Take it from a Never Trumper: If you’re holding your breath waiting for Congress to “reassert itself” against an immensely powerful right-wing demagogue, you’ll suffocate a thousand times over.

… Is this a “coup”? It’s certainly not violent. The constitutional framework remains formally intact. It’s just that no one with the authority to do so seems terribly interested in enforcing that framework to constrain Elon Musk.

… Per the Times, Elon’s team has “prioritized secrecy, sharing little outside the roughly 40 people” involved, and staffers have even gone as far as to refuse to give their surnames when interviewing federal workers on the job.

We haven’t yet reached the point of Trump-Musk goons barging into agencies in balaclavas and tactical gear to secure the premises. But when you’re weighing the legitimacy of a government action, whether relevant personnel feel obliged to conceal their identities in carrying out their tasks is a point worth considering.

…

Before you knock down a fence, Chesterton wrote, make sure you understand why it was put there in the first place. Musk’s approach to management is the opposite, TechDirt’s Mike Masnick explained last week. His oversight of DOGE resembles his oversight of Twitter in that both demonstrate “his authoritarian impulse to (sometimes literally) demolish systems without understanding them, and his tendency to replace existing, nuanced solutions with far worse alternatives (even when those older systems probably did require some level of reform).”

Moving fast and breaking things in the federal bureaucracy could actually lead to less efficiency in some cases, not more. A Biden administration veteran warned The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel that “even simple-sounding procedures—allocating government funds in a crisis like, say, a pandemic—require coordination among teams of civil servants across multiple government offices.” If you’re pulling Jenga pieces carefully and deliberately out of a teetering tower, you might successfully streamline the structure while keeping it upright. If you’re pulling them out willy nilly to show how bold and alpha you are (“Regulations, basically, should be default gone”), uh oh.

Before you knock down a fence, make sure you understand why it was put there in the first place. Elon’s response to that, in so many words, is “no fences.”

Nick Catoggio