Elon Musk’s secretive government IT takeover, explained

Billionaire Elon Musk and his band of young Silicon Valley engineers have gained access to IT systems controlling critical functions of the federal government, from the Treasury Department to the Small Business Administration. The problem is no one outside of the Trump administration really knows what Musk and his team at the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are planning to do with that access. In the name of uncovering fat to trim, they now have the personal information of millions of Americans stored in government databases at their fingertips and newfound influence over key parts of the federal bureaucracy long controlled by nonpartisan career officials. It’s clear Musk has exceptional access to government data, but it’s still not clear how much he can do with it. Most saliently, watchdogs and Democratic lawmakers suspect that Musk’s endgame is not just visibility into the payments the government is making, but also control over them.