ELON Musk has launched a campaign of slashing jobs and closing federal departments with nothing but contempt for Congress.
Musk, the world’s richest man, was appointed by president Donald Trump as his adviser and placed in charge of a team called the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge).
Doge despite its name is not an official agency of the federal government, instead the remit handed to Musk by Trump is to rampage through the various government agencies to carry out mass closures and sackings of federal employees.
Musk demonstrated his fitness and appetite for this job when he bought Twitter (now rebranded X) and immediately sacked 80% of the workforce. The fact that he handed the Trump presidential campaign about $250 million was clearly an added bonus.
Tearing up all the barriers and laws that inhibit the ability of the bosses to extract maximum profit is just what Trump and the ruling class need as the US drowns in a debt mountain of over $37 trillion while its economic supremacy over the world is fast disappearing.
Trump came to office on January 20 pledging to slash $2 trillion from the federal budget with immediate effect. It only took a few days into his presidency for Musk and his Doge outfit – by all accounts staffed with computer software engineers plucked from Musk’s businesses – to start the process.
Reportedly, Musk sent an email headed Fork in the Road, to all 2 million federal employees encouraging them to resign before mass sackings were imposed.
Musk reportedly offered workers seven months pay if they accepted resignation – an offer that few, if any, believe would ever be honoured. This was just the start.
An article in yesterday’s Guardian paper by it US correspondent Moira Donegan – headed: ‘It is Elon Musk who is now running the United States. Not Donald Trump’ – points out that ‘Musk and his young followers have moved to shutter specific programmes that they deem wasteful – including those whose funds have been allocated by Congress – and to shutter whole departments.’
In addition she writes: ‘He (Musk) has seized control of the Treasury, and specifically the Treasury’s payments system, granting him a personal line-item veto on all government spending. He has also gained access to reams of private and sensitive data … he can access bank accounts, medical histories, income and debt records.’
All this is being carried out without any authority from Congress by an unelected multi-billionaire promoted by Trump to do what is necessary to slash federal spending, close down any department deemed wasteful by a capitalist class desperate to shore up the profits of the bankers and giant corporations.
Just as Trump is tearing up international laws with his latest policy of driving over 2 million Palestinians out of Gaza, demanding Canada become a province of the US and threatening to invade Mexico and Greenland – at home all the old bourgeois democratic rules are being shredded.
Although this has found its expression in the sharpest way in the US, the same drive of capitalist governments for a ‘bonfire of regulations’ is taking place in the UK under a Labour government, obeying the demands of the bosses and bankers, for an end to all the laws that Chancellor Rachel Reeves declares restrict economic ‘growth’.
The world economic crisis is driving the most powerful capitalist nation in the world to drop the façade of bourgeois democracy and turn to the naked dictatorship of the ruling class over workers at home, and driving imperialist wars and slaughter on the people of the world. The time is over-ripe for the powerful working class of the world and their allies amongst the masses to resolve the crisis by taking power and advancing humanity out of a bankrupt capitalist system with socialist revolutions.
The urgent task today is the building of a leadership in the working class that is prepared to organise and lead the revolutionary seizure of power required for the victory of the world socialist revolution.
This means building up the WRP and Young Socialists in Britain and building sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to lead the world socialist revolution to its victory.
