Elon Musk’s Third Reich
In the pantheon of human beings who made principled resignations in the name of democracy, let us not forget the twenty-one employees who left the legally non-existent Department of Government “Efficiency” en masse. “We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopordize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services,” they wrote. “We will not lend our expertise to carry out or legitimize DOGE’s actions.”
For those former employees I hope there are plenty of principled companies out there eager to hire them. Those are the kind of people any company should be proud to employ.
As to those who remain, who continue to gleefully dismantle crucial government services that save actual American lives in real-time, who work diligently on a salary of mere thousands to further enrich their avaricious employer with billions, I have nothing but contempt. I have harsher words than that for the aforementioned remaining DOGE-bags, for the goose stepping marionettes of the Nerd Reich, but I remind myself that Palmer Report is a family news outlet.
To add embarrassment to their venality, they really suck at their jobs. So far all of the “waste, fraud and abuse” they claim to have “found” turns out to be wrong, including allegations of fraudulent payments of $8 million to the Reuters news agency, which turned out in fact to be TRSS, a separate US legal entity governed by a board of directors that operates independently from Reuters News. The irony is that for decades TRSS has served different administrations by preventing fraud, supporting public safety, and advancing justice. Hardly the profile of corruption.
The rush to identify and attack innocent programs or make irresponsible claims of corruption — such as the preposterous lie that USAID sent fifty million dollars to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas — is revealing, if anything. It’s characteristic of the desperation of people who need to find corruption to justify their existence — but cannot. Musk needs real cover to hide behind what he’s up to, which is, ironically, his very own waste, fraud and abuse. And it’s nothing new.
The greatest source of waste, fraud and abuse in any room that Elon Musk occupies is Musk himself. The Washington Post recently uncovered staggering amounts of taxpayer funds that have found their way into Musk’s pockets over the years. Ironically, the richest man in the world is one of the biggest earners paid from public money. Musk could very well be history’s biggest welfare fraud.
So Elon Musk is the richest man in the world thanks in part to US government funding. Just last year, at least $6.3 billion was committed to Musk’s companies. Musk used his status as the richest man in the world to impress Donald Trump so he could be given the most powerful position in the new administration, and therefore the world.
But wait, there’s more to the corruption irony. The very taxpayer dollars paid out to scum like Musk (which, interestingly, spells “Skum” backwards) have elevated him to a position where he can rob those same taxpayers of critical benefits necessary to keep some of them alive! It is a dizzying, widening gyre of pure evil.
Republicans in Congress are slowly coming to the terrifying realisation that they are living between a nightmare rock and a horrorshow hard place. On the one hand, their constituents — even their MAGA constituents — hate Elon Musk and what he’s doing to their jobs and their Medicaid benefits with a purple passion. On the other hand Musk is Donald Trump’s golden boy. What’s a corrupt, unscrupulous, crooked politician to do?
It gets better. The Post also discovered 52 contracts with seven different government agencies that are set to pay Musk another 111.8 billion dollars over the next few years. All seven agencies have come under DOGE’s scrutiny and these payouts are curiously absent Musk’s usual outrage-signalling.
Elon Musk is set to be the world’s very first trillionaire, and he’s going to do it on the public dime. If that isn’t waste, fraud and abuse, I don’t know what is. If DOGE were for real — and it isn’t, of course — the Fuhrer of the Nerd Reich, Elon Musk himself, would be its very first casualty.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.