What A Day - Is This An 'Administrative Coup'?

Episode Date: February 6, 2025

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has seemingly been waging a personal war on the federal government via his Department of Government Efficiency. In the last few weeks, he and his team have urged millions of federal workers to resign, fed the U.S. Agency for International Development 'into the wood chipper,' and gotten access the Treasury Department’s secure payment system. And on Wednesday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced Musk's DOGE team would soon ‘plug in’ to the air traffic control system. Charlie Warzel, a staff writer at The Atlantic covering tech and media, says Musk's actions amount to 'an administrative coup.' Later in the show, Crooked Media’s news editor, Greg Walters, shares stories from federal workers dealing with the fallout.And in headlines: The White House does damage control over Trump’s plans for the U.S. to ‘take over the Gaza Strip,’ the president signed yet another executive order targeting trans kids, and Scotland says it’s not banning cats.Show Notes:Check out Charlie's piece – https://tinyurl.com/2dmjvnhuSubscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/3kk4nyz8Support victims of the fire – votesaveamerica.com/reliefWhat A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcastFollow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday

It's Thursday, February 6th. I'm Jane Coaston and this is What a Day, the show wondering what possibly could have motivated Greenland to ban foreign political donations ahead of its March elections. Beats us! On today's show, because it's the day that ends in Y, Trump signed yet another executive order targeting trans kids, and the White House does some damage control over Trump's plans for the U.S. to take over the Gaza Strip. But let's start with Elon Musk, the world's richest man, and a man who once offered to

impregnate Taylor Swift. And now, he's apparently the co-president of the United States of America. Of course, the actual president of the United States is Donald Trump. And yet it's Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, that seem to be in charge. On Wednesday, lawmakers complained that Musk and his allies are knee-deep in the payment systems of the Treasury Department. And in the words of Musk himself, he's putting the United States Agency for International

Development, or USAID, quote, into the woodchipper. He's infiltrated the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration. And on Wednesday, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy announced that Doge is apparently taking on the US air traffic control system. An unelected billionaire and some dudes he likes, quote, plugging into the air traffic control system. What could possibly go wrong?

In fact, that's the thing, isn't it? Musk is a private citizen. Sure, that's the thing, isn't it? Musk is a private citizen. Sure, he's the wealthiest man on earth with a whole lot of thoughts on childbearing, but in the eyes of the federal government, he should just be some guy. And some guy does not have the right to fire government employees, or cancel government appropriations, or access your grandpa's social security payment information. Musk's involvement in the federal government goes way beyond anything that's ever happened before. And Republicans, the same ones who fear mongered

about Bill Gates and wealthy Democratic donors getting involved in politics, apparently Elon Musk getting his hands into the Treasury is cool and good. And Democrats have seemed largely unable to respond, though that's starting to change. California Democratic Representative Maxine Waters railed against Musk at a rally on Tuesday.

We have got to tell Elon Musk, nobody elected your ass. It's all baffling and infuriating. So to help make sense of Musk's actions over the last few weeks, I spoke with Charlie Wurzel. He's a staff writer at The Atlantic where he covers tech and media. Charlie, welcome back to What A Day. Thank you for having me on your program.

So you call what Elon Musk is doing with Doge a, quote, administrative coup. What do you mean by that? Well, the world's richest man who is unelected in a position that's not confirmed by Congress in any way. It has been put in charge of various parts of the government's bureaucracy and has brought with him a series of people, some of whom we don't know their identity, others whose identity he clearly wants to protect, others who have just graduated high school, to remake and go into the federal government and try to run it like a zero interest rate mid 2010s tech company. I think that the amount of power that he is seizing or the potential amount of power that he is seizing and the decisions that he is sort

of unilaterally able to make or thinks that he's able to make. I would say that that is an administrative coup in the sense of seizing control of something and using it to just kind of go after his, his own ideological bugaboos. I keep thinking about Musk's takeover of Twitter back in 2022 when he walked in holding a sink because he was going to take out everything and the sink? Yeah.

How do you think Musk's actions over the last few weeks compared to that? Because there was, yes, the same fork in the road resignation offer sent out, but at a deeper level, where do you see parallels? Well, I think the parallels began before this. They began on November 6th, right? And I think you could see that there were various people, even before Donald Trump won the election in 2024, sort of talking about Elon Musk and Twitter as his blueprint. The idea being when Musk came in to Twitter, he said, this organization is wildly inefficient, it's poorly run, it needs to be stripped of all of its bloat, it needs to be

It's poorly run. It needs to be stripped of all of its bloat. It needs to be reformatted so that we're not having employees working remotely, et cetera. And only I can fix it. And that, I believe, was viewed by Musk supporters and the MAGA wing as this really excellent operation, not because he was successful in trying to generate good advertising revenue. He alienated advertisers. He has thrown Twitter into organizational chaos for a long time, but he succeeded in turning it into a political weapon. He succeeded in triggering the libs, de-verifying accounts, bringing back the people who had been banned and sort of

restoring sort of a right-wing chaos to the social network. And I think that that is what people wanted Elon to come do in the government, right? It's not important necessarily that the government functions wonderfully for the people, right? Or that it is financially sound. What's important is that it acts as this political weapon. So that's what I think. I think the parallels there are really stark, honestly, and kind of upsetting because if you look at the legacy of that, X is not a very well run company. It runs, but it runs in a really dysfunctional way. But it serves the sort of ideological purposes of its founder, the people who he shares his politics with. To the extent that this is even knowable, and I don't want to do the kind of like

prognostication or projection onto like who, what is he thinking. Is there any kind of philosophy guiding Musk's actions here? Like, at a baseline level, why has the world's richest man, a foreign national, taken it upon himself to almost unilaterally downsize the US government? Why is he picking the targets he's picking? Why does he want to put USAID in the woodchipper? Why go after the Treasury Department's payment system? Like, can you help us make sense of any of his actions here? I think it's just simple.

Like, I think it's just simple. I think we overthink this. I think he believes that the Silicon Valley folk have created these companies with tremendous net worth that a lot of people use, that a lot of people talk about. They've made themselves rich in the process, and they believe that they are masters of industry, of business.

They also believe that this lean, move fast, break things ethos really translates everywhere. But I've been also talking to a bunch of government employees over the last week who work in the IT and technology sector. And they talk about the procedures that are in place here in all these different government systems, like a government payment system and how there's all kinds of, you know, like red tape and access restrictions and things like that. And so I said to some of these people, I said, well, Musk would say that's inefficient, we need to do it the Silicon Valley way.

And this engineer said, like, I worked in Silicon Valley. This is also how we do it. Like the move fast, break things, like it's overstated. And I think some of these people who people who run some of these companies are so actually removed from the day-to-day of programming and building these systems that they actually think it's easier than it is. They actually think it's less complicated. That to me is just really fascinating. There might be this really big disconnect between what these so-called tech geniuses think and what the rank and file employees are actually doing on a day-to-day basis.

I want to end by going back to Twitter. You talked about how Musk's takeover of the app was a success, not because the company benefited from his leadership or made more money or did anything good, but because he was able to turn it into a political weapon. So what does success for Musk look like here? And how can he use Twitter as his own political weapon to achieve that goal? I think in terms of what success looks like, I think this to a degree is success, right? And I think that what we're seeing with, you know, the chaos that's being caused, like,

he's sort of, he's using the federal government as this political weapon in the sense that he's exposing things. Like I think we're gonna see a Twitter files version of what's going on. He's basically going to find information and you can see a little of this. There was like a debunked thing on right wing media

about Politico supposedly getting all this money from USAID, which wasn't true. It was a misinterpretation. Right. It's about Politico Pro and subscriptions and people being idiots. Right. But that was an example of what you saw on right-wing media was a lot of people saying,

like, look, Elon did it. Elon found the corruption. He's going through systematically and he's getting this stuff. So I think he's going to use the federal government as sort of a political weapon in that way. And then obviously Twitter is the other one that's like the broadcast channel for this and then it feeds into the right-wing media ecosystem. And you have that entire group believing something like, you know, Politico got whatever, eight million dollars from USAID this year, and it's not true at all. Charlie, as always, thank you so much for joining me.

Thanks for having me. That was my conversation with Charlie Warzell, staff writer at The Atlantic covering tech and media. We'll link to his story in our show notes. We'll get to more of the News No Moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. What A Day is brought to you by Zeobiotics Pre-Alcohol. Let's face it, after a night with drinks, I don't bounce back the next day like I used

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The president has not committed to putting boots on the ground in Gaza. He has also said that the United States is not going to pay for the rebuilding of Gaza. Huh. On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt tried to do some damage control on President Trump's concept of a plan to, quote, take over the Gaza Strip and also relocate, maybe permanently, the roughly two million Palestinians living there. In a rambling speech next to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Tuesday, Trump said the U.S. will own the Gaza Strip and level the site. The only reason the Palestinians want to go back to Gaza is they have no alternative.

It's right now a demolition site. Levitt defended Trump and said that his Gaza proposal was out of the box and that's why the American people elected him. I thought they elected him because of grocery prices and the economy. Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended Trump's announcement during his visit to Guatemala. He called it a generous offer. What President Trump said yesterday is an acknowledgement of the following. Gaza has been severely damaged.

If you look at the aerial imagery, you see what's happening. The billions of dollars are going to be required for reconstruction are enormous. First, I wonder how all that destruction happened. And second, don't you just love when Republicans have to play that game of what Trump meant to say was? Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky pushed back on Trump's proposal. Paul wrote on Twitter, quote, I thought we voted for America first. We have no business contemplating yet another occupation to doom our treasure and spill

our soldiers' blood. And Republican Senator Tom Tillis of North Carolina said, quote, there is probably a couple of kinks in that slinky. With this executive order, the war on women's sports is over. President Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday banning trans student athletes from women's and girls' sports. This from the man who said he wanted to ban women's boxing because he doesn't want to watch it and definitely cares about women's sports.

A crowd of women and girls joined Trump for the signing of the order. Wednesday happened to be National Girls and Women in Sports Day. And he went on and on and on about how trans girls and women have an unfair advantage over their cisgender counterparts, despite the fact that there's no evidence to support that claim. We will not allow men to beat up, injure, and cheat our women and our girls. From now on, women's sports will be only for women. The order, titled Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports, essentially rolls back the Biden administration's efforts to protect trans kids from discrimination

in public schools under Title IX. It threatens to cut federal funding from schools that are inclusive of trans athletes and requires the Department of Education to investigate any violations of the rule. Which is interesting, since the Trump administration is drafting an executive order later this month that could dismantle the rule. Which is interesting since the Trump administration is drafting an executive order later this month that could dismantle the department. The order doesn't stop with school sports. It says it will work with

governing bodies like the International Olympic Committee. However, hours after the signing, the NCAA's president Charlie Baker issued a statement in support of Trump's order saying it provided a clear national standard. The first military flight deporting migrants from the U.S. to Guantanamo Bay landed in Cuba on Tuesday. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Fox News Monday it's a good plan. Guantanamo Bay, a naval station I spent a year at as a guard back in 2004, 2005, I know that terrain very well.

It's the perfect place to provide for migrants who are traveling out of our country. For decades, the base was mainly used to detain people associated with the 9-11 attacks. Director of the Refugee and Migrant Rights Program at Amnesty International USA, Amy Fisher, said sending immigrants to Guantanamo is profoundly cruel and cuts people off from their support system

so the US government can, quote, continue to violate their human rights out of sight. And finally, good news for Scottish cat lovers. In case you were wondering or scared or concerned, Scotland has made it clear it's not going to ban cats. First Minister John Swinney issued a statement after an independent report suggested that cats were a threat to wildlife. The Scottish Animal Welfare Commission said cats kill at least 700 million birds and other

animals in the UK each year. Last week, the commission recommended cat containment to keep cats indoors or on leashes. The suggestion caused a media frenzy with headlines from the Daily Mail like, quote, "...fury as households in Scotland could be banned from getting a pet cat. On Monday, Swinney was forced to clear up the rumours that Scotland was going to ban our feline friends. I can't quite believe I'm asking this First Minister, but does your government dislike cats? No. And we have absolutely no intention of banning cats. Can you keep clarifying, you're not considering an option to ban them in certain parts of

Scotland to protect wildlife? There's no way that's going to happen. I wish this was the extent of our problems. And that's the news. One more thing. The fork on the road deadline is today, and millions of federal employees are being forced to make a tough choice. Either they can stay on their jobs and potentially risk getting fired in two months because Elon Musk thinks they sneeze too hard, or they can accept a deferred resignation, go on administrative leave,

and leave their jobs in September. Maybe. The memo is markedly similar to the same one Musk sent to Twitter employees back in 2022. And federal employees should know that with Twitter, Musk promised a generous severance package to those who decided to leave and then just didn't give them severance. Unions representing some federal employees and the AFL-CIO filed a lawsuit on Tuesday seeking to postpone the deadline, calling the deal unlawful. A Massachusetts federal judge is scheduled to hear the case today. When we talk about federal employees, we're not just talking about folks who work in DC. We're talking about park rangers and VA doctors, and they're all feeling the brunt of the last

two weeks. So to learn more about how federal workers are feeling in this moment, I called up Crooked News editor Greg Walters. He works on the What a Day newsletter, and he heard from readers who work for the federal government. Greg, welcome back to What a Day. Hey, thank you, Jane. Greg, what have you heard from federal workers? So a little while ago, the writer of the What A Day newsletter,

sister publication to our podcast, put out a call out, just said, hey, are you being impacted by what the Trump administration is doing? What we got back was a tidal wave of anxiety, largely from federal workers, but also people in careers adjacent to the federal government, people who are servicing federal clients, and also the friends and family members of lots of different people. We heard back from dozens of people across the EPA, the Army, the National Park Service, the Veterans Affairs, HHS, FDA, Educational Department, and people are very, very worried about what's going on and their futures.

What are people most concerned about right now? Well, you know, I think for a lot of people, when they see the phrase federal workers, it can seem kind of vague, like these unnamed faceless people in the news, but these are real people making serious personal decisions about their lives on a daily basis. People are very anxious about the fork in the road email, which asks people to quit their jobs. They've also been very stressed out about all of the funding changes to like the government programs, to things they care about, because it's not just their own jobs.

It's that a lot of these people actually care about the mission that they're doing. There was one young woman, a federal worker, who had a baby in December. And her maternity leave ends in the spring. She gets this fork in the road email. Now she has to decide. She has just a few days to figure out if she should leave this job or gamble that it'll still be there for her in three months. Have you heard from anyone who is taking the buyout

that isn't a buyout or is thinking about it? Yes, we heard both ways. Some people are just tired and they're fed up, they want to go. And some people are saying, no, actually, we want to stay and fight, continue what we're doing. In fact, it seems the Fork in the Road email stiffened a lot of spines.

A lot of people said, well, I was thinking about getting out until I got this email and now it's like, no way, I got to stay. And you've also heard from people who aren't federal workers but count on federal funding to do their jobs. Yeah, that's right. I mean, for example, one person who worked for a state's Department of Natural Resources in the Fish and Wildlife Division, all of the salaries in that division come from federal grants, and they have just enough funds for the remainder of the year for 2025 until June. But in the meantime,

they don't know if they can pay for vehicles or like put out fires or stock fish or plant prairies for wildlife. And they said, this is bonkers. They can't make plans. They're not even a federal employee. Greg, as always, thanks for being here. Hey, thank you, Jane.

That was my conversation with Crooked News Editor Greg Walters. Before we go, if your only Grammy's takeaway is GIFs of Beyoncé looking confused, you have barely scratched the surface. On the latest Keep It, Ira and Lewis break down everything from the awards show. Then Edward Norton joins to talk a complete unknown, the Bob Dylan movie, not the future of democracy. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts

or watch on YouTube. That's all for today. If you liked the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, call your elected representatives, and tell your friends to listen. And if you are into reading, and not just about how you can call both Democrats and Republicans who are representing you in Congress and yell at them to do better, like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter.

Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Jane Coaston, and remember, we elect our representatives, we are not ruled by them. What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It's recorded in a mix by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producers are Raven Yamamoto and Emily Four. Our producer is Michelle Alloy. We had production help today from Johanna Case, Joseph Dutra, Greg Walters, and Julia Clare. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our executive producer is Adrian Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Giliard and Kshaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.