Musk’s Interns Are Rewriting the Government
A federal audit reveals how DOGE operatives gained access to sensitive data with almost no oversight.
There’s something almost poetic about naming a shadowy government squad after a meme coin.
Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency”—abbreviated as DOGE—sounds like a plot device from a satirical dystopia. Except it’s real. It’s in your government. And it’s currently under audit for potentially rummaging through everything from tax records to Treasury systems like a group of overconfident summer interns who just discovered root access.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO)—a body known for playing the long, quiet game of oversight—is finally stepping in.
It’s been auditing DOGE since March, trying to trace the digital footprints of Musk’s hand-picked operatives, who appear to have more background in JavaScript frameworks than constitutional law or federal security protocols.
They’ve wandered across departments like Labor, Education, Homeland Security, and Social Security, reportedly connecting systems, accessing sensitive data, and—most troublingly—asking for write access.
Yes, write access to payment systems at Treasury during an election year from a 25-year-old former X engineer.
Let’s break this down.
Efficiency as a Trojan Horse
Musk has long been involved in the cult of disruption.
Uber disrupted taxis, Tesla disrupted cars, and Twitter disrupted democracy. Now comes DOGE, disrupting civil service with all the subtlety of a bulldozer at a tea party.
This isn’t about “efficiency.” It’s about control.
The idea of centralizing fragmented government data systems sounds reasonable—if your benchmark for “reasonable” is Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Under the guise of reducing fraud and waste, DOGE appears to be building the infrastructure for something closer to a panopticon than a payroll system.
And when you peel back the buzzwords, it’s just the same old story: a tech messiah promising utopia if you’d just let him run the IRS like a startup—no meetings, no accountability, and definitely no unions.
Who’s Watching the Coders?
The most alarming part isn’t that DOGE operatives had access—it’s how easily they got it.
According to WIRED, agencies like the Department of Labor (DOL) were playing a digital keep-away game.
DOGE asked for write access. DOL said no. DOGE asked again. DOL gave them read access instead, and even then, they tried to funnel all requests through their own staffers, like chaperoning a group of middle schoolers on a field trip to Fort Knox.
No one knows exactly what DOGE did.
That’s what the GAO audit is for. They're investigating whether DOGE operatives—many with no prior clearance, minimal government experience, and direct ties to Musk’s private companies—accessed, changed, or exported sensitive data.
They’re checking audit logs, laptop settings, risk assessments, and maybe even Slack messages.
And it’s not just DOL. The Treasury, Health and Human Services, and Social Security are the crown jewels of American personal data, and DOGE seems to have the keys to all of it.
If it were anyone else, this would be a full-blown scandal. But because it’s Elon Musk, somehow it's still framed as “experimentation.”
The Real Problem: Musk Didn’t Buy the Government—He Plugged Into It
This is where things get dark.
Usually, when a billionaire wants to influence policy, they buy a few politicians, lobby for tax cuts, and call it a day. But Musk is playing a different game.
He didn’t just want access to the halls of power—he wanted root access to the systems that run them. Not metaphorical systems. Actual systems.
The most generous reading is that Musk is trying to show up the government by improving it. The more likely explanation? He’s repurposing the government as a proving ground for a privatized surveillance state.
If DOGE successfully consolidates all federal data, imagine what comes next: machine learning algorithms trained on citizen records, AI-generated audit models, or predictive behavior scoring “to fight fraud” (but mostly to nudge policy in ways that serve Musk’s empire).
You don’t need a conspiracy theory. You need to follow the incentives.
The Philosophical Frame: When Government Becomes a Sandbox
The American state was built on the idea that public institutions serve the public, not private ambition. It’s slow. It’s clunky. But that’s by design.
Efficiency isn't always a virtue in the context of state power—it can be a shortcut to authoritarianism.
What we’re seeing now is a billionaire using the language of tech to hollow out the institutions that are supposed to resist private capture. “Eliminating silos” sounds great—until it means one person can reach across departments and rewrite code. “Fighting waste” sounds noble—until it means firing career civil servants and replacing them with startup bros.
The question isn’t whether DOGE is efficient. The question is: Efficient for whom?
Because from where most Americans sit, this isn’t the government working better. It’s government being rewritten by a ketamine junkie.
What If DOGE Works?
This is the haunting part.
What if DOGE actually improves some federal systems? What if Musk’s engineers really can streamline databases, detect fraud, or modernize ancient code?
Even then, we lose.
Because we’re not supposed to outsource sovereignty to whoever has the best GitHub profile.
The ends don’t justify the means if the means dismantle democratic oversight.
We don’t let Amazon run elections just because its servers are fast, and we shouldn’t let Elon Musk run the government just because he understands Python.
The GAO audit may uncover damning evidence, or maybe just procedural sloppiness. But the real damage has already been done: we’ve normalized the idea that a billionaire can embed his own people in government systems and call it “efficiency.”
In a sane world, DOGE would be a joke. In this one, it’s the future.
Unless we unplug it first.
That’s the point.