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Your Guide to Washington and the World's 2024 US Election Means
Surprisingly, there's good news from America – the courts work. Later last week, a federal judge gave a temporary order restricting Elon Musk and his techno libertarian band, the so-called Office of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and received access to plumbing from the US Treasury Department. said there is a risk of indifferent harm.
The lawsuit will be brought by 19 attorney generals, and a long legal battle will unfold. However, the fact that the court has admitted the order very quickly is significant. All the worries the Trump administration is trying to do – from freezing foreign aid and domestic grants to dismantling USAID (almost certainly constitutionally illegal), ending birthright citizenship and giving them the opportunity to From firing federal employees who disagree, the Treasury is one of the most frightening things.
In comparison, even Trump's tariff threat is a side job. Within his first week of office, Treasury Secretary Scott Bescent placed the best ranking career Treasury Department David Lebrick on his vacation, before handing over the key to the internal workings of the American financial system to Mask. Ta. He refused to provide individuals with Doge with full access to departmental data and the computer systems that house them.
In other words, masks had access to the most sensitive personal data for each American taxpayer. In yet another case brought about by the alliance for retired Americans, the AFL-CIO and the SEIU (two large unions), “the scale of the invasion into personal privacy is large.” It's unprecedented.” Names, Social Security numbers, tax data, bank account data, credit card numbers, and more will be kept in the Ministry of Finance records, allowing for secure transfers between the public and the government.
This information can be anything from negative (senting the Internal Revenue Agency to audit people who don't like), opportunistic (ability to change financial transactions or payment routing, or freeze payments). There are many. Defense (the ability to determine whether or not to be paid in the event of a situation such as a budget shortage or a debt cap crisis).
Next, there are ways in which access to Treasury data allows for the unfair business benefits of Musk. Privileged access to such data probably allows him or people within his company and circles from the leading financial transactions, or major industries such as defense, energy, healthcare, technology Get insider information about government spending at.
Changes to existing software systems (which could include the implementation of artificial intelligence) pose enormous national security and geopolitical risks, especially given Musk's close business relationship with China.
But I think that blacklisted political opponents, business rivals, or groups that you think are troubled at home are drooping fruits. Ultimately, Musk himself has already stated in X that “@Doge team is rapidly closing” to pay groups to groups that include Lutheran family services and affiliated organizations that the Trump administration doesn't like .
Unauthorized access to such information by non-governmental officials is illegal and may even be a criminal offence. Most of the lawyers I have worked on cases against the administration over the past two weeks say that violations of the law are so extreme that one of the biggest challenges is to sort out the hierarchy of illegality.
But the top priority issue here is that this kind of Treasury control (which handles more than $6 million a year in transactions such as Social Security payments, tax refunds, federal grants, military salaries and more) is a history In fact, it was something only the monarch and dictator had. Palantir CEO Alex Karp said last week, as we have seen stock prices skyrocketing with the promise of a lucrative government contract: “This is a revolution… Some people will cut their heads off.”
The rapid doge takeover of federal infrastructure, and many of the comments from Musk, are the neo-response movement or the eerie philosophy developed by a software engineer named Curtis Yalbin and embraced by members of silicon. It has eerie similarities to the NRX ambitions. Valley elites (including Peter Tiel, Balajisrinivasan and Mark Andreesen). Philosophy is also known as “dark enlightenment” – wait for it.
These people who seem to read Ayn Rand believe that freedom and democracy are incompatible, and what America really needs is the CEO monarch. They don't want the government to be more efficient.
It must be science fiction. But that's not the case.
What shall we do? Keep receiving those suppression orders. Ambassador Norm Eisen, one of the many lawyers who have filed multiple cases against the administration, told me: “We have the authoritarian shock and adoration of Donald Trump. I have the shock and adoration of democratic in-laws.'' I hope the latter wins.
rana.foroohar@ft.com
