Rolling Stone reports:

Every regime’s enforcement mechanisms rely on threats and politicized intimidation. In the case of Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s ongoing power grab, it’s involved young staffers with Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) barging into different federal agencies, departments, and institutes, demanding that security officials and other senior staff give them access to whatever they want.

When security officials, for instance, at several departments and agencies have responded that they need to check to ensure these young Musk allies have proper clearance to view sensitive databases, DOGE staff have routinely erupted in fury. Some have told these security officials that if they don’t give them what they want immediately, they’ll call Musk’s cellphone and give him the officials’ names — and have the richest man in the world call and yell at them, or get them reprimanded or fired.

“Do I need to call Elon?” one DOGE member barked at a federal security official while demanding access to sensitive information at one agency this month, a source familiar with the exchange tells Rolling Stone.

This has happened repeatedly since the dawn of the second Trump administration — at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Treasury Department, at the Office of Personnel Management, and elsewhere. It has become a cruel punchline within the federal bureaucracy, four sources familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone, that “some child” from the DOGE team “will threaten to call Elon Musk, if you don’t do what the child wants,” as one federal career official describes it.

So far, it’s working: The DOGE teens — no matter how ridiculous their backstories or racist their posts — have swiftly been granted sweeping access to sensitive data and systems, including the Treasury systems that handle trillions of dollars in payments, longstanding federal laws be damned. [Continue reading…]