Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs Soon after taking over, they created a crisis by shutting down huge segments of federal government spending, though they restarted at least some payments after a judge slapped them with a court order. Late Friday, Elon Musk seized control of the Treasury Department’s payment system, which disburses trillions of dollars and houses sensitive data about millions of Americans. Some of the people helping him take over the government — who include, as Wired reported, a half dozen engineers between the ages of 19 and 24 — appear to be even less experienced than the neophytes who staffed the C.P.A. in Iraq.Employees at the General Services Administration, which manages office space, transportation and technology for the federal government, told Wired that Edward Coristine, a recent high-school graduate who spent three months at Musk’s company Neuralink, has been on calls where “workers were made to go over code they had written and justify their jobs.” Another young member of Musk’s team, a software engineer named Gavin Kliger, set out an email to USAID employees informing them that the headquarters has been closed and they shouldn’t come in; Musk said that he’s “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”At the Department of Education, employees have been put on leave for doing diversity training sessions that their managers recommended, and The Washington Post reports that Trump will soon begin dismantling the department altogether. More than a thousand people at the Environmental Protection Agency who work on issues like climate change and reducing pollution have been told they could be fired imminently.Trump’s lackeys are purging the security services. Thousands of F.B.I. agents are being scrutinized for their work investigating and prosecuting the Capitol rioters, and according to The New York Times, scores or even hundreds of agents could be forced out. Meanwhile, leading administration jobs are going to cranks and fanatics. Darren Beattie, whom Trump reportedly plans to tap to be under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, wrote last year, “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.”Many are describing Musk’s assault on the federal bureaucracy as a coup, which isn’t quite right. Trump was, alas, elected, and delegated outsize power to Musk voluntarily. But the reason it feels like a coup is that we have no precedent for an administration treating its own government like a hostile territory to be conquered and exploited. In his memoir of America’s war on Iraq and its aftermath, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad described being ruled by “young, naïve zealots who held unchallenged powers to reshape Iraq the way their masters wanted. They represented the worst combination of colonial hubris, racist arrogance and criminal incompetence.” We’re now getting a taste of that experience.
