These are deeply troubling times for the United States. Elon Musk has been granted unprecedented access to U.S. government data and systems, allowing him to reshape its operations as he sees fit. For weeks he and a team of volunteers and young coders from his companies have been on a rampage, firing officials and destroying government functions based solely on his own priorities.
For this reason, it’s important to understand:
The ideals that shaped Elon’s world view
What America gives up in allowing him to implement his vision
Whether he has the technical acuity to execute his ideals, and
The long-term consequences of his actions on the US and its citizens.
You may not be an American, but the tech elites who are the driving force behind such transformations have global aspirations. Don’t assume it can’t happen here.
Technocracy Incorporated & Apartheid
Elon’s maternal grandfather, Joshua Norman Haldeman, was a leader in Technocracy Incorporated, a social movement active in the United States and Canada in the 1930s. The movement advocated for a radical restructuring of political, social, and economic life, with science as its core operating principle. It envisioned a continental landmass called the Technate, governed by technical experts rather than elected officials. Sound familiar?
In October 1940, Canadian authorities arrested Haldeman for his involvement with Technocracy Incorporated, which had been banned as a subversive organization during World War II. By 1950, disillusioned with the movement -- and with Canada -- Haldeman chose to leave the country.
His destination: South Africa. According to The Guardian, Haldeman explained that the government's apartheid policies "encouraged me to come and settle here." In 1951, he went further, writing an article for the Saskatchewan newspaper, The Regina Leader-Post, defending apartheid and dismissing the native population as "very primitive" while praising the government's handling of the "native question" (source) .Elon's father, Errol Musk, confirmed the lure of apartheid to the family, stating that the Haldemans moved to South Africa because they "sympathised with the Afrikaner government" and its apartheid policies.
Technocracy Incorporated and apartheid -- these are the forces that shaped Elon’s worldview. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the DOGE team he leads assumes coding skills trump institutional expertise and that eliminating every diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) program is urgently necessary.
Nor should we be shocked that Musk spoke at a rally for Germany’s far-right AfD party earlier this month, encouraging its leaders to double down on their anti-immigration stance. But are technocrats, as Elon believes, best positioned to make decisions that will affect the lives of millions?
Technocracy vs. Democracy: The Myth of Unbiased Decision-Making
Democracy is messy. One set of constituents advocate for an issue that another set thinks is ridiculous. Compromises are sometimes, well, so compromised that it’s difficult to understand why anyone would bother.
The appeal of technocracy is that it sidesteps that messiness. Technocrats believe that decisions driven by technology are inherently objective, and free from the distortions of passion, belief, or ideology that makes democracy difficult. But is that true?
In reality, technology outputs are far from neutral. They reflect the biases, priorities, and profit motives of the individuals and corporations that design them, as Callum Cant, James Muldoon, and Mark Graham discuss in their book, Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labor Powering A.I. The book, well worth a read, goes on to assert that tech leaders, especially those in Silicon Valley, have shaped public policy without any oversight, public input, or meaningful democratic debate.
Take, for instance, Palantir, the data analytics firm founded by Peter Thiel. One of Palantir’s lines of business is predictive policing, which the company aggressively marketed to law enforcement agencies across the country. Advocates claim that by forecasting where crimes may occur, the police can better allocate resources, but the overwhelming evidence shows that it perpetuates racial bias, and a lot of misery. Still, thanks to the tech companies, predictive policing is becoming a policy priority without any public debate about its effectiveness, ethical implications, or whether or not predictive policing should exist at all.
Or consider Elon and SpaceX. The company has received some $20 billion in taxpayer dollars to pursue its build fast, fail fast, learn fast approach to rocket development -- aka the “hardware rich” approach. That fail fast bit refers to the number of times his rockets explode.
While proponents argue this method saves money, everyday Americans ask: Why must we spend all this tax money subsidizing SpaceX? Since 2001, Musk has said he wants to colonize Mars so that humanity may survive a climate apocalypse. And yet people ask, isn't it better to spend that $20 billion, say, helping everyday Americans install solar panels? Wouldn’t we generate fewer greenhouse gases if we stopped shooting up so many rockets? Is colonizing Mars a worthy goal?
But we don’t get a chance to weigh in on these questions. Elon has our president’s ear, and in his inauguration speech Trump promised, “We will pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.”
In mid-February, the New York Times reported on Elon’s web of influence. As it turns out, 11 different agencies were conducting 32 separate investigations, complaints, or enforcement actions into Elon Musk's six companies. But with the unprecedented power DOGE bestowed on him, Elon declared those agencies investigating him as wastes of government funding and began dismantling them.
For instance, Elon’s companies faced 24 National Labor Review Board (NLRB) investigations into alleged unfair labor practices and worker mistreatment. But Trump fired the Inspector General for the Department of Labor, as well as the NLRB chair. With the NLRB effectively paralyzed, Elon’s troubles have conveniently gone away.
This is not a dispassionate technocracy operating above politics for the good of the people; these are billionaires using a combination of tech tools and political influence to shape policy to ensure it serves their business interests.
DOGE: Incompetence Masquerading as Innovation
In the book, System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot, three Stamford professors lament the thinking their school instills in its students. They warn that once-prevalent idealism about technology is pure fantasy, though it’s difficult to dislodge that belief in certain tech circles.
Those professors aren’t wrong. Elon's technocratic ambitions rest on the assumption that technology expertise is best suited to solve society’s most complex challenges. Yet, his recent Oval Office press conference reveals just how little he and his DOGE team understand about the systems they've been entrusted to manage.
"There’s crazy things, like, just a cursory examination of Social Security and we've got people in there that are about 150 years old. Now, do you know anyone that's 150? I don't. OK. They should be in the Guinness Book of World Records, they're missing out,” Elon Musk told the world standing next to the Resolute desk. If I were in his shoes I’d factcheck stuff before opening my mouth.
It was a cringe-worthy statement, although Elon doesn’t seem to realize the extent to which it should embarrass him. You see, Elon and his fanboys stumbled across Social Security Administration records showing birth dates listed as May 20, 1875. They assumed this meant the agency was mistakenly paying benefits to people who should have died long ago.
What’s up with that date? On May 20, 1875, several countries convened to create the International Bureau of Weight and Measures with the goal of establishing uniform standards of mass and length for global trade. Later on the Bureau added rules for dates.
In this standard, May 20, 1875 serves as an epoch date, meaning it's a reference point from which dates are calculated. Let's say two companies in two different countries want to agree to a specific delivery date for goods; that date would be X-number of days after May 20,1875.
The Social Security Administration uses Common Business Oriented Language (COBOL), a programming language invented in 1959. A product of its time, COBOL uses May 20,1875 as a baseline, meaning dates are stored as the number of days AFTER May 20, 1875. When a date is missing, the system inserts May 20, 1875 as a default.
The geniuses at DOGE saw a bunch of records -- all with the exact same birthdate of May 20, 1875. Did they ask questions that you and I may find obvious? Did any of them think, "Gee, all these funny records have exactly the same birthday, maybe we should figure out if this is something idiosyncratic about this very old COBOL system?” Nah. They just assumed massive fraud and ran with the accusation. They saw a number, misunderstood its context, and rushed to declare a crisis.
This isn’t just a technical misstep. It’s a glaring example of what happens when self-proclaimed tech disruptors with no domain expertise are given the power to act on their own mistakes. Technocracy promises precision and efficiency but as we see with DOGE, all it can deliver is bluster, confusion and technological swagger parading as institutional expertise.
The DOGE Website: Amateur Hour on the World Stage
Ignorance of legacy systems is one thing. But the DOGE team, self-described as "the best and brightest," has made shockingly careless mistakes about matters they should have understood from day one.
On February 12, DOGE launched the doge.gov website, telling Americans they can "trace tax dollars through the bureaucracy." DOGE, of course, also promised that the site would take care not to reveal any state secrets but within hours of the launch it was clear they had failed spectacularly in keeping that promise.
The website publicly listed detailed information about the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) -- the agency responsible for managing the nation's intelligence satellites. The NRO's budget and personnel figures are classified, yet DOGE displayed this sensitive data for anyone with an internet connection to see.
Sorry, did it not occur to them that countries all over the world, friend and foe alike, would read the press release announcing the new site? Did they not realize spy agencies the world over would copy the entire site once it went live? In their rush to demonstrate the power of AI-driven government transparency, Elon and his team of tech-bros ignored basic data security protocols that every mid-level systems analyst knows.
But this isn’t the only utterly inept mistake DOGE made. The website also rolled out with a pretty significant vulnerability: It was connected to a publicly accessible database, one that anyone with a bit of curiosity and a connection to the internet could access and modify. Yes, the website intended to showcase the superiority of technocrats was left wide open to hackers.
The vulnerability allowed unauthorized users to push new entries directly to the live site. At least two such entries appeared, courtesy of bemused developers. One posted: "this is a joke of a .gov site" and another wrote "THESE EXPERTS LEFT DATABASE OPEN" -- using all caps presumably to help DOGE’s crack team of engineers notice their own incompetence.
Elon & Co. like to blather on about running the government like a business. But guess what? In a business environment, anyone with access to such sensitive data would be highly vetted. AND, they would be required to follow rigid standards for handling personally identifiable information (PII) and other sensitive information as laid out by the International Standards Organization (ISO), which replaced the International Bureau of Weights & Measurement in 1988. The ISO released a standard, ISO 27001 for handling sensitive data, with DOGE ran roughshod over.
I’m not saying that the government should run like a business (anyone who has battled insurance companies or telephone operators knows that’s a mistake). But Elon and DOGE can’t even meet that low standard.
Breaking The Government: Damage That Can’t Be Undone
The consequences of DOGE’s incompetence extend far beyond embarrassing website failures and reckless data leaks. We are watching the deliberate dismantling of the very institutions that keep Americans safe, informed, and prepared for the future. And if we let this continue, we must understand that recovering from the damage may be impossible.
DOGE operatives -- often young, inexperienced, and steeped in tech-world bravado -- are firing career civil servants with decades of expertise. Scientists at agencies like the EPA, NOAA, and NIH are being replaced by twenty-something tech enthusiasts who think coding skills are an adequate stand in for policy expertise. Why would a climatologist at NOAA or a public health expert at NIH ever return to government service after being summarily dismissed by someone barely old enough to rent a car?
The latest reports suggest DOGE has set its sights on NOAA, the agency responsible for producing the nation’s weather forecasts. The implications of crippling this institution are staggering. Accurate, real-time weather data saves lives, helps farmers plan their harvests, and allows businesses to prepare for storms and supply chain disruptions. Without NOAA’s modeling, emergency preparedness would be reduced to guesswork.
Do these DOGE kiddies think Americans can just check the Weather Channel? Do they have any idea where every weather station gets their data? It’s a legitimate question. Afterall, this is the same team that fired a bunch of engineers at the Department of Energy, unaware that those terminated employees were responsible for overseeing the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons (the government is now trying to rehire those employees).
‘Move fast and break things’ has been the ethos of Silicon Alley since the dot-com boom. But breaking a government is far easier than building one. Hollowing out agencies, driving out experts, and cutting off data sources may feel like bold, disruptive action to Elon and his team. But when the next hurricane strikes or the next public health emergency arises, the cost of their arrogance will be paid by the likes of you and me.
Our government is not a toy or a codebase that can be deleted and rewritten on a whim -- break it and it will be very difficult to rebuild it. We already see that happen as the government desperately tries to rehire the experts DOGE fired, including the Food and Drug Administration scientists who were on the front lines of combatting bird flu, and the Department of Energy scientists charged with overseeing the safety of America's nuclear arsenal.
And demonizing DEI isn’t just an attack on specific programs -- it sends a clear message that anyone who isn’t a white male must have been hired based on a quota rather than merit. It implies that their work is subpar, that they don’t belong, and that their presence in the workplace is something to be "corrected." Elon’s embrace of technocracy is no coincidence. It’s the worldview passed down through his family. Ditto for his disgust with the very existence of DEI.