Imagine, for just a moment, you’re in the checkout line at your local grocery store. Your items have been rung up so you reach for your debit card, scan it, and something odd happens: The card is refused.
Figuring that you probably entered the wrong personal identification number, you try again. The same thing occurs: Card denied.
You look around and see a store employee approaching, suggesting that you come with him to the store office, where he proceeds to call the police.
Sound absurd? It’s likely to become an everyday occurrence across the United States thanks to Elon Musk and his computer programming minions who are taking over various government agencies, including the Department of the Treasury, where several of Musk’s computer experts now have access to the federal payment system which dispurses funds to every account in the United States.
Economist and researcher Nathan Tankus warns on his Crises Notes website that Musk and those who work for his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) can “eliminate the financial existence of anyone.”
“Musk, [Donald] Trump and their respective cronies have unrestricted access to your Social Security numbers, your confidential bank information, your confidential medical information and so much more,” Tankus explains. “This is true with just ‘read only’ access.”
Over the past few days, there’s been an online debate regarding whether or not Musk’s top computer expert, Marko Elez, can actually access information inside government computers or merely read what is in the system. That, according to Tankus, is little more than a “red herring.”
“It matters, don’t get me wrong,” Tankus notes. “As a source yesterday said, apocalyptic. But that source also said that ‘read only’ was ‘catastrophic.’ If the smash and grab operation commences just as stupidly, quickly and dangerously as it has so far, this could easily become identity theft by an untold number of people using their personally identifiable information within weeks.”
But more troubling is that Elez and others working for Musk could easily designate anyone as being suspected of money laundering, which would freeze all their assets and leave them unable to buy or sell anything anywhere in the world.
“In short, they can not just steal money but eliminate the financial existence of anyone they felt like, if operational control gets sufficient,” Tankus explains. “The week Trump won his second term, I told a room full of Democratic party operatives that ‘if the Democratic Party really believed Trump was a fascist, they would destroy the servers containing all the surveillance data.'”
Even if Musk and his computer minions were suddenly stripped of their access to government programs, Tankus ominously warns, they could still create “backdoors” into the Treasury Department that would be impossible to track or eliminate, meaning they would still have control of what gets spent.
“What happens if they are just embedded so deeply in the heart of government payments that there is no mechanism to dislodge them?” Tankus notes. “Court Injunctions are not self enforcing either … As we’ve seen, there are no armed law enforcement figures coming in to save the day and if Musk’s DOGE get deep enough into the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the only way to enforce the law is through street actions.”
Musk and his computer goons don’t even have to be trying to destroy the American financial system, Tankus explains. They might do so by accident. The results, however, would be just as catastrophic.
“Even a disruption for a day would be a disaster. A disruption on longer timescales would have unimaginable knock on effects. The Treasury could involuntarily default because of operational issues. The worst case scenarios, which are completely and utterly plausible at the time of writing, would be a catastrophe without precedent. No typical economic calamity like the Great Financial Crisis or even the Great Depression would be comparable.”
In other words, Elon Musk and those loyal to him may end the United States as we know it not with a bang, but with a whimper.
