Federal workers are scared. They don’t know who to trust. As President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have hacked away at federal agencies over the past few weeks, I’ve spoken with more than a dozen workers who have outlined how the administration is pushing a new ideology and stoking paranoia within the government’s remaining ranks. My sources work, or until recently worked, across six different agencies, including the State, Commerce, and Defense Departments and USAID; most requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak or they feared being targeted. “People are terrified,” one worker told me, “not for losing their jobs but for losing democracy.”

The workers described a fundamental transformation in the character of the government: Many workers say they live in a constant state of fear, unable to trust their colleagues, unable to speak freely, reflexively engaging in self-censorship even on matters they view as crucial to national security. One team that works on issues related to climate change has gone so far as to seal itself off in a completely technology-sanitized room for in-person meetings—no phones, watches, computers, or other connected devices. (Representatives for the Commerce and Defense Departments, USAID, DOGE, and the White House did not respond to my requests for comment.)

[Read: There’s a term for what Trump and Musk are doing]

The widespread paralysis has been driven not just by the terminations and the crippling of entire agencies—which workers say has followed no apparent logic or process—but by executive orders and internal communications. Take the first diplomatic cable sent by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, on January 21, the day after the inauguration. The message, which was sent to all members of the State Department, and which outlined various priorities, takes an “Orwellian” tone, as one State Department employee described it to me. Next to a priority labeled “Stopping Censorship and Prioritizing Truth,” Rubio wrote that although the State Department has been “combatting malign propaganda from hostile states” since the Cold War, the agency has also recently worked to promote “censorship, suppression, and misinformation” targeting Americans—perhaps motivated by “an excess of zeal or misguided attempts to control discourse.” The email, a copy of which I obtained, goes on:

This Department will forever stand in support and defense of Americans’ natural and First Amendment rights to free speech. We will combat genuine enemy propaganda, but always and only with the truth: that America is a great and good and just country, whose people are generous, and whose leaders now prioritize our core interests while respecting the rights and interests of other nations. Above all, programs that lead or in any way open the door to the censorship of the American people will be terminated.

My sources were disturbed by the idea that the administration would dictate “the truth” and accuse workers of censoring Americans. (What censorship Rubio is referring to is unclear, and a State Department spokesperson, who replied to my email inquiry without giving their name, said only, “As a general matter, we do not comment on internal personnel matters.”) Those working on behalf of Trump have already hidden information and engaged in censorship themselves, deleting scientific data and prompting researchers to scrub terms related to gender and sexuality from their work, in addition to purging information related to climate change and more. Because of this, one worker said, colleagues at his agency have considered replacing the generic word including with such as in reports, given the word’s proximity to inclusion, or excising terms like vulnerable groups, which are often used to refer to children, out of concern that they could be flagged under the administration’s sweeps to eradicate anything pertaining to diversity.

Transitions of power always lead to changes in priorities, but that is not what the workers say they are witnessing. Instead, the new Trump administration is engineering what some feel could be described only as ideological obedience.

Secretary Rubio’s message is just one example of the many ways the Trump administration has made these red lines apparent. Many Republicans have spoken out against any group or agency that could be perceived as censoring conservative voices. Shortly after the election, for instance, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, an operation for countering foreign disinformation and propaganda established by President Barack Obama, shut down after a Republican-controlled House didn’t re-up its funding. Federal workers I spoke with now say that neither they nor their colleagues want to be associated in any way with working on or promoting disinformation research—even as they are aware that the U.S. government’s lack of visibility into such networks could create a serious national vulnerability, especially as AI gives state-backed operations powerful upgrades. Some are even discussing whether they should revise existing technical documents to scrub references to “misinformation” and “disinformation.” As one source told me, “If this administration is dictating the truth and dismantling disinformation efforts, you can’t bring it up anymore. You just don’t want to put a target on your back. Whether it’s intended or not, self-censorship emerges.”

Federal workers told me that this self-censorship started with issues related to DEI. On the third day of the Trump administration, the Office of Personnel Management instructed agency heads to email their employees a notice asking them to report one another for violations of President Trump’s executive order. Both the fear of being reported by colleagues and the fear of being punished for not reporting colleagues quickly led to a pervasive loss of trust and communication, my sources told me. Many employees stopped speaking openly in meetings in front of unfamiliar co-workers. Pronouns were dropped from emails; pride flags were taken off desks; references to Black History Month and promoting women in STEM were excised from office discussions, they said. Several workers told me they believed this was the intention: “Make people question what is safe—Where can I speak? Who can I speak to? How can I speak? You create a culture of chaos, fear, and confusion,” Stephie-Anne Duliepre, a former Science for Development fellow at USAID, told me. “I think that was the strategy because it was effective: wearing people out, stripping people’s will or faith that if they ever speak up they would be safe.”

This feeling may be by design. Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and architect of Project 2025, said in private speeches obtained by ProPublica that “we want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

Some federal workers who collect health and medical data from Americans to support a wide array of downstream research, including cancer-drug discovery, are discussing whether to continue recording if patients are transgender, or information about pregnancies and abortions, an employee told me. The absence of that information will limit the kind of research that scientists can do, like studying how a drug affects pregnant women, or gender-based health disparities. But the workers are wrestling with whether having these data will put Americans in danger of being targeted by their own government, the employee said. Although workers have often asked patients about illegal behavior in the past, including illicit drug use, this time feels different: “It’s not just because it’s illegal in some places,” the employee said, referring to abortions. “It’s because it’s political.”

[Read: DOGE has God-mode access to government data]

Climate change has become another perceived taboo, sources told me. At the Department of Defense, the direction has been explicit. On January 27, several staffers received an email from superiors, according to a copy I reviewed, stating that the director of Army staff was working to suspend any activities “associated with, but not limited to the following areas: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Critical Race Theory, Climate and climate change, Transgender, and Abortion policies." In other cases, workers are drawing their own conclusions. Some are discussing how to reframe climate-related policy documents, or even research on issues that could have downstream climate implications, into other kinds of energy and environmental issues that are more in line with the Trump administration’s priorities. (Trump signed an executive order directing agencies to pay “particular attention to oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, biofuels, critical mineral, and nuclear energy resources,” for example.)

For any communications related to climate and other sensitive topics, the team that has stopped bringing internet-connecting devices to in-person meetings has also shifted from email to Signal messages, a worker in the group told me. “All I have ever wanted to do was help the American people become more resilient to climate change,” the worker told me. “Now I am being treated like a criminal.”

During my conversations, many workers referred to George Orwell’s 1984, and its portrayal of a totalitarian regime through the eyes of a minor government bureaucrat, to explain the scope and scale of their experience. They referenced the Ministry of Truth, doublethink, and Newspeak as they described what was happening. Six terminated workers at USAID conveyed to me how the agency’s rapid dismantlement represented an example of the worst of what could happen in this environment: DOGE swept in, Trump froze virtually all aid spending, and Musk began blasting USAID publicly as a “criminal organization.” Agency staff were slow to grasp the full scope of what was happening and to react—they told me that they wish they’d organized protests or sounded the alarm to the outside world more quickly. Under the new regime, the staff became more afraid to talk to one another in large groups and stopped connecting their personal devices to the government Wi-Fi for fear of being surveilled. “USAID is a canary in a coal mine,” a terminated USAID worker told me. “It felt like being hunted by your own government.”

Last week, between posting photos of himself and slashing the federal bureaucracy, Elon Musk found the time to make some penis jokes. The world’s richest man briefly changed his display name on X to “Harry Bōlz,” apparently after learning that USAID had spent millions on circumcisions in developing countries. “Circumcisions at a discount, now 50% off!” he posted. “Judicial dicktatorship is wrong!" he added, the same day that a federal court ruled against the Trump administration’s chaotic federal-funding freeze.

Musk didn’t mention why USAID had paid for circumcisions: They were part of a program to reduce the spread of HIV, which, if anyone needs to be reminded, kills hundreds of thousands of people annually. Who knows how he arrived at “Harry Bōlz” specifically as a response. (He did not respond to a request for comment.) But it certainly fits a pattern. Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old hired at Musk’s DOGE, has gone by the pseudonym “Big Balls” online. Coristine is reportedly now a senior adviser within the Department of Homeland Security.

Penis jokes are the kind of juvenile humor that Musk is known for. After all, this is the same billionaire entrepreneur who began his ownership of Twitter by posting a video of himself carrying a sink into the company’s headquarters with the caption, “Let that sink in.” He has named Tesla’s vehicles so that the lineup spells “S3XY,” as in “sexy.” In 2018, he posted that he would take Tesla private at $420 a share (which he maintains was not a cannabis joke). I could go on.

Still, something else is up with Musk’s trolling. His jokes, terrible as they are, are indicative of a new sensibility taking hold on the right—one that Musk himself, in his rightward shift, has played a role in shaping. Trolling in its various forms (posting about balls, trying to offend, making political opponents squirm) has gone from an occasionally used tool to a unifying touchstone of an entire political faction. Call it a coalition of the crass.

Right-wingers getting kicks out of “triggering the libs” is hardly novel. The practice has existed since at least 1947, when a 21-year-old William F. Buckley and some of his friends showed up at a rally for the left-wing presidential candidate, Henry Wallace, wearing ironic bohemian getups. Rush Limbaugh built his career on delivering a steady stream of trolling sound bites on his radio show. But trolling has become more integral to the right in the Trump years. Trump himself loves to troll—addressing posts to “haters and losers”—and the Pepe the Frog meme blew up during his first term as the go-to way for the MAGA faithful to troll the left.

As Trump has returned to power, though, another wave of trolls has risen—this time with much more power and prominence. His victory has unleashed a coalition of the crass that encompasses a growing number of Americans who are excited to be able to call things “retarded” and “gay” again, joke about deporting people, and delight in the performance of saying things that are “not PC.” Some longtime trolls on the right have grown more aggressive and offensive as their ideas have made their way closer to the party’s mainstream. These include Nick Fuentes, the young white nationalist who celebrated Trump’s victory by proclaiming, “Your body, my choice,” as well as Bronze Age Pervert, the popular right-wing influencer who shitposts about killing political adversaries in between lewd posts about the superiority of the male figure. Ambiguity about whether he’s joking about any of this is precisely the point. (Bronze Age Pervert, whose real name is Costin Alamariu, did not respond to a request for comment.) Among the prominent trolls is also Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser: After Trump installed himself as chair of the Kennedy Center, Bannon  said that he wants the president to replace the internationally recognized opera singers and orchestras that typically perform there with a choir of January 6 rioters.

[Read: How Bronze Age Pervert charmed the far right]

Bannon and Musk have been at odds since Trump’s victory: Bannon detests the influence that tech billionaires have on this administration. On Tuesday, Bannon called Musk a “parasitic illegal immigrant.” But it’s not a coincidence that they both want to troll the left. They seemingly hate each other, but they hate the other side more. Trolling—whether it’s “Harry Bōlz” or a January 6 choir—has become the right’s most consistent manner of communicating. “Just watch the meltdown of the Washington elite,” Bannon fantasized about his Kennedy Center idea on an episode of his podcast, Bannon’s War Room. “Culturally, you would break them.”

Writers who study the right in the age of MAGA, including Corey Robin and John Ganz, have argued that what binds the right together is a belief that politics is fundamentally a zero-sum game. To win, you must accrue power and use it to bludgeon your political adversaries and any other group that is not aligned with your own. To the right-wing troll, there is no common good, or “universal interest,” as Ganz puts it, but simply different groups attempting to dominate one another. Politics is a war with clear winners and losers.

Crass jokes are the logical base expression of that political framework. Notable people on the right don’t want to just end gay marriage; they are calling people “faggots” again. They aren’t just banning the small handful of trans athletes who compete in women’s sports; they are bringing back “tranny.” At best, trolls don’t care if they cause pain to the people targeted, and at worst they want to cause pain.

Musk, too, has belittled the marginalized: Just this week he ridiculed a blind person, and in the past has mocked a disabled X employee (which he later apologized for), and rolled back protections against anti-trans harassment on Twitter. No one is hurt because of a joke about balls, but such jokes are still a middle finger to Musk’s intended audience of liberals and government workers. The point is to laugh in their faces as he dismantles the things that they care about, in an attempt to break them. It is not enough to beat your adversaries. They must be humiliated.

Spending time on dating apps, I know from experience, can make you a little paranoid. When you swipe and swipe and nothing’s working out, it could be that you’ve had bad luck. It could be that you’re too picky. It could be—oh God—that you simply don’t pull like you thought you did. But sometimes, whether out of self-protection or righteous skepticism of corporate motives, you might think: Maybe the nameless faces who created this product are conspiring against me to turn a profit—meddling in my dating life so that I’ll spend the rest of my days alone, paying for any feature that gives me a shred of hope.

The gnawing suspicion is a common one. In one 2024 study, researchers analyzed more than 7,000 online reviews of Tinder and interviewed 30 Tinder users, and found that many people believe that dating sites are messing with their profile’s visibility, manipulating their matches, and knowingly providing options that aren’t good fits. The study’s co-authors called it the “conflict of interest theory”: that dating-app companies (which want customers) have interests fundamentally at odds with those of many dating-app users (specifically, those who want to find someone and delete the app ASAP). The idea was so familiar to the researchers whom I interviewed while reporting this article that I hardly needed to explain it.

Some wariness of dating sites is understandable. One recent investigation found that, more and more, apps are nudging people to pay for perks—visibility boosts, unlimited likes—marketed as tools for finding love. Last year, a class-action lawsuit argued that Match Group, which owns Tinder, Hinge, Match.com, and several other apps, locks its users into “a perpetual pay-to-play loop” at the expense of “customers’ relationship goals.” (“We actively strive to get people on dates every day and off our apps,” Match Group responded in a statement. “Anyone who states anything else doesn’t understand the purpose and mission of our entire industry.” In December, a judge sent the case to arbitration.)

[Read: The slow, quiet demise of American romance]

Whether for-profit app companies are in fact trying to hinder people’s romantic game is questionable. Match Group keeps the details of its algorithms and strategies under lock, but a spokesperson told me that “the best scenario for us is for someone to find their partner using one of our products, and then tell other people about it … Our algorithms are designed to prioritize active users and mutual compatibility—not to keep people stuck in an endless loop.” And it’s not like companies need to worry about there being a finite supply of single people. You wouldn’t expect a therapist to undermine her clients’ treatment for the sake of income; plenty of people have problems that could use some talking through. Brutally, that 2024 paper determined that app skeptics might just be avoiding responsibility for their own “dating failures,” blaming a lack of matches on evil capitalist overlords instead of “their own actions or attractiveness.” (I flinched.)

Regardless, the fact that so many believe the theory suggests that modern dating isn’t working for a lot of people—and that for-profit matchmaking companies have, to a significant degree, lost the trust of their base. American romance isn’t exactly thriving, as I’ve reported: Some singles are quitting the apps, and others are quitting dating altogether. But recently, I started wondering whether another solution might be out there, one that still allows people to meet online and set up a date (rather than begging friends for a setup or hoping for a meet-cute). What I wanted to find, really, was a site that doesn’t try to make money: a nonprofit dating app.

A handful of them actually exist. Some are run by governments, and at least one option comes from scientists. So I set out to explore these alternatives, hoping to understand whether the experience of virtual courtship might ever change.

The most common type of nonprofit dating app, I quickly discovered, is the state-sponsored site, which is typically created in response to flagging marriage and fertility rates. Last fall, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government launched a dating platform, Tokyo Enmusubi, which uses AI to suggest matches—and which, according to the Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun, cost $1.28 million to develop. Guixi, a city in China, unveiled a dating-app venture in 2023; it draws on state-gathered data to make matches for its customers and then sends them off on blind dates. Terengganu, a region in West Malaysia, is developing an app too, which the local government said on Facebook is designed to “strengthen the family institution in the state.” If it sounds a little creepy for political leaders to be reaching into people’s intimate lives in this way—well, you might not be wrong.

Researchers did tell me that state dating apps have some potential benefits. Users might hope, for instance, that such platforms share their goal—that governments looking to raise marriage and birth rates, as well as increase trust in the state, want people to swiftly find love. And governments may have less incentive to share users’ data with third parties, or to inundate them with sponsored profiles and advertisements, than some for-profit apps do.

A state platform could also be effective at providing certain kinds of security. Luke Brunning, a University of Leeds philosopher who co-runs the Ethical Dating Online research network, told me that some for-profit companies might fear that requiring too much information at sign-up could turn away potential customers. Many governments, by contrast, are accustomed to collecting data on their residents and might not hesitate to demand information from dating-app users—which, in some cases, could help ensure that people aren’t bots, catfishers, or scammers, and could help keep track of users in case of bad behavior. (Tokyo Enmusubi, for one, mandates that users provide a photo ID, proof of income, and even official proof of singlehood; it also asks them to sign a pledge promising that they’re looking to wed.)

[Read: The dating-app diversity paradox]

The major commercial dating apps do grant users the ability to report a profile in the case of perceived abuse. They use AI and human moderators to detect suspicious activity, and have begun allowing, though not demanding, people to submit a selfie video in exchange for a mark showing that their profile is “verified.” Tinder users in the U.S. can run their own background checks on potential dates (for a fee, after two freebies), though the process requires people to enter information they might not have—including, for a criminal background check, an individual’s last name, city, and birth year. Even with these safeguards in place and many millions spent on trust-and-safety teams, users of commercial dating apps continue to encounter fake profiles—and to report sometimes-harrowing experiences.

Of course, even if governments collect more information on individuals, one can’t assume that they will be earnestly invested in protecting their apps’ users. The Communist Party of China has been accused in recent years of censoring women’s accounts of gender-based abuse and of using sexual violence for political ends. When Iran launched the dating app Hamdam in 2021, Firuzeh Mahmoudi, the executive director of the NGO United for Iran, told Vice World News that the app “treats women like property,” matching them with bachelors and then keeping those couples “under the watchful and constant eye” of marriage counselors employed by the state. The administration decreed all other dating apps illegal.

That’s the major underlying issue: Inevitably, a government platform will be shaped by political motivations. Imagine if South Africa’s government had created a dating app during the apartheid era, Jennifer Lundquist, a University of Massachusetts at Amherst sociologist, told me; it certainly wouldn’t have facilitated interracial relationships. And even if you trust your current leaders, power changes hands over time. A future state, Lundquist pointed out, might become more autocratic or fascist—and would have, thanks to its dating app, a trove of data on people’s romantic and sexual preferences.

[Read: ‘Nostalgia for a dating experience they’ve never had’]

Beyond all that, apps designed to boost birth rates serve only certain users. Lots of people aren’t looking to marry or have kids, or to find one person and then delete an app forever, Brunning told me. Anyone who’s queer or polyamorous or kinky, he said, or who wants to have casual sex, might be better served by commercial options. He’s not expecting to see a state app that “facilitates gay BDSM hookups” anytime soon.

Even if the state were committed to guiding people to whatever kind of relationship they want, it might not be the right candidate for the job; no evidence suggests that governments know any better than commercial apps what makes lovers compatible. People also might hesitate to use a government dating app because, let’s face it: It’s not cool. Singapore’s Social Development Network, a governmental body that for many years held meetup events—singles’ cruises, tango-dancing sessions, speed dating—was initially called the Social Development Unit, and people joked that SDU stood for “Single, Desperate, and Ugly.” In 2023, the SDN, citing declining membership, announced that it would end its dating events and instead focus on funding other organizations’ initiatives. “Today,” a ministry spokesperson told Singapore’s The Straits Times, “there are better alternatives offered by the private sector, including online dating apps.”

God help us, I thought to myself at this point in the search: Are dating apps all run by institutions that people famously do not trust? Then I heard of another type of nonprofit player, one that many Americans also dislike but perhaps not quite as much: scientists.

For the past couple of years, Elizabeth Bruch and Amie Gordon, University of Michigan researchers, have been working on Revel, a dating app being beta tested by 200 students. The problem with online dating, if you ask Bruch and Gordon, is that the major apps aren’t in the business of relationship science. Some of them do have behavioral scientists and other researchers on staff, but they’re likely to be somewhat limited in their ability to figure out what makes people click. For-profit companies aren’t always well suited to carrying out long-term scientific investigations, which can stretch on for many years and might not yield immediately useful (read: profitable) results. In a commercial setting, Bruch told me, a CEO can decide on a dime to prioritize some new direction, and a whole research project can be abandoned.

Besides, even researchers who study romantic chemistry for a living don’t yet understand it. In one 2017 study, psychologists tried to predict people’s compatibility using a mathematical model based on more than 100 measures of traits and preferences that their subjects self-reported; every combination of those characteristics failed to correlate with how much the participants hit it off when they met.

That’s why Bruch and Gordon started wondering if, however strange it might sound, they could be the right people to make a dating app. Bruch is a sociologist who has studied how people look for mates, as well as the idea of dating “leagues” (as in, she’s out of my league); Gordon is a psychologist interested in what makes some relationships work and others fail. Their app doubles as a scientific study—“For science,” Revel’s website reads, “not profit”—and they collect data in the name of research: seeing who matches, asking why a user did or didn’t “like” someone, following up continuously with pairs who’ve met in person. How many profiles, they want to know, can a person see in a day before feeling overwhelmed by “choice overload”? Does seeing more information about other people lead to better connections? How can the app help support different relationship goals, whether a long-term partnership, a short fling, or a meaningful platonic connection?

[Read: The people who quit dating]

Scientific knowledge might truly be a better incentive than financial gain—not only because people like Bruch and Gordon are invested in unlocking love’s mysteries, and because studies legally have to adhere to certain ethical guidelines, but also because the research community has norms around transparency. Unlike private companies, which generally fear helping out their competitors, or governments, which aren’t always open with their citizens, scientists tend to be eager to publish any findings of note. Revel’s website lists exactly what user data are collected and on what basis pairs are made. Bruch and Gordon plan to open the app to the whole University of Michigan community this fall; eventually, they intend to share their discoveries with other researchers and also with the app’s users, in hopes that doing so might illuminate a dating experience they know can be confusing and emotionally fraught.

Making scientific advances and, in turn, ameliorating the pain of courtship: That’s a lofty aim, and also one that could take a lot of time to work toward. Not all single people want to play the long game in their own life; they might be less concerned with society’s collective grasp of human chemistry, or even with understanding their own romantic needs and tendencies, than with finding a partner—or a kiss, or a wedding date, or a threesome—right now.

Perhaps more significantly, existing apps have already conditioned people to a new way of dating, and a not-for-profit platform is unlikely to reverse that. Scrolling through people on an app makes looking for love or sex feel like choosing products in a grocery store, Anil Isisag, a consumer researcher who studies dating-app user experiences, told me. An abundance of options, he said, “gives people the idea that there could be something better around the corner,” which is a solid recipe for perpetual dissatisfaction. At this point, many people may be so deeply Tinder-brained that using a different product—or even meeting potential dates in person—wouldn’t change the way they think about courtship.

Still, who’s running those platforms, and how transparent they are, matters a great deal. The people frustrated with dating apps aren’t all bellyachers who expect only romantic success; they just know that a consequential, incredibly personal part of their life is at the whim of a mysterious strategy, and they feel helpless. Perhaps, to empower them, app companies don’t need a flawless product. They just need to be more open, about both the workings of their algorithm and the fact that no algorithm can predict the coveted spark—not now, and maybe not ever.

If you have tips about the remaking of the federal government, you can contact Charlie, Ian, and Matteo on Signal at @cwarzel.92, @ibogost.47, and @matteowong.52.

DOGE has achieved “God mode.” That’s according to an employee in senior leadership at USAID, who told us that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency now has full, unrestricted access to the agency’s digital infrastructure—including total control over systems that Americans working in conflict zones rely on, the ability to see and manipulate financial systems that have historically awarded tens of billions of dollars, and perhaps much more.

The employee’s account, along with the accounts of several others across federal agencies, offers the clearest portrait yet of just how deep DOGE has burrowed into the systems of the federal government—and the sensitive information of countless Americans.

In the coming weeks, the team is expected to enter IT systems at the CDC and Federal Aviation Administration, and it already has done so at NASA, according to sources we’ve spoken with at each of those agencies. At least one DOGE ally appears to be working to open back doors into systems used throughout the federal government. Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who was recently appointed director of the Technology Transformation Services, requested privileged access to 19 different IT systems administered by teams within TTS, according to two federal workers we spoke with who are familiar with his request. With this level of control, Shedd would be able to not only view and modify federal data, but also grant and revoke access to other people. (In a written statement, Will Powell, the acting press secretary for the General Services Administration, of which TTS is a part, said Shedd needs this level of access to rapidly identify “areas for optimization and efficiencies” and insisted that he is working with “appropriate GSA officials” to follow established protocols.)

[Read: The government’s computing experts say they are terrified]

Over the past few days, we’ve talked with civil servants working for numerous agencies, all of whom requested anonymity because they fear what will happen if they lose their job—not just to themselves, but to the functioning of the federal government. Their observations reveal the abnormal degree of power that DOGE has already achieved. Federal agencies are subject to various forms of administrative and legal oversight, but they operate separately from one another for good reasons: to support a specialized purpose and to insulate them from undue outside influence. Now they effectively roll up to Elon Musk. (Neither the White House nor DOGE responded to requests for comment for this story. Earlier this week, a White House official claimed that Musk is not the head of DOGE. He is clearly the group’s functional leader.)

Among the federal agencies we reported on, USAID is the only one where we could confirm that DOGE has acquired God-mode access across the entire digital system. (The Trump administration has sought to effectively shut down USAID since the inauguration.) But as Musk and his acolytes enter a growing number of federal databases and IT systems, their unfettered access at USAID offers a sense of what they might be able to do elsewhere. At NASA, for example, it could mean access to knowledge about sensitive government technologies used for defense. At the CDC, such ability could expose millions of Americans’ health data and allow DOGE to access labs that store deadly pathogens. At Treasury, such access would allow Musk’s employees to view Americans’ names, Social Security numbers, and financial information. “It is not ridiculous to think they’d have bank-account and routing numbers for every single person in the United States,” the senior USAID source said. “What do you do with this information? I had to ask myself, Do I file my taxes this year or not? I had to sit and debate that.”

The federal government does not typically grant such wide-ranging access to a single entity, let alone one that is effectively under the control of an unelected, erratic, and politically extreme actor such as Musk. The group is working on behalf of Donald Trump, but sources we spoke with emphasized that the level of access DOGE possesses means that the organization may already be able to siphon data that Musk or his agents could hold on to forever, long after his time as a government liaison, or even after a potential falling-out with the president.

One experienced government information-security contractor offered a blunt response to the God-mode situation at USAID: “That sounds like our worst fears come true.” The purpose of DOGE’s incursions remains unclear to employees at these agencies. Musk was supposed to help improve the workings of the government—that is DOGE’s stated purpose. But in the offices where the team is reaching internal IT systems, some are beginning to worry that he might prefer to destroy it, to take it over, or just to loot its vaults for himself.

“Once they’re in, they’re in,” the USAID employee told us. And this is a big part of the problem in a nutshell: Access is everything, and in many cases, DOGE has it.

At USAID and other agencies whose employees we spoke with, leaders explained that Musk’s team could copy and remove information from government servers without anybody knowing. The team could then feed this classified information into AI tools, either for training purposes or to mine the data for insights. (Members of DOGE already reportedly have put sensitive data from the Education Department into AI software.) Within USAID, DOGE has full access to human-resources information—Social Security numbers, addresses, reputational data such as performance reviews, plus classified information and disciplinary information. The USAID source noted that DOGE can also control USAID systems that help with disbursement of funds, building-access tools, and payroll: “If they wanted to change how much a person is making, they could modify that, given their access in the system.” According to the employee, DOGE is also inside of an internal system for managing contracts and grants, which functions like a high-security online marketplace where USAID plans and approves billions in government spending.

Inside NASA, according to one agency employee we spoke with, DOGE workers already have access to contracts, partnerships, performance reviews, classified national-security information, and satellite data, among other materials. The NASA worker told us that such knowledge could erase generations of advantage in aerospace and defense capabilities if it falls into the wrong hands. Agency technologies such as propulsion systems, novel materials, and satellites overlap with Department of Defense projects. Someone with information about NASA’s thermal-protection or encryption technologies could take advantage of vulnerabilities in aerospace vehicles, for example.

[Derek Thompson: DOGE’s reign of ineptitude ]

USAID employees have felt more acute effects of DOGE’s operations. Employees there say they have been rattled by the demands of DOGE engineers: “They have walked in and said to senior staff, You have 15 minutes to do this or you’re fired,” the USAID senior leader told us. Now USAID staff are “operating in a zero-trust environment.” With its God-mode IT control at the agency, DOGE can read emails and chats, plus see who’s attending which meetings. The source described employees in a recent meeting growing alarmed when transcription services seemed to turn on without warning. An employee at NASA reported similar concerns, after unfamiliar messages appeared on workstations. “We’re operating believing our systems are completely bugged,” one person told us.

The senior USAID official fears that DOGE could terminate somebody working in a conflict zone like Ukraine, Sudan, or Ethiopia from an agency system. “If they lose access to their USAID laptop, phone, and accounts, for a lot of them that’s their only means of communication. We are putting their lives on the line,” one said.

For those who have watched DOGE storm into their workplace, what is perhaps most terrifying is its attempts to scale. If DOGE were to acquire God-mode administrative access across many systems, several sources told us, that level of control could affect every citizen at home, and many American interests abroad: personal financial data, defense secrets, and more, all in the palm of Musk’s hand.

There’s reason to believe that health information may be next. The Trump administration fired roughly 700 people at the CDC last weekend. As in other agencies, the firings will hollow out expertise but also remove obstacles to further changes. A CDC employee told us that the agency’s Office of the Chief Information Officer is expecting DOGE, but “no one has seen anyone yet.”

The individual, who has knowledge of how CDC information systems work, fears that DOGE could gain access to an abundant store of sensitive information about health and disease. This year, the CDC is supposed to roll out a central data platform for public-health surveillance and emergency response to better address new threats such as H5N1 bird flu and old ones such as measles. The new system, called the One CDC Data Platform, promises to aggregate all of the CDC’s public-health data, including hundreds of thousands of daily anonymized lab tests, data from emergency-room visits, and measurements from wastewater disease-reporting sites.

The design and rollout of this system were already controversial inside the agency, our source said, even before Trump and Musk came on the scene. Putting everybody’s health data in one place carries risks. Although the health data the CDC houses are usually de-identified or aggregated, “people with very stigmatizing illnesses could be identified by certain characteristics” if the data are exposed or misused, the CDC worker said. What’s more, plenty of health data contain information that, when correlated with other data outside the system, could pinpoint specific individuals. Given all of the data that DOGE appears to be capable of siphoning from all over the government, such identification could become much easier. The CDC collects electronic health-record details from all over the country, meaning that this could affect just about everyone—including us, and you too.

CDC systems control more than mere information about disease. At the agency’s facility in Atlanta, the CDC stores the microbes that cause disease and can hold secrets to treatment. Some are relatively benign, such as strains of E. coli. Others are intrinsically dangerous, including the Ebola and Marburg viruses, and the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. These materials are housed in labs with associated biosafety levels. The highest level, BSL-4, applies to only a small number of labs around the world containing “dangerous and exotic” microbes, as the CDC describes them, that pose a high risk of spread.

Access to such labs is managed by computers, and management of those computers is local to the CDC. If DOGE got the same kind of access to CDC IT systems as it has elsewhere, would that give the group direct access to CDC facilities? “Yes, those are all out of CDC level,” our source at the agency told us. Does that mean that DOGE could gain direct access to BSL-4 labs? we asked. “It’s definitely possible,” the employee said.

[Read: If DOGE goes nuclear]

Our source hoped that such a prospect would be averted. (To repeat, DOGE hasn’t taken control of CDC IT systems yet, at least as far as our source knew.) But the employee also explained that the recent layoffs will reduce the agency’s ability to defend against IT or security errors, on top of diminishing morale. The CDC did not respond to requests for comment about whether someone with full, local IT control could indeed grant entry to, or control over, BSL-4 labs and their contents.

The risk of harm, abuse, or political revenge is clear. But simple, brazen corruption is also a concern among the federal workers we spoke with. The CDC staffer wondered if DOGE’s unelected and seemingly unaccountable leadership, including Musk, might simply want to sell the public-health data the CDC collects. Democratic leaders have also expressed the worry that Musk’s interest in SpaceX, which has received billions of dollars in contracts from NASA over the years, creates an untenable conflict of interest. The NASA employee worried that Musk would end up “reaping all of the profits of the investment that the American public put into NASA’s research, which was being shared with the country.” NASA holds technical specs and research data for SpaceX competitors, and insiders fear that such information will soon be compromised, too. They also worry that classified NASA R&D in areas such as quantum, biotech, and astrobiology could be stolen for private gain.

A number of lawsuits have been filed seeking to limit DOGE’s access, with mixed results. Meanwhile, Trump and Musk have both attacked judges who have ruled against their interests; Musk has said they should be impeached. Trump has also indicated that he might just ignore the courts—an act that would be challenging to counter, providing plenty of opportunity for the administration to get its way. Across agencies, leaders have started to step aside voluntarily. Jim Jones, head of the Food and Drug Administration’s food division, resigned this week. Michelle King, who ran the Social Security Administration, stepped down too rather than carry out DOGE’s wishes. The resignations may be principled, but they open the door for more compliant replacements.

The request from Shedd, the former Tesla engineer, in particular, illustrates the variety of avenues and back doors that DOGE and Musk’s allies may have available to enter the government’s systems. According to the two federal workers we spoke with about Shedd’s efforts, such access typically is not granted to TTS leadership and requires a specific reason and the permission of each system’s owner. Shedd initially issued a blanket request, the sources told us, and is now attempting to bypass the individual system owners by seeking permission from other officials, circumventing standard security procedures. He also had not completed a background check, which is usually required for such access, at least as of when he first made the request, according to our sources. How much access Shedd has been granted remains uncertain.

This is the DOGE playbook: There are no norms to be respected, and everything is up for grabs. Once the damage is done, it will be difficult to remedy, especially if DOGE staffers can themselves grant or remove access to others at their discretion.

Musk and DOGE’s first month has been so chaotic, their incursions so haphazard, that assessing what has even happened is difficult. DOGE claims to be improving the government, but the agency workers we spoke with feel that they are being hacked instead. So it is worth stepping back to note the most basic fact: No good reason or case can be made for one person or entity to have this scope of access to this many government agencies containing this much sensitive information. Even in one government office, full administrative access to all systems is the rarest privilege. In the aggregate, across the whole of the government, it would be unfathomable.

Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl that escaped from the Central Park Zoo in 2023, is still with us (even though he’s dead).

He spent about a year roaming New York City—hunting in the park, hooting from fire escapes—and in that time, he became a celebrity. Then he flew into a building while disoriented by rat poison and pigeon herpes. It has been a year since Flaco’s untimely death, and now the New York Historical is hosting an exhibition memorializing his life. I went on opening day, in the middle of business hours, and found the space packed with Flaco fans. (“I couldn’t move,” Rebecca Klassen, the museum’s curator of material culture, told me afterward.)

“Packed” is an unusual state for a historical society. But people were eager to look, in person, at photos they most likely had already seen online: Flaco flying, Flaco preening, Flaco peering in a window, Flaco sitting on a pitcher’s mound. An older woman with a cane stood in front of a photo of Flaco avoiding recapture and chuckled to herself, then said quietly, “Marvelous.”

“The Year of Flaco” features videos and photographs of the beloved bird, as well as dozens of trinkets and letters that were left at a memorial for Flaco at the base of an oak tree in Central Park last March. Those items were collected and stored by a group of Flaco fans, who over the summer presented Klassen with the idea for the exhibition. Klassen was convinced by their sincerity and their presentation about Flaco’s significance to the city. She told The New York Times, “He was a raptor. Raptors have a hold on people,” which I thought was fantastic reasoning.

The exhibition takes up half of a long, narrow space that could more accurately be called “a hallway.” But it tells Flaco’s story in satisfying detail. Flaco escaped from the Central Park Zoo when an unknown vandal cut open the mesh of his enclosure. Though zoo employees initially made several attempts to recapture Flaco, mostly out of concern for his ability to care for himself in the “wild” (New York City), they gave up because he was evading them so well and because he started hunting and seemed to be enjoying his exciting new life. He mostly roamed Central Park, but in the fall of 2023, he took a few trips downtown. One day he was photographed sitting on the fire escape of a building on the Upper West Side. At the exhibition, this image—-and the idea of such an encounter—nearly brought me to tears. Imagine if that had happened to you! (Imagine if that had happened to me!) The luck of some people.

You may think this feeling is out of proportion, and you may not be wrong, but I am not alone. Flaco was the pride of the city for a season—or four—and Michiko Kakutani, the legendary and technically retired Times book critic, came back to write not one but two reported stories about him. He was somehow petite and precious (weighing only a few pounds) but also huge and terrifying (wingspan of about six feet). Just after he escaped, my colleague Matteo Wong used the words of Walt Whitman to describe him: “well-form’d, beautiful-faced, looking you straight in the eyes.” It’s true: His irises were a gorgeous shade of chrysanthemum orange. His talons looked like they could maim a medium-size dog. In letters displayed at the New York Historical, fans are startlingly—and even unsettlingly—vulnerable. They express attachment to Flaco that goes into the realm of the feelings they might have for their own actual pet, or for a person (one thanks Flaco for inspiring the writer to apply to law school). Others are short and sweet: “Fly high, Flaco”; “Freedom and peace our beautiful hero.” There is one acrostic poem: “Fabulous / Liberated / Awesome / Captivating / Owl.”

[Read: Is “instinct” really keeping Flaco the owl alive?]

After Klassen asked visitors if they had any Flaco stories to share, a woman in a cream turtleneck told me and the other onlookers that she’d gotten a Flaco tattoo on her back that she couldn’t show—because of the turtleneck—and that it was a cityscape done by an artist who has painted murals of Flaco. The woman shared that she’d seen Flaco herself on seven or eight occasions while running in the park. Sometimes, a crowd was around him already. If one wasn’t, she would keep his secret. “I would see him and I would wink,” she said.

Flaco was perpetually hounded by paparazzi (regular people with iPhones), and his apparent ease in that situation was what made him such a good celebrity. Many random animals do become symbols and social-media stars. When they die, we mourn them, but they also trigger our imagination (“I think for a lot of people, he symbolized that all things are possible,” the actor Alan Ruck said about Los Angeles’s favorite mountain lion, P-22, five months after he was hit by a car.) Think of the tragic story of Harambe the gorilla, which challenged the premise of zoos and then became a distasteful meme. Think of the white-tailed deer in Harlem that was labeled a Christmas reindeer just because he happened to appear in December. His death—though it actually had nothing to do with our lives—was read as poetic because it came at the end of 2016, when many New Yorkers were already quite emotional and glum due to the first election of President Donald Trump.

[Read: Tracking the mountain lion that ate a Chihuahua]

And though we like any animal with a story, we like escaped animals best. When some poor beast escapes from whatever zoo or circus or (sorry) slaughterhouse we put them in, we love to see it. We want them to get out. We want them to live like us. This is projection to an understandable but somewhat morbid degree. Many Flaco fans, including my co-worker Matteo, described Flaco as a New Yorker while he was alive, but of course, Flaco didn’t know what New York was or that he lived there. Others said he was an immigrant, though this is not true—his is a non-native species, but he was born in North Carolina. They said he was proving that everyone longs for freedom and the American dream, but he didn’t know about rights and probably didn’t even know about longing. They said he was gritty, but I honestly don’t know what that means when you’re talking about a bird.

Now that he is dead, we are thrusting martyrdom onto him. I think we love Flaco still, after all this time, because he lived on our toxic planet and in our wretched (wonderful) city that is so inhospitable to life, and he did it with dignity, grace, and humor until he couldn’t—until he lost all control of his faculties and died alone.

Also because he was such a beautiful, beautiful bird.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order last night that seeks to give more power to Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to cleave through the supposed “waste, bloat, and insularity” in the federal government. The team is being given broad permission by Trump to disrupt work at key agencies and cut jobs. This expanded power likely means even more chaos within federal agencies, but for a specific preview of what’s to come—and the potential consequences for Americans—look no further than the past week at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

On Thursday, operatives from DOGE swept into CFPB headquarters and set up shop, according to three agency employees I spoke with. (Each of the employees requested anonymity, fearing reprisal.) The next day, Musk posted a mission statement of sorts to his X account: “CFPB RIP 🪦.” By Saturday afternoon, one employee told me, three DOGE workers were installed in the building’s basement, where they plugged away in rooms whose internal windows had been papered over. Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and the CFPB’s acting director, announced on Saturday that the organization’s funding would be cut off, and employees were later told that the Washington headquarters would be closed this week. By Monday, CFPB employees had been told to “stand down from performing any work task,” and at least six DOGE affiliates were listed in the internal staff directory. Yesterday, two senior leaders resigned, and dozens of workers were fired. (Spokespeople for DOGE, the CFPB, and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.)

[Read: The government’s computing experts say they’re terrified]

The takeover should be of great interest to the many Americans who benefited from its work. Since its launch, in 2011—a direct response to the 2008 financial crisis—the CFPB has focused on protecting Americans from various forms of financial fraud and deception. (In 2022, for example, the CFPB ordered Wells Fargo to pay billions in damages and fines for several legal violations, including wrongfully repossessing borrowers’ cars.) No other federal regulator exists to safeguard consumers from such abuse. Closing the bureau would be like “telling fraudsters it’s open season on consumers,” Adam Levitin, a professor of law and finance at Georgetown, told me. Shady fintech companies would have less to worry about, lending standards could deteriorate, consumers experiencing fraud would not have a clear way to seek help from the federal government, and so on. Paul Krugman wrote that the current attack on the agency seems to be part of an effort “to make predatory finance great again.”

The CFPB’s mission is widely popular among Americans, based on polling across the political spectrum. Many Republican lawmakers have long opposed the agency, however, accusing it of regulatory overreach. Recently, Musk and certain other tech leaders, including Marc Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg, have become particularly critical of the watchdog, as the agency has turned its eye toward Silicon Valley. The CFPB has been taking steps to ensure that “Big Tech players are playing by the same rules as any other financial-services institution,” Julie Margetta Morgan, a former associate director at the CFPB who resigned after Trump’s inauguration this year, told me. The agency was investigating Meta for alleged misuse of financial data in targeted advertising (Meta has previously said that it disagrees with the agency’s claims and declined to comment when I reached out for this story). CFPB also recently took steps to more formally expand its oversight to payment services, which could include Venmo and Apple Pay, among others. Now those efforts will be stalled indefinitely.

The Trump administration does not appear to have the authority to unilaterally shut down CFPB. Outright demolishing the agency is “obviously unconstitutional,” Mike Konczal, a former chief economist for the National Economic Council, told me. The CFPB was created by Congress through the Dodd-Frank Act; to fully dismantle it would likewise require congressional action. On Sunday, the union that represents CFPB employees brought two lawsuits against Vought: one seeking to block the stop-work order, the other alleging privacy violations. (Vought did not respond to requests for comment.)

But legal action will take time, and a temporary pause could still be damaging. One of the watchdog’s most important consumer-facing services is a complaints-reporting system where people struggling to resolve an issue with a private company—such as inaccurate information on their credit report—can request the agency’s assistance. The agency says it has helped resolve millions of complaints over the years; it processes tens of thousands every week. Without workers to oversee the system, it may start to break down. And although a unilaterally imposed long-term shutdown may be illegal, the CFPB’s director still has significant discretion over the agency’s activities and can hamstring it from within. During the first Trump administration, those in charge of the agency significantly pulled back on various rule-making and enforcement efforts.

[Read: The Tesla revolt]

Even if the watchdog somehow remains fully intact, or is streamlined in some way that still serves the public, Americans should understand what it means for Musk’s team—largely made up of individuals with little to no experience handling sensitive government information—to have widespread access to CFPB systems. According to Bloomberg, on Friday, DOGE was “granted access to all the CFPB’s data systems.” If this is accurate, one employee told me, it would mean that DOGE employees have access to customer information, such as names, addresses, and aspects of their financial history. The agency, which regularly interacts with and investigates private companies, is home to significant amounts of confidential industry information. That can include trade secrets, whistleblower information, and employee and profitability data, according to two of the employees—some of which may belong to Musk’s competitors. “We don’t have employees from Google or Apple or PayPal just walking into our buildings saying, ‘Give me access to your systems,’” one employee told me.

Among Musk’s business interests that directly conflict with the CFPB’s work is Tesla. Over the years, the agency has received hundreds complaints about Tesla, many of which have to do with disputes over auto lending. (In fairness, the agency also receives complaints about many other car companies.) Late last month, X announced a partnership with Visa as a part of an initiative called “X Money,” which will add Venmo-like features to the social-media platform. Once it debuts, this, too, will likely fall under the CFPB’s purview—that is, if the bureau still exists.

Musk and others are well within their rights to criticize the CFPB. Levitin, at Georgetown, has himself disagreed with some of the CFPB’s actions over the past few years—in particular its tendency to announce policy by suing companies instead of advancing regulation, he told me. But to dismantle the watchdog on the grounds that it bears an excessive cost on the American people, as Musk alleged in a post on Monday, is plainly incorrect. “If you look at dollars spent relative to dollars recovered,” Levitin said, the agency “has recovered far more for consumers than it’s ever spent in its entirety on operations.” Musk says DOGE should save taxpayers money, but the CFPB has been doing that all along.

Updated at 4:52 p.m. on February 12, 2025

Donald Trump may be pleased enough with Elon Musk, but even as the Tesla CEO is exercising his newfound power to essentially undo whole functions of the federal government, he still has to reassure his investors. Lately, Musk has delivered for them in one way: The value of the company’s shares has skyrocketed since Trump was reelected to the presidency of the United States. But Musk had much to answer for on his recent fourth-quarter earnings call—not least that in 2024, Tesla’s car sales had sunk for the first time in a decade. Profits were down sharply too. Usually, when this happens at a car company, the CEO issues a mea culpa, vows to cut costs, and hypes vehicles coming to market soon.

Instead, Musk beamed about robotics, artificial intelligence, and Tesla’s path to being “worth more than the next top five companies combined.” This is the vision he has been selling investors for years: Making cars—a volatile, hypercompetitive business with infamously low profit margins—was only the start for Tesla. Its future business will be making fleets of self-driving taxis and humanoid robots trained for thankless manual labor. Whether his vision has any connection to reality is hotly debated by many AI and robotics experts, but most Wall Street analysts put their faith in Musk. And he has, at times, delivered on wildly ambitious goals. Shares jumped again after the call. (Tesla did not respond to a request for comment; a DOGE official did not respond to an email seeking comment.)

Musk gets the benefit of the doubt from investors because—despite undelivered promises, half-baked ideas, and forgotten plans—he has made Tesla worth, on paper at least, more than essentially the rest of the auto industry combined. His funders are asked to buy Musk’s picture of the future, and the recent enthusiasm for Tesla stock suggests they believe that his political influence will help him get there.

Musk needs that belief to hold. Tesla’s stock price is the largest source of his enormous wealth and, by extension, his influence; if his plans succeed, that stock is also his clearest shot at achieving trillionaire status. Right now, though, Tesla’s primary business is still selling cars that people drive, and Musk himself may be the biggest reason that faith in Tesla could falter.

For all of Musk’s ire for the former president, Tesla did very well in the Joe Biden years. The Model Y is the world’s best-selling electric vehicle and its best-selling car, period. The company has comfortably been out of its “money-losing start-up” phase for years. Although the competition among EV makers is heating up, the only individual company close to eating into Tesla’s market share is China’s BYD, which for the first time last year produced more EVs than Tesla did.

Yet that competition can’t entirely account for Tesla’s latest, abysmal numbers. Last year, Tesla sales were down nearly 12 percent in the EV stronghold of California. And in Europe, where Musk is helping supercharge far-right politics, Tesla’s sales were down 63 percent last month in France and 59 percent in Germany. This is happening even as the rest of the worldwide electric market is growing fast; nearly every car company that makes EVs saw sales gains in 2024, some of them huge.

Musk’s activism does seem to be turning off the affluent or middle-income progressive crowd that was traditionally Tesla’s bread and butter. Look no further than how the company’s new, updated Model Y has been received. Musk’s army of fanboys on X was as effusive as ever, but outside the hard-core Tesla bubble, the SUV was met with a flood of Nazi jokes following Musk’s Sieg heil–ish arm gesture at Trump’s inauguration. This type of reaction goes beyond that one car; the Cybertruck has a unique penchant for being the target of vandalism, and people appear to be making a killing selling anti-Musk bumper stickers to disgusted Tesla owners. In covering the auto industry, I can’t go a week without fielding emails from people asking for advice on the best EV alternatives to Tesla—many from longtime Tesla owners who say they’re ready to move on.

In theory, Musk’s rightward turn could help him swap out traditionally liberal buyers for more conservative ones, who usually tend to be more skeptical of EVs. And it’s likely that EVs will become less polarizing along partisan lines over time as electrification becomes more common on new cars. Right now, however, even the deep-red-coded Cybertruck doesn’t seem to be changing many minds about the concept of battery-powered cars. Take a recent report from the EV Politics Project, a nonprofit group that studies the partisan divide over electric cars. Their study indicates that although Musk himself is now viewed much more favorably by Trump voters and Republicans, he’s not leading some seismic shift in how they view EVs.

Nor is he obviously trying to get MAGA voters to buy the new Model Y. In fact, those who follow the auto industry closely wonder if Musk is still interested in running a car company at all. On that January earnings call, he offered only a boilerplate response about “more affordable” new Teslas coming soon; the word Cybertruck was not uttered once. He is, however, clearly focused on the company’s “unsupervised” robotaxi service. (Imagine Uber, except with Model Ys and Model 3 sedans, and with no humans behind the wheel.) He claims that Tesla will launch the taxis in Austin in June, the first step toward turning the company into the AI powerhouse that Musk thinks will make it so valuable. Right now, his AI ventures are separate, but he’s started mingling them with his ambitions for Tesla. Ultimately, his thinking—which he’s articulated in earnings and public appearances over a number of years—is that his roving network of autonomous vehicles can use their cameras to capture huge quantities of data, and those data can be used to train AI networks.

In the immediate future, Musk wants Tesla robotaxis everywhere, as soon as possible, and sleeping next door to the White House could help advance that part of his vision. Critics have expressed concerns that his newfound influence could also help stymie federal investigations into Tesla, which are probing the crash record of the company’s “Full Self-Driving” technology and its claims about the technology’s safety. And his current political position could help eliminate one of his oldest foes: regulations.

Tesla has long clashed with environmental rules (last year, a California judge ordered Tesla to pay $1.5 million over allegations that it mishandled hazardous waste), labor laws (employees at a Tesla plant have said that the company failed to pay overtime, among other alleged violations), and safety ordinances (the company was recently fined for violating California’s workplace-heat-safety rules at one of their plants). But the greatest roadblock to Musk’s vision of robotaxis everywhere is arguably America’s current patchwork of state-by-state rules and regulations for autonomous vehicles, which may allow self-driving cars in some places but not others. No federal standards currently exist, but creating rules favorable to the industry would speed things up—especially if those rules were tailored to especially benefit Tesla.

Musk’s approach to Tesla’s future has more than a few problems that the rest of the self-driving-car industry does not face. Tesla relies solely on cameras and AI for its automated-driving systems, rather than lidar and other more advanced sensors used by competitors. Plenty of experts think Tesla’s strategy can never power true autonomous driving. And Tesla is already years behind robotaxi companies operating in many cities right now, most notably Google’s Waymo. Musk’s Tesla faces the rising threat of China’s advancements in AI too: Investors are noticing BYD’s autonomy-focused deal with tech upstart DeepSeek. And they’re noticing where Musk’s attention lies; as he holds court in the Oval Office, Tesla’s stock has begun losing all those postelection gains.

The most daunting problem, though, may be the same problem Musk has always had: people. Even if he does succeed in tearing down the regulatory state for the sake of his own companies, who’s to say anyone will buy what they’re selling. Any power Musk has in the future depends on turning millions of people into Tesla customers. If he can’t do that—or at least keep convincing investors that he’ll be able to—he’s just another guy screaming online.

This story originally stated that Tesla responded to a request for comment; it has not.

Over the past few weeks, Donald Trump has positioned himself as an unabashed bull on America’s need to dominate AI. Yet the president has also tied this newfound and futuristic priority to a more traditional mission of his: to go big with fossil fuels. A true AI revolution will need “double the energy” that America produces today, Trump said in a recent address to the World Economic Forum, days after declaring a national energy emergency. And he noted a few ways to supply that power: “We have more coal than anybody. We also have more oil and gas than anybody.”

When the executives of AI companies talk about their ambitions, they tend to shy away from the environmental albatross of fossil fuels, pointing instead to renewable and nuclear energy as the power sources of the future for their data centers. But many of those executives, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, have also expressed concern that America could run out of the energy needed to sustain AI’s rapid development. An electricity shortage for AI chips, Elon Musk predicted last March, would arrive this year.

Both Trump and the oil and gas industry—which donated tens of millions of dollars to his presidential campaign—seem to have recognized an opportunity in the panic. The American Petroleum Institute has repeatedly stressed that natural gas will be crucial in powering the AI revolution. Now the doors are open. The oil giants Chevron and Exxon have both declared plans to build natural-gas-powered facilities connected directly to data centers. Major utilities are planning large fossil-fuel build-outs in part to meet the forecasted electricity demands of data centers. Meta is planning to build a massive data center in Louisiana for which Entergy, a major utility, will construct three new gas-powered turbines. Both the $500 billion Stargate AI-infrastructure venture and Musk’s AI supercomputer reportedly already or will rely on some fossil fuels.

If one takes the dire warnings of an energy apocalypse at face value, there’s a fair logic to drawing from the nation’s existing sources, at least in the near term, to build a more sustainable, AI-powered future. The problem, though, is that the U.S. is not actually in an energy crunch. “It is not a crisis,” Jonathan Koomey, an expert on energy and digital technology who has extensively studied data centers, recently told me. “There is no explosive electricity demand at the national level.” The evidence is ambiguous about a pending, AI-driven energy shortage, offering plenty of reason to believe that America would be fine without a major expansion in oil, coal, or natural-gas production—the latter of which the U.S. is already the world’s biggest exporter of. Rather than necessitating a fossil-fuel build-out, AI seems more to be a convenient excuse for Trump to pursue one. (The White House and its Office for Science and Technology Policy did not respond to requests for comment.)

Certainly, data centers will drive up U.S. energy consumption over the next few years. An analysis conducted by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and published by the Department of Energy in December found that data centers’ energy demand doubled from 2017 to 2023, ultimately accounting for 4.4 percent of nationwide electricity consumption—a number that could rise to somewhere between 6.7 and 12 percent by 2028. Some parts of the country will be affected more than others. Northern Virginia has the highest concentration of data centers in the world, and the state is facing “the largest growth in power demand since the years following World War II,” Aaron Ruby, a spokesperson for Dominion Energy, Virginia’s largest utility, told me. Georgia Power, similarly, is forecasting significant demand growth, likely driven by data-center development. In the meantime, Microsoft, Google, and Meta are all rapidly building out power-hungry data centers.

But as Koomey, who co-authored the LBNL forecast, argued, that forecasted growth does not seem likely to push the nation’s electricity demands past some precipice. Overall U.S. electricity consumption grew by 2 percent in 2024, according to federal data, and the Energy Information Administration predicted similar growth for the following two years. A good chunk of that growth has nothing to do with AI, but is the result of national efforts to electrify transportation, heating, and various industrial operations—factors that, in their own right, will continue to substantially increase the country’s electricity consumption. Even then, the U.S. produced more energy than it consumed every year from 2019 to 2023, as well as for all but one month for which there is data in 2024. An EIA outlook published last month expects natural-gas-fired electricity use to decline through 2026. John Larsen, who leads research into U.S. energy systems and climate policy at the Rhodium Group, analyzed the EIA’s power-plant data and found that 90 percent of all planned electric-capacity additions through 2028 will be from renewables or storage—and that the remaining additions, from natural gas, will be built at two-thirds the rate they have been over the past decade.

None of this discounts the fact that the AI industry is rapidly expanding. The near-term electricity-demand growth is likely real and “a little surprising,” Eric Masanet, a sustainability researcher at UC Santa Barbara and another co-author of the LBNL forecast, told me. More people are using AI products, tech companies are building more data centers to serve their customers, and more powerful bots may also need more power. Last year, Rene Haas, the CEO of Arm Holdings, which designs semiconductors, attracted much attention for his prediction that data centers around the world may use more electricity than the entire country of India by 2030. Some regional utilities have projected much higher demand growth into the late 2030s than nationwide estimates suggest. And chatbots or not, building enough electricity generation and power lines for transportation, heating, and industry in the coming years will be a challenge.

Still, tremendous uncertainty exists around just how power-hungry the AI industry will be in the long term. State utilities, for instance, are likely exaggerating demand, according to a recent analysis from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. That might be because utilities are overestimating the number of proposed data centers that will actually be built in their territories, according to a new Bipartisan Policy Center report that Koomey co-authored. And AI still could not turn out to be as world-changing and money-making as its makers want everyone to believe. Even if it does, the energy costs are not straightforward. Last month, the success of DeepSeek—an AI model from a Chinese start-up that matched top American models for lower costs—suggested that AI can be developed with lower resource demands, although DeepSeek’s cost and energy efficiency are still being debated. “It’s really not a good idea” to look beyond the next two to three years, Masanet said. “The uncertainties are just so large that, frankly, it’s kind of a futile exercise.”

If AI and data centers drive sustained, explosive electricity demand, natural gas and coal need not be the energy sources of choice. For now, utilities are likely planning to use some fossil fuels to meet short-term demand, because these facilities are more familiar and much quicker to integrate into the grid than renewable sources, Larsen told me. Plus, natural-gas turbines can operate around the clock and be ramped up to meet surges in demand, unlike solar and wind. But clean energy will also meet much of that short-term demand, if for no reasons other than cost and inertia: Solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries are becoming cost-competitive with natural gas and getting cheaper, while a growing number of industries are turning to renewable energy sources. The tech firms leading the AI race are major purchasers of and investors in clean energy, and many of these companies have also made substantial investments in nuclear power.

Using natural gas, coal, or oil to power the way to an AI future will not be the inevitable result of the physics, chemistry, or economics of electricity generation so much as a decision driven by politics and profit. AI proponents and energy companies “have an incentive to argue there’s going to be explosive demand,” Koomey told me. Tech firms benefit from the perception that they are building something so awe-inspiring and expensive that they need every possible source of energy they can get. Any federal blessing for data-center construction, as Trump granted Stargate, is a boon to production. Meanwhile, oil and gas companies want to sell more energy; utilities earn higher profits the more they spend on infrastructure; and the Republican Party, Trump included, has a pretense to satisfy demand to ramp up fossil-fuel production.

Of course, AI needn’t precipitate a national energy shortage to add to a different crisis. Microsoft and Google, despite promising to significantly reduce and offset their carbon footprints, both emit more greenhouse gases across their operations than they did a few years ago. Google’s emissions grew 48 percent from 2019 to 2023, the most recent year for which there is public data, and Microsoft’s are up 29 percent since 2020, an increase driven substantially by data centers. These companies want more power, and the fossil-fuel industry wants to supply it. While AI’s energy needs remain uncertain, the environmental damages of fossil-fuel extraction do not.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s chaotic approach to reform is upending government operations. Critical functions have been halted, tens of thousands of federal staffers are being encouraged to resign, and congressional mandates are being disregarded. The next phase: The Department of Government Efficiency reportedly wants to use AI to cut costs. According to The Washington Post, Musk’s group has started to run sensitive data from government systems through AI programs to analyze spending and determine what could be pruned. This may lead to the elimination of human jobs in favor of automation. As one government official who has been tracking Musk’s DOGE team told the Post, the ultimate aim is to use AI to replace “the human workforce with machines.” (Spokespeople for the White House and DOGE did not respond to requests for comment.)

Using AI to make government more efficient is a worthy pursuit, and this is not a new idea. The Biden administration disclosed more than 2,000 AI applications in development across the federal government. For example, FEMA has started using AI to help perform damage assessment in disaster areas. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has started using AI to look for fraudulent billing. The idea of replacing dedicated and principled civil servants with AI agents, however, is new—and complicated.

[Read: The government’s computing experts say they are terrified]

The civil service—the massive cadre of employees who operate government agencies—plays a vital role in translating laws and policy into the operation of society. New presidents can issue sweeping executive orders, but they often have no real effect until they actually change the behavior of public servants. Whether you think of these people as essential and inspiring do-gooders, boring bureaucratic functionaries, or as agents of a “deep state,” their sheer number and continuity act as ballast that resists institutional change.

This is why Trump and Musk’s actions are so significant. The more AI decision making is integrated into government, the easier change will be. If human workers are widely replaced with AI, executives will have unilateral authority to instantaneously alter the behavior of the government, profoundly raising the stakes for transitions of power in democracy. Trump’s unprecedented purge of the civil service might be the last time a president needs to replace the human beings in government in order to dictate its new functions. Future leaders may do so at the press of a button.

To be clear, the use of AI by the executive branch doesn’t have to be disastrous. In theory, it could allow new leadership to swiftly implement the wishes of its electorate. But this could go very badly in the hands of an authoritarian leader. AI systems concentrate power at the top, so they could allow an executive to effectuate change over sprawling bureaucracies instantaneously. Firing and replacing tens of thousands of human bureaucrats is a huge undertaking. Swapping one AI out for another, or modifying the rules that those AIs operate by, would be much simpler.

Social-welfare programs, if automated with AI, could be redirected to systematically benefit one group and disadvantage another with a single prompt change. Immigration-enforcement agencies could prioritize people for investigation and detainment with one instruction. Regulatory-enforcement agencies that monitor corporate behavior for malfeasance could turn their attention to, or away from, any given company on a whim.

Even if Congress were motivated to fight back against Trump and Musk, or against a future president seeking to bulldoze the will of the legislature, the absolute power to command AI agents would make it easier to subvert legislative intent. AI has the power to diminish representative politics. Written law is never fully determinative of the actions of government—there is always wiggle room for presidents, appointed leaders, and civil servants to exercise their own judgment. Whether intentional or not, whether charitably or not, each of these actors uses discretion. In human systems, that discretion is widely distributed across many individuals—people who, in the case of career civil servants, usually outlast presidencies.

Today, the AI ecosystem is dominated by a small number of corporations that decide how the most widely used AI models are designed, which data they are trained on, and which instructions they follow. Because their work is largely secretive and unaccountable to public interest, these tech companies are capable of making changes to the bias of AI systems—either generally or with aim at specific governmental use cases—that are invisible to the rest of us. And these private actors are both vulnerable to coercion by political leaders and self-interested in appealing to their favor. Musk himself created and funded xAI, now one of the world’s largest AI labs, with an explicitly ideological mandate to generate anti-“woke” AI and steer the wider AI industry in a similar direction.

[Read: If DOGE goes nuclear]

But there’s a second way that AI’s transformation of government could go. AI development could happen inside of transparent and accountable public institutions, alongside its continued development by Big Tech. Applications of AI in democratic governments could be focused on benefitting public servants and the communities they serve by, for example, making it easier for non-English speakers to access government services, making ministerial tasks such as processing routine applications more efficient and reducing backlogs, or helping constituents weigh in on the policies deliberated by their representatives. Such AI integrations should be done gradually and carefully, with public oversight for their design and implementation and monitoring and guardrails to avoid unacceptable bias and harm.

Governments around the world are demonstrating how this could be done, though it’s early days. Taiwan has pioneered the use of AI models to facilitate deliberative democracy at an unprecedented scale. Singapore has been a leader in the development of public AI models, built transparently and with public-service use cases in mind. Canada has illustrated the role of disclosure and public input on the consideration of AI use cases in government. Even if you do not trust the current White House to follow any of these examples, U.S. states—which have much greater contact and influence over the daily lives of Americans than the federal government—could lead the way on this kind of responsible development and deployment of AI.

As the political theorist David Runciman has written, AI is just another in a long line of artificial “machines” used to govern how people live and act, not unlike corporations and states before it. AI doesn’t replace those older institutions, but it changes how they function. As the Trump administration forges stronger ties to Big Tech and AI developers, we need to recognize the potential of that partnership to steer the future of democratic governance—and act to make sure that it does not enable future authoritarians.

Paul Ingrassia is just your average right-wing edgelord with a law degree and a high-level position at the Justice Department. In the past several years, on X, he has likened Andrew Tate, the misogynist influencer, to the “ancient ideal of excellence”; he has written a Substack post titled “Free Nick Fuentes” in support of reinstating the white nationalist’s X account (when it was still banned); and he has called Nikki Haley, Donald Trump’s former United Nations ambassador who ran against Trump in the Republican primary, an “insufferable bitch” who might be an “anchor baby” too. On Inauguration Day, Ingrassia was sworn in as the new White House liaison for the DOJ.

In his new job, Ingrassia—who did not respond to a request for comment—is responsible for managing other White House appointments within the DOJ, and for identifying and recommending people to potentially be hired or promoted within the agency, according to a department memo. As such, Ingrassia is part of a small but growing class of important Trump officials with a history of posting things (and doing things) that might have been disqualifying for any other administration in recent memory, up to and including Trump’s own four years ago. This group includes Darren Beattie, appointed to a top post at the State Department despite having been dismissed from his job as a Trump speechwriter in 2018 after reportedly appearing at an event alongside white nationalists, and having claimed online that January 6 was orchestrated by the FBI. And also Gavin Kliger, an employee of Elon Musk’s DOGE, who appears to have shared a Fuentes post that disparages white people who adopt Black children and uses the pejorative slang term for women, “huzz.” (Kliger did not respond to a request for comment.)

[Read: A speechwriter gets a second shot at the State Department]

Not every such indiscretion has been completely ignored by the Trump administration and its allies. Another DOGE employee, Marko Elez, resigned on Thursday, reportedly over having made racist posts including “Normalize Indian hate” and “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.” Within 24 hours, however, Vice President J. D. Vance was lobbying to rehire him under the justification that “stupid social media activity” shouldn’t “ruin a kid’s life.” Later that afternoon, Musk announced that Elez would be brought back.

Ingrassia’s appointment represents another win for young, online reactionaries in Washington. He praised and reposted an article from the fitness enthusiast and proponent of “race science” Raw Egg Nationalist. He has worked for the Gateway Pundit—a conservative news site that frequently publishes lies and conspiracy theories. And he has extensive ties to Tate, having worked on his legal team; he even posted a picture of himself with Tate and Tate’s brother. Tate is currently being investigated by Romanian authorities for alleged rape and human trafficking, and he has been separately accused of rape and assault in the United Kingdom. He has denied all of the allegations against him.

Ingrassia’s “Free Nick Fuentes” post called for Musk to end a ban on Fuentes’s account that dated to 2021. (Fuentes was banned after what a Twitter spokesperson described as “repeated violations” of the company’s rules.) Such a move was necessary, Ingrassia argued, to “shift the Overton Window” on social media. People who argue against content moderation on social platforms often do so by arguing that more speech is always better. (In Fuentes’s case, that meant more Holocaust denial, more praise of Adolf Hitler, and more denigration of women and Black people.) But Ingrassia also appears to be drawn to at least some of the substance of what Fuentes posted.

And although there were almost certainly members of the first Trump administration who shared Ingrassia’s views, few if any publicly said so, or discussed their ideas online under their own name. They seemed to understand that there were stakes and consequences for airing such beliefs in public.

Ingrassia’s presence in the new administration reflects a departure from that era. It also shows that not all young, online reactionaries are the same. Ingrassia appears to represent the populist, nationalist wing of the MAGA coalition, which stands in opposition, in certain ways, to the tech-right faction including Kliger and led by Musk. The two groups were aligned through the election and still have many shared goals: Witness Ingrassia and Kliger’s shared interest in Nick Fuentes. But they have also aggressively diverged on some issues. The tech industry generally supports the use of H-1B visas for highly skilled immigrants, whereas MAGA nationalists tend to oppose them. Ingrassia, in the latter camp, has written that the United States should end the H-1B-visa program as well as birthright citizenship, and institute a “20 year moratorium on legal immigration.”

That this internal disagreement has been spilling out into public view may be the flip side of the no-longer-need-to-hide-it administration. The H-1B fight, which took off at the end of December, was very visible online. People like Ingrassia, Kliger, and Beattie, with their freewheeling and unapologetic social-media personas, have helped make these internal tensions very clear. They’re just posting through it.

If you have tips about the remaking of the federal government, you can contact Charlie and Ian on Signal at @cwarzel.92 and @ibogost.47.

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 attempting to access. In our conversations, each expert was unequivocal: They are terrified and struggling to articulate the scale of the crisis.

Even if the president of the United States, the head of the executive branch, supports (and, importantly, understands) these efforts by DOGE, these experts told us, they would still consider Musk’s campaign to be a reckless and dangerous breach of the complex systems that keep America running. Federal IT systems facilitate operations as varied as sending payments from the Treasury Department and making sure that airplanes stay in the air, the sources told us.

Based on what has been reported, DOGE representatives have obtained or requested access to certain systems at the U.S. Treasury, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Office of Personnel Management, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with eyes toward others, including the Federal Aviation Administration. “This is the largest data breach and the largest IT security breach in our country’s history—at least that’s publicly known,” one contractor who has worked on classified information-security systems at numerous government agencies told us this week. “You can’t un-ring this bell. Once these DOGE guys have access to these data systems, they can ostensibly do with it what they want.”

[Read: If DOGE goes nuclear]

What exactly they want is unclear. And much remains unknown about what, exactly, is happening here. The contractor emphasized that nobody yet knows which information DOGE has access to, or what it plans to do with it. Spokespeople for the White House, and Musk himself, did not respond to emailed requests for comment. Some reports have revealed the scope of DOGE’s incursions at individual agencies; still, it has been difficult to see the broader context of DOGE’s ambition.

The four experts laid out the implications of giving untrained individuals access to the technological infrastructure that controls the country. Their message is unambiguous: These are not systems you tamper with lightly. Musk and his crew could act deliberately to extract sensitive data, alter fundamental aspects of how these systems operate, or provide further access to unvetted actors. Or they may act with carelessness or incompetence, breaking the systems altogether. Given the scope of what these systems do, key government services might stop working properly, citizens could be harmed, and the damage might be difficult or impossible to undo. As one administrator for a federal agency with deep knowledge about the government’s IT operations told us, “I don’t think the public quite understands the level of danger.”

Each of our four sources, three of whom requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal, made three points very clear: These systems are immense, they are complex, and they are critical. A single program run by the FAA to help air-traffic controllers, En Route Automation Modernization, contains nearly 2 million lines of code; an average iPhone app, for comparison, has about 50,000. The Treasury Department disburses trillions of dollars in payments per year.

Many systems and databases in a given agency feed into others, but access to them is restricted. Employees, contractors, civil-service government workers, and political appointees have strict controls on what they can access and limited visibility into the system as a whole. This is by design, as even the most mundane government databases can contain highly sensitive personal information. A security-clearance database such as those used by the Department of Justice or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, one contractor told us, could include information about a person’s mental-health or sexual history, as well as disclosures about any information that a foreign government could use to blackmail them.

Even if DOGE has not tapped into these particular databases, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the group has accessed sensitive personnel data at OPM. Mother Jones also reported on Wednesday that an effort may be under way to effectively give Musk control over IT for the entire federal government, broadening his access to these agencies. Trump has said that Musk is acting only with his permission. “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval,” he said to reporters recently. “And we will give him the approval where appropriate. Where it’s not appropriate, we won’t.” The specter of what DOGE might do with that approval is still keeping the government employees we spoke with up at night. With relatively basic “read only” access, Musk’s people could easily find individuals in databases or clone entire servers and transfer that secure information somewhere else. Even if Musk eventually loses access to these systems—owing to a temporary court order such as the one approved yesterday, say—whatever data he siphons now could be his forever.

[Read: Trump advisers stopped Musk from hiring a noncitizen at DOGE]

With a higher level of access—“write access”—a motivated person may be able to put their own code into the system, potentially without any oversight. The possibilities here are staggering. One could alter the data these systems process, or they could change the way the software operates—without any of the testing that would normally accompany changes to a critical system. Still another level of access, administrator privileges, could grant the broad ability to control a system, including hiding evidence of other alterations. “They could change or manipulate treasury data directly in the database with no way for people to audit or capture it,” one contractor told us. “We’d have very little way to know it even happened.”

The specific levels of access that Musk and his team have remain unclear and likely vary between agencies. On Tuesday, the Treasury said that DOGE had been given “read only” access to the department’s federal payment system, though Wired then reported that one member of DOGE was able to write code on the system. Any focus on access tiers, for that matter, may actually simplify the problem at hand. These systems aren’t just complex at the code level—they are multifaceted in their architecture. Systems can have subsystems; each of these can have its own permission structures. It’s hard to talk about any agency’s tech infrastructure as monolithic. It’s less a database than it is a Russian nesting doll of databases, the experts said.

Musk’s efforts represent a dramatic shift in the way the government’s business has traditionally been conducted. Previously, security protocols were so strict that a contractor plugging a non-government-issued computer into an Ethernet port in a government agency office was considered a major security violation. Contrast that with DOGE’s incursion. CNN reported yesterday that a 23-year-old former SpaceX intern without a background check was given a basic, low tier of access to Department of Energy IT systems, despite objections from department lawyers and information experts. “That these guys, who may not even have clearances, are just pulling up and plugging in their own servers is madness,” one source told us, referring to an allegation that DOGE had connected its own server at OPM. “It’s really hard to find good analogies for how big of a deal this is.” The simple fact that Musk loyalists are in the building with their own computers is the heart of the problem—and helps explain why activities ostensibly authorized by the president are widely viewed as a catastrophic data breach.

The four systems professionals we spoke with do not know what damage might already have been done. “The longer this goes on, the greater the risk of potential fatal compromise increases,” Scott Cory, a former CIO for an agency in the HHS, told us. At the Treasury, this could mean stopping payments to government organizations or outside contracts it doesn’t want to pay. It could also mean diverting funds to other recipients. Or gumming up the works in the attempt to do those, or other, things.

In the FAA, even a small systems disruption could cause mass grounding of flights, a halt in global shipping, or worse, downed planes. For instance, the agency oversees the Traffic Flow Management System, which calculates the overall demand for airspace in U.S. airports and which airlines depend on. “Going into these systems without an in-depth understanding of how they work both individually and interconnectedly is a recipe for disaster that will result in death and economic harm to our nation,” one FAA employee who has nearly a decade of experience with its system architecture told us. “‘Upgrading’ a system of which you know nothing about is a good way to break it, and breaking air travel is a worst-case scenario with consequences that will ripple out into all aspects of civilian life. It could easily get to a place where you can’t guarantee the safety of flights taking off and landing.” Nevertheless, on Wednesday Musk posted that “the DOGE team will aim to make rapid safety upgrades to the air traffic control system.”

Even if DOGE members are looking to modernize these systems, they may find themselves flummoxed. The government is big and old and complicated. One former official with experience in government IT systems, including at the Treasury, told us that old could mean that the systems were installed in 1962, 1992, or 2012. They might use a combination of software written in different programming languages: a little COBOL in the 1970s, a bit of Java in the 1990s. Knowledge about one system doesn’t give anyone—including Musk’s DOGE workers, some of whom were not even alive for Y2K—the ability to make intricate changes to another.

[Read: The “rapid unscheduled disassembly” of the United States government]

The internet economy, characterized by youth and disruption, favors inventing new systems and disposing of old ones. And the nation’s computer systems, like its roads and bridges, could certainly benefit from upgrades. But old computers don’t necessarily make for bad infrastructure, and government infrastructure isn’t always old anyway. The former Treasury official told us that mainframes—and COBOL, the ancient programming language they often run—are really good for what they do, such as batch processing for financial transactions.

Like the FAA employee, the payment-systems expert also fears that the most likely result of DOGE activity on federal systems will be breaking them, especially because of incompetence and lack of proper care. DOGE, he observed, may be prepared to view or hoover up data, but it doesn’t appear to be prepared to carry out savvy and effective alterations to how the system operates. This should perhaps be reassuring. “If you were going to organize a heist of the U.S. Treasury,” he said, “why in the world would you bring a handful of college students?” They would be useless. Your crew would need, at a minimum, a couple of guys with a decade or two of experience with COBOL, he said.

Unless, of course, you had the confidence that you could figure anything out, including a lumbering government system you don’t respect in the first place. That interpretation of DOGE’s theory of self seems both likely and even more scary, at the Treasury, the FAA, and beyond. Would they even know what to do after logging in to such a machine? we asked. “No, they’d have no idea,” the payment expert said. “The sanguine thing to think about is that the code in these systems and the process and functions they manage are unbelievably complicated,” Scott Cory said. “You’d have to be extremely knowledgeable if you were going into these systems and wanting to make changes with an impact on functionality.”

But DOGE workers could try anyway. Mainframe computers have a keyboard and display, unlike the cloud-computing servers in data centers. According to the former Treasury IT expert, someone who could get into the room and had credentials for the system could access it and, via the same machine or a networked one, probably also deploy software changes to it. It’s far more likely that they would break, rather than improve, a Treasury disbursement system in so doing, one source told us. “The volume of information they deal with [at the Treasury] is absolutely enormous, well beyond what anyone would deal with at SpaceX,” the source said. Even a small alteration to a part of the system that has to do with the distribution of funds could wreak havoc, preventing those funds from being distributed or distributing them wrongly, for example. “It’s like walking into a nuclear reactor and deciding to handle some plutonium.”

DOGE is many things—a dismantling of the federal government, a political project to flex power and punish perceived enemies—but it is also the logical end point of a strain of thought that’s become popular in Silicon Valley during the boom times of Big Tech and easy money: that building software and writing code aren’t just dominant skills for the 21st century, but proof of competence in any realm. In a post on X this week, John Shedletsky, a developer and an early employee at the popular gaming platform Roblox, summed up the philosophy nicely: “Silicon Valley built the modern world. Why shouldn’t we run it?”

This attitude disgusted one of the officials we spoke with. “There’s this bizarre belief that being able to do things with computers means you have to be super smart about everything else.” Silicon Valley may have built the computational part of the modern world, but the rest of that world—the money, the airplanes, the roads, and the waterways—still exists. Knowing something, even a lot, about computers guarantees no knowledge about the world beyond them.

“I’d like to think that this is all so massive and complex that they won’t succeed in whatever it is they’re trying to do,” one of the experts told us. “But I wouldn’t want to wager that outcome against their egos.”

You may have never heard of the National Nuclear Security Administration, but its work is crucial to your safety—and to that of every other human being on the planet. If Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) hasn’t yet come across the NNSA, it surely will before too long. What happens after that could be alarming.

As recently as yesterday morning, Musk made clear that DOGE will go line by line through the government’s books looking for fat targets for budget-cutting, including those that are classified—especially those that are classified. DOGE employees are bound to notice NNSA, a 1,800-person organization that sits inside the Department of Energy and burns through $20 billion every year, much of it on classified work. But as they set out to discover exactly how the money is spent, they should proceed with care. Musk’s incursions into other agencies have reportedly risked exposing sensitive information to unqualified personnel, and obstructing people’s access to lifesaving medicine. According to several nuclear-security experts and a former senior department official, taking this same approach at the NNSA could make nuclear material at home and abroad less safe.

The NNSA was created by Congress in 1999 in order to consolidate several Department of Energy functions under one bureaucratic roof: acquiring fissile material, manufacturing nuclear weapons, and preventing America’s nuclear technology from leaking. It has all manner of sensitive information on hand, including nuclear-weapon designs and the blueprints for reactors that power Navy ships and submarines. Even the Australian Navy, which has purchased some of these submarines, is not privy to their precise inner workings, James Acton, a co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me.

So far, the people who work for DOGE have not wished to be slowed down by cumbersome information-security protocols. Late last week, they reportedly demanded access to a sensitive Treasury Department system that controls government payments. When the most senior civil servant at the Treasury raised security concerns, DOGE engineers were undeterred, according to The New York Times. They were happy to blast ahead while he resigned in protest.

The employees at DOGE are reportedly working seven days a week, on very little sleep. This slumber-party atmosphere isn’t a great fit for the sober and secretive world of nuclear weapons, where security lapses are hugely consequential. I spoke with three former officials and nuclear experts about what might happen if DOGE were to take a too-cavalier approach to the NNSA. None believed that Musk’s auditors would try to steal important information—although it is notable that not everyone at DOGE is a federal employee, many lack the security clearance to access the information they are seeking, and Musk had to be stopped from hiring a noncitizen. Nuclear-security lapses don’t need to be intentional to cause lasting damage. “When access to the NNSA’s sensitive systems is not granted through proper channels, they can be compromised by accident,” the former senior official at the Department of Energy, who requested anonymity to discuss internal matters, told me. “You could stumble across some incredibly sensitive things if you are coming at it sideways.”

DOGE employees might try to avoid file systems that are known to contain nuclear-weapons designs. But they could still create some risk simply by inquiring into the ways that the NNSA spends money abroad, Acton said. (Overseas expenditures have been a focus for DOGE.) The NNSA helps other governments keep highly enriched uranium secure within their own borders, and also arranges for them to ship it to the United States for safekeeping. The details of these agreements may include information about the degree to which a country’s uranium is enriched, its precise whereabouts, and the nature of the security systems that protect it—all of which are very sensitive. If one of Musk’s recruits were to access this information on their personal laptop, they could expose those secrets to hackers or spies.

[Read: The dictatorship of the engineer]

A terrorist in possession of such information could find it easier to steal material for a nuclear device, Acton said. Even the mere perception that DOGE was not minding proper security protocols could hinder the NNSA’s relationships with other countries, which are essential to its nonproliferation work. These countries may not feel like they can trust the U.S. during a security breach or other kinds of emergencies.

One nuclear-security expert with more than 10 years experience told me that he’s worried that DOGE employees will poke around in personnel records at the NNSA, as they have at other federal agencies. (The expert did not wish to be identified, because he has previously worked with the United States government and governments abroad.) As part of a larger inquiry into which employees are most productive and who gets paid what, they could potentially access the “SF-86” forms that federal employees fill out when applying for a security clearance. Those may contain information about a person’s vulnerabilities that would be useful to the hostile foreign governments that hope to recruit NNSA employees to their cause.

[Read: The growing incentive to go nuclear]

On a Monday-night conference call for concerned federal workers organized by Representative Don Beyer of Virginia, a federal contractor who works with the Energy Department asked what to do if DOGE demands access to classified nuclear data. They wouldn’t be able to complain to the inspector general. Donald Trump reportedly fired the one who oversees the Department of Energy on his fourth day in office. On the call, they were told to speak with security officials at their agency. But this is cold comfort: When DOGE employees tried to access a secure system at USAID that included personnel files, John Voorhees, that agency’s director of security, confronted them. The DOGE employees threatened to call the U.S. Marshals, and in the ensuing standoff, DOGE prevailed. Voorhees and his deputy were placed on administrative leave.

None of this is to say that the NNSA should be exempted from questions about its budget. The agency likely overspends on some things, as any bureaucracy will. But nonexperts will struggle to determine what is essential and what is excessive in its highly specialized and technical realm. Building nuclear weapons is not like making widgets. DOGE can try to root out waste, but it should take its time and avoid the break-it-to-rebuild-it approach that Musk tends to prefer. A tech-start-up mindset might be dangerous, the former official told me: “That doesn’t work with nuclear weapons.”

Darren Beattie may not be a household name, but you are almost certainly familiar with his long-standing ideas and preoccupations. Beattie, a speechwriter whom Trump fired in 2018 and appointed to a top State Department job this week, is a fixture in far-right conspiracist circles.

Over the years, Beattie has reportedly spoken alongside white nationalists, alleged that the FBI orchestrated January 6—his preferred term is Fedsurrection—and repeatedly posted online that various Black personalities and politicians should “take a KNEE to MAGA.” In his new role as under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, he will help shape the tone of America’s public messaging abroad, oversee “the bureaus of Educational and Cultural Affairs and Global Public Affairs,” and participate “in foreign policy development,” according to the State Department’s website.

Beattie’s ascent is another sign that the new administration has no interest in catering to norms established by its critics or perceived political foes. What was a scandal in Trump’s first term is grounds for a promotion in his second. Beattie’s 2018 firing came after CNN reported that he had spoken at the 2016 H. L. Mencken Club, an event whose attendees have included prominent white nationalists such as Richard Spencer and Peter Brimelow. Beattie then launched Revolver News, a right-wing website that trumpeted his appointment and described him as “a relentless force in exposing the left’s DEI agenda, their censorship schemes, and the J6 entrapment operation.”

Many of the site’s articles are standard conservative fare: attacks on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other Democrats alongside criticism of powerful technology companies that purportedly censor the right, including Revolver itself. Other content on the site veers sharply into conspiracism: It often posts external links to content from the likes of Bronze Age Pervert, a pseudonym of the pro-authoritarianism writer Costin Alamariu, who has posited that “Black Africans” are so genetically ”divergent from the rest of humanity that they exceed the threshold commonly used in other species to draw sub-species boundaries,” and Steve Sailer, another prominent booster of pseudoscientific racism. Beattie has also used Revolver as a platform to advance his nationalist views, including pushing for mass deportation and “America-first trade policy.”

[From the September 2023 issue: How Bronze Age Pervert charmed the far right]

Beattie is a “well-regarded” and “beloved” figure in Trump world, as Semafor and Politico describe him, respectively. (Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson both praised Beattie in text messages to Semafor’s Ben Smith.) His appointment will likely be seen as a win for the nationalist wing of the Republican Party, which has been fighting against tech-right figures including Elon Musk and the venture capitalist David Sacks for influence in the Trump administration. While the tech-right and nationalists have been aligned in many areas, they vocally diverged on H-1B visas for highly skilled immigrants in a very public internet fight in December. More recently, as my colleagues Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer reported, Trump advisers stopped Musk from hiring a noncitizen at DOGE, the team he leads within the Trump administration. Bannon, who sits squarely in the populist-nationalist camp and is friends with Beattie, has aggressively criticized Musk and other tech elites and said publicly that he wants to impede their influence.

True adherents to the nationalist-populist wing of MAGA are almost nonexistent in Trump’s Cabinet. For as long as he is in his acting role in the State Department, however, Beattie joins a small but powerful group of nationalist Trump appointees. The immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller, who is now Trump’s deputy chief of staff, and his fellow conservative intellectual Michael Anton, who is also at the State Department, are among this cohort.

The ascendant intellectual wing of the nationalist right will be particularly pleased with Beattie’s appointment. Prior to his time in the Trump administration, Beattie received a Ph.D. in political theory from Duke University, where he wrote his dissertation on the prominent German philosopher Martin Heidegger, and he has contributed to The New Atlantis, a publication with a reputation among the right for its rigorous critiques of technology.

If nothing else, Beattie’s eccentricities—buttoned-up intellectualism on one hand, crude and offensive polemic on the other—demonstrate one underlying truth of Trump world: It’s a big tent. Kiss the ring, and you may just be welcomed back.

When I was in my early 20s, commuting to work over the freeways of Los Angeles, I listened to Brian Wilson’s 2004 album, Smile, several hundred times. I like the Beach Boys just fine, but I’m not a superfan, and the decades-long backstory of Smile never really hooked me. But the album itself was sonic mesmerism: each hyper-produced number slicking into the next, with Wilson’s baroque, sometimes cartoonish tinkering laid over a thousand stars of sunshine. If I tried to listen again and my weathered Mazda mutely regurgitated the disc, as it often did, I could still hear the whole thing in my head.

Around this time, a friend invited me to see Wilson perform at the Hollywood Bowl, which is a 17,000-seat outdoor amphitheater tucked into the hills between L.A. and the San Fernando Valley. Elsewhere, this could only be a scene of sensory overload, but its eye-of-the-storm geography made the Bowl a kind of redoubt, cool and dark and almost hushed under the purple sky. My friend and I opened our wine bottle, and Wilson and his band took the stage.

From the first note of the a capella opening, they … well, they wobbled. The instruments, Wilson’s voice, all of it stretched and wavered through each beat of the album (which constituted their set list) as if they were playing not in a bandshell but far down a desert highway on a hot day, right against the horizon. Wilson’s voice, in particular, verged on frail—so far from the immaculate silk of the recording as to seem like a reinvention. Polished and rhythmic, the album had been all machine. But the performance was human—humans, by the thousand, making and hearing the music—and for me it was like watching consciousness flicker on for the first time in the head of a beloved robot.

Music is different now. Finicky CD players are a rarity, for one thing. We hold the divine power instead to summon any song we can think of almost anywhere. In some respects, our investment in how we listen has kept pace: People wear $500 headphones on the subway; they fork out the GDP of East Timor to see Taylor Swift across an arena. But the engine of this musical era is access. Forever, music was tethered to the human scale, performers and audience in a space small enough to carry an organic or mechanical sound. People alive today knew people who might have heard the first transmitted concert, a fragile experiment over telephone lines at the Paris Opera in 1881. Now a library of music too big for a person to hear in seven lifetimes has surfed the smartphone to most corners of the Earth.

In another important way, though, how we listen has shrunk. Not in every instance, but often enough to be worthy of attention. The culprit is the single speaker—as opposed to a pair of them, like your ears—and once you start looking for it, you might see it everywhere, an invasive species of flower fringing the highway. Every recorded sound we encounter is made up of layers of artifice, of distance from the originating disturbance of air. So this isn’t an argument about some standard of acoustic integrity; rather, it’s about the space we make with music, and what (and who) will fit inside.

From the early years of recorded music, the people selling it have relied on a dubious language of fidelity—challenging the listener to tell a recording apart from the so-called real thing. This is silly, even before you hear some of those tinny old records. We do listen to sound waves, of course, but we also absorb them with the rest of our body, and beyond the sound of the concert are all the physical details of its production—staging, lighting, amplification, decor. We hear some of that happening, too, and we see it, just as we see and sense the rising and falling of the people in the seats around us, as we feel the air whipping off their applauding hands or settling into the subtly different stillnesses of enrapturement or boredom. People will keep trying to reproduce all of that artificially, no doubt, because the asymptote of fidelity is a moneymaker. But each time you get one new piece of the experience right, you’ve climbed just high enough to crave the next rung on the ladder. Go back down, instead, to the floor of the most mundane auditorium, and you’ll feel before you can name all the varieties of sensation that make it real.

For a long time, the fidelity sell was a success. When American men got home from World War II, as the cultural historian Tony Grajeda has noted, they presented a new consumer class. Marketing phrases such as “concert-hall realism” got them buying audio equipment. And the advent of stereo sound, with separated left and right channels—which became practical for home use in the late ’50s—was an economic engine for makers of both recordings and equipment. All of that needed to be replaced in order to enjoy the new technology. The New York Times dedicated whole sections to the stereo transition: “Record dealers, including a considerable number who do not think that stereo is as yet an improvement over monophonic disks, are hopeful that, with sufficient advertising and other forms of publicity, the consumer will be converted,” a 1958 article observed.

Acoustic musicians were integral to the development of recorded sound, and these pioneers understood that the mixing panel was now as important as any instrument. When Bell Laboratories demonstrated its new stereophonic technology in a spectacle at Carnegie Hall, in 1940, the conductor Leopold Stokowski ran the audio levels himself, essentially remixing live the sounds he’d recorded with his Philadelphia Orchestra. Stokowski had worked, for years, with his pal Walt Disney to create a prototype of surround sound for Fantasia. The result was a system too elaborate to replicate widely, which had to be abandoned (and its parts donated to the war effort) before the movie went to national distribution.

Innovators like Stokowski recognized a different emerging power in multichannel sound, more persuasive and maybe more self-justifying than the mere simulation of a live experience: to make, and then remake in living rooms and dens across the country, an aural stage without a physical correlate—an acoustic space custom-built in the recording studio, with a soundtrack pieced together from each isolated instrument and voice. The musical space had always been monolithic, with players and listeners sharing it for the fleeting moment of performance. The recording process divided that space into three: one for recording the original sound, one for listening, and an abstract, theoretical “sound stage” created by the mixing process in between. That notional space could have a size and shape of its own, its own warmth and coolness and reverberance, and it could reposition each element of the performance in three dimensions, at the inclination of the engineer—who might also be the performer.

Glenn Gould won permanent fame with his recordings of Bach’s keyboard works in the 1950s. Although he was as formidable and flawless a live performer as you’ll get, his first recording innovation—and that it was, at the time—was to splice together many different takes of his performances to yield an exaggerated, daring perfection in each phrase of every piece, as if LeBron James only ever showed up on TV in highlight reels. (“Listen, we’ve got lots of endings,” Gould tells his producer in one recording session, a scene recalled in Paul Elie’s terrific Reinventing Bach.) By the ’70s, the editors of the anthology Living Stereo note, Gould had hacked the conventional use of multi-mic recording, “but instead of using it to render the conventional image of the concert hall ‘stage,’ he used the various microphone positions to create the effect of a highly mobile acoustic space—what he sometimes referred to as an ‘acoustic orchestration’ or ‘choreography.’” It was akin to shooting a studio film with a handheld camera, reworking the whole relationship of perceiver to perceived.

Pop music was surprisingly slow to match the classicalists’ creativity; many of the commercial successes of the ’60s were mastered in mono, which became an object of nostalgic fascination after the record companies later reengineered them—in “simulated stereo”—to goose sales. (Had it been released by the Beach Boys back then, Smile would have been a single-channel record, and, in fact, Brian Wilson himself is deaf in one ear.) It wasn’t really until the late ’60s, when Pink Floyd championed experiments in quadraphonic sound—four speakers—that pop music became a more reliable scene of fresh approaches in both recording and production.

Nowadays, even the most rudimentary pop song is a product of engineering you couldn’t begin to grasp without a few master’s degrees. But the technologization of music producing, distribution, and consumption is full of paradoxes. For the first 100 years, from that Paris Opera telephone experiment to the release of the compact disc in the early 1980s, recording was an uneven but inexorable march toward higher quality—as both a selling point and an artistic aim. Then came file sharing, in the late ’90s, and the iPod and its descendant, the iPhone, all of which compromised the quality of the music in favor of smaller files that could flourish on a low-bandwidth internet—convenience and scale at the expense of quality. Bluetooth, another powerful warrior in the forces of convenience, made similar trade-offs in order to spare us a cord. Alexa and Siri gave us new reasons to put a multifunctional speaker in our kitchens and bathrooms and garages. And the ubiquity of streaming services brought the whole chain together, one suboptimal link after another, landing us in a pre-Stokowski era of audio quality grafted onto a barely fathomable utopia of access: all music, everywhere, in mediocre form.

People still listen to music in their car or on headphones, of course, and many others have multichannel audio setups of one kind or another. Solitary speakers tend to be additive, showing up in places you wouldn’t think to rig for the best sound: in the dining room, on the deck, at the beach. They’re digital successors to the boombox and the radio, more about the presence of sound than its shape.

Yet what many of these places have in common is that they’re where people actually congregate. The landmark concerts and the music we listen to by ourselves keep getting richer, their real and figurative stages more complex. (I don’t think I’ve ever felt a greater sense of space than at Beyoncé’s show in the Superdome two Septembers ago.) But our everyday communal experience of music has suffered. A speaker designed to get you to order more toilet paper, piping out its lonely strain from the corner of your kitchen—it’s the first time since the arrival of hi-fi almost a century ago that we’ve so widely acceded to making the music in our lives smaller.

For Christmas, I ordered a pair of $60 Bluetooth speakers. (This kind of thing has been a running joke with my boyfriend since a more ambitious Sonos setup showed up in his empty new house a few days after closing, the only thing I needed to make the place livable. “I got you some more speakers, babe!”) We followed the instructions to pair them in stereo, then took them out to the fire pit where we’d been scraping by with a single unit. I hung them from opposite trees, opened up Spotify, and let the algorithmic playlist roll. In the flickering darkness, you could hear the silence of the stage open up, like the moments when the conductor mounts the podium in Fantasia. As the music began, it seemed to come not from a single point on the ground, like we were used to, but from somewhere out in the woods or up in the sky—or maybe from a time before all this, when the musician would have been one of us, seated in the glow and wrapping us in another layer of warmth. This wasn’t high-fidelity sound. There wasn’t a stereo “sweet spot,” and the bass left something to be desired. But the sound made a space, and we were in it together.

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A recent target in Elon Musk’s long and eminently tweetable list of grievances: the existence of the world’s most famous encyclopedia. Musk’s latest attack—“Defund Wikipedia until balance is restored!” he posted on X last month—coincided with an update to his own Wikipedia page, one that described the Sieg heil–ish arm movement he’d made during an Inauguration Day speech. “Musk twice extended his right arm towards the crowd in an upward angle,” the entry read at one point. “The gesture was compared to a Nazi salute or fascist salute. Musk denied any meaning behind the gesture.” There was little to be upset about; the Wikipedia page didn’t accuse Musk of making a Sieg heil salute. But that didn’t seem to matter to Musk. Wikipedia is “an extension of legacy media propaganda!” he posted.

Musk’s outburst was part of an ongoing crusade against the digital encyclopedia. In recent months, he has repeatedly attempted to delegitimize Wikipedia, suggesting on X that it is “controlled by far-left activists” and calling for his followers to “stop donating to Wokepedia.” Other prominent figures who share his politics have also set their sights on the platform. “Wikipedia has been ideologically captured for years,” Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital, posted after Musk’s gesture last month. “Wikipedia lies,” Chamath Palihapitiya, another tech investor, wrote. Pirate Wires, a publication popular among the tech right, has published at least eight stories blasting Wikipedia since August.

Wikipedia is certainly not immune to bad information, disagreement, or political warfare, but its openness and transparency rules have made it a remarkably reliable platform in a decidedly unreliable age. Evidence that it’s an outright propaganda arm of the left, or of any political party, is thin. In fact, one of the most notable things about the site is how it has steered relatively clear of the profit-driven algorithmic mayhem that has flooded search engines and social-media platforms with bad or politically fraught information. If anything, the site, which is operated by a nonprofit and maintained by volunteers, has become more of a refuge in a fractured online landscape than an ideological prison—a “last bastion of shared reality,” as the writer Alexis Madrigal once called it. And that seems to be precisely why it’s under attack.

The extent to which Wikipedia’s entries could be politically slanted has been a subject of inquiry for a long time. (Accusations of liberal bias have persisted just as long: In 2006, the son of the famed conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly launched “Conservapedia” to combat it.) Sock puppets and deceptive editing practices have been problems on the site, as with the rest of the internet. And demographically speaking, it’s true that Wikipedia entries are written and edited by a skewed sliver of humanity: A 2020 survey by the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, found that roughly 87 percent of the site’s contributors were male; more than half lived in Europe. In recent years, the foundation has put an increased emphasis on identifying and filling in these so-called knowledge gaps. Research has shown that diversity among Wikipedia’s editors makes information on the site less biased, a spokesperson pointed out to me. For the anti-Wikipedia contingent, however, such efforts are evidence that the site has been taken over by the left. As Pirate Wires has put it, Wikipedia has become a “top-down social activism and advocacy machine.”   

In 2016, two researchers at Harvard Business School examined more than 70,000 Wikipedia articles related to U.S. politics and found that overall they were “mildly more slanted towards the Democratic ‘view’” than analogous Encyclopedia Britannica articles. Still, the finding was nuanced. Entries on civil rights had more of a Democratic slant; articles on immigration had more of a Republican slant. Any charge of “extreme left-leaning bias,” Shane Greenstein, an economist who co-authored the study, told me, “could not be supported by the data.” Things could have changed since then, Greenstein said, but he’s “very skeptical” that they have.

Attacks will continue regardless. In June, the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, published a report suggesting that Wikipedia articles about certain organizations and public figures aligned with the right tend to be associated with greater amounts of negative sentiment than similar groups and figures on the left. When asked about bias on the site, the Wikimedia spokesperson told me that “Wikipedia is not influenced by any one person or group” and that the site’s editors “don’t write to convince but to explain and inform.” (They certainly like to write: A debate over the spelling yogurt versus yoghurt was similar in length to The Odyssey. In the end, yogurt won, but three other spellings are listed in the article’s first sentence.)

The fact that Musk, in his most recent tirade against Wikipedia, didn’t point to any specific errors in the entry about his inauguration gesture is telling. As he gripes about injustice, the fundamental issue he and others in his circle have with Wikipedia seems to be more about control. With his acquisitional approach to global technology and platforms, Musk has gained influence over an astonishing portion of online life. He has turned X into his own personal megaphone, which he uses to spout his far-right political views. Through Starlink, his satellite-internet company, Musk quite literally governs some people’s access to the web. Even other tech platforms that Musk doesn’t own have aligned themselves with him. In early January, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta would back away from third-party fact-checking on its platforms, explicitly citing X as an inspiration. (Zuckerberg also announced that the company’s trust and safety teams would move from California to Texas, again borrowing from Musk.)

One thing Musk does not control is Wikipedia. Although the site is far from perfect, it remains a place where, unlike much of the internet, facts still matter. That the people who are constantly writing and rewriting Wikipedia entries are disaggregated volunteers—rather than bendable to one man’s ideological views—seems to be in the public interest. The site’s structure is a nuisance for anyone invested in controlling how information is disseminated. With that in mind, the campaign against Wikipedia may best be understood as the apotheosis of a view fashionable among the anti-“woke” tech milieu: Free speech, which the group claims to passionately defend, counts only so long as they like what you have to say. Attempts to increase the diversity of perspectives represented on the site—that is, attempts to bring about more speech—have been construed as “censorship.” This group is less interested in representing multiple truths, as Wikipedia attempts to do, than it is in a singular truth: its own. (Musk, Maguire, and Palihapitiya did not respond to requests for comment.)

Ironically, Wikipedia resembles the version of the internet that Musk and his peers speak most reverently of. Musk often touts X’s Community Notes feature, which encourages users to correct and contextualize misleading posts. That sounds a lot like the philosophy behind … Wikipedia. Indeed, in a recent interview, X’s vice president of product explained that Community Notes took direct inspiration from Wikipedia.

Strike hard enough and often enough, the Wikipedia-haters seem to believe, and the website might just fracture into digital smithereens. Just as Twitter’s user base splintered into X and Bluesky and Mastodon and Threads, one can imagine a sad swarm of rival Wikipedias, each proclaiming its own ideological supremacy. (Musk and others in his orbit have similarly accused Reddit of being “hard-captured by the far left.”) Musk can’t just buy Wikipedia like he did Twitter. In December 2022, months after he purchased the social platform, a New York Post reporter suggested that he do just that. “Not for sale,” Jimmy Wales, one of the site’s co-founders, responded. The following year, Musk mockingly offered to give the site $1 billion to change its name to “Dickipedia.”

Even if he can’t buy Wikipedia, by blasting his more than 215 million followers with screeds against the site and calls for its defunding, Musk may be able to slowly undermine its credibility. (The Wikimedia Foundation has an annual budget of $189 million. Meanwhile, Musk spent some $288 million backing Trump and other Republican candidates this election cycle.) Anyone who defends free speech and democracy should wish for Wikipedia to survive and remain independent. Against the backdrop of a degraded web, the improbable success of a volunteer-run website attempting to gather all the world’s knowledge is something to celebrate, not destroy. And it’s especially valuable when so many prominent tech figures are joining Musk in using their deep pockets to make their own political agendas clear. At Donald Trump’s inauguration, the CEOs of the companies who run the world’s six most popular websites sat alongside Trump’s family on the dais. There was no such representative for the next-most-popular site: Wikipedia.

If you have tips about the remaking of the federal government, you can contact Charlie on Signal at @cwarzel.92.

Elon Musk is not the president, but it does appear that he—a foreign-born, unelected billionaire who was not confirmed by Congress—is exercising profound influence over the federal government of the United States, seizing control of information, payments systems, and personnel management. It is nothing short of an administrative coup.

As the head of an improvised team within the Trump administration with completely ambiguous power (the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, in reference to a meme about a Shiba Inu), Musk has managed quite a lot in the two weeks since Inauguration Day. He has barged into at least one government building and made plans to end leases or sell some of them (three leases have been terminated so far, according to Stephen Ehikian, the General Services Administration’s acting administrator). He has called in employees from Tesla and the Boring Company to oversee broad workforce cuts, including at the Office of Personnel Management (one of Musk’s appointed advisers, according to Wired, is just 21 years old, while another graduated from high school last year). During this time, OPM staffers, presumably affiliated with DOGE, reportedly set up an “on-premise” email server that may be vulnerable to hacking and able to collect data on government employees—one that a lawsuit brought by two federal workers argues violates the E-Government Act of 2002 (there has not yet been a response to the complaint). Musk’s people have also reportedly gained access to the Treasury’s payments system—used to disburse more than $5 trillion to Americans each year (a national-security risk, according to Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon)—as well as computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of civil servants. (They subsequently locked some senior employees out of those systems, according to Reuters.) Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Over the weekend, the Trump administration put two senior staffers at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) on administrative leave—staffers who, according to CNN, had tried to thwart Musk’s staff’s attempts to access sensitive and classified information. Musk posted on X yesterday that “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.” USAID staffers were barred from entering the unit’s headquarters today.

This is called “flooding the zone.” Taken in aggregate, these actions are overwhelming. But Musk’s political project with DOGE is actually quite straightforward: The world’s richest man appears to be indiscriminately dismantling the government with an eye toward consolidating power and punishing his political enemies.

Two days before the 2024 election, I wrote that Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter was going to be the blueprint for his potential tenure at DOGE. Unfortunately, I was right—he’s running the exact same playbook. But it’s worth keeping in mind that there are two ways of measuring success for Musk’s projects: first, whether the organizations themselves benefit under his leadership, and second, whether Musk himself gets something out of the arrangement. Musk’s stewardship of X has been a financial nightmare. He has alienated advertisers, tanked revenue and user growth, and saddled investment banks with debt from the purchase that they’ll need to sell off. Yet Musk’s own influence and net worth have grown considerably during this time. His fanboys and the MAGA faithful don’t care that X is a flailing business, because Musk did deliver on giving liberals their supposed comeuppance by de-verifying accounts and reinstating banned trolls. He turned the platform into a conspiratorial superfund site, has boosted right-wing accounts and talking points, and helped elect Donald Trump as president. Musk’s purchase is a success in their eyes because he succeeded in turning X into a political weapon.

[Read: Musk’s Twitter is the blueprint for a MAGA government]

The same thing is happening right now with DOGE. Musk and his Silicon Valley acolytes are acting on a long-held fantasy of approaching the federal government like a software company and running it like a venture-backed tech start-up during the days of zero-percent interest rates. Here’s the problem: The federal government is not a software company. “The stakes are wildly different,” a former senior Twitter executive told me recently. This person, who requested anonymity because they worked closely with Musk during his takeover and fear retribution, argued that Musk seems incapable of recognizing the limits of his own knowledge. When I asked them to describe Musk’s managerial strategy, they borrowed a term of art from SpaceX’s own rocket mishaps: “This is a rapid unscheduled disassembly of government services.”

The theory that the government is inefficient is not altogether incorrect. I recently spoke with Robert Gordon, formerly the deputy assistant to the president for economic mobility in the Biden administration, to get a sense of how intricate government agencies are and what it would take to reform them. Gordon, who has spent time in the Office of Management and Budget and as the assistant secretary responsible for grants policy at the Department of Health and Human Services, was quick to note that we desperately need to simplify processes within the federal government to allow workers to execute more quickly and develop more agile technology, such as the Direct File product that the IRS recently made to allow Americans to file taxes for free. “No doubt the government could do more here,” he told me. “But it requires incredibly specific approaches, implemented in a thoughtful way. It requires paying enormous attention to detail, not blowing shit up.” Musk and DOGE have instead operated with a “vast carelessness,” Gordon wrote in a Substack post last week. “This government cannot trouble itself to plan for the biggest things, the funds that thousands of organizations use to serve millions of people,” he wrote. “It has swept up civil servants in a vortex of confusion and fear.” Musk wrote today on X that the Treasury team that built Direct File no longer exists. “That group has been deleted,” he said.

[Read: The American people deserve DOGE]

Among Gordon’s biggest concerns is that DOGE’s slapdash cuts will remove key links in the bureaucratic chain that make the government function. Even simple-sounding procedures—allocating government funds in a crisis like, say, a pandemic—require coordination among teams of civil servants across multiple government offices. “All of this is done by back-office types,” Gordon told me. “There are so many people in that process, and it matters enormously how good they are.” That this system is inefficient is frustrating, Gordon said, but he worries that the chaos caused by Musk’s efforts will halt any possibility of reform. “If you want to make this system better, you need to create space for civil servants who know what they’re doing to do that work,” he told me. “What’s very likely to happen now because of this pressure is that the most competent people on that chain are at super-high risk of saying, I gave it my best shot; I don’t need this and quit, because they can get better jobs. That’s what I see happening.”

Of course, the so-called tech right does not agree. As the political scientist Henry Farrell wrote this past weekend, “The fact that none of the DOGE people actually understand how government functions is a feature, not a bug. If you understand the workings of the federal bureaucracy, you are almost certainly part of the problem, not the solution.” But this reasoning is not usually compatible with the reality of managing complex organizations. As the former Twitter exec told me, after Musk took over the platform, his people enthusiastically championed ideas that seasoned employees with knowledge of the company had already researched and rejected: “It wasn’t that we hadn’t thought about new ways, say, to do verification or handle bots, but we rejected them on the basis of research and data. There was a huge contrast between the methodical approach and Musk’s rapid-fire whims.”

When Musk barged into Twitter in 2022 as its new CEO, his strategy was “decision making by vibes,” according to the former exec I spoke with. Those vibes were often dictated by the sycophants in Musk’s orbit. The executive described Musk as surprisingly receptive to ideas when presented with facts and data, but said that few in his inner circle questioned or spoke frankly with him: “And so, in the absence of rational decision making, we got the vibes-based, yes-man approach.”

The former executive did point to a meaningful difference between X and DOGE, however: The government is big and complex. This may be an asset during an assault. “Even if you try to take a flamethrower to the government, the destruction won’t be quick. There’ll be legal challenges and congressional fights, and in the months and weeks, it’ll be individuals who keep essential services running,” they said. The government workers who know what they’re doing may still be able to make positive incremental change from within.

[Read: There really is a deep state]

It’s a rousing, hopeful notion. But I fear that the focus on the particulars of this unqualified assault on our government is like looking at X’s bottom line, in that it obscures Musk’s real ambitions. What are DOGE’s metrics for success? If X is our guide, health, functionality, and sustainability are incidental and able to be sacrificed. The end game for Musk seems to be just as it was with Twitter: seize a polarized, inefficient institution; fuse his identity with it; and then use it to punish his enemies and reward his friends. DOGE is a moon-shot program to turn the government into Musk’s personal political weapon.

“Can you never do that again?” my son texted me on Monday in our family group chat. I had sent a series of photos of my flight in the tiny Cessna Caravan that had just flown my mortal being 120 miles, from Chicago O’Hare International Airport to West Lafayette, Indiana. The nine-seat aircraft, which runs on a single turboprop engine, was so small that the ground crew had to weigh luggage and passengers in order to distribute their weight evenly in the cabin. It was, in short, the kind of plane that makes it easy to fear for your life. By contrast, I hadn’t been concerned at all—and my son had found no cause to worry—about the American Airlines regional jet that I’d taken on the first leg of my trip, from St. Louis to Chicago.

Just a few days later, an American Airlines regional jet collided with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter in Washington, D.C., killing everyone involved: 60 passengers, four crew members, and three service members. The National Transportation Safety Board has said it will take at least a year to identify a final probable cause of the crash. Until then, one can only guess that the aircraft and their machinery were not themselves to blame. The New York Times has reported that the relevant air-traffic-control tower may have been understaffed and that the helicopter might have been outside its flight path. As Juliette Kayyem wrote for The Atlantic yesterday, a rise in flight traffic has been increasing the risk of midair collisions for years, especially in busy airspace such as Washington’s.

[Read: The near misses at airports have been telling us something]

Statistically, for now at least, flying is still much safer than driving. According to the International Air Transport Association, on average a person would have to travel by plane every day for more than 100,000 years before experiencing a fatal accident. A host of factors has made flying more reliable, among them more dependable equipment, better pilot training, tighter regulations, stricter maintenance standards, advances in air-traffic control, and improved weather forecasting. But the amorphous, interlocking systems that realize commercial flight are hard to see or understand, even as they keep us safe. For ordinary passengers—people like me and my son—any sense of danger tends to focus on the plane itself, because the plane is right in front of us, and above our heads, and underneath our feet, and lifting us up into the sky. A fear of flying makes little sense, because flying is just physics. One really fears airplanes, the aluminum tubes in which a fragile human body may be trapped while it is brought into flight. A machine like that can crash. A machine like that can kill you.

The Boeing 737 Max’s recent string of mishaps, including two fatal accidents in 2018 and 2019, and, more recently, a lost door during flight, are still fresh in the minds of passengers, and history only reinforces the fear. In 1950, a TWA Lockheed Constellation en route from Mumbai to New York crashed when its engine caught on fire and detached. In 1979, another engine detachment on a DC-10 wide-body jet caused the crash of American Airlines Flight 191. In 1988, an Aloha Airlines Boeing 737 lost an 18-foot-long section of upper fuselage on the way from Hilo to Honolulu. Human error—a contributing factor in most crashes, if not their direct cause—can also stem from equipment failure, as in the case of Pan Am Flight 812 in 1974 and Air France Flight 447 in 2009.

Yet the salience of an airplane’s actual machinery has been fading too. For passengers, the experience of commercial flight may be worse than ever, but the planes themselves now seem more reliable and more accommodating (if only so many passengers weren’t packed into them). Twenty years ago, regional flights would commonly use turboprops to transport passengers between hubs and small-to-medium-size cities. These planes were louder and bumpier. Flying in them felt worse, and it inspired more anxiety for that reason.

Are little turboprops actually more dangerous than jets? A direct comparison is difficult, because the smaller planes are often used for shorter flights, and more flights mean more takeoffs and landings—when most accidents occur. But the numbers are somewhat reassuring overall, at least when it comes to commercial flight. (The numbers for general aviation, which includes recreational planes, skydiving operations, bush flying, and the rest of civilian noncommercial flight, are less reassuring.) The NTSB filed investigations into eight fatal aviation accidents in the United States from 2000 to 2024 that involved commercial aircraft with turboprop engines, and 13 for aircraft with turbo fans (the most common passenger-jet engine).

In any case, modern airport logistics, just like modern jumbo jets, have helped build a sense of safety—or at least hide a source of fear. U.S. passengers used to board and disembark their flights from the tarmac with more regularity. This was true of prop planes and bigger jets alike. The shrill whine of turbines and the sweet smell of aviation fuel made the mechanisms of flight more palpable; it reminded you that you were entering a machine. Nowadays, that reality is hidden. You board comfortable, quiet cabins from the climate-controlled shelter of jet bridges.

All of these changes have tamped down the fear of planes to the point that, for many passengers, it will now resurface only under certain throwback conditions—such as when I found myself bobbing over the Hoosier farms in a plane cabin the size of a taco truck. That sort of white-knuckling is a distraction from the truer, more pervasive risks of air travel in 2025. The systemic lapses and conditions that have produced frequent near misses in aviation, and that may have contributed to this week’s accident, now seem likely to worsen under the Trump administration, which has purged the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, fired the head of the Transportation Security Administration, and blamed DEI for a fatal crash.

[Read: Is there anything Trump won’t blame on DEI?]

The nation’s pervasive weakness in aviation safety is genuinely scary, but it’s shapeless, too. It provokes the sort of fright that you feel in your bones, the sort that makes you entreat a loved one to please never fly in one of those again, okay? And yet, I might well have been safer in the cold cabin of a turboprop 5,000 feet above Indiana than I would have been on an approach to an overcrowded, understaffed airport in a quiet regional jet. The plane still seems like the thing that might kill you. Even now, I suspect it always will.

The internet is growing more hostile to humans. Google results are stuffed with search-optimized spam, unhelpful advertisements, and AI slop. Amazon has become littered with undifferentiated junk. The state of social media, meanwhile—fractured, disorienting, and prone to boosting all manner of misinformation—can be succinctly described as a cesspool.

It’s with some irony, then, that Reddit has become a reservoir of humanity. The platform has itself been called a cesspool, rife with hateful rhetoric and falsehoods. But it is also known for quirky discussions and impassioned debates on any topic among its users. Does charging your brother rent, telling your mom she’s an unwanted guest, or giving your wife a performance review make you an asshole? (Redditors voted no, yes, and “everyone sucks,” respectively.) The site is where fans hash out the best rap album ever and plumbers weigh in on how to unclog a drain. As Google has begun to offer more and more vacuous SEO sites and ads in response to queries, many people have started adding reddit to their searches to find thoughtful, human-written answers: find mosquito in bedroom reddit; fix musty sponge reddit.

But now even Reddit is becoming more artificial. The platform has quietly started beta-testing Reddit Answers, what it calls an “AI-powered conversational interface.” In function and design, the feature—which is so far available only for some users in the U.S.—is basically an AI chatbot. On a new search screen accessible from the homepage, Reddit Answers takes anyone’s queries, trawls the site for relevant discussions and debates, and composes them into a response. In other words, a site that sells itself as a home for “authentic human connection” is now giving humans the option to interact with an algorithm instead.

The company announced the feature last month as an improved “search experience” that pulls “information … from real conversations and communities across all of Reddit.” Reddit Answers includes links to those conversations, which users are free to click, read, and comment on. Even so, using Reddit Answers is a demoralizing experience. It’s streamlined, yes: The AI responds to questions in bulleted lists, with bold headings followed by summaries of and brief quotes from actual Reddit discussions. But these answers lose the messy, endearing excess of any good Reddit thread. They appear like takeaways instead of teasers, final answers instead of entry points for further discovery; you are unlikely to fall down a rabbit hole of posts from here. Nor are you encouraged to unfurl a thread of people debating, reviewing, and building upon legitimately useful advice. Instead of a Redditor, you feel like you’re just here to peck meat off some bones.

Consider, for example, requesting tips for traveling with a baby on an airplane. Reddit Answers generates a list of ideas—perhaps “Pack Essentials” or “Board Early”—decontextualized from the parents who gathered this wisdom, the horrifying and hilarious anecdotes in their original posts, and the heartwarming support and tips in additional responses. Perhaps the greatest value of a good Reddit thread is the informed disagreement on best purchases and practices—what really were the best earbuds of 2024, and for what reasons. The chatbot’s bulleted summaries steamroll that back-and-forth. The AI answer isn’t even clearly more efficient or useful than reading answers yourself. Aside from the specificity, caveats, and elaboration unique to human conversations, many Redditors already format their responses in digestible lists. (In one thread asking for tips for flying with a baby, the top comment is a list in which every other bullet reads “snacks.”)

For less pragmatic matters, it’s hard to imagine any advantage to using Reddit’s AI. Asking the chatbot for music recommendations will return a boring, unwieldy list. The Reddit thread “What’s a dead giveaway someone grew up as an only child?” has some fantastic responses—doesn’t immediately know which half of a sliced cake is bigger, can’t roughhouse, leaves rooms without announcing where they are going—while the AI answers are bland: “Difficulty Sharing,” “Difficulty in Relationships.” Why would I ask an AI about the odds that the New York Mets re-sign Pete Alonso, what makes focaccia in Liguria special, or the annoying thing about transplants to New York City? Reddit, for its part, seems to understand the limitations: When I reached out to ask about this product, a spokesperson told me over email that in part, “Answers simply summarizes redditors’ existing posts and conversations without presenting an opinion or perspective of its own” and directs users to relevant discussions.

The site exists as it always has outside of Reddit Answers, but the embrace of generative AI feels foreboding. This is a trend across much of the digital and now even physical worlds, as tech companies stuff the technology into apps, smartphones, and glasses. AI can legitimately make life easier—helping more quickly summarize complex topics, write computer code, or edit photos, for instance. But many applications of AI remain limited and frequently superfluous. Google, instead of organizing humanmade information, is blending the web through frequently flawed “AI Overviews.” Apple is touting an Apple Intelligence service that has sent fake-news alerts (a problem that the company solved by temporarily turning off this part of the feature altogether) and that strip-mines texts into “lifeless summaries,” as my colleague Lila Shroff noted. Mikey Shulman, the CEO of Suno, an AI music start-up, recently said that making music is “not really enjoyable”—his product can do that work instead. Algorithms, instead of helping bring you to humans, are being pitched as the web’s start, middle, and end point.

[Read: Apple lost the plot on texting]

All of these generative-AI applications, of course, are only as good as the content they draw from. (Reddit has long been prized as a trove of high-quality AI-training data.) Without human answers, there is no Reddit Answers—and so, should the feature really take off and Redditors stop engaging with one another, the chatbot will be drained of biological intelligence, and soul as well. It’s the same with any AI tool seeking to synthesize, summarize, and boil portions of the web down to their essence: Eventually, the pot will burn dry.

The #Democrat and #Democrats hashtags, on Instagram, are affixed to a lot of low-quality content: a crying Statue of Liberty; Elon Musk with a Hitler mustache; other, worse memes that aren’t even decipherable. But for a short time last week, these posts were blocked from view. Donald Trump’s second presidency had only just begun, and suddenly—suspiciously—any platform search for #Democrat or #Democrats returned an error message: “We’ve hidden these results,” it said. “Results from the term you searched may contain sensitive content.”

TikTok, too, was soon accused of censoring anti-Trump dissent, and of changing up its algorithmically generated feeds to favor right-wing content. Back on Instagram, and also on Facebook, many people said that their accounts had auto-followed Donald Trump and J. D. Vance, while posts from abortion-pill providers were getting blurred out or removed from search results. To some, this pattern was as unmistakable as it was malicious: Social media was turning against Democrats.

For years, such worries went the other way. Right-wing figures groused that their views were being hidden, or moderated more heavily than their rivals’. It seems like only yesterday that Donald Trump Jr. was reposting copypasta on Instagram in an effort to suss out whether he’d been shadowbanned. That was around the same time as the former Twitter regime’s botched management of a radioactive news story about Hunter Biden, which gave rise to an enduring symbol of anti-Republican censorship. Now the roles are reversed, and Democrats are feeling paranoid.

Then and now, the particulars have never really matched people’s sense of persecution. Despite some high-profile incidents that suggested bias, Republicans do not appear to have been intentionally and broadly censored by the major social-media platforms. Last week’s incidents have been similarly overinterpreted. For starters, the funny business with the #Democrat hashtag was almost certainly a technical glitch (as Meta told reporters). (If Instagram really meant to launch a crackdown on left-leaning speech, would it choose to block just two generic hashtags?) And TikTok users should not have been surprised to see “Free Palestine” videos suppressed in their TikTok feeds: That platform has often erred on the side of minimizing the visibility of even lightly controversial political issues. (TikTok denies having changed any policies or algorithms since the inauguration.) As for the auto-following of Trump and Vance, that was just a product of the transfer of official president and vice-president accounts to the new administration. Meta acknowledged that some of the blocked abortion-pill content had resulted from “over-enforcement.” A spokesperson told several news outlets, including The Atlantic: “We’ve been quite clear in recent weeks that we want to allow more speech and reduce enforcement mistakes.”

[Read: Why Hunter Biden’s laptop will never go away]

This doesn’t mean people are wrong to say that something feels different. Much has been written about the tech world’s recent warming to President Trump. It was on full display at the inauguration, where Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, and other famous tech-world figures stood together with the Trump family. This visual—accompanied by sizable donations and kind words—stands in contrast to the reception that the industry gave Trump when he was first elected, in 2016, or when he tried to stay in power after losing in 2020.

Official policies are changing too. Zuckerberg has made a number of significant management decisions in the past several months: He got rid of Meta’s DEI team; he ended fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram, explaining that the checkers had become too politically biased in favor of liberals and the left; and he overhauled his company’s hate-speech rules to “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender” that were, as he put it, “out of touch with mainstream discourse.” On Joe Rogan’s podcast, Zuckerberg described the “journey” he’d been on for the past eight years, from disillusionment with the media during the first Trump administration to a loss of faith in the federal government during the Biden administration. Both, he claimed, had tried to force his hand and make his platforms more censorial.

Zuckerberg hasn’t indicated any desire to interfere with Instagram moderation at a granular level, or do any other editing of political speech. Still, users are right to wonder whether his personal political views may influence the operations of the multiple enormous platforms over which he has nearly unfettered control. The same reasonable doubts apply to TikTok. This was never a free-speech-oriented platform, but its users could hardly avoid being made aware of the company’s new coziness with Trump. “As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!,” they were told by the app on January 19, after it had been very briefly banned. (The same evening, the company sponsored a glitzy party for social-media influencers who had aided the Trump campaign.) And X, of course, is run by one of Trump’s most enthusiastic backers. An ongoing user exodus from that platform saw another burst last week amid the controversy over whether Musk did or did not intend to give a Nazi salute at the inauguration.

How the CEO of a social-media company thinks and acts may be taken as a clue to how their platform operates. (Until recently, Zuckerberg was known as a Millennial liberal, and an ally to mainstream Democrats. Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter, had a similar reputation.) But these signals only go so far: The actual maintenance of a social network unfolds behind the scenes; what rules exist aren’t nearly as important as how they get enforced, which has always been opaque.

Social-media users today are just as in the dark as ever. We know only what we’ve been told, and even then, we don’t know whether we should believe it. A kind of folklore has emerged around what’s really going on, flavored by anxiety and dread, and shifting with the news. The specific stories may be changing, but their overarching paranoia has some basis in the truth. There is no great conspiracy to bottle up a hashtag—but the people in charge of social media can do whatever they want.

One week ago, a new and formidable challenger for OpenAI’s throne emerged. A Chinese AI start-up, DeepSeek, launched a model that appeared to match the most powerful version of ChatGPT but, at least according to its creator, was a fraction of the cost to build. The program, called DeepSeek-R1, has incited plenty of concern: Ultrapowerful Chinese AI models are exactly what many leaders of American AI companies feared when they, and more recently President Donald Trump, have sounded alarms about a technological race between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. This is a “wake up call for America,” Alexandr Wang, the CEO of Scale AI, commented on social media.

But at the same time, many Americans—including much of the tech industry—appear to be lauding this Chinese AI. As of this morning, DeepSeek had overtaken ChatGPT as the top free application on Apple’s mobile-app store in the United States. Researchers, executives, and investors have been heaping on praise. The new DeepSeek model “is one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I’ve ever seen,” the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, an outspoken supporter of Trump, wrote on X. The program shows “the power of open research,” Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, wrote online.

Indeed, the most notable feature of DeepSeek may be not that it is Chinese, but that it is relatively open. Unlike top American AI labs—OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind—which keep their research almost entirely under wraps, DeepSeek has made the program’s final code, as well as an in-depth technical explanation of the program, free to view, download, and modify. In other words, anybody from any country, including the U.S., can use, adapt, and even improve upon the program. That openness makes DeepSeek a boon for American start-ups and researchers—and an even bigger threat to the top U.S. companies, as well as the government’s national-security interests.

To understand what’s so impressive about DeepSeek, one has to look back to last month, when OpenAI launched its own technical breakthrough: the full release of o1, a new kind of AI model that, unlike all the “GPT”-style programs before it, appears able to “reason” through challenging problems. o1 displayed leaps in performance on some of the most challenging math, coding, and other tests available, and sent the rest of the AI industry scrambling to replicate the new reasoning model—which OpenAI disclosed very few technical details about. The start-up, and thus the American AI industry, were on top. (The Atlantic recently entered into a corporate partnership with OpenAI.)

DeepSeek, less than two months later, not only exhibits those same “reasoning” capabilities apparently at much lower costs but has also spilled to the rest of the world at least one way to match OpenAI’s more covert methods. The program is not entirely open-source—its training data, for instance, and the fine details of its creation are not public—but unlike with ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, researchers and start-ups can still study the DeepSearch research paper and directly work with its code. OpenAI has enormous amounts of capital, computer chips, and other resources, and has been working on AI for a decade. In comparison, DeepSeek is a smaller team formed two years ago with far less access to essential AI hardware, because of U.S. export controls on advanced AI chips, but it has relied on various software and efficiency improvements to catch up. DeepSeek has reported that the final training run of a previous iteration of the model that R1 is built from, released last month, cost less than $6 million. Meanwhile, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has said that U.S. companies are already spending on the order of $1 billion to train future models. Exactly how much the latest DeepSeek cost to build is uncertain—some researchers and executives, including Wang, have cast doubt on just how cheap it could have been—but the price for software developers to incorporate DeepSeek-R1 into their own products is roughly 95 percent cheaper than incorporating OpenAI’s o1, as measured by the price of every “token”—basically, every word—the model generates.

DeepSeek’s success has abruptly forced a wedge between Americans most directly invested in outcompeting China and those who benefit from any access to the best, most reliable AI models. (It’s a divide that echoes Americans’ attitudes about TikTok—China hawks versus content creators—and other Chinese apps and platforms.) For the start-up and research community, DeepSeek is an enormous win. “A non-US company is keeping the original mission of OpenAI alive,” Jim Fan, a top AI researcher at the chipmaker Nvidia and a former OpenAI employee, wrote on X. “Truly open, frontier research that empowers all.”

But for America’s top AI companies and the nation’s government, what DeepSeek represents is unclear. The stocks of many major tech firms—including Nvidia, Alphabet, and Microsoft—dropped this morning amid the excitement around the Chinese model. And Meta, which has branded itself as a champion of open-source models in contrast to OpenAI, now seems a step behind. (The company is reportedly panicking.) To some investors, all of those massive data centers, billions of dollars of investment, or even the half-a-trillion-dollar AI-infrastructure joint venture from OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank, which Trump recently announced from the White House, could seem far less essential. Maybe bigger AI isn’t better. For those who fear that AI will strengthen “the Chinese Communist Party’s global influence,” as OpenAI wrote in a recent lobbying document, this is legitimately concerning: The DeepSeek app refuses to answer questions about, for instance, the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre of 1989 (although the censorship may be relatively easy to circumvent).

None of that is to say the AI boom is over, or will take a radically different form going forward. The next iteration of OpenAI’s reasoning models, o3, appears far more powerful than o1 and will soon be available to the public. There are some signs that DeepSeek trained on ChatGPT outputs (outputting “I’m ChatGPT” when asked what model it is), although perhaps not intentionally—if that’s the case, it’s possible that DeepSeek could only get a head start thanks to other high-quality chatbots. America’s AI innovation is accelerating, and its major forms are beginning to take on a technical research focus other than reasoning: “agents,” or AI systems that can use computers on behalf of humans. American tech giants could, in the end, even benefit. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, framed DeepSeek as a win: More efficient AI means that use of AI across the board will “skyrocket, turning it into a commodity we just can’t get enough of,” he wrote on X today—which, if true, would help Microsoft’s profits as well.

Still, the pressure is on OpenAI, Google, and their competitors to maintain their edge. With the release of DeepSeek, the nature of any U.S.-China AI “arms race” has shifted. Preventing AI computer chips and code from spreading to China evidently has not tamped the ability of researchers and companies located there to innovate. And the relatively transparent, publicly available version of DeepSeek could mean that Chinese programs and approaches, rather than leading American programs, become global technological standards for AI—akin to how the open-source Linux operating system is now standard for major web servers and supercomputers. Being democratic—in the sense of vesting power in software developers and users—is precisely what has made DeepSeek a success. If Chinese AI maintains its transparency and accessibility, despite emerging from an authoritarian regime whose citizens can’t even freely use the web, it is moving in exactly the opposite direction of where America’s tech industry is heading.

During an American election, a rich man can hand out $1 million checks to prospective voters. Companies and people can use secretly funded “dark money” nonprofits to donate unlimited money, anonymously, to super PACs, which can then spend it on advertising campaigns. Pod­casters, partisans, or anyone, really, can tell outrageous, incendiary lies about a candidate. They can boost those falsehoods through targeted online advertising. No special courts or election rules can stop the disinformation from spreading before voters see it. The court of public opinion, which over the past decade has seen and heard everything, no longer cares. U.S. elections are now a political Las Vegas: Anything goes.

But that’s not the way elections are run in other countries. In Britain, political parties are, at least during the run-up to an election, limited to spending no more than £54,010 per candidate. In Germany, as in many other European countries, the state funds political parties, proportionate to their number of elected parliamentarians, so that politicians do not have to depend on, and become corrupted by, wealthy donors. In Poland, courts fast-track election-related libel cases in the weeks before a vote in order to discourage people from lying.

Nor is this unique to Europe. Many democracies have state or public media that are obligated, at least in principle, to give equal time to all sides. Many require political donations to be transparent, with the names of donors listed in an online registry. Many have limits on political advertising. Some countries also have rules about hate speech and indict people who break them.

Countries apply these laws to create conditions for fair debate, to build trust in the system, and to inspire confidence in the winning candidates. Some democracies believe that transparency matters—­that voters should know who is funding their candidates, as well as who is paying for political messages on social media or anywhere else. In some places, these rules have a loftier goal: to prevent the rise of anti­democratic extremism of the kind that has engulfed democracies—­and especially European democracies—­­in the past.

But for how much longer can democracies pursue these goals? We live in a world in which algorithms controlled by American and Chinese oligarchs choose the messages and images seen by millions of people; in which money can move through secret bank accounts with the help of crypto schemes; and in which this dark money can then boost anonymous social-media accounts with the aim of shaping public opinion. In such a world, how can any election rules be enforced? If you are Albania, or even the United Kingdom, do you still get to set the parameters of your public debate? Or are you now forced to be Las Vegas too?

Although it’s easy to get distracted by the schoolyard nicknames and irresponsible pedophilia accusations that Elon Musk flings around, these are the real questions posed by his open, aggressive use of X to spread false information and promote extremist and anti-European politicians in the U.K., Germany, and elsewhere. The integrity of elections—and the possibility of debate untainted by misinformation injected from abroad—is equally challenged by TikTok, the Chinese platform, and by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, whose subsidiaries include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads. TikTok says the company does not accept any paid political advertising. Meta, which announced in January that it is abandoning fact-checking on its sites in the U.S., also says it will continue to comply with European laws. But even before Zucker­berg’s radical policy change, these promises were empty. Meta’s vaunted content curation and moderation have never been transparent. Nobody knew, and nobody knows, what exactly Facebook’s algorithm was promoting and why. Even an occasional user of these platforms encounters spammers, scammers, and opaque accounts running foreign influence operations. No guide to the algorithm, and no real choices about it, are available on Meta products, X, or TikTok.

In truth, no one knows if any platforms really comply with political-funding rules either, because nobody outside the companies can fully monitor what happens online during an intense election campaign—and after the voting has ended, it’s too late. According to declassified Romanian-intelligence documents, someone allegedly spent more than $1 million on TikTok content in the 18 months before an election in support of a Romanian presidential candidate who declared that he himself had spent nothing at all. In a belated attempt to address this and other alleged discrepancies, a Romanian court canceled the first round of that election, a decision that itself damaged Romanian democracy.

Not all of this is new. Surreptitious political-party funding was a feature of the Cold War, and the Russian government has continued this practice, sometimes by offering deals to foreign business­people close to pro-Russian politicians. Press moguls with international political ambitions are hardly a novelty. Rupert Murdoch, an Australian who has U.S. citizenship, has long played an outsize role in U.K. politics through his media companies. John Major, the former British prime minister and Conservative Party leader, has said that in 1997, Murdoch threatened to pull his newspapers’ support unless the prime minister pursued a more anti-European policy. Major refused. Murdoch has said, “I have never asked a prime minister for anything,” but one of his Conservative-­leaning tabloids, The Sun, did endorse the Labour Party in the next election. Major lost.

That incident now seems almost quaint. Even at the height of its influence, the print edition of The Sun sold 4 million copies a day. More to the point, it operated, and still does, within the constraints of U.K. rules and regulations, as do all broadcast and print media. Murdoch’s newspapers take British libel and hate-speech laws into consideration when they run stories. His business strategy is necessarily shaped by rules limiting what a single company can own. After his journalists were accused of hacking phones and bribing police in the early 2000s, Murdoch himself had to testify before an investigative commission, and he closed down one of his tabloids for good.

[McKay Coppins: Europe braces for Trump]

Social media not only has far greater reach—Musk’s personal X account has more than 212 million followers, giving him enormous power to set the news agenda around the world—it also exists outside the legal system. Under the American law known as Section 230, passed nearly three decades ago, internet platforms are not treated as publishers in the U.S. In practice, neither Facebook nor X has the same legal responsibility for what appears on their platforms as do, say, The Wall Street Journal and CNN. And this, too, has consequences: Americans have created the information climate that other countries must accept, and this allows deceptive election practices to thrive. If countries don’t have their own laws, and until recently most did not, Section 230 effectively requires them to treat social-media companies as if they exist outside their legal systems too.

Brazil broke with this pattern last year, when a judge demanded that Musk comply with Brazilian laws against spreading misinformation and political extremism, and forced X offline until he did. Several European countries, including the U.K., Germany, and France, have also passed laws designed to bring the platforms into compliance with their own legal systems, mandating fines for companies that violate hate-speech laws or host other illegal content. But these laws are controversial and hard to enforce. Besides, “illegal speech” is not necessarily the central problem. No laws prevented Musk from interviewing Alice Weidel, a leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, on X, thereby providing her with a huge platform, available to no other political candidate, in the month before a national election. The interview, which included several glaringly false statements (among others, that Weidel was the “leading” candidate), was viewed 45 million times in 24 hours, a number far beyond the reach of any German public or private media.

Only one institution on the planet is large enough and powerful enough to write and enforce laws that could make the tech companies change their policies. Partly for that reason, the European Union may soon become one of the Trump administration’s most prominent targets. In theory, the EU’s Digital Services Act, which took full effect last year, can be used to regulate, fine, and, in extreme circumstances, ban internet companies whose practices clash with European laws. Yet a primary intent of the act is not punitive, but rather to open up the platforms: to allow vetted researchers access to platform data, and to give citizens more transparency about what they hear and see. Freedom of speech also means the right to receive information, and at the moment social-media companies operate behind a curtain. We don’t know if they are promoting or suppressing certain points of view, curbing or encouraging orchestrated political campaigns, discouraging or provoking violent riots. Above all, we don’t know who is paying for misinformation to be spread online.

In the past, the EU has not hesitated to try to apply European law to tech companies. Over the past decade, for example, Google has faced three fines totaling more than $8 billion for breaking antitrust law (though one of these fines was overturned by the EU’s General Court in 2024).

In November, the European Commission fined Meta more than $800 million for unfair trade practices. But for how much longer will the EU have this authority? In the fall, J. D. Vance issued an extraordinarily unsubtle threat, one that is frequently repeated in Europe. “If NATO wants us to continue supporting them and NATO wants us to continue to be a good participant in this military alliance,” Vance told an interviewer, “why don’t you respect American values and respect free speech?” Mark Zuckerberg, echoing Vance’s misuse of the expression free speech to mean “freedom to conceal company practices from the public,” put it even more crudely. In a conversation with Joe Rogan in January, Zuckerberg said he feels “optimistic” that President Donald Trump will intervene to stop the EU from enforcing its own antitrust laws: “I think he just wants America to win.”

Does America “winning” mean that European democracies, and maybe other democracies, lose? Some European politicians think it might. Robert Habeck, the German vice chancellor and a leader of that country’s Green Party, believes that Musk’s frenzies of political activity on X aren’t the random blurts of an addled mind, but rather are “logical and systematic.” In his New Year’s address, Habeck said that Musk is deliberately “strengthening those who are weakening Europe,” including the explicitly anti-European AfD. This, he believes, is because “a weak Europe is in the interest of those for whom regulation is an inappropriate limitation of their power.”

Until recently, Russia was the most important state seeking to undermine European institutions. Vladimir Putin has long disliked the EU because it restricts Russian companies’ ability to intimidate and bribe European political leaders and companies, and because the EU is larger and more powerful than Russia, whereas European countries on their own are not. Now a group of American oligarchs also want to undermine European institutions, because they don’t want to be regulated—and they may have the American president on their side. Quite soon, the European Union, along with Great Britain and other democracies around the world, might find that they have to choose between their alliance with the United States and their ability to run their own elections and select their own leaders without the pressure of aggressive outside manipulation. Ironically, countries, such as Brazil, that don’t have the same deep military, economic, and cultural ties to the U.S. may find it easier to maintain the sovereignty of their political systems and the transparency of their information ecosystems than Europeans.

A crunch point is imminent, when the European Commission finally concludes a year-long investigation into X. Tellingly, two people who have advised the commission on this investigation would talk with me only off the record, because the potential for reprisals against them and their organizations—­whether it be online trolling and harassment or lawsuits—­is too great. Still, both advisers said that the commission has the power to protect Europe’s sovereignty, and to force the platforms to be more transparent. “The commission should look at the raft of laws and rules it has available and see how they can be applied,” one of them told me, “always remembering that this is not about taking action against a person’s voice. This is the commission saying that everyone’s voice should be equal.”

At least in theory, no country is obligated to become an electoral Las Vegas, as America has. Global democracies could demand greater transparency around the use of algorithms, both on social media and in the online-advertising market more broadly. They could offer consumers more control over what they see, and more information about what they don’t see. They could enforce their own campaign-funding laws. These changes could make the internet more open and fair, and therefore a better, safer place for the exercise of free speech. If the chances of success seem narrow, it’s not because of the lack of a viable legal framework—­rather it’s because, at the moment, cowardice is as viral as one of Musk’s tweets.

This article appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “Can Europe Stop Elon Musk?”

On Sunday night, in the basement ballroom of the Salamander Hotel in Washington, D.C., Charlie Kirk was happier than I’d ever seen him. “I truly believe that this is God’s grace on our country, giving us another chance to fight and to flourish,” Kirk, the head of Turning Point USA, a conservative youth-outreach organization, said to cheers from the hundreds of MAGA loyalists who had come out for his pre-inaugural ball. “What we are about to experience is a new golden era, an American renaissance.”

The celebrations have continued now that Donald Trump is back in the White House, as he has signed a flurry of executive orders to make good on his campaign promises. But this might be the best mood that MAGA world will be in for a while. The president’s coalition is split between two distinct but overlapping factions that are destined for infighting. On one side are the far-right nationalists and reactionaries who have stood by Trump since he went down his golden escalator. Among them are Stephen Miller, who is seen as a chief architect of Trump’s anti-immigration agenda, and Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and the former executive chair of Breitbart News. On the other side is the tech right: Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley elites, including Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, who have become ardent supporters of the president. Already, these groups are butting heads on key aspects of Trump’s immigration crackdown. In Trump’s second term, not everyone can win.

During the campaign, it was easy for these two groups to be aligned in the goal of electing Trump. Members of the nationalist wing took glee in how Musk boosted their ideology on X, the social platform he owns. With his more than 200 million followers, Musk has helped spread far-right conspiracy theories, such as the false claim that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating people’s pets. Meanwhile, the tech right has relished attacks on DEI efforts in the workplace—attacks that have allowed them to more easily walk back hiring practices, against the wishes of their more liberal employees.

But the two groups also want different things. The nationalist right wants an economy that prioritizes and assists American-born families (specifically, traditional nuclear ones), sometimes at the expense of business interests; the tech right wants a deregulated economy that bolsters its bottom line. The nationalist right wants to stop almost all immigration; the tech right wants to bring in immigrant workers as it pleases. The nationalist right wants to return America to a pre-internet era that it perceives as stable and prosperous; the tech right wants to usher in a bold, globally focused new economy.   

Already, the cracks have started to show. Last month, Trump’s pick of the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as an AI adviser led to a bitter and very public spat between the two camps over visas for highly skilled immigrants. (“FUCK YOURSELF in the face,” Musk at one point told his critics on the right.) At the time, I argued that the MAGA honeymoon is over. The disagreements have only intensified. Last week, after former President Joe Biden used his farewell speech to warn about the influence of Silicon Valley oligarchs and the “tech industrial complex,” the white-nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes posted on X that “Biden is right.” Bannon, in particular, has not relented: Earlier this month, he told an Italian newspaper that Musk is a “truly evil person” and that he would get the billionaire “kicked out” of Trump’s orbit by Inauguration Day. (Considering that Musk is reportedly getting an office in the West Wing, Bannon does not seem to have been successful in that quest.) In an interview with my colleagues Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, Bannon described the tech titans as “nerds” whom Trump was humiliating. Seeing them on Inauguration Day was “like walking into Teddy Roosevelt’s lodge and seeing the mounted heads of all the big game he shot,” Bannon said.

In a sense, he is right. During the inauguration ceremony, tech billionaires—including Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Apple CEO Tim Cook—sat directly behind Trump’s family on the dais. They are not all as forcefully pro-Trump as Musk, but they have cozied up to the president by dining with him at Mar-a-Lago and making million-dollar donations to his inaugural fund (in some cases from their personal bank accounts, and in others from the corporations they head).

In doing so, they’ve gotten his ear and can now influence the president in ways that might not line up with the priorities of the nationalist right. On Monday, during his first press conference from the White House this term, Trump defended the H-1B visa program: “We want competent people coming into our country,” he said. Later, Bannon responded on his podcast, lamenting the “techno-feudalists” to whom Trump is apparently listening.

Both factions still have overlapping interests. They are both fed up with a country that they see as having grown weak and overly considerate to the needs of the vulnerable, at the expense of the most productive. America lacks a “masculine energy,” as Zuckerberg recently put it. Some members in both camps seem interested in trying to reconcile their differences, or at least in not driving the wedge further. On the eve of the inauguration, just before Turning Point USA’s ball, the right-wing publishing house Passage Publishing held its own ball in D.C.—an event intended to be a night when “MAGA meets the Tech Right.” The head of Passage Publishing, Jonathan Keeperman, has been keen on playing peacemaker. Last month, he went on Kirk’s podcast and tried to frame the debate over visas as one where his reactionary, nativist wing of the right could find common cause with the tech right. By limiting immigration and “developing our own native-born” STEM talent, he said, Silicon Valley can “win the AI arms race.”

Kirk couldn’t keep his frustration toward the tech elite from seeping out. “Big Tech has censored us and smeared us and treated us terribly,” he said. “Why would we then accommodate their policy wishes?” It’s easy to imagine Musk asking the same question. He and his peers run some of the most powerful companies in the world. They’re not going to give that up because a few  people, on the very platforms that they own, told them to. Each side is steadfast in what it wants, and won’t easily give in.

We already can guess how this will end. During his first administration, despite making populist promises on the campaign trail, Trump eventually sided with the wealthy. Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist during the start of his first term, pushed for tax hikes on the wealthy. Seven months into his presidency, Trump fired him, and then proceeded to pass tax cuts. In his new administration, the nationalist right will certainly make gains—it is thrilled with Trump’s moves around birthright citizenship and his pledge to push forward with mass deportations. But if it’s ever in conflict with what Trump’s rich advisers in the tech world want, good luck.

Remember, it was Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk who sat on the dais at Trump’s inauguration. Bannon, Keeperman, and Kirk were nowhere in sight.

Things were not looking great for OpenAI at the end of last year. The company had been struggling with major delays on its long-awaited GPT-5 and hemorrhaging key talent—notably, Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, and Alec Radford, the researcher who’d set the company on the path of developing GPTs in the first place. Several people who left either joined OpenAI competitors or launched new ones. The start-up’s relationship with Microsoft, its biggest backer and a crucial provider of the computing infrastructure needed to train and deploy its AI models, was being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission.

And then there was Elon Musk. He’d co-founded OpenAI with Sam Altman and others, but the two had become fierce rivals. As “first buddy” to Donald Trump, Musk was suing OpenAI while rapidly building up his own AI venture, xAI, whose chatbot, Grok, has become a central feature on X. Amid all of this drama, Altman was notified by his sister, Annie, that she intended to sue him; she alleges that he sexually abused her when she was a child. (That lawsuit was filed at the start of this month; Altman and members of his family strongly denied the allegations through a statement posted on X.)

It’s remarkable, then, that with its latest maneuver, OpenAI has once again reestablished its dominance. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump announced the Stargate Project, a joint venture between SoftBank, Oracle, and OpenAI to pump $500 billion of private-sector investment over four years into building out U.S. AI infrastructure, with the intent of securing America’s leadership in AI development against China. Very little is known about how any of this will work in practice, but OpenAI is speaking as though it will reap most of the rewards: In its blog post announcing the partnership, it said that all of the infrastructure will be “for OpenAI.” The company’s president, Greg Brockman, underscored the point on X: “$500B for AI data centers for OpenAI.”

In one fell swoop, the project reduces OpenAI’s dependence on Microsoft, grants OpenAI (rather than its competitors) a mind-boggling sum of capital for computer chips—the hottest commodity in the AI race—and ties the company to Trump’s “America First” agenda, providing the best possible protective shield against Musk. (Musk blasted the project yesterday, alleging that it doesn’t “actually have the money,” which Altman then denied.) OpenAI (which entered into a corporate partnership with The Atlantic last year) did not respond to a request for comment.

It’s unclear whether Stargate will even be able to spend $500 billion in four years. But consider just how astounding that goal is. In late 2023, as Microsoft started spending roughly $50 billion a year on expanding cloud-computing capacity, one semiconductor analyst had already declared that that was “the largest infrastructure buildout that humanity has ever seen.” Rene Haas, the CEO of the semiconductor company Arm Holdings, said that even this pace of expansion across the industry would put global computing on track to consume more energy than India by 2030.

[Read: Microsoft’s hypocrisy on AI]

The move is a masterful display of Altman’s power at work. Altman has shown an uncanny ability throughout his career to get himself out of the toughest binds by leaning on his influential network, ingratiating himself with the powerful, and fundraising extraordinary amounts of capital. It was for these reasons that Altman successfully orchestrated his return to OpenAI as CEO in late 2023, after the board briefly ousted him. And it is why so many people have expressed alarm about his leadership in recent years. This week, he was at it again, standing next to Trump during the Stargate announcement in a symbol of solidarity and praising him later on X: “watching @potus more carefully recently has really changed my perspective on him … i’m not going to agree with him on everything, but i think he will be incredible for the country in many ways!”

Although OpenAI has led the pack, many AI companies have worked over the past two years to influence policy and grow without government interference. Silicon Valley has always operated like this, and many other major tech CEOs took their place next to Trump this week. But the demands of generative AI are meaningfully different from, say, those of a traditional search engine or a social-media platform: Its development requires far more crucial physical infrastructure. Generative-AI models are of a size that necessitate the build-out of data centers at unprecedented scale. This, in turn, will give Silicon Valley outsize influence over the placement of power plants and even water lines across the country. Already, the past few years of dramatic data-center expansion have affected power reliability for millions of Americans and threatened to raise the cost of drinking water.

[Read: Billions of people in the palm of Trump’s hand]

The tech industry expertly laid the groundwork for this outcome: It made big promises about the wondrous potential of its technologies while creating a sense of peril by evoking China’s own technological advancement. During the Stargate announcement, Trump said that he would do what he could to strip away any regulatory barriers. “China is a competitor, and others are competitors,” he said. “I’m going to help a lot through emergency declarations, because we have an emergency. We have to get this stuff built.”

Standing at the same podium, Altman emphasized America’s leadership. “I’m thrilled we get to do this in the United States of America,” he said. And then, in recognition of his new benefactor: “We wouldn’t be able to do this without you, Mr. President.”

Late yesterday afternoon, the president of the United States transformed, very briefly, into the comms guy for a new tech company. At a press conference capping his first full day back in the White House, Donald Trump stood beside three of the most influential executives in the world—Sam Altman of OpenAI, Larry Ellison of Oracle, and Masayoshi Son of SoftBank—and announced the Stargate Project, “the largest AI infrastructure project, by far, in history.”

Although Trump’s rhetoric may seem to suggest otherwise, Stargate is not a new federal program but rather a private venture uniting these three companies with other leaders in the AI race, such as Microsoft and Nvidia. The new company—for which Son will serve as chairman and OpenAI will be in charge of operations—will spend a planned $500 billion over the next four years to build data centers, power plants, and other such digital infrastructure in the United States, all in hopes of developing ever more advanced AI models. Trump presented Stargate as a victory for his “America First” agenda, saying that it may “lead to something that could be the biggest of all”—an apparent reference to superintelligent machines. The executives concurred, speaking of AI’s potential to generate cures for cancer and heart disease. “It’s all taking place right here in America,” Trump said.

Although the project will likely produce many jobs and generate some value for the companies involved, it is hard to ignore the feeling that Trump needs this more than any of the men he was standing beside. “It’s an honor that they want to come to our country” for their AI-infrastructure build-out, Trump said of these “three great people, great CEOs, and great geniuses.” Over the course of roughly 45 minutes, he said seven separate times that it was an honor to host them, adding, “For Larry to be here and do this is very unusual, because he doesn’t do this stuff; he doesn’t need it.”

He may be correct, and not just about Ellison. Altman has reportedly proposed similarly massive AI-infrastructure projects to investors in the Middle East and computer-chip makers in Asia. Just this week, Jensen Huang, the CEO of the computer-chip giant Nvidia, visited China—America’s biggest geopolitical foe—apparently thanking local staff and lauding his company’s contributions to “one of the greatest markets, the greatest countries in the world.” SoftBank is a Japanese corporation. Oracle has substantial investments and AI infrastructure in the Middle East. A United Arab Emirates firm, MGX, is Stargate’s fourth initial financial backer, and the British chip manufacturer Arm is a technical partner alongside Nvidia. In other words, AI development is proceeding within, but also outside of, the U.S., Stargate or not. (The Atlantic recently entered into a corporate partnership with OpenAI.)

As such, the project may be less a vote of confidence in Trump’s vision for America so much as the latest sign of the country’s capitulation to the AI industry, which has repeatedly pushed for lenient regulations and invoked the specter of China to clear a path for rapid development. (Although, to be clear, tech giants have done plenty of capitulating to Trump too.) Trump emphasized that his role is to welcome these companies and get out of the way: “We’re going to make it as easy as it can be,” he said. He also referenced China more than once. “China is a competitor; others are competitors. We want [AI] to be in this country,” he said, later adding, “This is money that normally would have gone to China.”

[Read: A virtual cell is a ‘holy grail’ of science. It’s getting closer.]

AI may well change the world, but the announcement provided little in terms of specifics of how it would get there. Despite promises of AI-enabled cancer vaccines and personalized medicine, exactly how the technology will revolutionize the military, biology, or any other industry is unclear, and the path to “superintelligence” is hazier still. Even if generative AI yields productivity gains and speeds up medical research, there will be trade-offs: The technology and its infrastructure are as likely to displace millions of jobs, require massive natural-gas and nuclear power plants to meet tremendous electricity demands, raise consumer energy prices, and take up substantial public land. Even some AI enthusiasts expressed skepticism: Elon Musk broke with Trump by publicly bashing the announcement, posting on X that SoftBank doesn’t “actually have the money” to support Stargate. (Altman called this characterization “wrong” in a post of his own.)

To hear these companies tell it, however, the path forward is all but inevitable. Put together, major American tech companies are already spending perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars a year developing their technology with a questionable path to profit. Instead of acting as a deterrent, those costs have been spun into a selling point. Executives at OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Nvidia, and their competitors are fond of touting the lucrative sums—$100 billion, or perhaps $7 trillion—their technology will require, as if to say: This will be big. Don’t miss out. They have seemingly willed demand into existence.

In an interview after the press conference, Altman said that Stargate “means we can create AI and AGI in the USA. It wouldn’t have been obvious this was possible—I think with a different president, it might not have been possible—but we are thrilled to get to do this. I think it will be great for Americans.” Now the White House is fully embracing tech executives’ messaging. But all of this started well before Trump’s inauguration. Ellison himself said that Stargate had been in the works for “a long time,” and the nationwide build-out of data centers, power plants, and transmission lines is well under way. Days before his term ended, Joe Biden signed an executive order for “advancing United States leadership in artificial intelligence infrastructure,” which would open up federal lands for data-center construction. (Trump, when asked if he would rescind the order, responded, “No, I wouldn’t do that. That sounds to me like something I would like.”)

[Read: Microsoft’s hypocrisy on AI]

Winning the generative-AI race would, in Trump’s telling, be a display of his geopolitical and economic might. But only a day into his presidency, Stargate showed Trump taking cues from China, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Biden all at once—from a foreign adversary, the tech giants he vilified in 2020, and a political rival he has ruthlessly vilified. During yesterday’s briefing, Trump read a statement that the tech executives had apparently prepared. “This monumental undertaking is a resounding declaration of confidence in America’s potential under a new president,” he said, looking up from the dais and grinning at the final two words. “New president. I didn’t say it; they did. So I appreciate that, fellas.” Altman and the others knew exactly how to play this. Trump—and the rest of the nation—is merely tagging along.

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In the hours after Donald Trump returned to power, Jacob Chansley, already in a celebrating mood, became exuberant. Chansley, who is also known as the QAnon Shaman, a nickname he earned for the horned costume he wore during the attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021, did what any red-blooded MAGA American might have done in his situation. “I GOT A PARDON BABY!” Chansley posted on X last night. “NOW I AM GONNA BUY SOME MOTHA FU*KIN GUNS!!!”

In the lead-up to Inauguration Day, Trump had spent a lot of time talking about getting revenge on his political enemies. But in one of his first moves as president, Trump decided to treat his supporters to some forgiveness. Last night, he pardoned all of the nearly 1,600 people who had been convicted for their involvement in the Capitol riots. He commuted the sentences of 14 insurrectionists who remained in prison, allowing them to go free. Paired with his order for the attorney general to dismiss “all pending indictments,” Trump has effectively let everyone convicted for their actions in the January 6 attack off the hook.

In Trump’s telling, the people he pardoned were viciously and unfairly punished for what happened at the Capitol. Yesterday, he called the rioters “hostages.” Some of those pardoned included goofy characters, such as Chansley, who seemingly did not arrive at the Capitol intending to overthrow the government but got swept up in the moment. Chansley wasn’t exactly going out of his way to avoid the chaos of the day, however: He left a note on then–Vice President Mike Pence’s desk that said, “It’s only a matter of time, justice is coming.” Among those pardoned was Adam Christian Johnson, otherwise known as “lectern guy”: On January 6, he carried then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s podium around the Capitol, smiling and waving in a now-viral photo. “I’m ashamed to have been a part of it,” he said to a judge in February 2022, before he was ordered to pay a $5,000 fine and sentenced to 75 days in jail. “Got a pardon … now … about my lectern,” Johnson wrote on X before later asking Trump to free the men imprisoned for plotting to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

Among the rioters granted clemency by President Trump there are also longtime militia leaders who planned carefully for the riot. They have been implicated in actively conspiring to violently overtake the Capitol and attack police officers. Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers militia group, and Kelly Meggs, who led its Florida chapter, were among the 14 people whose sentences were commuted. Meggs allegedly participated with his wife in weapons training to prepare for the attack. Before the president intervened, both were slated to spend more than a decade in prison after being convicted of seditious conspiracy. According to the Department of Justice, Rhodes and Meggs had organized “teams that were prepared and willing to use force and to transport firearms and ammunition into Washington, D.C.,” and tried “to oppose, by force, the lawful transfer of presidential power.”

Of the 14 people whose remaining prison sentences were commuted by Trump, nine were affiliated with the Oath Keepers and five with the Proud Boys, another violent far-right group. At least one other militia leader was outright pardoned: Enrique Tarrio, a former head of the Proud Boys, is now free long before the end of his 22-year sentence. Though he wasn’t in Washington during the insurrection, Tarrio egged on Proud Boys who entered the Capitol, posting on social media that he was “proud of my boys and my country” and telling his supporters, “Don’t fucking leave” moments after rioters entered the Capitol. In private messages, he took credit for the attack: “Make no mistake,” he wrote, “we did this.” Some of the Proud Boys, including top members Joe Biggs and Zachary Rehl, went inside the Capitol, where they “overwhelmed officers,” according to the Department of Justice. Biggs was sentenced to 17 years in prison and Rehl to 15.

Of course, it wasn’t just militia members who seemingly arrived at the Capitol with violence in mind. Also among those pardoned was Eric Munchel, who was sentenced to nearly five years in prison after entering the Capitol clad in a tactical vest and carrying zip ties, with which he intended to “take senators hostage,” according to the judge who heard his case. The most important part of the pardons isn’t specifically who is released from prison, but the meaning of Trump’s gesture: Radical militias are free to act with impunity—as long as they’re loyal to Trump. Should an extremist on the right break the law, he can reasonably hope for Trump to pluck him out of the justice system. This is one of the key ingredients to the perpetuation of political violence across society—a belief among those who might carry it out that they can do so, and that they’ll get away with it.

In that sense, the pardons mark what’s to come. The insurrection was the culmination of increased militia activity during the first Trump administration. But after the riot, as law-enforcement agencies began to prosecute those involved, the militias went underground. Groups such as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys continued to operate while many of their leaders and members were in prison, but in a less publicly visible way than before. Even without militia groups operating at their peak levels, political violence, particularly by the right, has been ascendant over the past several years. Now, after the pardons, right-wing extremists no longer have to hide.

*Lead-image credit: Illustration by Allison Zaucha / The Atlantic. Sources: Mark Peterson / Redux; Anna Moneymaker / Getty; Evan Vucci / AP; Getty.