — SpaceX, Tesla and X, formerly known as Twitter.

But he also is interested in cutting this funding for a very personal reason, which is he is interested in paying for the tax cuts that Congress is teeing up this year. They are estimating $5 trillion in tax cuts, mostly going to the wealthy and corporations. And DOGE is the entity that is supposedly going to find the money, find the savings to pay for those tax cuts. So I think we can sum it up this way: Elon Musk is going to pay for his tax cut with your Social Security. That’s really what we’re looking at here. That’s what DOGE is up to. And I think we can put aside —

AMY GOODMAN: Lindsay Owens, we’re going to have to leave it there. And I just want to give Waleed the last word. Ten seconds. What should people do right now?

WALEED SHAHID: People should go to Indivisible.org and visit their Senate office and demand an investigation of Elon Musk and that Senate business should come to a halt.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank Waleed Shahid, Democratic strategist. We’ll link to his piece, “Elon Musk is staging a coup.” And, Lindsay Owens, thanks for joining us, from Groundwork Collaborative, and your piece, “There are several reasons Musk wants to control Treasury payments. None of them are good,” she writes. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.