‘Be careful what you say, what you type and what you do’: Elon Musk’s creepy White House act
Billionaire Elon Musk’s team have been accused of carrying out a seriously chilling act as part of a wider Trump administration plan.
Are you insufficiently loyal?
Or are you just not vocal enough in lauding the right boss’s brilliant ideas?
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) auditors are using AI to scour social media and emails to assess civil servant fealty.
US President Donald Trump’s DOGE has been tasked with slashing public service jobs, cancelling government grants and restructuring the country’s financial system.
The stated purpose is to eliminate waste, fraud, “over-governance” and any job that “did not align with the administration’s mission”.
It’s supposed to free up $US1 trillion in cash to address America’s national debt.
However, DOGE is accused of vetting staff based on partisan political criteria.
It’s doing so by accessing communications services such as Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, X and Facebook and running all posts through an AI-enhanced filter.
“We have been told they are looking for anti-Trump or anti-Musk language,” an anonymous source linked to one of DOGE’s most prominent targets, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), told US media.
“Be careful what you say, what you type and what you do.”
The accusation comes amid revelations a far-right lobbyist has been assigned to vet White House officials for their loyalty to President Donald Trump. And at least one departmental head has been subjected to a lie-detector test.
But the EPA itself has denied the “outlandish” accusation of loyalty assessments.
“EPA is not monitoring or transcribing phone calls, meetings, or calendar entries,” it said in a statement.
“The agency is not using AI as it makes personnel decisions in concert with DOGE,” an EPA spokesperson later told US media.
“The agency is, however, looking at AI to better optimise agency functions and administrative efficiencies.”
DOGE has yet to respond to the allegations.
Move fast, break things …
“Expansive DOGE cuts are taking place rapidly, with what even some Republicans characterise as a distinctly ideological mission,” argues UK think-tank Chatham House analyst Max Yoeli.
“And it is far from certain that DOGE is achieving its key objective of saving taxpayer dollars.”
The fact that government waste, outdated services and overly bureaucratic procedures exist is not disputed. What they are, however, is.
DOGE claims to have saved US taxpayers $A225 billion in its first two months of operation. But its accounting of these savings is riddled with errors and false assumptions.
Conservative public relations executive Sarah Selip says controversy is the inevitable outcome of DOGE’s success.
“When DOGE rolls in with receipts, you can bet the swamp starts bubbling,” she writes for The Heritage Foundation.
“Recently, more than 100,000 people marched on DC in what was billed as a grassroots response to DOGE’s ‘destruction’ of the federal government. Translation? Career bureaucrats and activists are terrified they’ll be forced to justify their budgets.”
But the team of young auditors hand-picked by the world’s richest man and Special Government Employee Elon Musk are allegedly evading any such oversight for themselves.
A federal judge ordered DOGE to hand over all its records for legal scrutiny on March 10. DOGE has yet to comply.
It argues it is exempt from record-keeping laws as it is part of the President’s Executive Office. It also uses this argument to bypass privacy and data protection provisions.
Now the DOGE team is accused of using the self-deleting Signal chat service and multi-user Google Docs to avoid leaving a digital trail of their deliberations.
“There’s multiple people in one Google Doc editing things simultaneously,” one EPA source accused.
The EPA has had 600 employees forced onto administrative leave pending legal challenges to the status of their jobs. White House officials have said they want to slash 65 per cent of the environmental law enforcer’s budget.
Wrongthink crusade
“Trump has reportedly used denialism – about Joe Biden winning the 2020 election and that January 6 entailed pro-Trump protesters violently assaulting police officers – to help vet appointees for senior national security and intelligence posts,” argue US political science professors Joe Wright and John Chin.
“Loyalty tests can screen for appointees who will enthusiastically carry out a president’s agenda and follow orders – even if asked to break the law.”
The acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was reportedly subjected to a lie-detector test after details of an Oval Office discussion leaked to the media.
Lie detectors are generally regarded as “junk science”.
They were invented as a heart-rate monitor.
Some claim this can be used to infer whether or not a subject is telling the truth.
Most US states do not permit detector results as legal evidence.
Administrator Cameron Hamilton met with Homeland Security director Kirsti Noem and controversial Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski. Noem accused Hamilton of leaking details about the extent of her planned cuts – despite having detailed her intentions on social media a day earlier.
Hamilton reportedly passed the test.
Another controversial Trump adviser, far-right social media celebrity Laura Loomer, has been given access to the White House with the express purpose of weeding out disloyalty. She was reportedly behind the recent firing of two senior National Security Committee (NSC) members.
“You know the NSC officials I reported to President Trump are disloyal people who have played a role in sabotaging Donald Trump,” Loomer stated in a post to Musk’s X social media platform.
Trump defended her role.
“Always we’ll let go (of) people — people that we don’t like or people that we don’t think can do the job or people that may have loyalties to somebody else,” he told reporters on Air Force One.
Brookings Institution governance analyst Benjamin Wittes says this is a deliberate campaign to repress opposition to his MAGA agenda.
“Eviscerating the internal oversight mechanisms of a variety of different agencies and firing politically suspect prosecutors, FBI agents, and military lawyers served two functions simultaneously,” Wittes writes.
“They make clear to the bureaucracy that there is room only for yes-men and yes-women in wielding power, and they thus position the government to comply with future commands to go after enemies and protect friends.”
Jamie Seidel is a freelance writer | @jamieseidel.bsky.social
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