Elon Musk’s coup: what’s happening with DOGE and the US

Elon Musk and the team at the Department of Government Efficiency figured out one thing really fast: if you control the computers, you control everything. And so Musk and his merry band of engineers have spent the last week or so parading into various US government agencies and taking control of their systems. There’s so much about what’s really happening here — who has what access, when anyone will try and stop them, whether this small group really will successfully shut down agencies and convince thousands of federal employees to leave their jobs — that we don’t know. But however it shakes out, the X-ification of the US government is not a good thing.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we start by trying to, if not make sense of things, at least try and explain them. Nilay, David, and The Verge’s Richard Lawler talk about why DOGE is operating the way it is, how it has been able to so quickly assume so much control over the government, and what might come next.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, beginning with DOGE and tariffs:

And in the lightning round: