A Five-Alarm Fire in America
Urgent updates to share from DC (written Sunday, Feb 2nd and shared that day on other platforms). Folks who are paying attention will already be aware, but these events aren’t being reported on widely or clearly enough, and we need to call this what it is.
Elon Musk is in the midst of an active coup and is taking over the federal government. I don’t mean “Musk, following Trump’s orders, is being brazen.” I mean Musk alone has gone rogue. This is not hyperbole, or theoretical. The coup has been ongoing since at least last Friday.
DOGE is not a federal agency (it’s nothing) and Musk is not a federal employee. This unelected, foreign-born private citizen has in the last week been allowed to waltz into federal agencies, tap into their servers, steal their data, lock thousands of career federal employees out of their emails and all digital systems, intimidate them, fire thousands, monitor their communications with AI his teams installed, take down federal websites, and as of today, gain access to U.S. Treasury payment systems--the federal government’s checkbook--processing $6 trillion in payments per year.
Musk has taken over the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s HR office which houses sensitive data on millions of current and former federal employees—not just addresses and Social Security numbers but fingerprints and FBI background check information and more—and locked career employees out of all systems and threated to fire them. It’s pretty clear Musk intends to start directly stealing money from the Treasury as soon as possible to cover his own lack of liquidity and debts. That means YOUR Social Security payments, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, and any other assistance you receive, in addition to federal grants and programs.
I repeat, this is a coup. Trump is not in charge. Musk is. In a remotely healthy democracy, the first hints of this would put him under arrest and Trump would be impeached. Instead, here we are. Musk and Trump are testing the boundaries, seeing what they can get away with.
Reminder that these are not the actions of a strong regime but an incredibly weak one. Trump's attempts to ram through an extremely unpopular agenda by fiat in his first two weeks show he and Project 2025 know how little support they have--and Trump and Musk are way out over their skis. Dictators are frightening but they are brittle. This is a stressful time, but friends, fear not. This is the time to get loud. We all have a role to play.
What do we do? Turn up the heat on Senate Democrats to refuse to consider Trump’s nominees and stop all Senate business until Musk is fired and all federal grants are unfrozen. Pressure Senate Republicans not to support Trump’s wildly unpopular Project 2025 policies or nominees.
Call your elected officials daily or better yet, make plans with local contacts to show up at their offices and demand they take action. Organize others to get in the streets. This is not a moment for apathy. We need to get loud. Don’t wait for permission—if you have an idea for how to resist, work with others locally and make it happen it now.
This is a reason why I'm setting up this account on Ghost for my writing and updates on the state of democracy and the latest from Washington. More to come soon; I invite you to join me here and subscribe to my newsletter. This is a time where we will need in-person and digital community more than ever. Join me in building a community on a site designed for writing that doesn't platform N@zis. Stay well and take care of yourselves and your people, friends.