Attention to the Unseen

The Washington Post reports: Billionaire Elon Musk’s blitzkrieg on Washington has brought into focus his vision for a dramatically smaller and weaker government, as he and a coterie of aides move to control, automate — and substantially diminish — hundreds if not thousands of public functions. In less than three weeks, Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service has followed the same playbook at one federal agency after another: Install loyalists in leadership. Hoover up internal data, including the sensitive and the classified….

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Wired reports: Members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team have had access to the US Treasury Department’s payment systems for over a week. On Thursday, the threat intelligence team at one of the department’s agencies recommended that DOGE members be monitored as an “insider threat.” Sources say members of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s IT division and others received an email detailing these concerns. “There is ongoing litigation, congressional legislation, and widespread protests relating to DOGE’s…

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Charlie Warzel and Ian Bogost write: Elon Musk’s unceasing attempts to access the data and information systems of the federal government range so widely, and are so unprecedented and unpredictable, that government computing experts believe the effort has spun out of control. This week, we spoke with four federal-government IT professionals—all experienced contractors and civil servants who have built, modified, or maintained the kind of technological infrastructure that Musk’s inexperienced employees at his newly created Department of Government Efficiency are…

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CNBC reports: Elon Musk said Friday he will rehire a DOGE staffer who resigned from a Treasury Department post after the exposure of his tweets advocating for racism and eugenics. Musk’s announcement on his social media platform X came after Vice President JD Vance urged Musk to hire the staffer back and President Donald Trump endorsed the view. “He will be brought back,” Musk, the head of DOGE, wrote on X in response to Vance’s recommendation. “To err is human,…

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Reuters reports: One of the people working with billionaire Elon Musk in his efforts to overhaul the U.S. government is a Berkeley-educated computer scientist who has boosted white supremacists and misogynists online. Gavin Kliger lists his job on LinkedIn as “Special Advisor to the Director” at the Office of Personnel Management, which has been spearheading Musk’s efforts to shrink the federal workforce. His USAID email address was copied on a message reviewed by Reuters that was sent to staffers at…

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Bloomberg reports: Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old member of Elon Musk’s squad that’s criss-crossing US government agencies, was fired from an internship after he was accused of sharing information with a competitor. “Edward has been terminated for leaking internal information to the competitors,” said a June 2022 message from an executive of the firm, Path Network, which was seen by Bloomberg News. “This is unacceptable and there is zero tolerance for this.” A spokesperson for the Arizona-based hosting and data-security firm…

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