Elon Musk, often described as Donald Trump’s shadow president, has quickly morphed into something much more dangerous: Trump’s co-autocrat. Hitherto, Trump’s biggest threat to American democracy came when he incited the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The event was typically Trump in that it was lurid, violent, theatrical, and televised. January 6, like Trump’s first term, demonstrated that he had the ability to menace democratic norms and spur on mayhem—but not to really control the ultimate operation of government.

For his second term, Trump has tried to make amends for that failure by recruiting true believers who share his passion for subduing the government, including running roughshod over the system of checks and balance. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who specializes in taking over large companies and remaking them in his image, has been Trump’s most important ally in this agenda, acting as considerably more than an aide. In truth, Musk is emerging as a government within the government, using the time-honored revolutionary tactic of developing dual power in order to seize control.

On Sunday, the Financial Times reported that

Musk vowed to unilaterally cancel hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of government grants after apparently gaining access to review the US Treasury’s vast payments system, a move that prompted the sudden resignation of one of the department’s most senior officials.

The world’s richest man, who bankrolled Donald Trump’s reelection campaign and was tasked by the president with running the cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency, boasted on his social media site X that he was “rapidly shutting down…illegal payments” after a list of grants to Lutheran organisations was posted online.

This is a remarkable power grab on Musk’s part, because he’s a private citizen who is still overseeing his vast fortune even as he claims authority to unilaterally slash government funding. Further, Musk is doing this on behalf of DOGE, which The New York Times accurately describes as “the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.” In fact, DOGE is not a real department authorized by Congress but merely the fiat creation of an executive order signed by Trump. DOGE is an advisory group that is usurping power the Constitution grants to Congress alone. Last week, Trump issued a memo to freeze federal funding for government programs such as Medicaid and SNAP, only to retreat in the face of both popular protest and an adverse court decision. Under the Constitution, Congress alone has the power of the purse, while the president is obligated to “faithfully execute the laws.” Trump’s attempt to arrogate the power to not spend money already allocated by Congress thus constitutes “impoundment”—a practice forbidden by long-standing practices and court decisions.

Waleed Shahid, a Democratic Party strategist and member of The Nation’s editorial board, distilled with bracing clarity the breathtaking scope of Musk’s power grab:

Not with tanks in the streets or militias at government buildings, but with spreadsheets, executive orders, and a network of loyalists embedded in the federal bureaucracy. In just the past few days, Musk’s hand-picked agents have seized control of Treasury’s 6 trillion payment system, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and the General Services Administration (GSA)—institutions that, together, function as the central nervous system of the U.S. government…. In any other country, experts would call it state capture, a textbook coup.

Because Musk and his DOGE minions have strong-armed their way into the offices of the Treasury, OPM, GSA, and USAID, they have access to an astonishing body of public data. Musk can, for example, find the Social Security number of any American citizen and also what funds (if any) they receive from the government.

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Musk is currently targeting mainstream Protestant churches involved in immigration resettlement. On X, the social media site he owns, Musk went after Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, DC, who delivered a sermon calling for compassion to immigrants at a service Trump attended. Musk retweeted a claim that Episcopal Migration Ministries received $53 million for immigration resettlement and said, “She’s on the take.” There is a strong element of political theater in this smearing of Budde, as in Musk’s attack on the Lutheran church. Government funding of social programs run by religious organizations is a long-standing practice and already a matter of public record. But Musk is trying to create the illusion that he’s uncovered a deeply buried government secret.

What’s scandalous is Musk’s nebulous status as both a private citizen and presidential crony, which has allowed him access to data that that can easily be abused. Coming from Silicon Valley, Musk knows that data is power. Now, he has access to the full data set of the federal government, which he is both hoarding to himself and preventing the public from seeing (many government websites have already been shuttered, allegedly as a temporary measure during the Trump/Musk riorganizzazione, including those with public health information and Census data).

Most disturbingly, Musk and his DOGE team have no proper congressional authorization. As University of Denver political scientist Seth Masket notes:

Elon Musk is not a federal employee, nor has he been appointed by the President nor approved by the Senate to have any leadership role in government. The “Department of Government Efficiency,” announced by Trump in a January 20 executive order, is not truly any sort of government department or agency, and even the executive order uses quotes in the title. It’s perfectly fine to have a marketing gimmick like this, but DOGE does not have power over established government agencies, and Musk has no role in government. It does not matter that he is an ally of the President. Musk is a private citizen taking control of established government offices. That is not efficiency; that is a coup.

The end goal of the coup is to give Trump and Musk control over the spigot of Treasury spending: in other words, control over the heart of the federal government that ensures the flow of money. In a post on Monday morning, economist Nathan Tankus assembled alarming reporting that makes clear Musk and his DOGE team are working toward control of Treasury’s computer network system. Tankus spells out the new power this would give Trump and Musk:

Without political control of the payment’s heart, the Trump administration and Elon Musk must chase down every agency and bend it to their will. They are in the process of doing that, but bureaucrats can notionally continue to respect the law and resist their efforts. They are helped in this effort by court injunctions they can point to. This is bureaucratic trench warfare. But if Musk and Trump can reach into the choke point, the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, they could possibly not need agency cooperation. They can just impound agency payments themselves. They could also possibly stop paying federal employees they have forced on paid administrative leave, coercing them to resign. These possibilities are what every Treasury expert I’ve talked to instantly thought of the moment they read the Washington Post reporting and are incredibly alarmed about.

Is anyone prepared to end this coup? In an earlier post, Tankus noted that describing an action as unconstitutional does little good if the system of checks and balances breaks down. Paraphrasing Joseph Stalin’s famous quip about the powerlessness of moral leaders such as the pope, Tankus asks, “…and how many divisions does the Constitution have?” There are likely to be court challenges, some of which will roll back parts of Musk’s coup. But the courts are a fickle—and in any case nondemocratic—remedy. Musk’s abuse of power is a massive encroachment on congressional power, but there is little reason to expect Congress will fight back.

Congressional Republicans have shown themselves to be abjectly servile to Trump, which makes remedies such as impeachment moot. Nor do Democrats at this moment have any fighting spirit. Instead, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has adopted the stance that it is best to keep the Democrats’ powder dry for future battles. Schumer told The New York Times, “We’re not going to go after every single issue. We are picking the most important fights and lying down on the train tracks on those fights.” It’s a bit distressing that even in this fantasy scenario, Schumer is not imagining rallying the public to counter Trump’s destruction of democracy. Instead, Schumer daydreams about Democrats tying themselves to the metaphorical train tracks, which he apparently believes (all evidence to the contrary) will excite the mercy of the Republicans to stop the train. This is the dream life of the willfully self-defeating—people whose only hope is that the bully will at some point get tired of beating them up.

More vigorous elements of the Democratic coalition haven’t given up the right. The grassroots group Indivisible notes,

The rules of the Senate are designed to protect the rights of the minority, and Democrats have tools at their disposal to grind Senate business to a halt if Republicans try to ram through Trump’s extremist agenda. The three biggest weapons? Blanket opposition, quorum calls, and blocking unanimous consent—parliamentary guerrilla tactics that can slow, stall, and obstruct at every turn.

Schumer is not entirely wrong to believe that Democrats need to pick their battles. My normal preference would be to focus on economic fights, which will emerge quickly enough as Trump’s tariff wars drive up inflation. But Musk’s coup is an economic matter as well an attack on the Constitution. Having the world’s richest man gain privileged access to government data, which he will then unilaterally use to slash spending, is the very embodiment of oligarchy. By making Musk’s coup a fighting issue, Democrats have a chance to appeal to the distrust of centralized power and wealth that spans the political spectrum. Polling shows the public is increasingly souring on Musk, who has a net approval rating of minus 16 percent (36 percent favorable, 52 percent unfavorable). It’s unlikely that very many Americans want Musk to have their personal information. If inflation ticks up, going after the super-wealthy who are self-dealing as Trump cronies will become an even more effective line of attack. A political party looking to turn around its own low approval numbers would do well to ferociously attack Musk now as a plutocrat destroying democracy.