Inside Musk’s Government Takeover

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1:17Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist-landed company and needs your support. to subscribe, go to 404media.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Get access to that content at 404media.co. I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are two of the 404 Media co-founders, the first being Emmanuel Mayberg. Hello. And then Jason Kebler. Hello, hello. Good to be here. Yeah. So we're going to be talking about Musk and Trump and the US government, because it is an incredibly important series of stories and coverage right now.

2:08We're going to do it in a little bit different way. We're going to talk about that, then talk about two of our stories spread out a little bit. Jason, what did you want to like, sort of explain at the top? Yeah, I mean, I wanted to say that when Trump was elected, we did an article about how we were going to cover the Trump administration in the same way that we've covered previous administrations, because what the government does is very important, especially when there are so many gigantic tech companies who are involved in this administration in some way. And I think one thing that we said is we don't want to write only about politics and Trump and the government, because there's a lot of other things going on.

2:53there's also a lot of people reporting on politics at the moment and so there's a lot of like civilian stories that are happening like you know private companies doing things that we are working on and that we want to talk about and that we want to cover i think all of that said the outlets that are really rising to the occasion right now are wired i think we've done really good work and a few other like tech focused publications And one of the reasons for that is because this administration is obsessed with running the government much like a tech company. And a lot of the people involved in it are either former, current Tesla employees, Neuralink employees, associated with Elon Musk in some way, or they're like Silicon Valley venture capitalists.

3:39and so that's to say if you don't like uh you know politics in general and if you want to hear about something else this is not going to be that episode but we are not going to cover only this it's like our focus as a publication is not changing in the long term i think it's just in the short term there's so much happening right now we have very important sources who put themselves at risk to talk to us and so you know we're trying to report on what's going on and that takes a lot of our attention and resources and frankly like a lot of people are paying attention to what is happening right now and so we don't want to publish a ton of stories about unrelated things have no one pay attention to them and then you know them not getting the attention that they deserve i mean do you do you all think that's fair did we even need to say that uh i don't think we needed to but i think it's a fun sort of conversation and it helps people contextualize and understand.

4:37I mean, I would just stress that, you know, we are primarily a technology publication. We cover tech companies, we cover surveillance, privacy, sex on the internet, how all of these things intersect as well. But I would say like this election and this administration is probably the most techified administration it's ever been. um you have ai and the push from there and we'll get to that too i think our first story where we're talking about this push to have more ai in the u.s government and that will have impacts inside government also you know just ordinary people's lives you know and then of course as you say you have the musk connection as well the richest man in the world and the owner of multiple tech companies like it's no longer um it's no longer the time where people can say oh you should stick to tech i think that was stupid when people say and nobody said that to us to be clear i'm even thinking like way back to 2014 or something you know what i mean or um even defective being told uh stick to sports or something no no one's saying that to us all i'm trying to get across is that there is a massive amount of tech going on here and it's really really going to impact people.

5:54Emmanuel, what do you think about that? I think that if you don't want to hear about politics, you should become a paid subscriber and listen to our bonus section about libraries and AI. That's actually a very fair point, yeah. I mean, the story that Emmanuel published today is fantastic reporting on AI, which libraries, there's a political angle there too, which I'm sure we'll bring up. But yes, That was a fantastic investigation, and people are reading it. So obviously people care about other things that are going on as well, but most of the free section of this podcast is going to be about Musk's takeover of the federal government.

6:35Yeah, and before we talk about our story that we just published, based on leaked audio that we'll get into, let's just do a really quick rundown of what is happening or what has happened recently. because honestly, I'm losing track. We were writing that article and it's just hard to remember what happened from one day to the other. So, I mean, there's a few things like Musk's allies have gotten access to sensitive treasury data, right? Gained access to classified information related to USAID. Probably going to shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is an agency we covered recently because they've started taking action against some of the companies we cover, you know, like privacy and surveillance and all of that.

7:25Some of the people associated with Musk's Doge agency and then the agencies around that are very young engineers or coders from Musk's other companies. Jason, did I miss anything? I mean, you missed the government websites going down and the archiving of information, which we did talk about a little bit last week. but there's sort of like wholesale deletion of all of these big US databases. Anything having to do with DEI broadly defined, a lot of climate stuff is coming down. And then we've covered a lot of the efforts to archive that. I did a big piece about where that stuff continues to live on that you should go check out.

8:10But there's sort of the dual tracks here. There's the Musk track and the government website purge of government data, which we're actually more familiar with because that happened during the first administration as well. And you covered it then for Motherboards as well, right? Yeah. Whereas the sort of like, let's bring on Silicon Valley to start up a fight and automate the government is pretty new. I mean conservatives have always wanted to cut government programs and government funding and say you know the government is too big things like that but I think that the techification of it and the sort of like let's use automated systems and AI to do it is fully that's new as far as I know yeah that sounds about right alright how about we leave that intro there and then we'll have a quick break and then when we come back we're going to talk about one of the specific stories we just published about how a Musk ally is trying to push AI across the US government.

9:12We'll be right back after this.

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12:19All right, and we are back. here's the story that we all worked on actually all three of us uh it was kind of a scramble the headline is things are going to get intense how a musk ally plans to push ai on the government um jason i said we all worked on it and that is true but you did most of the heavy lifting here to be clear me and emmanuel more just helped out you know and contextualized that sort of thing I guess first of all what was this meeting who was involved who were they talking to and then we'll get into what was said yeah so maybe let's start with the agencies that are involved which I'll try to do as quick as I can so there's DOGE which the Department of Government Efficiency or it's called something else now to make it uh align with a specific acronym but there's basically DOGE, which is Elon Musk's thing.

13:19And the way that that agency was created was on day one, Donald Trump issued an executive order establishing DOGE. And the way that he did it was he took this agency called the US Digital Services, which falls under the Office of Budget and Budget. There's so many acronyms and remembering all of them, It's crazy, man. It's crazy. So it fell under OMB. And USDS was formed in the aftermath of the healthcare.gov debacle. We actually did talk about 18F a little bit last week, I think. But basically, USDS is this digital services department of coders, more or less, who hop between agencies and solve problems.

14:11And Trump renamed that, put Elon Musk in charge of it, and put it directly underneath the president. Let me just clarify one thing. The reason they renamed United States Digital Services is because he can't create a new agency whole cloth. So they had to basically rebrand one. Is that right? That's right. And he picked a specific one that falls under this special authority that I'm not going to get into right now because it's way too complicated. And I think I do understand it, actually. But basically, it is an agency that the president has a lot of control over. And he put it directly underneath his chief of staff, which means that it's not beholden to specific hiring requirements, which is why you have random people working there, more or less.

15:04It has different record-keeping rules, which we'll probably do more reporting on. But basically, there's Elon Musk and there's Doge. And then Elon Musk's Doge people have been going into different agencies. They have been essentially saying, under our executive authority, under the president, we are going to come help you cut costs. And what that means is we're going to help you gut agencies. So they've gone into USAID, which is the aid organization. They've gone into Treasury, as you mentioned. And they've also gone into this agency called GSA, which is the General Services Administration. We did talk about GSA last week.

15:41But they basically do a lot of coding for other parts of the government. They do a lot of standard setting for other parts of the government. And they also are in charge of government real estate and things like that. So under GSA, there is this agency called TTS, which is something technological services. Good. Yeah. So there's TTS. and then under TTS there's something called 18F and 18F is the it's technology transformation services and of course we know that it's just that when you're asked to list all the agencies and the acronyms it's fucking confusing yeah and the reason that I don't have all this in front of me right now is because we've literally been reporting around the clock constantly like normally we were we prepare more for this podcast so please forgive us because it's like we just published this story.

16:35Our hair is on fire. We're running around like crazy. So that's a huge preamble. But basically, there's this department called TTS. And the person in charge of this is a former Tesla engineer named Thomas Shedd. And so he's basically like a Musk plant at this agency. And so even though he's not technically part of Doge, he is like an Elon Musk ally. They're working very closely with Doge. And he oversees this group of hundreds of government coders. And so... They're basically government software engineers in a way. And they're like product managers. And they build products for the government, basically.

17:16And I know the word product is kind of strange to some people when you're talking about government. But that's also in the same sort of terminology that, you know, intelligence agencies use and that sort of thing. We're developing a product for XYZ or something. Right. So Thomas Shedd had a big meeting with these government software engineers, and we got audio of that meeting. And in that meeting, he talks about what he wants them to do, more or less. And this includes things like doing changes to login.gov, which is one of those products that Joseph just mentioned that the government works on, where it's a unified login system across all of the US government.

17:54So I have a login.gov account that I use to do things with such as like TSA pre-check and things like that. He basically said, I think it's important to read the quote more or less. But he said, you know, I'm going to need help with changes to login.gov. And one thing that he said was he wants to start using it as a mechanism to identify fraud and abuse within the government. identify US citizens who are defrauding the government in some way. And right now, login.gov doesn't have access to any sort of government information across agencies. It's just like a login platform. Yeah, it's just a way to authenticate in some ways to log in where, as you say, for TSA or whatever, or for the IRS or whatever it is, you don't need to make a different account for every single one, which is a massive pain, I imagine.

18:48So you just have this one account. but that he wants to add something to that. Yeah. So like you can't, if you, if you're on social security, if you're getting social security payments, you can use login.gov to log into social security, like social security administration to see your things. But login.gov doesn't have access to how much money you're getting from the social security administration, whether, you know, you have another account, like stuff like that doesn't have access to your personal information. And he wants to change that. So he said, quote, in this meeting with his employees, he said, quote, just like a fun one, we've been thinking through with login.gov, specifically in TTS, is login can't access government information on individuals.

19:32And so there's no connection that login has with social security or any other government system, even though we're part of the government. And so part of one of the things to work through now is how do we make it so that those agencies that have information of very secure APIs that can be leveraged by Login to further identify individuals and detect and prevent fraud.

19:58To summarize, it's like, how can we use Login.gov to detect fraud and identify the individuals who are committing that fraud? And then one of his employees on this meeting says, well, that would be illegal because there's a Privacy Act that says, you know, these government agencies can't just share information willy-nilly. Yeah, you can't just have one agency randomly one day start sharing social security information with another agency for the hell of it, basically. And there would need to be some sort of opt-in consent. There's actually that quote from the employee question. What was that quote exactly?

20:38He said, I think we were on the topic of login aggregating data. It's an illegal task. the Privacy Act forbids agencies sharing personal information without consent. And then Thomas Shedd says, the idea would be that folks would give consent to help with the login flow. But again, that's an example of something that we have a vision that needs to be worked on and needs clarified. And if we hit a roadblock, then we hit a roadblock. But we still should push forward and see what we can do. Emmanuel, I think you have some good insight on what he's saying here and why this is notable? I think the notable thing about it is that he makes very clear that they don't intend to break the law, right?

21:27He's not getting on the meeting and saying, here are the laws we have to break in order to do this, please break the law. He's responding to this question and saying, okay, I understand. We understand the legal limitations of what we're trying to do, but there is a vision. And they're striving towards this vision. And they sort of say, I don't know if we ended up quoting this, but at some point he even says, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. Which I think just tells you a lot about the mentality of the Musk camp in the government and what they're trying to do. They're looking at the rules and they're trying to navigate them to fit this vision of a startup-like streamlined organization with a ton of efficiencies.

22:17and we happen to be very lucky to have seen Musk do this very recently at Twitter. And I'm not saying that we know that it's going to look exactly the same, but we just saw him do this exact thing at a private company. And it gets pretty ugly. A lot of people lose their jobs. A lot of services go offline. The quality of services generally deteriorates. And the quality of their product overall is worse and less valuable. Right? So, I think... Yeah, I mean, that's partially true. But the other thing that seems to be happening here is they're saying, we have a vision and we're going to start doing stuff.

22:51And if it happens to be illegal, try and stop us. Or we'll figure it out. Yeah. I mean, in some cases, I think the attitude is try and stop us. I'm not saying Shed has that ethos in this because he's saying like, oh, we'll try to navigate it. But Musk certainly on Twitter is like, we're just doing stuff. We're gutting stuff. And we're getting access to the Treasury. And we're doing whatever. And, you know, there's many lawsuits that have been filed, but it's unclear which ones are going to stick, which ones, like, what actions are going to be taken and whether they'll be stopped. Yeah, and that's a mode of governance that is bigger than Musk at the moment.

23:32It is representative of what Trump is doing across the entire government, right? It's not just Musk that is laying down a goal that seems unfeasible and says, we'll figure it out. That is exactly what Trump is doing with the Department of Education, with the Department of Labor, with, I don't know, making Canada a state, whatever it may be. So how does AI and automation come into this? Because Shed talks a fair bit about that, especially at the top of the meeting. Yeah, I mean, he talked about a lot of things and we had audio the whole meeting. So one thing he talks about is having a team of coders.

24:10He basically was like, I need volunteers to help me build AI coding agents, meaning essentially like AI government employees that will write software for other government agencies, which is not... I mean, Mark Zuckerberg was literally talking about trying to do this at Facebook at Meta in an all hands last week. And so this is a Silicon Valley dream where it's like, we're going to have coders teach the AI how to write code. And then an individual human coder can be 100 times more efficient, or we can just deploy these AI coders to do a whole bunch of stuff. And then at some point, maybe there's human oversight to say, this code is good or this code is bad.

24:58I talked to one employee from TTS who is a software developer, and they were horrified by this proposal because writing government software is different from writing enterprise software in many cases. There's many more privacy laws. There's many more, you know, you're designing things to make sure that they won't break because a lot of times the software deals with things like social security payments or things that you like really need to not go down, which is part of why a lot of government systems run on extremely old technology. So there's that. They also talk about trying to train some of these AI on or using AI to analyze government contracts to determine fraud, abuse, duplicate contracts, things like that.

25:52You know, that could also be problematic where you just take an AI and say, go analyze all this stuff and then make decisions based on that. Yeah, ends up killing some contract that's actually really important or something. You know, like we look at a lot of US government contracts. I'm always going through procurement databases. And I always FOIA emails, often from GSA, because they're the ones sometimes touching the purchase of the product. And, I mean, I don't know. They're very professional there, you know. And you go through these emails and they're keeping track of stuff. And I've seen people be like, oh, we're still owed to this and that sort of thing.

26:33obviously that is anecdotal and just a snapshot uh and not an entire view of the u.s government but you sort of brought up motivations and that was what really stuck out to me when i was listening to this audio and what i pulled out which is that shed um again the musk ally really framed it almost like a private company trying to please shareholders at one point he says you know we're basically bankrupt as an agency, TTS. I believe an employee then says a question which is read out, which is something like, I don't agree with the bankruptcy claim. And then Shed replies, look, TTS is losing something like$200 million.

27:17If it was a private company, our shareholders would be telling us to do XYZ. And that is just so illuminating to me, because the government is not a private business. The government is not there to make money. the government is there to provide services and security and various other things to its citizens it's not there to make a buck like what do you think it's literally like a it is a government service and people make that argument about the post office sometimes where they're like the post office loses all this money and it's like well first of all the post office doesn't lose that much money there we won't get into it uh it's very it's a very well organized run organization but it's providing a service for millions of americans across you know the entire country uh and so the people who act like you can just like kill all this stuff and it having no impact is really wild i think uh there was another really illuminating question on there where an employee said we're not allowed to work more than 40 hours a week with you know because overtime rules and things like that.

28:22And he's basically like, yeah, we're working on that. We're working on that. Consult HR policies, I think, was also mentioned as well, which is like, you're just turning the government from a collection of civil servants into a fucking hackathon where everybody's going to gather around and try to churn stuff out. I don't know. That can work for private companies and startups. It's just the motivations are fundamentally different when we're talking about government, you know? All right, let's leave that there. We'll have a quick break, and then we come back. We're going to talk about the second story we did about Doge and Musk and that sort of thing.

29:04We'll be right back after this.