Lambert here: A good wrap-up of DOGE’s early data defalcations, in a useful frame.
Over the past few days, people working for the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, Elon Musk’s shadowy quasi-governmental organization, have reportedly demanded access to the Department of the Treasury’s payment system. According to press reports, they have grabbed control of the Office of Personnel Management’s computer system, locking out regular employees. They have “taken over” the General Services Administration. These appear not to be isolated incidents but parts of a haphazard effort to circumvent ordinary democratic controls to repurpose the U.S. state.
These efforts involve technical systems that are incomprehensible and boring to outsiders, few of whom even know that the Office of Personnel Management exists, let alone what it does.
We are highly familiar with such systems and how they can be used. Our academic research, and our recent book, “Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy,” explain how the U.S. quietly took control of similar technical systems that hold the world economy together and used them to exercise domination over allies and enemies alike. Now, Musk is seemingly doing to the U.S. government what the U.S. government once did to the rest of the world: refashioning the plumbing of the federal government into a political weapon against his adversaries.
The plumbing became political. During the Obama administration, the Snowden leaks revealed how the U.S. had turned the internet into an enormous system for global surveillance—waking people up to the role of dollar clearing and the SWIFT system. But these changes had begun several years before, even if many did not then understand their systemic consequences. Shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, officials in George W. Bush’s Treasury Department demanded access to SWIFT, providing them with a “Rosetta stone” to decipher the global financial system. A decade later, the Obama administration used SWIFT and dollar clearing to completely cut Iran out of the global financial system. The first Trump administration tried to use export controls to perform the same gambit in exerting control over semiconductor supply chains, providing the Biden administration with the tools it has used to limit China’s ability to train frontier artificial intelligence models.
Nearly exactly the same thing is happening now—except that this time the U.S. federal government is having done unto it what it used to do to others. Musk’s strategy has not been a coup so much as a takeover bid, aided and abetted by other parts of the Trump administration and the tacit acquiescence of the Republicans who control both houses of Congress.
The U.S. identified key choke points that allowed it to weaponize the world’s payment, information, and physical infrastructure to achieve its ends. Musk’s DOGE is weaponizing the U.S. government’s payment, information, and physical infrastructure in highly similar ways, carrying out an end run around the political structures that are supposed to restrain unilateral executive action. Just as when the U.S. weaponized the world economy over two decades ago, it is hard for those at the receiving end to understand exactly what is happening to them.
In a letter to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the Treasury Department maintains that Musk’s people only have “read” access to the system—that is, they were unable to change the system and its underlying software. But Wired and Talking Points Memo report that Musk’s people can rewrite the software code. According to Tankus, one individual has “write access” to two crucial systems, the “Payment Automation Manager (PAM) and Secure Payment System,” allowing for the possible control of payments on a granular level. PAM alone reportedly facilitated $4.7 trillion of payments in 2024. While Musk has boasted that he is “rapidly shutting down” payments to a Lutheran charity, which he claims without evidence is corrupt, there is no confirmation yet of this claim.
[Politicians] find it hard to understand why the more arcane seeming takeover of technical systems is so important, let alone to explain it to the public. What they need to grasp—and quickly—is that Musk, and by extension Trump, appear to be trying to turn these technical systems into levers of control.
Just as control over SWIFT provided the U.S. with vital strategic information over global financial flows, so too could DOGE use access to the federal payments system to gain insight into the operations of government. In our research on global payments, we described how the U.S. had turned global finance into a “panopticon” that gave it exquisitely detailed information on who was sending money to whom, which it could then weaponize against adversaries. Gradually, the U.S. used the dollar system as a choke point to stymie payments and to convert foreign banks into agents of U.S. power.
The federal payments system has been a panopticon for decades, waiting for someone with political ambitions to break down the bureaucratic firewalls protecting it, and open it up. Apparently, that has now happened. If the system transforms into a tool to arbitrarily block payments to entities whom Musk or Trump doesn’t like, which Musk has claimed without confirmation is already happening, any contractor or third party that relies on money from the U.S. government will find itself dependent on their patronage and political whims. That will be technically hard to accomplish, but it would generate astounding opportunities for covert and overt corruption and for the imposition of political and ideological preferences on third parties. Blocking payments to federal agencies would likely be technically easier.
The gross inefficiencies and “technical debt” documented by experts like Jennifer Pahlka may turn out to be an accidental immune system against those who might like to turn government technical systems into smoothly functioning systems of coercion.
Lambert here: Long live COBOL, say I.
Just as it took decades for the U.S. to really turn the technical systems of the global economy to its purposes, it will take time and tinkering around for DOGE to really begin to fulfill its ambitions. The bad news is that both federal employees and the entire U.S. population will be the unwilling guinea pigs in this vast experiment. The slightly less bad news is that what looks like a government takeover accomplished over a weekend is not yet a machinery of power, and it will take hard, uninterrupted work to make it so. Legislators, lawyers, and ordinary citizens who don’t want this hostile takeover to succeed should take every opportunity to throw sand into the works now through politics and protest, while there is still a chance to preserve institutions that—although imperfect—are necessary to the functioning of U.S. society and democracy.
Lambert here: Deeply ironic that a site called “Lawfare” is making this pitch, the legal system being another example of politicized plumbing.
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