To survey the macro-market news landscape mid-week is just to collect and arrange stories about Donald Trump’s tariffs and the invasive species that is Elon Musk’s “DOGE” initiative.

The latter, I felt compelled to point out Wednesday at the risk of inciting irritability both among Musk’s critics and especially his acolytes, may well go down as the most brazen usurpation of government by a private citizen in US history. It’s also an unfathomably egregious intrusion into Americans’ privacy, and could represent a grave national security threat.

Let’s be clear about one thing up front: There’s no “department” of government efficiency. “DOGE” — and let’s not forget that even the name, a callback to what some might describe as Musk’s legal manipulation of the crypto market in 2021, is a troll — is completely made up. It’s not an agency, it’s not a ministry, it’s not a bureau. It’s a Trump-consecrated project.

“Project” is an especially apt descriptor for DOGE. If we’re honest (and very much contrary to his lady doth protest too much-esque proclamations, Musk’s anything but), DOGE is Project 2025’s civil service purge thinly disguised as a cost-cutting effort. Musk’s working to “dismantle the administrative state,” one of what the Heritage Foundation described, in the original Project 2025 document, as “four broad fronts that will decide America’s future.”

The ironies are myriad, and (far) too many to enumerate, but I’ll highlight a couple. The Project 2025 document laments the fact (and this is mostly factual) that “policy is no longer set by Congress at all, but by the Administrative State,” and not because the administrative state set about actively usurping Congress’s legislative authority (that’s what Musk’s doing), but rather because it fell in their lap when Congress effectively delegated that authority in order to evade responsibility for bad outcomes. As Project 2025 put it, “Given the choice between being powerful but vulnerable or irrelevant but famous, most Members of Congress have chosen the latter, pass[ing] intentionally vague laws that delegate decision-making [to] bureaucrats, not just unelected but seemingly un-fireable.”

The fix for this, we’re told by the Trump administration, is Musk, an unelected billionaire tech mogul who’s demonstrated both a willingness and capacity to set the policy agenda on his own, unilaterally. Trump still denies any connection with Project 2025, but the parallels are plain as day. Even the language and cadence is similar to Trump’s rhetoric.

In the same section on the administrative state cited above, the authors complained that in all matters, including foreign affairs, federal budgeting and policymaking, “ruling elites slash and tear at restrictions and accountability placed on them, centraliz[ing] power up and away from the American people.” That’s bad when the ruling elites are plural, and when the upward centralization process sees power accruing to “supra-national treaties and organizations” and “left-wing ‘experts.'” But it’s good, apparently, when upward power centralization finds all authority vested in the world’s richest person who, by his own account, suffers from a learning disability and clinical depression which he treats with ketamine.

If the goal’s to force Congress into reclaiming for itself a policy-setting agenda it wittingly yielded to unelected partisans masquerading as apolitical bureaucrats, then Project 2025 might succeed — accidentally. In Musk, lawmakers are staring up at a kind of grand mandarin (Grand Wizard?) who, in purging the bureaucratic “deep state,” is assuming for himself all manner of powers reserved for Congress including, alarmingly, to power to spend or, more aptly in this case, not to spend. To say Congress should be jealous of that power grab would be a good early candidate for understatement of the year.

A Congress which sits idly by while the world’s richest man, in an unelected capacity, seizes the power of the purse string, is a Congress which has given up on the Constitution. Perhaps more germane at a time when one party in America’s political duopoly cares nothing for the Constitution, a Congress which de facto cedes its spending authority to a private citizen is a neutered Congress and one that’ll see its capacity to engage in pork barrel, logrolling and everything else that makes life as a congressperson worth living, constrained.

As a charlatan, Musk’s gaslighting on DOGE knows no bounds whatever. This is a man who claims to be the standard-bearer for reactionary libertarianism. Colloquially, he’s the self-appointed leader of the “Don’t tread on me” bumper sticker crowd. That’s a group of people who, if you believe the misspelled signs in their yards, will shoot you even for looking in the direction of their property, so God help a representative from the federal government who knocks on the front door. It’s Ronald Reagan’s “I’m with the government and I’m here to help” joke, only not funny, and with shotguns and meth.

Musk’s not just knocking on doors, he’s kicking them down in the middle of the night and sending in a small army of twenty(or thirty-)-something data scientists to view the most sensitive of all sensitive data on American citizens. It’s a privacy invasion so flagrant that Musk’s able to pass it off as the exact opposite on the (implicit) notion that it can’t possibly be what it looks like.

To the reactionary libertarians among you (i.e., to the “Stay out of my life, government!” crowd) let me assure you: This is exactly what it looks like. Musk and a handful of nerds are working night and day to access every, single last bit of information the US government has on you and your family, and no one (including, probably, Musk) knows what they intend to do with it.

For what it’s worth (i.e., not nearly as much as Musk would have you believe), the cost-cutting effort’s not going well. Bloomberg, without using the word “lie,” reported on Wednesday that Scott Bessent’s claim of $50 billion in DOGE cost savings is wildly overstated. “[DOGE] says it has saved $55 billion in federal spending so far, but its website only accounts for $16.6 billion of that [a]nd that’s before factoring in an error that mislabels a contract,” Andre Tartar wrote, adding that DOGE’s total itemized savings to date come to just $8.6 billion.

Read that again: So far, Musk’s spelunking expedition has saved just $8.6 billion. “Immaterial” is wholly insufficient as an adjective to describe that sum in the context of the US federal budget. That’s not even a lot of money to Musk personally, let alone to Uncle Sam who, far from “broke” (as the silly meme suggests), can issue dollars at will. Or at least he could until a very (un)stable genius claimed for himself the spending power the Founders granted to Congress.

Meanwhile, DOGE could, through any number of channels, imperil America’s national security. As James Goldgeier and Elizabeth Saunders wrote earlier this month for Foreign Affairs, “even setting aside the legality of DOGE’s moves and the dangerous privacy risks to Americans from the breach of sensitive data, Musk’s activities present a national security nightmare.”

In the linked article, which you’re encouraged to read in full, Goldgeier and Saunders exhort the public to “consider what the intelligence agencies of US allies and adversaries see when the American president grants sweeping access to the basic systems that make the US government run to a team of young people who have no government experience, who may not have been put through standard personnel vetting processes and who work for an unelected figure with extensive personal financial interests in national security spending.”

Allies, they went on, see a problem, and may not be inclined to share intelligence with the US. Adversaries, Goldgeier and Saunders warned, “surely see an espionage and blackmail bonanza.”

Bottom line: Congress needs to shut DOGE down before it’s too late. Alas, the damage is almost surely done. It’s just a question of where, and how extensive it is.