The USA should delete Musk from power, Instead of deleting whole agencies as he demands

Nobody voted for Elon Musk to have a position of political power. But, since Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 47th President of the USA, Musk has used DOGE (a fake government agency) to invade real government agencies, and to start firing people and canceling contracts.

These actions are blatantly illegal and unconstitutional. The USA Government is divided into three co-equal branches of government: Judiciary, Legislative, and Executive. The Legislative branch, specifically the House of Representatives, has the power of the purse, meaning it creates the budget for each year, deciding which programs are funded, etc. The Executive Branch does not control the funding, the House of Representatives does.

Those of us who graduated from High School in the USA learned about all that before graduating.

The fake position Elon Musk holds, besides being fake, is to lead a fake Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), that is part of the Executive branch.

Therefore, it is not within the powers of the President or DOGE (if it were a real agency or department) to delete agencies, cancel programs, and so forth.

Further, that he holds the CEO or Chairman of six companies, including electric car maker Tesla, many of whom have government contracts, is an obvious conflict of interest. As pointed out in our last article, Elon Musk, fiduciary duties, his six companies PLUS his political activities, he is very likely ignoring his fiduciary duties and the shareholders of those companies should remove him from his CEO and Chairman positions.

According to the Associated Press, during a videocall to the World Governments Summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Elon Musk claimed “We really have here rule of the bureaucracy as opposed to rule of the people.” He went on to say “I think we do need to delete entire agencies as opposed to leave a lot of them behind,” and that “If we don’t remove the roots of the weed, then it’s easy for the weed to grow back.”

There is a tendency for governments to grow their bureaucracy and bloat. But, there is a procedure to go through, working with Congress to demand the elimination of various things. That’s the legal way to approach this problem. It allows all stakeholders to have a say.

Next, because of his position as CEO or Chairman of six companies, we have to question his motive for using DOGE to destroy parts of he USA government. Are any of the agencies he has invaded or threatened overseeing any of his companies?

For example, it’s reported that USAID, the first agency Musk attacked using DOGE, was investigating Starlink, a subsidiary of SpaceX, over how it handled sending Starlink terminals to Ukraine.

Ukraine is (was?) using Starlink terminals for remote control of long-range drones. It’s been reported that SpaceX/Starlink denied Ukraine’s ability to use Starlink terminals in certain areas around Crimea which then hampered Ukraine’s ability to attack Russian naval bases. It just so happens that Elon Musk has had many contacts with the Russian government, seemingly to do business in Russia. Did Musk attack USAID to stop this investigation?

Another issue some discuss regarding USAID is that agency’s role in helping South Africa end the Apartheid policy. As a white South African, Elon Musk grew up on the privileged white-person side of Apartheid. But, the Musk family is not just any white South African. Musks grandfather, Joshua Hamilton, was a white supremacist Nazi originally from Canada who moved his family to South Africa because of the Apartheid regime (Wikipedia). It’s possible Musk took on destroying USAID as a personal act of revenge.

Another overlap is Elon Musk’s call to overhaul the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). As ProPublica notes, the FAA is one of the regulatory agencies overseeing SpaceX’s operations. Could Elon be looking to browbeat the FAA into allowing SpaceX to do whatever it wants?

There are plenty of other potential conflicts of interest between Elon Musk’s personal needs, the needs of his businesses, and the regulatory oversight by many government agencies. Musk has had frequent tussles with the SEC, the NHTSA, and more. Tesla, as the vendor of solar panels and Power Walls, is surely under the scrutiny of the Dept of Energy and FERC.

I started this blog, LongTailPipe, because of a commitment to having electric vehicles and renewable clean energy technologies to completely replace the fossil fuel and gasoline vehicle industries. I’ve written many glowing articles about Tesla over the years. I used to strongly support Tesla, its mission, and believed that Elon Musk was committed to those goals. Frequently, when finishing an article I’d immediately rush to the Tesla careers page to look for a job at Tesla, and I did send in several applications.

Times change. Those of us who have a similar dream of replacing fossil fuels with clean energy technology must recognize that Elon Musk has at least lost track of the mission and that it’s possibly much worse than that. His Nazi salute a couple of weeks ago was probably not a mistake.

Elon Musk is leading an illegal and unconstitutional effort to – as he now demands – delete large portions of the USA government, while there are obvious huge conflicts of interest with the companies where he serves as CEO or Chairman or otherwise has a personal ownership stake.

Elon Musk deserves to be under indictment, facing trial, with the DOGE fake agency abolished, and removed from his positions as CEO or Chairman.

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About David Herron

David Herron is a writer and software engineer living in Silicon Valley. He primarily writes about electric vehicles, clean energy systems, climate change, peak oil and related issues. When not writing he indulges in software projects and is sometimes employed as a software engineer. David has written for sites like PlugInCars and TorqueNews, and worked for companies like Sun Microsystems and Yahoo.