Elon Musk's A.I.-Fuelled War on Human Agency

Not long ago, the American public could have been forgiven for thinking of Elon Musk's vaunted Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as a version of a familiar Republican cost-cutting, government-shrinking project. The man who took over Twitter and slashed its staff by around eighty per cent would take a similarly aggressive tack against bureaucratic inefficiency, reining in budgets and laying off federal employees. In the past couple of weeks, though, it's become clear that Musk's aim within the Trump Administration goes further: he wants not only to reduce the U.S. government but to install his own technological vision of the future at its heart. To run his agency, Musk brought on a group of tech-company managers and inexperienced twentysomethings whose credentials included internships at SpaceX. We watched as this crew began interrogating federal employees about their jobs, interfering with the system that controls payments at the Treasury Department, and trawling government budgets while Musk used X, the social platform he owns, to call out the agencies and programs in his crosshairs.