Letters from an American - February 4, 2025

Episode Date: February 5, 2025

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February 4th, 2025. Shortly after one o'clock this morning, Victoria Elliott, Dhruv Marotra, Leah Feiger, and Tim Marchman of Wired reported that, according to three of their sources, a 25-year-old engineer named Marco Elez, who previously worked for two Elon Musk companies, SpaceX and X, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly than 20% of the U.S. economy, including government payments of veterans benefits, Social Security benefits, and veterans pay. The admin privileges he has typically permit a user to log into servers through secure shell access, navigate the entire file system, change user permissions, and delete or modify critical files. That could allow someone to bypass the security measures of, and potentially cause irreversible changes to the very systems they have access to. If you would have asked me a week ago if an outsider could have been given access to a government server, one federal IT worker told the Wired reporters, I'd have told you that this kind of thing would never in a

million years happen. But now, who the f*** knows? The reporters note that control of the Bureau of Fiscal Service computers could enable someone to cut off monies to specific agencies or even individuals. Will Doge cut funding to programs approved by Congress that Donald Trump decides he doesn't like? Asked Senator Chuck Schumer, a Democrat of New York yesterday. What about cancer research, food banks, school lunches, veterans aid, literacy programs, small business loans? Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo reported that his sources said that Ales and possibly others got full admin access to the Treasury computers on

Friday, January 31st and that he or they have already made extensive changes to the code base for the payment system. They are leaning on existing staff in the agency for help, which those workers have provided reluctantly in hopes of keeping the entire system from crashing. Marshall reports those staffers are freaking out. The system is due to undergo a migration to another system this weekend. How the changes will interact with that long-planned migration is unclear. The changes, Marshall's sources tell him, all seem to relate to creating new paths to block payments and possibly leave less visibility into what has been blocked.

Both Wired and the New York Times reported yesterday that Musk's team intends to cut government workers and to use artificial intelligence or AI to make budget cuts and to find waste and abuse in the federal government. Today, Jason Kobler, Joseph Cox, and Emanuel Mayberg of 404 Media reported that they had obtained the audio of a meeting held Monday by Thomas Shedd for government technology workers. Shedd is a former Musk employee at Tesla who is now leading the General Services Administration's Technology Transformation Services or TTS,

the team that is recoding the government programs. At the meeting Shedd told government workers that things are going to get intense as his team creates AI coding agents to write software that would, for example, change the way logging into the government system works. Currently, that software cannot access any information about individuals. As the reporters note, login.gov currently assures users that it does not affect or have any information related to the specific agency you are trying to access. But Shedd said they were working through how to change that login to further identify individuals

and detect and prevent fraud. When a government employee pointed out that the Privacy Act makes it illegal for agencies to share personal information without consent, Shedd appeared unfazed by the idea they were trying something illegal. The idea would be that folks would give consent to help with the login flow, but again that's an example of something that we have a vision that needs to be worked on and needs clarified, and if we hit a roadblock then we hit a roadblock, then we hit a roadblock, but we should still push forward and see what we can do.

A government employee told Kobler, Cox, and Myberg that using AI coding agents is a major security risk. Government software is concerned with things like foreign adversaries attempting to insert back doors into government code. With code generated by AI, it seems possible that security vulnerabilities could be introduced unintentionally, or could be introduced intentionally, via an AI-related exploit that creates obfuscated code that includes vulnerabilities that might expose the data of American citizens or of national security importance. A blizzard of lawsuits has greeted Musk's campaign and other Trump administration efforts

to undermine Congress. Today, Senator Chuck Schumer, a Democrat of New York, and Representative Hakim Jeffries, also a Democrat of New York, the Representative Hakeem Jeffries, also a Democrat of New York, the minority leaders in their respective chambers, announced they were introducing legislation to stop Musk's unlawful actions in the Treasury's payment systems and to protect Americans, calling it Stop the Steal, a play on Trump's false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. This evening, Democratic lawmakers and hundreds of protesters rallied at the Treasury Department

to take a stand against Musk's hostile takeover of the U.S. Treasury payment system. Nobody elected Elon, their signs read. He has access to all our information, our Social Security numbers, the federal payment system. Representative Maxwell Frost, a Democrat of Florida, said, what's going to stop him from stealing taxpayer money? Tonight, The Washington Post noted that Musk's actions appear to violate federal law. David Super of Georgetown Law School told journalists Jeff Stein, Dan Diamond, Faiz Siddiqui, Katz Ikrusski, Hannah Natanson, and Jacqueline Alamany,

so many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they're playing a quantity game and assuming the system can't react to all this illegality at once. Musk's takeover of the U.S. government to override Congress and dictate what programs he considers worthwhile is a logical outcome of 40 years of Republican rhetoric. After World War II, members of both political parties agreed that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights.

The idea was to use tax dollars to create national wealth. The government would hold the economic playing field level by protecting every American's access to education, health care, transportation and communication, employment, and resources so that anyone could work hard and rise to prosperity. Businessmen who opposed regulation and taxes tried to convince voters to abandon this system but had no luck. The liberal consensus, liberal because it used the government to protect individual freedom and consensus because it enjoyed wide support, won the votes of members of both major

political parties. But those opposed to the liberal consensus gained traction after the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision declared segregation in the public schools unconstitutional. Three years later, in 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, sent troops to help desegregate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Those trying to tear apart the liberal consensus used the crisis to warn voters that the programs in place to help all Americans build the nation as they rose to prosperity were really an attempt to redistribute cash from white taxpayers to undeserving racial minorities, especially

black Americans. Such programs were, opponents insisted, a form of socialism or even communism. That argument worked to undermine white support for the liberal consensus. Over the years, Republican voters increasingly abandoned the idea of using tax money to help Americans build wealth. When majorities continued to support the liberal consensus, Republicans responded by suppressing the vote, rigging the system through gerrymandering, and flooding our political system with dark money and using right-wing media to push propaganda. Republicans came to believe that they were the only legitimate lawmakers in the nation.

When Democrats won, the election must have been rigged. Even so, they were unable to destroy the post-World War II government completely because policies like the destruction of Social Security and Medicaid or the elimination of the Department of Education, remained unpopular. Now, MAGA Republicans in charge of the government have made it clear they intend to get rid of that government once and for all. Trump's nominee to direct the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vogt, was a key architect

of Project 2025, which called for dramatically reducing the power of Congress and the United States Civil Service. Vogt has referred to career civil servants as villains and called for ending funding for most government programs. �The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country, he said recently. In the name of combating diversity, equity and inclusion programs, the Trump administration is taking down websites of information paid for with tax dollars, dollars, slashing programs that advance health and science, ending investments in infrastructure, trying to end foreign aid, working to eliminate the Department of Education, and so on. Today the administration offered buyouts to all the people who work at the Central Intelligence

Agency, saying that anyone who opposes Trump's policies should leave. Today, Musk's people entered the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, which provides daily weather and wind predictions. Cutting NOAA and privatizing its services is listed as a priority in Project 2025. Stunningly, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced today that the U.S. has made a deal with El Salvador to send deportees of any nationality, including U.S. citizens, which would be wildly unconstitutional, for imprisonment in that nation's 40,000 person terrorism confinement center for a fee that would pay for El Salvador's prison system.

Tonight, the Senate confirmed Trump loyalist Pam Bondi as Attorney General. Bondi is an open election denier who refuses to say that Trump lost the 22 presidential election. As Matt Cohen of Democracy Doggett noted, a coalition of more than 300 civil rights groups urged senators to vote against her confirmation because of her opposition to LGBTQ rights, immigrants rights, and reproductive rights, and her record of anti-voting activities. The vote was along party lines, except for Senator John Fetterman, a Democrat of Pennsylvania,

who crossed over to vote in favor. Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGIE, is the logical outcome of the mentality that the government should not enable Americans to create wealth, but rather should put cash in the pockets of a few elites. Far from representing a majority, Musk is unelected, and he is slashing through the government programs he opposes. With full control of both chambers of Congress, Republicans could cut those parts themselves, but such cuts would be too unpopular ever to pass.

So instead, Musk is single-handedly slashing through the government Americans have built over the past 90 years. Now, MAGA voters are about to discover that the wide-ranging cuts he claims to be making to end diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, skewer them as well as their neighbors. Attracting white voters with racism was always a tool to end the liberal consensus that worked for everyone. And if Musk's cut stand, the US is about to learn that lesson the hard way. In yet another bombshell, after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,

Trump told reporters tonight that the US will take over the Gaza Strip and suggested sending troops to make that happen. We'll own it, he said. We're going to take over that piece, develop it, and create thousands and thousands of jobs, and it'll be something the entire Middle East can be proud of.

It could become the Riviera of the Middle East, he said. Reaction has been swift and incredulous. Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat of Virginia, who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, called the plan deranged and nuts. Another Foreign Relations Committee member, Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat of Delaware, said he was speechless, adding, that's insane. While MAGA representative Nancy Mace, a Republican of South Carolina, posted in support, let's turn Gaza into Mar-a-Lago, Senator Tom Tillis, a Republican of North Carolina, told NBC News reporters Frank Thorpe V and Raquel Coronel Uribe that there were a few kinks in that slinky, a reference to a

spring toy that fails if it gets bent. Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat of Connecticut, suggested that Trump was trying to distract people from the real story, the billionaires seizing government to steal from regular people. ["Letters from an American"] Letters from an American was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dedham, Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.