You should be very alarmed.. This is unprecedented, unsupervised, apparently unfettered access to financial information that even if it is only read out could do severe harm to the public at large, and if Musk et al have write access and control of the payment system (which appears to be the case) they can literally cripple the government and any organization, public or private, which utilizes or depends upon that system to conduct business, purchase goods and services, and pay employees and contractors. This is literally a wholesale highjacking of the federal government at a core level that is fundamentally even deeper than replacing every member of Congress with their pod clone.
Scott Bessent has plenary authority to at least temporarily reassign or place on administrative leave any Treasury department employee who does not follow his direction, and even AFGE might back and win a hypothetical legal challenge, it would not change the fact that Bessent will sooner or later come to “career bureaucrats” with a kid in college, or a spouse in chemo, or one mortgage payment away from going red on their bank account, who will comply because they can’t afford to do otherwise; indeed, that the top levels of government have now been taken over by a gang of venal, mendacious, vengeful criminals and the only recourse is to rely upon these ‘gray’ men and women dutifully holding back the tide of devastating undermining of critical and basic functions of civil governance at peril to their own livelihoods describes plainly just how dire this situation has become. The entire notion that a court order is going to put the brakes on what is already an enormously illegal excess of unlawful executive authority as well for an utter failure to protect government record keeping systems per 5 USC § 552 is so far beyond risible and into pertinacious naïveté it is difficult to imaging an adult human being writing that sentence with honest intent.
Elon Musk, of course, has never given a wet fart for what any regulatory agency or court has said, freely violating laws and buying favorable judgments, and now that he has upped his game to literally buying the influence over a president and extorting Republican congresspeople through threat of being ‘primaried’, isn’t going to stop just because some judge said so. What he’s doing is already illegal (and no, it is not the ‘grey area’ that many pundits are claiming as anyone familiar with federal government procurement, payment, and information systems can attest; access to these systems is very restricted and misuse of the, even by authorized people is cause for termination and even legal repercussions) and Musk doesn’t care because he is doing it under the aegis of executive order by a president who have been giving an infinite stack of ‘Get Out Of Jail Free!’ cards by a Supreme Court majority which has zero interest in preserving the rule of law where it conflicts with their ideologies and personal fealty to Trump.
All of these people declaring that “The law is the sole source of Trump’s ability to do anything. If law means nothing then Trump has no power.” seem to be willfully obtuse to the fact that Trump regularly breaks the law with impunity and his ‘power’ comes from one-sided loyalty and fear of defying his populist base, not some deep legalistic skill wielding. Trump and his facilitators will do what they want with virtual assurance that there are no legal ramifications and even little enough in the way of adverse publicity beyond a few gadflies and soon-to-be redundancied journalists at the Washington Post and New York Times.
Stranger