Is Elon Musk Unstoppable?
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Hey, everyone. Just a heads up that this is a fast-moving news story. It's possible that some things might have changed by the time you listen. Also, yes, my voice is a little scratchy. Got a bit of a cold. Okay, here's the show. On Monday, a group of employees from the government's General Services Administration were called into a meeting.

GSA oversees real estate, professional and tech services, and supplies for the federal government. This team was focused on tech, and speaking to them was Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer.

And so Shedd got before them and started laying out not only his vision, but also the GSA administrator's vision for what this agency could be. That's McKenna Kelly, who writes about politics for Wired. When he talked to the employees, Shedd also echoed the views of his former boss, the richest man in the world.

Of course, Elon Musk is now heading Doge, and I think they share a lot of similar values and ideas of what they want this government agency to look like. Doge, Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, has spread its arms and philosophy across numerous federal agencies in the past week, including into the GSA's Technology Transformation Services, or TTS, which Thomas Shedd now heads.

TTS handles creating and improving digital services for the federal agencies. I know there are a lot of acronyms in the story. Just stick with me here. They discussed turning GSA into an AI-first agency and having it mimic and mirror a, like a Silicon Valley software company. The TTS workers were curious about what Shed had to say, but also nervous.

So a lot of the questions in this meeting weren't necessarily focused on the technical aspects of this vision, but more so focused on, OK, so what happens to us? Like so many of the two million federal employees, they'd received an email from Doge offering them the chance to resign by midnight on Thursday with an offer to be paid through September.

On Thursday afternoon, a federal judge delayed that deadline until a hearing can be held on Monday. But beyond that, their futures aren't certain. And they were asking questions like, I think it's illegal to work 40 plus hours a week in D.C. Do we plan to do that? And Shedd responded saying it was unclear. There's other questions about return to office, right? What if they live somewhere where GSA doesn't have a hub office?

Are they just not going to be able to work, period? And so there's a lot of questions right now that, like, even if these TTS workers wanted to focus on whatever mission they have at hand, they really can't. Because right now they're being forced to reckon with things that will, you know, surely disrupt their personal lives extremely. Musk and his team have been quite clear. They want to dramatically slash the federal government, which means cutting money and people.

While Doge employees have been going from agency to agency in Washington, it's worth noting that federal employees work all across the country and in every state. Texas alone has 132,000 federal workers. The lives and livelihoods of millions of federal workers depend right now on a team of people reporting to Elon Musk.

a billionaire with massive government contracts who spent nearly $300 million to elect President Trump. This is an unprecedented moment in American history. I think that I can say that fairly. This is a billionaire, the richest man in the world, who is going to be the next president of the United States.

who is staffing or advising these agencies to staff a ton of people who have previously worked for him. Thomas Shedd, we mentioned, was a Tesla engineer. But also a ton of these young interns who are working for him have ties to SpaceX.

have ties to Neuralink, have ties to XAI, all of these different companies associated with Musk. And so not only, right, are we just, is this wrecking ball going through our administrative state in the United States, but it's also being influenced by people who seem to at least want to curry favor with Elon Musk himself and get involved in these agencies and do things that may be good for his businesses. Yeah.

Today on the show, he's unelected and unaccountable. Is Elon Musk also unstoppable? I'm Lizzie O'Leary, and you're listening to What Next TBD, a show about technology, power, and how the future will be determined. Stick around. Running a small business means you're wearing a lot of hats. Your personal phone becomes your business phone. But as your team grows, that's impossible to manage. That's where Open Phone comes in.

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Here's an example of Doublenomics. Discover automatically doubles the cash back earned on your credit card at the end of your first year with cash back match. That means with Discover, you could turn $150 cash back to $300. It pays to Discover. See terms at discover.com slash credit card. Over the past week, employees from Musk's team have gone from agency to agency, demanding meetings and details.

And the list of departments they're targeting keeps growing. It includes the Treasury Department, the Department of Education, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which houses the National Weather Service, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and reportedly the Department of Labor. I asked McKenna to zero in on the Treasury Department, which houses something called the Bureau of Fiscal Service.

You can think of it like government accounts payable or the nation's checkbook. The BFS is not supposed to make funding decisions. Just follow what Congress authorized and send the money out the door.

On Wednesday night, the Trump administration agreed in court to allow only two people associated with Musk to see the funding data, and even then, just to read it. But it's unclear whether people from the Doge team have already been able to access the payment system or why they're so interested in the first place.

My colleagues at Wired have reported that they're able to interact with this system. The White House disagrees. There's been conflicting reporting. But of course, I trust my colleagues at Wired the most and the reporting that they've done. And so it does seem as if there is unprecedented access here. And you know, it is Congress. We say it all. You learn it in civics class. They control the purse strings. And so it's not as if people at the Treasury can be like, we don't want to pay this anymore because these are

funds appropriated by government to go towards different things. And if that is what is going on, that when talking to experts seems like one of the most illegal things that Doge could be doing. This is, I should point out, the part of the government that pays out, among other things, Social Security. Yes. And some direct payments to everyday people who depend on these services. Right.

You have reported on the people who are working for or with Elon Musk. Some of them are longtime Musk associates like Steve Davis, who is the head of the Boring Company. But then there are these basically, what, college kids? Who are they? How did they get here? Yeah, there's like a couple of 19 to 24-year-olds, 25-year-olds who...

have been brought on to do a lot of the engineering work for Doge. There's Luke Ferator, who is from Lincoln, Nebraska, who famously won $700,000 in prizes for using AI to read an ancient scroll from Pompeii, which is honestly really cool work. But when I was looking at the video of him, of the promotional video from UNL and making that announcement, he's wearing a SpaceX t-shirt.

Which is like years now at this point removed from him joining Doge. There's an Ethan Chow Tran who I believe won an XAI hackathon. And I think that is probably where his tie to Elon Musk comes from.

But, you know, it seems like every day I'm hearing more and more from sources seeing these young faces just walking around their buildings that they don't recognize. And it's not just that these young engineers are going into these systems, but they're also working in somewhat of managerial roles. Earlier this last week, it would have been last Thursday.

I was hearing from sources at TTS and GSA that there were these young guys that they were forced to sit in one-on-one meetings with who didn't want to identify themselves and were asking them, you know, drilling down into their coding ability, wanting to look at their products, look at their poll requests, things that they have done. And so it's not just that they're doing a lot of the work themselves. These young Doge guys are also deciding, okay, who else is capable of doing this work?

Doge took over what was once the U.S. Digital Service, an arm of the government created by President Obama to modernize federal IT. But the way Doge employees are acting now, trying to slash expenses or asking employees to explain and justify their jobs, comes from the private sector, specifically from how Elon Musk ran Twitter after he bought it.

There's a lot of fear in these reactions. They don't know, right, like what it is that these people want to hear. Is it just, you know, full-throated excitement about whatever projects Elon wants to do? It's like they're being interviewed for a job that they don't know what the job is in many ways. And so, yeah, the response is like confusion, but also a

A lot of folks are angry. They're angry that these people had just stepped in, in many ways feels as if they've appointed themselves to these roles, stepped in, and want to change everything that they're doing. And especially at TTS, which is an agency with

A lot of career civil servants as opposed to USDS. There's a lot of people who have spent a lot of time at USDS as well, but people tend to do about two to three year, two to five year terms at USDS. So there isn't as much of a strong culture at USDS as there is at GSA.

And so I think that's why you're seeing GSA leak like a sieve compared to some of the other agencies, because this is, you know, who they are and this is not what they've been doing. And this is not how they've been working for so many years with these same colleagues and these same faces. And so they're definitely irritated, scared, confused, and waiting for some kind of guidance on what happens next.

Musk has said anyone taking the deferred resignation offer would be paid until September. But employees and their unions question the validity of that offer. And some see it simply as pressure to quit. Or worry that they might have the same experience as several former Twitter employees who never received their severance pay. Many federal employees serve decades from one administration to another and take an oath to the U.S. Constitution, not any particular president.

In every meeting that I've talked to people who have been in, they do not get much more additional information. There's questions about...

about like, I've been working for so long, I don't want to, you know, take off on September 30th or trust this Elon Musk plan that came out of nowhere that, you know, a lot of folks who are like scrambling for legal advice and like meeting with attorneys and lawyers to figure out, you know, whether or not they should take this. And if it is 100% legal, which no one has really, no one has really figured out just yet. It comes into the calculus, right? For a

When we come back, what does the law say here? And will Elon Musk even follow it?

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Hi, this is Dahlia Lithwick. I host Amicus, Slate's legal podcast, and I wanted to flag our recent episode, Trump's American Takeover. Americans have this idea that when democracy fails, it's going to fail with tanks in the streets. Listeners are saying that Professor Kim Lane Shepley gave the single best explanation they have yet heard of how autocracy uses the law to establish itself and what we can do about it.

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Originally, a lot of this work was authorized under an executive order that replaced the U.S. Digital Service with Doge. And the wording of that is about, you know, modernizing federal technology, maximizing government efficiency and productivity. That does not seem to be the extent of what they are doing now. And so I'm wondering if they respond to questions pointing that out, pointing out that

What they're doing seems to be beyond the legal scope of what they were authorized to do. I think J.D. Vance on Wednesday made some tweet that kind of explains this really well, which was there's Democrats are coming at Trump and Elon Musk saying like the American people did not vote for Musk to do this.

And then Republicans are coming back and saying, well, actually, Trump was very clear that he was going to make the government more efficient with Elon Musk. And they did, in fact, vote for it. And that seems to just be the answer to whether or not they have the power to do this.

we keep hearing from Trump about this mandate for the American people to do all of these things, to issue all of these executive orders that, you know, many of them themselves, you know, starting January 20th were legally dubious and whether or not these things are legal and they should be doing this. I think the reason why they are just continuing to do this is because how,

of how slow our judiciary system moves. It probably won't be two or three years down the line until, you know, if somebody sues Doge, sues whoever, agency, whatever, for this stuff that's happening with Doge, that won't be resolved in the courts until years from now. And by then, the damage will have been done.

I talked to a longtime government ethics lawyer who is part of one of the many lawsuits around Doge. And they told me that Doge and Elon Musk himself are potentially violating several laws, conflict of interest laws, financial disclosure issues, privacy laws. Has there been any sense that that kind of legal exposure is something that Doge or the White House even cares about?

I haven't heard anything from anyone remotely close to Doge about, you know, how whether or not what a lot of what they're doing is illegal. There was a protest outside of the Treasury Department on Tuesday.

where people all over, and including Democratic lawmakers, were calling what Elon and his team are doing illegal. I spoke to Nydia Velasquez, who is a representative from New York, and she was calling this a constitutional crisis. And it seems like the fears are there, but when you look at the Senate, I believe it was on Tuesday, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries announced this bill that

That would stop, I guess, whatever it is Doge is doing. And they called it Stop the Steal. And Schumer laughed. And the whole room in the press area laughed. And it just didn't seem as if they were taking this incredibly seriously. Yeah.

And so if they plan to do anything that is still to be seen, there really hasn't been much other than, you know, the protests and some thinking about, OK, maybe we stop approving Trump's nominees for whatever cabinet position is still in the works.

The people who are working for Doge are supposed to be special government employees. It's this particular classification. You get a six-month term. Elon Musk, it sounds like, wasn't actually one until a couple of days ago, and then the White House said he was. Do we have any idea if these people have security clearances? Because some of the information they're looking at is classified.

This depth and this breadth of access is completely unprecedented. You have some of these young guns, right? These young software engineers with emails at three or five different agencies going into all of these different layers of government. It's not just one project that they're working on, right? It's access to data across agencies on whatever it could be. And so even though

No, there is a little leeway on what Doge's USDS former self was allowed to do. This is just completely like times that by 10. And on security clearances, it's very unclear. Last week, I heard that there were people who did not have credentials yet and did not even have government emails while they were sitting in on these meetings where they were going over changes because of Doge.

It seems worth saying here that Elon Musk's companies were promised about $3 billion across about 100 different government contracts last year with 17 federal agencies. And I'm looking at 18 U.S.C. Section 208, part of the federal code, that prohibits all employees, including SGEs, from participating in

in a particular matter that has a direct and predictable effect on their own financial interests. Um, those two things seem wildly at odds. We have a massive governmental contractor with the ability to look at massive numbers of governmental contracts. And I don't feel like, I don't know, does that seem to raise any eyebrows?

It's raising eyebrows with definitely some public interest groups who are launching, you know, their own lawsuits. But it's just the rate at which Doge is making these changes is just unheard of. It's impossible nearly to track all of it. And unfortunately...

It seems as if we can say and suggest that Doge is violating all of these laws, but what matters is whether or not some law enforcement agency will hold them accountable. On Wednesday, the White House said that Musk would police his own conflicts of interest. Does anyone in the White House believe

care that Elon Musk seems to be as or maybe even more powerful than the president. On Wednesday, I had a colleague report that it is definitely ruffling some feathers in the White House, specifically amongst advisors to President Trump. President Trump himself seems to be

fine with whatever is going on with Elon mostly. But I think there was a quote in the story from someone at the White House saying that they wanted Susie Wiles, the chief of staff of the White House, to do something and intervene at some point. And they said Elon was getting too big for his britches.

and doing more than perhaps some folks in the administration expected him to do. Because a lot of the reporting when Doge was first instituted was that it was going to provide advice and go through things and tell agencies what they should do instead of taking the wrecking ball themselves straight into the agency's front doors. There are lawsuits against Doge, but Elon Musk has a long history of...

shall we say, dancing around the edges of, or if not outright,

breaking the law. He was sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission. California sued him for instances of pretty graphic racism at the Tesla Fremont plant. Tesla faces several wrongful death lawsuits. He's been sued over drug use, his pay package. Many former Twitter employees sued him over reneging on their pay packages. SpaceX has been sued by the National Labor Relations Board. Musk has also launched a lot of retaliatory lawsuits

And the thing about Elon is looking at the last few years, the only place that I can see that he has really been stopped is when Chancery Court in Delaware basically said, nah, you got to buy Twitter. You can't get out of your promise to buy Twitter. You have to do it. And it just makes me wonder if Elon Musk has so much money that he is, for all intents and purposes, above the law.

The money does give him a sheen of immunity that has been very, very hard to break. And like you said, the Chancery Court seems to be the only time that he's ever felt repercussions for a lot of what it is that he's done that has been accused of being illegal. What's the endgame here? Because J.D. Mance, in his tweet, was right. You know, when he said...

People didn't vote for Elon Musk, which is what you hear. People did not vote for Elon Musk. But many people did vote for Donald Trump, who promised to bring Elon Musk along. And so I wonder, is this where this story ends, with radical slashing of various departments of the U.S. government? Or does it go somewhere else? You know, you talk consistently about the speed and the confusion here.

And it's hard not to wonder where this all finally slows down. Yeah, all the conversations that I've been having with people is they do not expect this to slow down or for me to be able to do any other reporting that isn't Elon for quite some time. I've been hearing...

that there are still plans to go to other agencies towards the end of the month. And so these plans are made and they are out there and there's plenty to do, I guess, for them. And it's not ending anytime soon. McKenna Kelly, thank you so much for your really dogged reporting and for talking with me about it. Of course. I'm happy to be here. McKenna Kelly covers politics for Wired. You should check out all her work at Wired. It's really great.

We reached out to Doge with questions about their work and the legal authority under which they're operating. We did not hear back by recording time. Also, if you want to hear all about how Elon Musk cheats at video games, stick around for our Sleep Plus segment. It's only for subscribers. All right, that is it for our show today. What Next TBD is produced by Patrick Fort and edited by Evan Campbell and Tony Tran.

TBD is part of the larger What Next family. And we will be back on Sunday with a show about the disappearing federal data. I'm Lizzie O'Leary. Thanks so much for listening.