White House mysteriously shuffles US AID office, placing focus on Musk and staff

A dramatic re-organizing of a bureaucracy shrouded in stagecraft and vitriolic language opens new questions of control

(“The Bobs” in the classic Office Space explain why not paying “Milton” is not the same as firing him.)

Was it a dusty restructuring of American bureaucracy or one tech oligarch’s latest stab at a coup?

One narrative which quickly emerged Monday as people returned to work in Washington, was that the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, had added ownership of the United States to his already massive portfolio, which includes a global satellite network, spaceships, electric cars and massive digital publishing world. 

Musk himself goaded it along with wild proclamations that he had single-handedly closed an arm of the United States government.

“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk said. (But Musk himself later said the move had been directed by President Donald Trump.)

The argument from the Trump White House and conservatives has been to paint the U.S. charitable agency, which invests in poverty reduction programs and more around the globe, as a de facto rogue agency inside the government unaccountable to anyone. (Musk deemed it “criminal” but did not explain the alleged crimes.)

What emerged through the day Monday seemed more to be a carefully crafted mirage, akin to President Donald Trump’s vaunted stagecraft of yore, with very real chaos and confusion ensuing.

White House staffers emailed workers at the U.S. Agency for International Development to tell them not to show up for work. A large man stood in front of the turnstiles at the US AID office Monday morning blocking entry. Democratic Sen. Andy Kim marched to the building but was refused a meeting with US AID’s top bureaucrat.

And then, after a few hours, hundreds of miles away in Central America, Secretary of State Marco Rubio casually announced that he was now running U.S. AID – an effort which Trump telegraphed a few days ago, amid questions of whether it can be done without changing the law.

“There are a lot of functions of US AID that are going to continue, that are going to be part of American foreign policy, but it has to be aligned with American foreign policy,” Rubio said during a stop in El Salvador.

The dramatic and traumatic initiation followed a longstanding pattern from the Trump administration.

Trump himself paraded massive tariffs which promised to shutter exports – including the many avocados needed for Super Bowl parties – but backed off the threat against Mexico for a month after Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum agreed to send 10,000 Mexican troops to the U.S. border to curtail drug trafficking. (At this writing there was not yet an update on the promised tariffs against Canada.)

UFOs swarming the airspace around military installations in New Jersey and Virginia, which dominated headlines for weeks?

The White House press secretary tossed out as an aside at her first press conference last week that there was nothing there to worry about, which is the same thing what the administration of former president Joe Biden had been saying for weeks. 

But the apparent stagecraft has put a laser focus on the mysterious operations of the White House, its staff and the rebranded U.S. Digital Service (tucked within the executive order which “established” the Department of Government Efficiency is the lesser acknowledgment that they just put a new name on the IT group inside the White House.) 

This even amid a flood of news from the second term for Trump, including:

• The mass pardon for violent rioters in the January 6th insurrection, the mass firing of law enforcement who investigated the January 6th attack and Trump’s absconding from the White House in 2021 with boxes upon boxes of classified documents, the mass firing of internal government watchdogs and more.

• An assault on independent media via lawsuits and replacing traditional media with access partisan outlets and activists.

• The start of deportations of undocumented immigrants, including raids on school and churches

• Executive actions opening up new access to oil drilling, the re, re-naming of Mt. McKinley in Alaska, dubbing the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America

• And the widespread elimination of federal “DEI” programs and information, including the removing references across innumerable government websites

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People working for the rebranded digital office have been emailing workers repeatedly since Trump took office. But they don’t seem to have all the power they’re projecting.

The offer of a worker “buyout” turned out to be a rebranding of the federal deferred resignation program, and opened questions of whether workers who take the deferred resignation would even be paid for the time they’re gone.

The White House staffers at the rebranded digital agency did shut workers out of their computers and digital systems through the Office of Personnel Management.

The White House staffers also gained access to the highly sensitive U.S. payment processing system in the Treasury Department, which controls trillions of dollars in payments for the entire country, after a dramatic fight with the non-partisan bureaucrat who used to run it, David Lebryk.

And the staffers have shuttered public communications and websites, moving communications exclusively in some cases, on to online publication of the digital agency’s leader, Elon Musk. (After the plane crash at Reagan National Airport last week, the National Transportation Safety Board stopped sending updates via email and began using Musk’s publication to announce updates.)

Some of the mysteries of the new White House staff could be dispelled, however, in court.

A number of worker unions, nonprofits and others have filed federal suits citing violations by Musk’s rebranded White House digital agency, including alleged violations of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which mandates public disclosure of actions and other public information.

For now though, much of the country remains on edge looking for answers from and about mystery White House group.