Elon Musk has overtaken President Donald Trump as the hero of America’s far-right movement. A WIRED review of message boards, encrypted channels, social media platforms, online search trends, and public statements from influencers and lawmakers suggests that Musk and the actions of his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) organization haveContinue Reading
“Listen, when the process is going this fast, from extreme outsiders, the communication is bound to be a mess,” says Matthew Bartlett, a Republican operative and former State Department official under Trump in his first term. Bartlett says the rest of Washington is getting their first real taste of theContinue Reading
An engineer named Nikhil Rajpal is representing Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task force at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), according to multiple sources. Government records reviewed by WIRED show that Rajpal has working email addresses with both DOGE and the NOAA. The DOGE address,Continue Reading
“Our partners say that for some survivors they are in touch with inside the scam centers, even if they can somehow manage to get out, they then have no place to put them. Then, the survivors have no money for a flight home and no place to go, so theyContinue Reading
As Elon Musk’s DOGE team continues its efforts to dismantle the US government’s primary agency for distributing foreign aid, its overseas employees are stuck in limbo. Workers at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) are stationed in dozens of different countries around the world, but reports from ABCContinue Reading
Federal employees are seeking a temporary restraining order as part of a class action lawsuit accusing a group of Elon Musk’s associates of allegedly operating an illegally connected server from the fifth floor of the US Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) headquarters in Washington, DC. An attorney representing two federalContinue Reading
A 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who previously worked for two Elon Musk companies, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the US government, three sources tell WIRED. Two of those sources say that Elez’s privileges include the ability not just to readContinue Reading
USAID staff who still have access to their email accounts received a notice on Monday evening from Ken Jackson, the agency’s assistant to the administrator for management and resources, saying that the agency “would likely undergo a reorganization” and be integrated into the State Department. “As we evaluate USAID andContinue Reading
In a Monday morning meeting, Thomas Shedd, the recently appointed Technology Transformation Services director and Elon Musk ally, told General Services Administration workers that the agency’s new administrator is pursuing an “AI-first strategy,” sources tell WIRED. Throughout the meeting, Shedd shared his vision for a GSA that operates like aContinue Reading
PERSONAL DATA The pace and intensity of Musk’s operation, which is using employees brought from his own companies, has caught opponents off guard. In one especially tense episode, Musk’s team insisted on gaining access to the Treasury’s highly sensitive payment system, which is used for dispatching trillions of dollars aContinue Reading
