Musk, Trump and the Coup Underway Via DOGE
People took part in protests across the nation’s capital on Feb. 4 as Elon Musk and his squad of sycophantic tech bros abruptly shuttered federal agencies.
The richest man on the planet — and what we can only describe as the Elon Youth — invaded the Treasury Department’s Social Security and Medicare database and will exploit that access for the next step in their horrific autocratic scheme.
Via his unconstrained “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), Musk is blitzing major agencies like the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Treasury and the Departments of Education and Labor. He’s forcing out civil servants with actual expertise to make room for his handpicked legion, literally reshaping our government — and everyday people will pay the price. He’s stealing our most sensitive data while threatening essential social services.
Since Trump’s inauguration, you have likely heard news about the abrupt firings, buyout offers and explicit threats the administration has made against equal-opportunity programs and staff. This is on top of the back-and-forth chaos around the federal-grant freeze order that would hobble essential programs and destroy generations of research in this country. The Musk/Trump administration — we all know who’s running the show here — has weaponized the federal government against its people, prioritizing bigotry and intimidation over their sworn duty to good governance.
DOGE’s actions have countless people living in fear of the falling hammer of the state.
DOGE and the destruction of democracy
Musk is building a deep state far more real and terrifying than the purported entity that became a Republican bogeyman in recent years.
Despite what its name would have you believe, DOGE is not a congressionally designated cabinet department: It emerged instead from Trump’s personal sign-off. And now Musk and his loyalists are running roughshod over the Constitution with all the statutory authority of a Pilates class.
Free Press Action has closely monitored DOGE since its outline became public, and we’re staunchly opposed to its threat to public media: Musk aims to completely defund the (already underfunded) Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports hundreds of NPR and PBS stations across the country.
The Trump administration’s purge of the federal bureaucracy is about stripping our democratic system of all accountability mechanisms and the public servants that keep social services functional. These oligarchs want to undermine the public interest, reshape the government and rewrite the truth.
Musk’s history of villainy
Free Press Action has sounded the alarm about Elon Musk for years: From reinstating thousands of neo-Nazis and other extremists on Twitter to gutting the platform’s content-moderation rules to helping repressive regimes silence dissidents, Musk has a pattern of spreading hate and harassing critics.
Musk’s millions of obsessive followers on Twitter will eagerly tout his “cost-cutting” “leadership” on the social-media platform as his “credentials” to do the same for the government — and that’s exactly what has us worried. Every decision Musk has made since taking over Twitter has made the platform less safe and less reliable for its users — just as every decision he’s made through DOGE has jeopardized pillars of our democracy and our government services.
In other words, now that he’s spent nearly $300 million to elect Trump — successfully buying his way into the highest echelon of the federal government — he is more dangerous than ever.
Musk: unelected and unacceptable
This is a clear authoritarian power grab from a man who twice gave an apparent Nazi salute to cheers from an adoring inaugural crowd. No one elected this man. And yet he won’t take no for an answer.
Elon is conducting a coup before our eyes and members of the Senate have an obligation to do everything in their power to stop him. Please call your senators at 202-688-0628 before it’s too late. Here’s a script you can use:
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