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      Democrats call for investigation into potential security breaches by Elon Musk

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      Senior Democrats are demanding an investigation into potential national security breaches created by Elon Musk’s takeover of certain federal agencies through his self-styled “department of government efficiency” (Doge).In a letter published on Thursday, the members of the House oversight committee say they are worried that Musk and his operatives have illegally accessed classified information and sensitive personal data at agencies including the office of personnel management (OPM), the US treasury and the US Agency for International Development (USAid).“There is no evidence that he, or any of his associates working under the ‘Doge team’ moniker, are entitled to access our government systems, nor is there any evidence that they have undergone the proper vetting to ensure the security of taxpayer and government data,” the letter said.It calls on deputy inspectors general at those agencies, and others including the education department, the General Services Administration and the Small Business Administration, to investigate potential national security breaches involving Musk’s team.“We are deeply concerned that unauthorized system access could be occurring across the federal government and could pose a major threat to the personal privacy of all Americans and to the national security of our nation,” the letter continued.The development comes as Democrats begin to crank up their opposition to Musk’s upending of US government systems and as a judge temporarily limited the unofficial department of government efficiency’s (Doge) ability to access the highly sensitive payment system of the US treasury that Musk’s associates reportedly attempted to use to block USAid payments.The ruling marked the first time that courts have limited Doge, which, in the last two weeks, has dug into the federal bureaucracy, pushing to shut down USAidand sowing chaos in the civil service.It came in response to unions that represent federal employees accusing the treasury of unlawfully sharing personal employee data with Doge. The ruling named two Doge associates who could be given access to the payment system – but on a read-only basis.At the same time a new poll suggests even some Republicans are becoming upset by the wrecking ball Musk is aiming at even more federal agencies, including the labor department.The number of Republicans who want Musk and Doge to have “a lot” of influence in the Trump administration has fallen significantly, to 26%, according to the Economist/YouGov poll conducted this week, reported by the Hill.The same poll taken in the days immediately after Trump’s November election win revealed that enthusiasm among Republicans for Musk’s role stood at 47%.The disquiet also appears to have spread to a number of Republican senators, who have begun voicing alarm at Musk’s tightening grip. The billionaire has moved to shutter USAid, and accessed payment systems and workers’ personal data at the US treasury, prompting a lawsuit and an agreement from justice department lawyers to back off, at least temporarily.On Wednesday, agents of Doge spread across several more government agencies seeking access to data, the Washington Post reported, including the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.On Wednesday night the Doge team, said to include inexperienced coders and engineers as young as 19, visited the US Department of Labor. Earlier in the week Doge workers entered at least two offices of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), making personnel changes and accessing IT systems.Musk’s next big target, meanwhile, appears to be the Department of Education, which Trump has repeatedly said he wants to shut down. Similar to actions taken at other federal agencies and departments, employees were told not to come to work or placed on leave, and dozens of workers were locked out of government email accounts and other computer systems.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Trump administration has set a Thursday night deadline for roughly 2 million employees in the federal government to surrender to buyouts or face the risk of being fired without compensation, although critics say there is no guarantee that those who accept will see any money either. On Thursday a federal judge suspended the deadline until a hearing on Monday.Democrats say Musk’s infiltration of the federal government, through an unofficial agency with no constitutional mandate or congressional oversight, amounts to a coup. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate minority leader, told the chamber on Tuesday that an unelected “shadow government” was conducting a hostile takeover and usurping Trump’s authority.“Whatever Doge is doing, it is certainly not what democracy looks like, or has ever looked like in the grand history of this country, because democracy does not work in the shadows, democracy does not skirt the rule of law,” Schumer said.The White House, in an apparent effort to provide cover for Musk’s operations, said the SpaceX and Tesla founder had been designated an unsalaried “special government employee” at Trump’s direction to root out inefficiency and waste in government spending.Trump himself has told reporters Musk “can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval”.But unease has been mounting among elected officials, alongside a growing number of lawsuits. On Wednesday night, justice department attorneys agreed to an order temporarily restricting Doge staffers from accessing the treasury department’s payment system. That followed a lawsuit from union members and retirees claiming Musk’s team violated federal privacy laws.In the House on Wednesday, the Wisconsin Democratic congressman Mark Pocan filed legislation called the Eliminate Looting of Our Nation by Mitigating Unethical State Kleptocracy Act, AKA the Elon Musk Act.“Elon Musk is ripping us off and like millions of Americans across the country, I’m pissed. I’m taking action [to prevent] grifters like him from getting richer while pillaging our tax dollars for himself,” Pocan said. More

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      Trump administration disbands task force targeting Russian oligarchs

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      The US justice department under Donald Trump is disbanding an effort started after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine to enforce sanctions and target oligarchs close to the Kremlin.A memo from the attorney general, Pam Bondi, issued during a wave of orders on her first day in office but not previously reported, said the effort, known as Task Force KleptoCapture, will end as part of a shift in focus and funding to combating drug cartels and international gangs.“This policy requires a fundamental change in mindset and approach,” Bondi wrote in the directive on Wednesday, adding that resources now devoted to enforcing sanctions and seizing the assets of oligarchs would be redirected to countering cartels.The effort, launched during Joe Biden’s administration, was designed to strain the finances of wealthy associates of Vladimir Putin and punish those facilitating sanctions and export control violations.It was part of a broader push to freeze Russia out of global markets and enforce wide-ranging sanctions imposed on Moscow amid international condemnation of its war on Ukraine.The taskforce brought indictments against the aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska and TV tycoon Konstantin Malofeyev for alleged sanctions busting, and seized yachts belonging to the sanctioned oligarchs Suleiman Kerimov and Viktor Vekselberg.It also secured a guilty plea against a US lawyer who made $3.8m in payments to maintain properties owned by Vekselberg.Prosecutors assigned to the taskforce will return to their previous posts. The changes will be in effect for at least 90 days and could be renewed or made permanent, according to the directive.Trump has spoken about improving relations with Moscow. He has previously vowed to end the war in Ukraine, though he has not released a detailed plan.The emphasis on drug cartels comes after Trump designated many such groups as terrorist organizations, part of a crackdown on illegal immigration and fentanyl trafficking.The shift also implicates enforcement of a US foreign bribery law that has led to some of the justice department’s largest corporate cases over the last decade. The unit enforcing that law, known as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), will now prioritize bribery investigations related to cartels, according to the memo.A wide range of multinational firms has come under justice department scrutiny over the law, including Goldman Sachs, Glencore and Walmart. Those large corporate resolutions do not typically involve cartels.“It is a radical move away from traditional FCPA cases and toward a narrow subset of drug and violent crime-related cases that have never been the focus of FCPA enforcement,” said Stephen Frank, a lawyer at law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan who worked on FCPA cases as a federal prosecutor. More

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      Aspiring autocrats are always more dangerous the second time they are in office | Jan-Werner Müeller

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      In retrospect, the weeks between the election and Donald Trump’s first executive order seem like a phoney war. Everyone knew that something bad was about to happen, but there was still a sense it might not be so bad. After all, Trump’s first four years had been less terrible than observers predicted. That was always a mistake: aspiring autocrats are most dangerous when they come to power a second time. But even those bracing for shocks could hardly have expected Trump to be so blatantly lawless and destructive once back in office. This approach – sabotage bureaucracies, violate the constitution, then see what happens – might now be applied to education.Trump’s choice of education secretary, pro-wrestling billionaire Linda McMahon, seemed positively harmless compared with figures like the walking talking threat to public health known as Robert F Kennedy Jr. Though she has an accusation of having enabled the sexual abuse of young boys in the wrestling world hanging over her, McMahon denies all wrongdoing.At least unlike Trump’s first education secretary, Betsy DeVos, McMahon seemed to have no particular investment in charter schools and predatory for-profit colleges. Perhaps nothing worse might happen than a push for conventional Republican policies, in particular voucher schemes that end up helping wealthier parents who are already sending their children to private schools.True, Trump’s executive orders also affirmed a desire for more “patriotic education”, possibly based on another amateur whitewashed American history as first formulated by his ill-fated 1776 commission. But these are no more than bombastic sounding wishlists: the federal government does not control curricula and most spending on education is local or strictly determined by Congress.Yet, the surprise is that Trump has not pursued the strategy familiar from other far-right populists in power, namely what scholars call “autocratic legalism”: observe formal procedures when legislating, but violate the spirit of the law and, ultimately, the constitution, as you pursue a relentless concentration of power. Despite the Republican control of all branches of government, Trump (and Elon Musk) have opted for a strategy of chaos, sabotage and evident lawlessness: destroying USAid and quite possibly now trying the same with the Department of Education.As lawyers have been shouting from the rooftops, departments cannot be undone by executive order; Congress needs to act. That was one reason why some observers suggested sitting back and relaxing before Trump came back into office; after all, he had threatened to kill the Department of Education before. In fact, the Republican party has been committed to the idea ever since the 1980s.Yet, Trump clearly feels emboldened to adopt the conduct long familiar from his businesses: just see how far you can push and see who will really sue. Of course, the imperative – break things, and if they were really important, someone else will put them back together – is also part of the worldview of his new Silicon Valley allies. And Trump might be forgiven for thinking that, after years of never having been held to account for anything – from allegedly inciting an insurrection to mishandling documents – he is the most unconstrained president ever.Courts might eventually put a stop to Trump’s sabotage of the American state. His administration might just disaggregate some of the functions of the Department of Education, let private actors take over loans and the states be responsible for special education (all of which will make the most vulnerable kids worse off), plus get rid of whatever Musk happens not to like on a particular day and then declare victory. But a lot of damage will have been done, including the intimidation of plenty of administrators in colleges and universities and possibly schools, which will do Trump’s bidding even in the absence of valid laws. Florida has set the example; and in the face of legal uncertainty, many adapt and self-censor.One executive order instructed the justice department to initiate a compliance investigation of a private institution of higher education with an endowment of more than $1bn. Deans may well be inclined to obey in advance and abolish anything smacking of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) – which like critical race theory, has now been redefined into an all-purpose political weapon. The spending freeze of National Science Foundation grants, possibly followed by a devastating attack on the institution itself through mass layoffs and the scramble to find the tiniest traces of DEI in existing projects – such as, God forbid, the word “women” – will have a major chilling effect.Trump does not have the authority fundamentally to reorient education; but, as we have by now seen, lack of authority does not equate to refraining from power grabs. The shock-and-awe tactics could further radicalize rightwing activists; civil rights enforcement in schools and universities over which Trumpists will have control might be both weakened and weaponized. One thing is sure: as with USAid, Trump’s actions manage to inflict harm on many individuals and cause major national self-harm at the same time.

      Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton University and is a Guardian US columnist More

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      What will Trump 2.0 mean for the global world order? | Stephen Wertheim

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      Many assumed that Donald Trump’s second term as president of the United States would turn out like his first. But this time looks to be different. In his opening weeks, the US president has taken a flurry of actions he never attempted before, wielding sweeping tariffs against the US’s neighbors, upending portions of the federal workforce, and attempting to change constitutionally enshrined citizenship laws through executive order.The early signs on foreign policy are no exception. In his inaugural address, Trump said next to nothing about the issues that have dominated US foreign policy for decades – matters of war and peace in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Instead, he spoke of expanding US territory in the western hemisphere (and going to Mars), harking back explicitly to the 19th-century tradition of manifest destiny. Astoundingly, Trump mentioned China solely for the purpose of accusing it, inaccurately, of operating the Panama canal. When he turned beyond the Americas, Trump’s most telling line signaled restraint: “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end – and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”Then Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, made even more pointed and intriguing remarks. Rubio ran for president in 2016 vowing to usher in a “new American century”, the mantra of post-cold war neoconservatives. But days ago, sitting for his first lengthy interview as America’s chief diplomat, he emphasized the need for a foreign policy grounded in the US national interest and said:“So it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was not – that was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the cold war, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. We face that now with China and to some extent Russia, and then you have rogue states like Iran and North Korea you have to deal with.”For a US secretary of state to announce that the world is now “multipolar”, or is inevitably heading in that direction, is historically significant. Hillary Clinton also used the m-word in 2009 at the start of her tenure in the same role, but she invoked it less than affirmatively: Clinton professed a desire to move “away from a multipolar world and toward a multipartner world”. Rubio, by contrast, meant that a world of multiple poles or powers is to be accepted, not resisted. He also implied that US foreign policy had long been off course, having taken unrivaled American dominance to be a normal or necessary condition when in fact it was destined to disappear. At the end of the cold war, Rubio explained: “We were the only power in the world, and so we assumed this responsibility of sort of becoming the global government in many cases, trying to solve every problem.”The message: no longer.Still, no longer could lead down any number of roads. Read against the Trump administration’s Americas-centric start, Rubio’s comments have provoked dread – or excitement, depending on the perspective – that the United States will radically reduce its political-military role beyond the western hemisphere even as it asserts its power within the Americas.For traditional figures in Washington, the fear is that Trump 2.0 will give China and Russia a free hand to command “spheres of influence” in their regions, so long as they permit the United States to police its own sphere. For advocates of US restraint overseas, the hope is that Trump will deliver on his promises to end the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, shift more responsibility for defending Europe on to the shoulders of European allies, and seek to find a stable if competitive mode of coexistence with China. If Rubio thinks the world is now multipolar, presumably it follows that the United States should abandon the approach it pursued in the bygone age of unipolarity – a grand strategy of “primacy” or “hegemony”, as scholars call it.Perhaps. Rubio, though, was not nearly so conclusive. Throughout the interview, he referred to the governments in Moscow and Beijing in adversarial terms, which hardly suggest a willingness to grant them spheres of influence. Nor is there a straight line from acknowledging the loss of unipolarity to abandoning primacy. Even in a crowded, competitive landscape, the United States could try to remain militarily stronger than every rival, retain all its globe-spanning defense commitments, and maintain a large troop presence in Asia, Europe and the Middle East simultaneously. Those are the elements of primacy. Rubio did not renounce any of them. The United States, in short, could still pursue primacy without enjoying unipolarity.Indeed, in associating multipolarity with the existence of “multi-great powers”, Rubio may have meant to affirm the outlook of the first Trump administration, which adopted “great power competition” as a watchword. For Trump 1.0, as for the Biden administration that followed, the rise of China and the assertion of Russia did not compel Washington to pare back its military commitments and presence. Quite the contrary. Over the two presidencies, Nato enlarged to four new countries, the US military presence in the Middle East (excluding Afghanistan) remained stable, and the United States deepened security cooperation with Ukraine, Taiwan and others.So far, the appearance of formidable rivals has done less to discipline US ambitions than to furnish US global primacy with a new rationale – to stand up to the aggressive and revisionist activities of America’s adversaries. As Rubio put it: “China wants to be the most powerful country in the world and they want to do so at our expense, and that’s not in our national interest, and we’re going to address it.”But Rubio did signal more restraint than a continuation of business as usual. Just after his remarks on multipolarity, he noted that the second world war ended 80 years ago and that “if you look at the scale and scope of destruction and loss of life that occurred, it would be far worse if we had a global conflict now.” Since the end of the cold war, US leaders have invoked the second world war almost exclusively to exhort the country to lead the world. Rubio, by contrast, did so to caution against the dangers of overreach. He continued:“You have multiple countries now who have the capability to end life on Earth. And so we need to really work hard to avoid armed conflict as much as possible, but never at the expense of our national interest. So that’s the tricky balance.”Quite so. In recent years, the risk of conflict between major powers has grown acute. The war in Ukraine – in which one major power is fighting directly on its borders and the other heavily arming its opponent – had no parallel during the cold war. A US-China military conflict over Taiwan would be ruinous. In a country unused to paying noticeable costs for foreign policy choices, and a world that no longer remembers the last general war, Rubio delivered a salutary message.The policy test, however, is still to come. If the new administration is serious about avoiding catastrophic wars, without exposing core US interests to great power predation, it will make a determined, sustained diplomatic effort to end the war in Ukraine and minimize the risks of escalation if initial talks do not succeed. It will explore politically difficult ways to reach a modus vivendi with China, including by offering assurances that the United States does not seek to keep Taiwan permanently separate from the mainland, a red line for Beijing.The new administration’s opening moves suggest some intention to find a more sustainable and less confrontational approach toward the world’s major powers. But if unipolarity is dead, the lure of primacy remains very much alive.

      Stephen Wertheim is a senior fellow in the American statecraft program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School and Catholic University More

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      ‘They’re hurting our children, our babies’: US schools on high alert amid Trump immigration raids

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      As immigration officers moved in on Chicago following Donald Trump’s inauguration, carrying out the president’s plans for “mass deportations”, the city’s schools began to notice waves of absences.Parents were picking up kids early, or parking a few blocks away – fearful immigration raids will target the pickup rush. In a city that has received thousands of new immigrant students in recent years, teachers made house calls to check in on families that were terrified of leaving their homes. At after-school programs for high-schoolers, educators passed out “know your rights” information for students to give to their undocumented parents.And all across the city, teachers and parents wondered how long the administration’s ramped-up raids would last before the pressure lifts.As the Trump administration moves forward with its immigration agenda, rescinding longstanding protections against immigration raids on school campuses and deploying hundreds of federal agents into residential neighborhoods and quiet suburban enclaves, educators across the US are scrambling to maintain safe spaces for students to learn.In some cities and states with hardline immigration policies, educators and civil rights groups are fighting to keep public education accessible to students regardless of immigration status. In Oklahoma, teachers and elected leaders are fighting the passage of a proposed rule requiring schools to ask for proof of US citizenship during enrollment.“Children – they can have the capacity to learn algebra only if they have a supportive environment,” said Alejandra Vázquez Baur, co-founder and director of the National Newcomer Network, a national coalition of educators and researchers working to support immigrant children and families. “And so every teacher is already an advocate.”Amid immigration raids, now teachers also have to grapple with their students’ difficult questions and fears about deportations. “Children don’t see immigration status. Children see friends,” she added. “What happens if students see their classmates plucked out of a classroom? So how do you explain these things to them?”In Chicago, educators had started preparing months ago for the impact of Trump’s deportation agenda on public school students. Teachers and school administrators coordinated safety plans, and brushed up on their legal rights.Even so, school staff found themselves rushing to support parents and children who were suddenly terrified to leave their homes, said Ashley Perez, a licensed clinical social worker at schools in Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood.As images of Ice agents ramming down the doors of undocumented immigrants circulated online and in the news, Perez – who is the director of clinical services at Brighton Park neighborhood council – said children began increasingly expressing worry that their parents would be taken away. She recently visited with a family that had not come to school for more than a week after inauguration day, and coaxed them to start sending the kids in by reviewing all the ways that teachers could protect them, and offering to help walk all the kids to and from campus.“And then we all sort of sat down, the parents and the kiddos, in their dining room to process some of their feelings,” Perez said. “Because there’s so much fear right now … and schools should be a place of stability, not fear.”In Chicago’s Pilsen – a largely Mexican American neighborhood – Chalkbeat Chicago reported that one high school principal told parents that though the school was doing the utmost to keep children safe, he would understand families’ decision to stay home.“Please know that while our school is safe and that our students will be protected while they are in school, I also understand that there is a lot of fear and anxiety among our families,” Juan Carlos Ocon, the principal, wrote in a message obtained by Chalkbeat.Roy, a second-grade teacher in Chicago’s south-west side, said he had already been fielding questions from his six- and seven-year-olds.View image in fullscreenMany of his students are new arrivals from Venezuela, who wound up in his classroom after a long, and often traumatic migration. “Last year, one of my students who came here from Venezuela would tell me stories about people not making it in the jungle, while crossing rivers,” he said. “ I was just not prepared for that type of conversation.”Now that the Trump administration has begun targeting Chicago for large-scale raids and moved to rescind the temporary legal status that has protected thousands of Venezuelans from deportation, Roy’s students are facing a fresh wave of uncertainty and trauma. The Guardian is not publishing his full name and the school where he teaches due to concerns his students and their families could be targeted by immigration enforcement.Many of his students too young to fully understand what is going on, or why the adults in their lives have been on edge – but others are keenly aware. Not long after Trump was elected, a student from Honduras explained to all his classmates what it means to get deported. “He said, ‘If you’re from Venezuela, you’re going back there. If you’re from El Salvador you’re going back there’ And he pointed to himself, ‘I’m from Honduras, so I’m going back there.’”Horrified, Roy tried to reassure the kids that he was going to make sure that everyone could stay right where they were, that the school had security that wouldn’t let Ice in. And he tried to joke around a bit. “I said, ‘You know, if they really do send you back, I’ll come too. We’re going to go to the beach,’” he said.For older children, some of whom are also worried about what they should be doing to support undocumented parents, Stephanie Garcia – the director of community schools for the Brighton Park neighborhood council (BPNC) – said she had emphasized the importance of staying focused on school, “so that their parents don’t have anything extra to worry about right now”.At after-school programs and community events, the BPNC has also encouraged older kids and young adults to get to know their own rights and make plans with their parents. “It’s difficult to tell a high school freshman, ‘Hey, encourage your parents to have a deportation plan just in case,’” she said. “Unfortunately, here we are.”It’s a scene playing out in many cities. In New York, teachers are using encrypted group chats to alert each other of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) sightings, and residents are volunteering to escort the children of undocumented immigrants to and from school. In Los Angeles on Monday, the school superintendent, Albert Carvalho, said that attendance across the school district, the second largest in the US, was down 20%, with about 80,000 students missing. He attributed the absences to both fear and activism, as students participated in nationwide protests against Trump’s immigration policies.“We have to figure this out,” said Emma Lozano, a pastor of Chicago’s Lincoln United Methodist church and a member of the city’s board of education. “It just gets me because they are hurting our children, our babies. It just isn’t right.”Parents, too, are struggling to explain the raids to their children. “They’re sad and they’re scared,’” said Lucy, who has an eight-year-old daughter and a 10-year-old son, both enrolled in a public school in Chicago’s Gage Park neighborhood. “And I have to explain racism, and how we are being profiled.”What has really helped, she said, is recruiting her kids to help her pass out “Know your rights” flyers to families after school. “They get really happy, like, ‘Mom we’re going to help so many people!’”Though Lucy, her husband and her children are all US citizens, several of their extended family members, cousins and close friends have been living in Chicago without documentation for years. The Guardian is not printing her surname to protect her family from immigration enforcement.As federal agents descended on the city’s immigrant neighborhoods last week, Lucy made grocery runs for loved ones without documents who were too nervous to leave their homes, and offered to do pickups and drop-offs for parents worried about being apprehended while taking their kids to school.“I’m nervous, we’re all a little nervous,” said Silvia, a mother of four children including two that are school-aged in Chicago. “But we have the confidence that if something bad should happen to us, we have the support of the community, of the organizations here.”The Guardian is not publishing Silvia’s surname because she is undocumented, and could be targeted by immigration enforcement. Silvia herself volunteers with the Resurrection Project, an immigrant advocacy organization distributing immigrants’ rights information at local businesses, and helping connect other immigrants to legal aid.Raids have always happened, she said – this isn’t all that new. “There’s a lot of bad information being passed around right now, and it’s creating panic,” she said. “But if we have good information, we don’t have to be afraid.”She has charged her eldest son, who is 26 and has a temporary authorization to stay in the US, with taking care of her eight- and 14-year-old children should she and her husband get arrested or deported. They have also prepared a folder with all of the family’s important documents, as well as a suitcase with essentials, that their son can bring or send them to Mexico.Other than that, she said, she keeps showing up to drop her kids off at school. Her husband is still going to work. “Sometimes if we’re afraid, we end up putting fear in our children, don’t we?” she said. “So we are calm … and we’re keeping the same routine.” More

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      President Trump fired me. Now it will be easier for the government to spy on Americans | Travis LeBlanc

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      Donald Trump fired me on Monday from my job as a member of the bipartisan Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board – a job he nominated me for twice. Yes, I am a Democrat. He also fired every other board member who is not a registered Republican. While most Americans have never heard of our board, which oversees national security agencies such as the CIA, NSA and FBI, we should all be concerned about the undermining of an oversight agency designed by Congress to ensure that government surveillance does not infringe our privacy and civil liberties.The board I served on was created to make sure that independent bipartisan subject matter experts – such as myself and my fellow board members – could keep a close watch on the use of new national security powers presidents were given to surveil Americans after 9/11. Our job was to look for abuses that threatened Americans’ privacy and freedom.Congress designed the board as an “independent agency” to keep it insulated from day-to-day politics. Members of the board must be Senate confirmed and are appointed to six-year terms so that they serve by law and design across two administrations. At least two of the five members must not be from the president’s political party, and in selecting those members the law requires that the president consult with the opposition party. That design helps to ensure that potential surveillance abuses – abuses that might be targeted at the opposition and not otherwise be known to Congress, the courts or the American public – are more difficult to hide behind invocations of national security and executive privilege. Despite Congress’s attempt to insulate the board from politics, I and other board members were fired before the end of our terms with no explanation. Our firings were clearly partisan, but Americans should not be fooled into thinking that board members have partisan agendas. I was nominated for my seat two times by Trump in his first term and confirmed by a Republican Senate. At a time when Democrats and Republicans were fleeing the federal government, I dutifully took up Trump’s call to serve in his first administration.My top priority while at the board was oversight of the FBI – a concern that I am confident the president shares. And since taking office, I have been criticized by Joe Biden’s national security council and earned praise from Freedom caucus Republicans for proposing reforms to ensure that federal surveillance activities are not being abused to spy on American citizens.The result of these historically unprecedented firings at our agency is that a board intentionally designed by Congress to be staffed on a bipartisan basis across administrations is now exclusively staffed by a single Republican. That Republican has previously aligned herself with Merrick Garland and the Biden administration in defending warrantless surveillance by the FBI on average Americans – a practice that a federal court in New York ruled unconstitutional last week. And worse, the board (which requires a quorum of three members to do anything) will no longer engage in any oversight of presidential surveillance of American citizens. In other words, by firing us, the president has extinguished independent oversight of surveillance activities of the exact kind that plagued Trump and Carter Page in past years.The same story is being repeated throughout the executive branch. Trump has fired many of the inspectors general whose job is to prevent government waste, fraud and abuse. He’s fired the heads of other independent agencies such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the National Labor Relations Board, with many others likely to follow. And he’s undertaking a swift purge of the civil service to get rid of anyone not perceived as sufficiently loyal.These partisan witch-hunts and firings need to stop. Congress creates independent agencies and insulates civil servants from partisan firings for a reason. They provide critical non-partisan expertise to Congress, the president and the American people on a wide range of critical issues from privacy, to securities regulation, to monetary policy, to transportation safety, to protecting American consumers from corporate abuses, to the storage of radioactive materials. If this week’s actions by the president become the new normal – and partisanship overrides Congress’s design and becomes the only criteria for holding a position in a federal agency – then our financial markets will be more volatile, our consumer products more hazardous, our skies and railroads more dangerous, and our civil liberties and constitutional rights less secure.

      Travis LeBlanc was a Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board member from 2019 to January 2025. He is a partner at Cooley LLP, a global law firm, and an expert on data privacy, cybersecurity and the regulation of emerging technologies. He has held key roles at the Federal Communications Commission, Department of Justice and California attorney general’s office More

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      It is Elon Musk who is now running the United States. Not Donald Trump | Moira Donegan

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      It’s one of the humiliations of our historical moment that the constitutional order has been destroyed by such stupid and unserious people. On the trail with Donald Trump, the billionaire Elon Musk, who financed Trump’s campaign to the tune of about $250m, pledged to cut $2tn from the federal budget, a project that promised to wreck the economy, destroy the nation’s credit, eliminate programs and institutions that structure people’s lives and create an international economic and leadership vacuum into which America’s rivals – namely, China – could step.This would have been ominous enough on its own. But because Musk is a narcissist and a nerd – because he insists on discarding solemnity and being ostentatiously irreverent and carefree as he destroys people’s lives – he named his new project the “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, a juvenile reference to a years-old internet meme featuring a shiba inu.It is under this idiotic banner that Musk has upended the American system of government, seizing an unprecedented, unelected and seemingly wholly unaccountable degree of personal power. Less than three weeks into the Trump restoration, Doge is well under way.The group is not a government department; Musk is not a cabinet member and has not been subjected to a Senate confirmation process. But he now reportedly has an office in the West Wing, along with one in the Eisenhower executive office building across the street. At his direction, a small group of coders and engineers – men reported to be aged between 19 and 25 years old – are fanning out across federal agencies, seizing control of their sensitive data and making proposals for massive cuts.Just days after Trump’s inauguration, Musk reportedly sent an email to all 2 million federal employees – subject line Fork in the Road – encouraging them to resign ahead of anticipated mass firings. Musk reportedly offered workers a buyout of seven months’ pay; it’s doubtful whether any of those who take him up on the offer will ever receive it.Musk and his young followers have moved to shutter specific programs that they deem wasteful – including those whose funds have been allocated by Congress – and to shutter whole departments. He has declared the closure of USAid, America’s foreign aid agency, and is reportedly looking to eliminate much of the Department of Education and the Department of Labor, along with privatizing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He has seized control of the treasury, and specifically the treasury’s payment system, granting himself a personal line-item veto on all government spending. He also has gained access to reams of private and sensitive data and has reportedly downloaded much of it on to private servers. He can access bank accounts, medical histories, income and debt records. If he cared to, he could look up your social security number.No one elected Musk and very little of what he is doing is legal. It is Congress, not some random rich guy, who is granted the power of the purse, because the citizens deserve to have a say, through their elected representatives, in how the government spends their tax dollars. Federal civil servants are protected by law from purges, because the federal bureaucracy is supposed to serve the people of the United States, not to merely function as courtiers and enforcers of whim for some entitled foreign billionaire who nobody has ever voted for.There is a chance that Musk will be told to stop his unconstitutional dismantling of the federal government by a court order, one he might even obey; there is a chance that he will get scared, declare a hasty victory and back off. But that chance looks more and more remote. Musk, now, has seized control of many of the organs of state. There also does not seem to be any way to stop him.Trump critics have long predicted an oncoming rift between Musk and Trump, but it’s not clear, exactly, that it is from Trump that Musk is deriving his power: his gutting of federal agencies and slashing of federal expenditures seems to be coming from his own preferences and impulses, not as any direction from the man who is nominally the president.It may be Trump, that is, who sits in the Oval Office, and it may be Trump who takes to television every few days to sign yet another executive order seeking to punish and humiliate trans people. But it is Musk who controls government operations and federal spending, and so it is Musk who is running the country. The constitutional order, now, is largely window dressing. The reality is that a foreign billionaire is running the state through a shadow government, and that his power has no formal check.Another humiliation of our era: that to merely state what is happening sounds hyperbolic, even unhinged. Musk, after all, is such a morally small man – so transparent in his corrupt self-interest, so childish in his peevish self-regard – that it is hard to countenance him as such a profound agent of history.He represents not so much the banality as the imbecility of evil: how shallow and vacuous it is. Yet Musk’s personal, private seizure of state power has thrown real doubt on whether the US constitution is still in effect. How can it be, if he upends its demands so heedlessly, and with such impunity? How can it be, if the power of the people’s elected representatives can simply be wished away by a man rich enough to buy anyone?For a long time now, it has been clear that America was slipping out of a liberal democratic mode of governance and into something more vulgar and less accountable, something more like a privatized racket for the rich that extracts from and punishes the people, but never responds to their will. We knew this was coming. I just didn’t expect it to be so embarrassing.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More