Wired reports:

As America’s most decorated civil servants sipped cocktails in the presidential ballroom of the Capital Hilton, worrying about their table assignments and wondering where they fell in the pecking order between US senator and UAE ambassador, Elon Musk sat staring at his phone, laughing.

Few of the guests at the Alfalfa Club banquet in Washington, DC, on January 25 knew what he knew: that a crew of senior executives and young Musk loyalists was preparing to occupy the top offices of a nearby federal building. Under guard, they would sleep on mattresses lined with body temperature and breath rate sensors as they raced to refactor the nation’s code base—or, better yet, scrap it altogether.

Musk wasn’t big on formalities, but he’d dressed up for the occasion. The Alfalfa Club had been around since 1913 and existed solely to host a yearly banquet where the most important people in government could hobnob with the most important people in business. Membership was limited to around 200, and the Alfalfas admitted new “sprouts” only when existing members died. That evening, Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan and Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman joined the likes of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and US senator Kirsten Gillibrand as members. Musk was attending as a guest.

The social chairs of the Alfalfa Club seemed to think that elections and constitutional norms should determine the seating chart in American political life. The head table was reserved for Alfalfas in government. Musk, the assumed leader of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, sat on the opposite side of the room. He spent much of the dinner on his phone—talking to the president, if whispers were to be believed. Musk was closer than ever to Donald Trump. He told friends he was crashing in government buildings. He would soon move in next door to the White House, staying in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building’s Secretary of War Suite. He’d even had his video-gaming rig installed there.

As Musk sat in the Hilton ballroom, his operatives, working under a trusted lieutenant, had already gained access to systems at the Office of Personnel Management, the federal HR department for 2.2 million or so career civil servants. Many of these operatives would show up later at agencies across the federal government—people like Akash Bobba, a UC Berkeley graduate and former intern at Palantir, the defense contractor cofounded by Peter Thiel; Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old who has gone by the online nickname “Big Balls”; and Nikhil Rajpal, an engineer in his 30s who had worked at Twitter during Musk’s acquisition, where he’d once pitched the idea of auctioning off dormant usernames to the highest bidder. As an undergraduate, also at UC Berkeley, Rajpal had been president of a libertarian student group that was fond of the motto “Futuate cohortem urbanam”—Latin for something like “Fuck these city dwellers.”

In Musk’s mind, Washington needed to be debugged, hard-forked, sunset. His strike teams of young engineers would burrow into the government’s byzantine bureaucratic systems and delete what they saw fit. They’d help Trump slash the budget to the bone. Musk turned to those around the table at the Hilton: Can you believe we were spending taxpayer money on condoms? They shook their heads. Musk looked back at his phone. Then: What if we cut all federal grants to NGOs?

In the days and weeks that followed, DOGE hit one part of the federal government after another. The Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Education, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Justice, and Veterans Affairs; the Federal Aviation, General Services, Social Security, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations; the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Internal Revenue Service; the US Agency for International Development and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; the National Park Service and the National Science Foundation—all fell under Musk’s control. An estimated tens of thousands of federal employees were effectively fired or resigned. “This is a digital coup,” one USAID source told WIRED at the time. [Continue reading…]