Few have escaped the unconstitutional encroachments of Elon Musk(olini) (professional manchild) into US agencies, with his team of followers (at least 37 people, because the portrayal of the single, man “genius” simply doesn’t exist – they always rely on lots of followers and fixers).
Ostensibly they’re distmantling agencies (USAID was instituted by the Republican party in the 1990’s by the way) and “saving expenditures” for the sake of saving money and perhaps decreasing the US debt. Personally, I believe the real purpose is, primarily, to harvest as much data on the population as possible, to provide all of it to Muskolinis Grok AI. The scaling laws need more data, and why not harvest secret and non-official data? Without it, AI programs can neither proceed nor progress, and now Grok has an advantage. Whoever wins this war of artificial intelligence wins all of it (it is presumed) and can control the population with extremely sensitive data on virtually every American.
Secondly, Grok will have the capacity to surveil and weed out uncomfortable and inconvenient employees in the federal bureaucracy. If necessary, they’ll fire more people and bring in loyalists and sycophants to fill the vacant places.
As Ezra Klein put it: “Congress is a place where you can lose. […] Trump is acting like a king, because he’s too weak to govern like a president.” So, expect no resistance from the weak Republicans in Congress. And this is what happens to democracy and bureaucracy when “entrepreneurs” think they can play government.
From now on, I’ll follow the Canadian motto “Buy Canadian”, though in the way of “Do not buy American whenever you can avoid it.”