Elon Musk Is Leading an Electronic Coup D’État
by Dan La Botz
Feb 3, 2025
Elon Musk, the multibillionaire and advisor to President Donald Trump who now heads a team called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has been taking over U.S. government agencies—the Treasury Department, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), General Services Administration (GSA), and the United States Agency for International Development, and perhaps others—a process that at least in some cases appear to be illegal. Where officials have resisted, Trump has removed them from their positions. Musk’s take-over is tantamount to a coup, and far more effective, serious, and dangerous than the insurrection that Trump organized on January 6, 2021.
Controlling the executive branch, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court, Trump apparently believes that he and Musk have the power to carry out a coup with impunity. With Trump having purged the Justice Department, the FBI, the Inspectors General, there is, in fact, no one to call out and stop these attacks on the government bureaucracy from within. The Democrats and groups such as the ACLU have been filing suit in various courts with some success, but if they end up at the Supreme Court, given that the Supreme Court ruled in July 2024 that the U.S. presidents have absolute immunity for their official actions and broad immunity for most other actions, Trump is likely to win.
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Trump-Musk wrecking operation illegally shuts down 2 federal agencies, gains access to Treasury payment system
By Patrick Martin
Feb 3, 2025
Acting with the approval of US President Donald Trump, representatives of billionaire Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, took control early Monday of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), firing hundreds of employees and instructing all of the agency’s nearly 10,000 employees worldwide to stay home and stop working.
A similar operation was carried out a few hours later at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an independent federal agency set up after the 2008 Wall Street crash. Trump named Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—himself a hedge fund billionaire—as interim administrator of the agency. Bessent then told the 1,600 employees of the CFPB to stop working while he reviewed its operations, which include numerous lawsuits against major banks and corporations over consumer fraud.
Both actions were entirely unlawful. The two agencies were established by Congress, the USAID under the Kennedy administration in 1961 and the CFPB in 2010. Neither can be shut down on the say-so of the president alone, without congressional action. But Trump’s policy since his inauguration has been to break the law whenever he pleases, relying on the impotence of the Democrats and support of his fascist partisans in the Supreme Court.
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USAID To Merge With State Department and Face Cuts
Feb 3, 2025
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) will be merged into the State Department and will face significant cuts, CBS News reported on Monday.
President Trump’s pause on foreign aid has upended USAID, which serves as a soft power arm of the US government and its intelligence agencies to meddle in the affairs of countries across the world, including by funding opposition groups to foment dissent.
USAID has been targeted by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and the Tesla CEO has suggested President Trump wants a complete “shutdown” of the agency. However, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said many of the functions of USAID will continue under the State Department, though he stressed the need for reform.
Speaking to reporters in El Salvador, Rubio said that he was now the acting director of USAID. “My frustration with USAID goes back to my time in Congress. It’s a completely unresponsive agency; it’s supposed to respond to policy directives of the State Department, and it refuses to do so,” he said.
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“It is disgraceful that the Trump administration has allowed unelected billionaires and their lackeys unfettered access to the personal and financial information of Americans.”
By Jake Johnson
A pair of labor unions and an advocacy group representing retirees sued the U.S. Treasury Department on Monday in an effort to halt Elon Musk’s team’s dangerous access to a critical government payment system—access granted by U.S. President Donald Trump’s handpicked Treasury chief.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s decision last week to give DOGE “full, continuous, and ongoing access to that information for an unspecified period of time means that retirees, taxpayers, federal employees, companies, and other individuals from all walks of life have no assurance that their information will receive the protection that federal law affords,” the lawsuit adds.
Continue reading at www.commondreams.org
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