The US government has just placed two high-ranking security chiefs at the Agency for International Development on leave following an incident when they refused to grant the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DoGE) access to their records. An official from the Treasury Department was also put on administrative leave recently after refusing access to documents by a DoGE team.
The incidents are begging the question of how much of Elon Musk’s policymaking is justified and how much is overreach.
Musk came up with the concept of DoGE during Trump’s election campaigning, clearly a cynical reference to the popular meme character Doge, an image of a Shiba Inu dog that appears to be complicity smirking and giving the impression that the social media poster is making a joke. Whether Musk’s intention is to do just that and make fun of the status quo is yet to be seen. Nonetheless, the concept of making the US government more efficient, with less red tape and far lower internal spending, was popular enough with voters to steal a win at 2024’s election.
Members of DoGE eventually did gain access to the aid agency’s classified information, which includes intelligence reports and financial accounts. According to the security officials at the Agency for International Development, they did not believe that the DoGE inspectors had enough security clearance to warrant access to the files.
DoGE, created by Musk, gains access to sensitive Treasury Dept. files
Similarly, Musk’s crew is said to have gained access to sensitive Treasury data, including Social Security and Medicare customer payment systems. The highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, Ron Wyden of Oregon, wrote to Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent expressing his concern that ‘officials associated with Musk may have intended to access these payment systems to illegally withhold payments to any number of programs,’ something the department denies.
The Treasury payment system, which distributes funds all across government departments, is a closely held operation run by career civil servants, with a very limited number of people authorised to access information given its sensitive nature.
The consensus appears to be that by Trump including the billionaire Musk in his government, this has made him a danger. The real question is, to whom is he the biggest threat?
