What the fuck is Elon doing at OPM?
We demand to know what the hell is going on in the Office of Personnel Management.
Save for the psychopaths and inattentive, this has been an unhappy, catastrophic week in the GOP-ruled Washington. It is impossible to discern which wrongs Republicans deliberately inflicted on the United States and which were accidental. At the center of this chaos and confusion, for once, is not President Donald Trump—he is too preoccupied complaining about DEI to be aware of his government’s meltdown. The real villain of the week is unelected SpaceX, Tesla, Twitter, The Boring Company, Neuralink, and xAI CEO Elon Musk, who heads the nebulously-defined fake Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) (formerly the U.S. Digital Service (USDS), an agency devoted to the more focused task of modernizing government websites). He has been engaging in sinister, bizarre, and likely illegal activities at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), where he does not work. Each new report grows stranger and more unsettling with the cadence of a Saturday Night Live sketch.
Mr. Musk—many people are now calling him “President Musk”—is already too comfortable furtively commanding the government without any oversight, and feels entitled to hire his underlings, fire civil servants, access whichever computer systems he wants with whatever proprietary software he wants, and give the data therefrom to minor Silicon Valley CEOs, such as Tom Krause; meanwhile, the American people have to hope he is sober and has no intention of profiting or training some personal transhumanist AI nightmare project with it.
The father of twelve seemingly has extra time to harvest government data and harass federal employees in addition to running six companies, “K-holing” nightly on the dissociative horse tranquilizer ketamine, tweeting misinformation more than sixty times daily, doing Nazi salutes, and cheating at video games. This is not something the governed consented to—even Mr. Trump may not be aware of the scope of abuses happening behind his back. It could be illegal and certainly requires disclosure, oversight, and reassurance. This is a fucking coup masquerading as reform.
Mr. Trump’s nominee for OPM Director, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Scott Kupor, managing partner at Andreessen Horowitz and author of Wall Street Journal best-seller “Secrets of Sand Hill Road,” has not yet been confirmed. His boss, Trump ally and Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, was recently described by Trump consigliere Steve Bannon as a “technofeudalist” “broligarch,” “crawling on [his] bell[y],” who is “polluting the movement” and “if not stopped,” will “destroy not just this country, [but also] destroy the world.” Even by the standards of Mr. Bannon (who I suppose I am rooting for in the GOP Civil War) this is not an endorsement.
If Senate Republicans do not reject Mr. Kupor or stall his vote until the American people learn what the fuck is happening at OPM, it is because they decided to be complicit with each bad outcome stemming from this mismanagement.
The Acting Director OPM, Charles “Chuck” Edgar Ezell, a data analytics enthusiast, musician, and Musk fanboy who appears to be working remotely from Macon, Georgia, has been described by a panicked whistleblower in a now-deleted Reddit thread as “the friendliest ‘yes man’ you’ll ever meet.”
Screenshots of the thread in question have circulated widely.
Mr. Ezell, by all accounts, is a nice person who took the path of least resistance, which is “rolling over” and allowing Mr. Musk’s henchmen to commandeer the director’s office to do as they please to the federal workforce. I understand condemning Mr. Ezell’s complicity is fashionable in beautiful Macon, Georgia, but anyone Mr. Trump installed into that position would have been similarly pressured to betray the civil service. I hope, at least, he was well-compensated.
Still, it is not too late for Mr. Ezell to stand up, come clean before the American public about what is happening, and resign in disgrace. Courage and character are rare commodities among leaders who surrender their powers and responsibilities, but it is not impossible Mr. Ezell’s conscience could eventually overburden him, if he is indeed the “nicest ‘yes man.’”
Amanda Scales, formerly of Human Capital, worked HR for Mr. Musk’s xAI from October 2024 to January 2025, where she presumably earned his trust rapidly. She does not appear to be trained for any role at OPM; instead, she sprouted there overnight, like a mushroom. She was made Chief of Staff for OPM (an agency which, again, Mr. Musk does not run) and allegedly is charged with collecting names of U.S. government employees deemed a “threat” to the generally incoherent MAGA agenda. It is unclear how Ms. Scales, in just four months at xAI, demonstrated the loyalty, competence, and ideological commitment required for a partisan purge, but she will now be tested in Court—I expect we might learn more about her motives when she inevitably has to speak under oath about this bullshit.
Shortly after Ms. Scales’s arrival, an e-mail server was installed and began spamming over 3 million federal workers from addresses like: hr@opm.gov, DEIAtruth@opm.gov, defendingwomen@opm.gov, amanda.scales@opm.gov, employ@opm.gov.
(Some rapscallions started a campaign to send time-wasting junk mail, pornography, and hoaxes to these addresses to “gum up the works,” which is inappropriate and inadvisable.)
These harassing e-mails have included fake buyout offers, suggestions that federal employees “find more productive employment,” demands to uncover “hidden DEIA,” solicitation of employee snitching, and have generally been described as “harassing” and “psychological warfare.” As Ms. Scales majored in psychology at UC Davis, one suspects this is the intended effect. Indeed, Mr. Trump’s nominee to run the Office of Management and Budget, Heritage Foundation devotee and Project 2025 author Russell Vought suggested it was the goal of Mr. Trump’s regime to put “bureaucrats” “in trauma,” that “when [civil servants] wake up in the morning, [the Trump administration] wants them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”
No, sir, the villains in the story are quite clear.
Does v. Office of Personnel Management, Case 1:25-cv-00234
US Government sued after mass emails to federal workforce allegedly sent from insecure server
In addition to these puppets, WIRED reported Mr. Musk has also hired—into leadership roles!—a 19-year-old recent high school graduate who was either an intern at Neuralink or a test subject, and a 21-year-old, presumably a “blood boy,” from Peter Thiel’s Palantir. Enterprise would not allow these children to rent cars, but Mr. Musk imagines they naturally possess relevant experience to manage the federal workforce. I do not expect these young men were hired based on merit; rather, their “star quality” must have been fealty. Mr. Musk may believe this is a “troll move” on scale with Caligula appointing his horse Incitatus to the Senate, but unlike that gentle equine, these kids have careers ahead of them that will be forever tainted by these treasons. As youths, they are too naïve to know the purpose of hiring “fall guys” is to let them fall and be disposed when worn from abuse taken in their masters’ steads.
Do they expect Mr. Musk, notoriously a fickle friend, to grant them lifelong patronage? Do they think they will be immune to his future episodes of malice?
The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk's Government Takeover
Reuters has reported that DOGE thugs “locked career civil servants out of computer systems,” including the Enterprise Human Resources Integration, “that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees,” such as “dates of birth, Social Security numbers, appraisals, home addresses, pay grades and length of service of government workers.” Officials’ access to this data has been revoked, so nobody can observe what is being done with it. The director’s suite and fifth floor of the OPM building, generally, where Mr. Musk’s cronies are secreted, “can only be accessed with a security badge or a security escort.”
Like Mr. Musk, who is supposedly sleeping in the DOGE offices, his servants have brought sofa beds into their new workspaces so they can work around the clock, party, crash, and prevent outsiders from seeing what they are doing. This violates Federal law. Does the building have a shower? Unless they let some janitors in, I imagine this room will become unsanitary and smell unpleasant before they finish their coup.
So, unqualified, untrained, inexperienced, unaccountable, unwashed, nearly-underaged interns loyal not to America but to transhumanist tech sector oligarchs have barricaded themselves away with the personal information of every federal government employee, past and present, and hooked outside servers up to that network so they can steal data and send mass e-mails demanding resignations from the entire civil service. Not good!
Acting Deputy Secretary of the Treasury David Lebryk was pushed out after 30 years of government service because he rightfully did not give Mr. Musk access to the “government’s entire payment [processing] system,” which controls the disbursement of trillions of dollars to Social Security, SNAP, Medicare, Medicaid, Meals on Wheels, Head Start, tax returns—everything. (This is, again, outside the scope of the Digital Service that Mr. Musk has renamed.)
Additionally, there has been reporting that DOGE goons forced their way into the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), demanding access to security systems, personnel records, and classified information. They began dismantling the office, installed some AI bullshit onto the e-mail clients, deleted its Twitter handle, and took its website offline. The agency provides foreign and humanitarian aid, disaster relief, and development assistance to countries around the world. Meanwhile, Mr. Musk, having limited empathy or understanding, says it is “time for [USAID] to die” and professes it to be a “criminal organization.” To be clear: this is illegal. USAID was created by and can only be dissolved by an act of Congress. Neither the U.S. president nor an unelected billionaire—no matter how much ketamine he snorts— has the authority to shut it down.
I am not generally convinced Mr. Musk is in his right mind, and his tweets suggest that he is operating in a state of sleepless delirium. He claims he and his staff are working 120-hour weeks. This is not impossible, but certainly not sustainable. The 17 hours of daily work this figure requires leaves approximately 7 hours remaining for eating, sleeping, bathing, abusing narcotics, and talking with loved ones (although they may have none.) If this is not bullshit, which it likely is, I suspect, very strongly, that chemical supplementation is occurring. Democratic lawmakers would be well-advised to send in some K9 units to investigate the presence of amphetamines in whatever premises these stinky men are “holed up” in.
I have no confidence these sleepless computer junkies are in their right minds, have any care for what they are doing, or comprehend the harm they will do to the lives of American citizens and our standing in the world each time they fuck up. We should be concerned they might continue to hook up insecure, experimental software to these databases—such as Mr. Musk’s mediocre xAI. We cannot trust this data will not be abused or “taken home” for alternative uses, or that anybody is complying with the law.
Mr. Trump was elected by a slim majority for many reasons, most of them wrong, but he was at least elected. Mr. Musk was not. He and his minions have strongarmed their way into buildings they have no business in, assumed more power than they have any right to, taken massive amounts of the government’s data, and then locked out everyone else so their actions cannot be scrutinized. We need to know what the fuck he’s doing and this must stop.