A Wicked Game
Just before the kickoff of the Super Bowl last Sunday, rumors started spreading online that Elon Musk, the billionaire charged with running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, had purchased five ad spots that would air during the broadcast. The ads—said to cost a total of $40 million—would reportedly target USAID, the independent foreign aid and development agency Musk and his “lean team of small-government crusaders” were in the process of gutting.
Musk’s rumored ads never materialized during the game, a 40-22 shellacking of the two-time defending champions Kansas City Chiefs by the Philadelphia Eagles. But, less than forty-eight hours later, the man himself made a triumphant appearance in the Oval Office, lobbing unsubstantiated claims about USAID’s financial malfeasance and “anti-American” programs that many feared he had locked and loaded for the Super Bowl. Dressed in all black, Musk held court next to the Resolute Desk and alleged, without offering any evidence, that USAID had been taking kickbacks for years and insinuated, without naming her explicitly, that former director Samantha Rice had “walked away with about $30 million.”
The spectacle of the world’s richest man defaming a government agency that distributed more than $40 billion in foreign aid in 2023 was made even more surreal when Musk’s four-year-old son, “Lil X,” started toddling around the Oval Office, and the assembled press paid little attention to an uncharacteristically taciturn—and visibly uncomfortable—Donald Trump. “The people voted for major government reform and that’s what the people are going to get,” Musk said.
Since Inauguration Day, when Trump signed an executive order empowering Musk to cut more than a trillion dollars in government spending, Musk has dispatched his cadre of young software engineers to more than a dozen departments and administrations throughout the federal government in search of alleged waste and bureaucratic redundancies. According to various reports, these special government employees have gained access to what has been described as sensitive databases of government payments and employee information at USAID, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Energy, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Government Services Administration, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Federal Emergency Management Association. They have also reportedly visited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency, though it’s unclear whether they were granted access to these systems. (A federal judge temporarily blocked Musk and his team from accessing records at the Treasury Department, and multiple lawsuits are still pending to block their access at the Department of Education and the Office of Personnel Management.)
Musk has bragged that his team is putting in 120-plus hours of work per week, which makes it difficult to keep track of their progress or confirm what they’re doing with the information they’ve collected. The Republican-controlled House Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, which only met for the first time this week, has given little to no indication that it’s willing to rein in Musk or demand greater transparency from his department.
What has become increasingly clear, however, is that the chaos created by Musk and his department is intentional—a feature, not a bug. Recently, I spoke with someone familiar with the day-to-day operations of USAID. He characterized Musk’s campaign against the agency as one of “shock and awe” designed to decapitate leadership and demoralize employees. “He left the staff filled with fear and paranoia,” he told me, “which is a deliberate tactic to create a [work environment] that’s so uncomfortable people don’t want to stay. It’s very similar to what [Musk] did when he took over Twitter. All the way down to the ‘Fork in the Road’ email.”
On the Friday night before the Super Bowl, thousands of USAID employees were put on administrative leave and workers stationed in foreign countries were ordered to return to the United States within thirty days. A federal judge temporarily blocked the order, but the injunction is set to expire before midnight on February 14, and what’s left of the agency is expected to be folded into the State Department.
The effects of Musk’s cuts are already apparent. Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that the stop-work order on USAID-funded research has left thousands of people throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America with experimental drugs and medical devices in their bodies. Democratic senator Chris Coons posted on X, Musk’s social media platform, that $300 million worth of medications will soon expire. “These drugs would’ve prevented people from going blind from a preventable tropical disease,” Coons wrote. “Donald Trump would rather waste them in an East African warehouse.”
Additional instances of neglect and cruelty are sure to come to light, which is perhaps why Musk didn’t care to draw further attention to his “shock-and-awe” attack on the agency before he could decapitate it. More likely, he wasn’t compelled to try. His press conference in the Oval Office on Tuesday afternoon wasn’t orchestrated to sell the American public on his plans to gut the federal government. Instead, it was staged to demonstrate his power to act with impunity—something a sixty-second spot during an uncompetitive Super Bowl could never fully impress on audiences.
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