The Dunning-Kruger Coup
By 
20 August 1991: Soviet armored vehicles roll down the main highway toward the Tallinn television tower. A coup attempt is under way in Moscow and at Mikhail Gorbachev’s dacha in Crimea. The Baltic States were moving toward independence and needed to be brought back under control. Seizing the television tower to control communications was critical.
But Estonian civilians fought back and protected the tower. The Soviet army stood down.
In the late 20th century, control of television and radio stations was an early step in a coup. Sometimes it worked. The point was to broadcast that “We are now in control of the government.”
Elon Musk is now attempting an analogous move with computers. “We control all your data.” But he’s got a problem.
A couple of problems, really. In 1991, one television tower controlled television across Estonia. A number of computers in Washington are central to the way the government works, but no one fully controls. That leads to the second problem: You have to understand how the computers work together.
Government is at its best when most people don’t notice what it’s doing. Flying is safe, food is safe, income tax refunds and other checks arrive on time. Most people don’t have to understand the details, and most don’t.
Elon Musk doesn’t. He grew up in another country. He believes that he is the master of everything, can learn anything in an hour or two. The boys working for him have been encouraged by the Silicon Valley ethos not to spend time in school, where they might have been exposed to a cursory idea of the structure and function of the government. The adults working for Musk have less excuse, but all of them live in the Silicon Valley bubble.
The thing about a coup, though, is that you have to do it fast. The Estonian tower operators sat in the top floor, the story goes, and wedged a matchbook into the elevator door to disable it so that the Soviet soldiers had to climb up the stairs. One thousand of them. Meanwhile, the operators broadcast for help. Civilians gathered outside, outnumbering the soldiers.
Musk, or one of his lieutenants, figured out that the Office of Personnel Management was a central repository of personnel information and that Treasury is where the checks are printed. But this is a government for a country with 340 million people. The government employs more people than the population of Estonia.
What Musk didn’t figure out is that the decisions associated with hiring and firing people and with sending out checks resided elsewhere. So they hit OPM and Treasury first. It’s a strong move, but not as strong as they may have thought.
Musk promised to remove $2 trillion dollars from the $6 trillion national budget. That’s a lot. The big money is not in personnel, it’s in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and big contracts in the Defense Department and NASA. Musk’s website currently claims, with a great many errors, to have removed $2 billion dollars. They only need to find 999 times that more to make up the $2 trillion.
Personnel seemed the easiest, after some forays into ending contracts and overhead for NSF and NIH contracts, much smaller than the defense and space contracts, but damaging to those nasty people who thought they knew so much about COVID and insisted we wear masks. A large motivation for this effort seems to have been to remove civil rights protections from the workforce and generally cause chaos, along with whatever dollar amounts could be claimed.
After mucking around in the OPM and Treasury computers, installing an “email all” function at OPM to every government employee, they realized that they would have to go to the agencies. Presumably Musk was whipping them on for speed, but there was no low-hanging $2 trillion to be found. Aha! Employees on probationary status could be fired more easily than others. Probationary status included recent hires and those recently promoted or moved to new jobs.
Not knowing the functions of the agencies, they fired people who were watching over nuclear weapons and bird flu and running the national parks. Some are being hired back, but the Musk operation didn’t retain contact information. Some agencies, like the FBI and CIA, seem to have rebuffed the cuts..
Over the weekend, Musk sent out an email, as he did when he took over Twitter, demanding progress reports from the entire workforce. Not all agencies are complying. It’s another pretext for firing workers. They didn’t get enough with the provisional workers.
The pace is slowing, and resistance is rising. Citizens at congressional town halls are demanding that Musk and his boys be removed from the computers. Lawsuits are in progress against their actions.
Matt Bai has interviewed people run over by the Musk operation (gift link), with more detail. I’ve developed this scenario on the basis of information available publicly. I don’t have any inside information. The structure of the federal government has stymied some of Musk’s destruction, and the slowing pace is allowing resistance to form, just as that matchbook held the Soviet soldiers at bay. Twenty of the civil service employees in the office that was made into DOGE have resigned in protest against the actions, and lawsuits questioning the legality of DOGE are in progress.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner