Mother Jones reports:

According to Elon Musk’s posts on X, the social media platform he acquired through allegedly illegal tactics, Musk is discovering lawbreaking everywhere as he rampages through government. “Career Treasury officials are breaking the law every hour of every day,” he claimed. USAID, the agency that has saved millions of lives under its mandate from Congress? “A criminal organization.” The federal bureaucracy? “Unconstitutional.”

But as elementary school kids have known for time immemorial, whoever smelt it, dealt it. In this case, the man flinging accusations of illegality is the one breaking the law. Even, as he put it himself, “every hour of every day.” That’s because there is simply no legal architecture that would allow Musk, the richest man in the world, to remake the entire federal government without running afoul of criminal conflict of interest laws.

“There’s probably no person on the planet who has more varied business interests before the US government than Elon Musk,” says Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy nonprofit, “and therefore, no person who would be more conflicted and less appropriate to have the role he has than Elon Musk.”

It’s a reality that underscores the nature of Musk’s enterprise: Not a by-the-book reworking of the government but a hostile takeover. In a lawsuit filed on Thursday, multiple states alleged that Musk’s vast power over the executive branch is inconsistent with our democratic system of government. “Evidence suggests that he has, and continues to, cut billions of dollars from agency budgets, fired agency personnel, and, in his words, ‘delete[d]’ entire agencies,” the complaint recounts. “He has canceled government contracts, announced plans to sell government property, and promised to withdraw a multitude of regulations across different agencies. He has installed his own teams into agencies and given them access to the agencies’ most sensitive data. In other words, an individual accountable only to the President—if he answers to anyone at all—is exercising apparently limitless power within the Executive Branch.” [Continue reading…]