Among his many other actions this week, Trump also withdrew the US from the United Nations Human Rights Council and ordered a review into its participation in UNESCO; initiated plans for a sovereign wealth fund that could buy TikTok; instructed newly confirmed Attorney-General Pam Bondi to create a task force aimed at rooting out “anti-Christian bias” at the Justice Department, tax office, FBI and other agencies; revealed he has ordered advisers to obliterate Iran if it assassinates him; sued the state of Illinois for frustrating efforts to round up illegal migrants; mandated an audit of all federal money going to NGOs; and barred International Criminal Court officials and families from entering the US if the court commits “transgressions” in its actions against Israel.
A man sells bread under the rubble of his bakery destroyed by the Israeli air and ground offensive in Jabaliya, Gaza Strip.Credit: AP
But it was Trump’s billionaire “first buddy” Elon Musk who, rather than the president himself, commanded attention from Democrats and spurred them out of their post-election malaise.
Musk and his youthful team of inquisitors from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have been granted unprecedented access to departments and their data, most notably Treasury’s payments system. They launched an all-out assault on foreign aid agency USAID, and began probing the Education Department, which is set to be gutted by an executive order later this month.
DOGE’s march through the bureaucracy has also alarmed Democrats, who led protests outside the headquarters of the Treasury and USAID in Washington. In other cities people gathered outside state parliaments to denounce Musk as an unelected autocrat operating in the shadows.
In the Senate, Democrats spoke all night on Wednesday and into Thursday afternoon to oppose the appointment of hard-right Project 2025 architect Russell Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget. The 920-page Project 2025 was a pre-election conservative blueprint that laid out plans for Trump’s second administration.
Trump, Musk and Vought were not “the disruptors they tell you that they are”, said Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey in a 2am speech, but old-fashioned grifters “putting their thumb on the scale for the well-off and well-connected”. The Senate later confirmed Vought’s appointment.
A demonstrator holds a fake cheque during a protest against Elon Musk outside the US Treasury building in Washington this week.Credit: Bloomberg
“You’re not seeing something new,” Kim said. “You’re seeing something that’s very old: just another power-hungry politician, elite figure, seeking to hoard power at the expense of real American families.”
The Trump administration sees it differently. They argue they are correcting out-of-control bureaucratic bloat and corruption, and in the case of USAID, saving taxpayers’ money from fringe or even anti-American exploits overseas. Their underlying message: Trump and Musk are running the show like a business.
“The American taxpayers deserve that,” Republican congressman Buddy Carter, a member of the parliamentary “DOGE Caucus”, told CNN. “[Trump] was elected overwhelmingly on these things … he told you he was going to do this.”
They’re not entirely without a case. The US Government Accountability Office estimates the federal government loses between $US233 billion and $US521 billion ($355 billion to $830 billion) a year to fraud, representing between 3 and 7 per cent of the $US7 trillion spent by the government annually.
The White House amplified many examples of wasteful spending, but they were often misleading. In an all-caps rant on Truth Social, Trump said it looked like “billions of dollars have been stolen at USAID, and other agencies, much of it going to the fake news media as a ‘payoff’ for creating good stories about the Democrats”.
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Trump claimed $US8 million had gone to the media organisation Politico, in what might be “the biggest scandal of them all, perhaps the biggest in history”. In fact, the payments are subscriptions to premium Politico products, and they come from across the government. “This is not funding. It is a transaction,” the news outlet was forced to clarify.
USAID took out one such subscription in 2024 – $US24,000 for an in-depth energy and environment service. Regardless, the White House said all $US8 million worth of Politico subscriptions would be cancelled. On Friday, the scale of the massacre at USAID became apparent, with nearly all 10,000 worldwide employees reportedly laid off.
Few arms of government were spared from the cost-cutting drive. The New York Times revealed that in order to comply with an executive order, the Central Intelligence Agency sent the White House an unclassified email with the first names and initial of new hires who could be easily dismissed.
Meanwhile, other efforts to remake the country or shrink the size of government were slowed by the courts. The Trump administration’s offer to about 2 million federal government workers to quit and be paid until the end of September was paused by a federal court judge in Massachusetts, hours before a deadline was due to expire.
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White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt, who earlier said more than 40,000 employees had applied for the buyout, told reporters the administration was grateful to the judge for extending the deadline so more federal workers who “don’t want to show up to the office” and “want to rip the American people off” could resign. “The Democrats can hoot and holler all they want,” she said.
In Washington, FBI agents are suing the Justice Department over attempts to curate a list of FBI employees who were involved in the investigation of the January 6, 2021 riots or Trump’s hoarding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
The extraordinary request is widely seen as a precursor to mass terminations, consistent with Trump’s long-standing determination to exact revenge on those he deems to have wrongly pursued him and the January 6 rioters – whom he pardoned on day one.
And a federal judge in Washington temporarily limited Musk and DOGE’s access to those sensitive Treasury payments systems, restricting access to just two DOGE embeds at Treasury.
However, one of those two employees, Marko Elez, abruptly resigned from DOGE the same day after The Wall Street Journal linked him to racist social media posts.
