Elon Musk is staging a coup.

Not with tanks in the streets or militias at government buildings, but with spreadsheets, executive orders, and a network of loyalists embedded in the federal bureaucracy. In just the past few days, Musk’s hand-picked agents have seized control of Treasury’s 6 trillion payment system, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and the General Services Administration (GSA)—institutions that, together, function as the central nervous system of the U.S. government.

If this were Pakistan, Chad, or Venezuela, the headlines wouldn’t hedge: A billionaire oligarch seizes control, dismantling democracy in real time. Musk’s loyalists, armed with executive orders instead of rifles, are gutting the civil service, locking officials out of government systems, and dictating policy from a boardroom-turned-war room. Trump, a fading strongman, is the figurehead; Musk, the junta’s real leader. Treasury, national security, federal agencies—one by one, falling under private rule. In any other country, experts would call it state capture, a textbook coup. Here, the press still asks if democracy is in danger, as if waiting for the moment history makes it undeniable.

Last week, the administration attempted to freeze federal funding for programs like SNAP and Medicaid. The move was so legally dubious that courts intervened, forcing a reversal. But the broader strategy remains intact. Senior career civil servants at multiple agencies, including the Treasury, the Office of Personnel Management, and the FBI, have been fired or sidelined. Reuters reported that Musk’s aides have locked government officials out of critical data systems containing the personal information of millions of federal employees—actions that raise serious cybersecurity and oversight concerns.

But the most dangerous move so far? The takeover of the Treasury’s payment system. According to the Washington Post, David A. Lebryk, the highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department, resigned after refusing to hand over control of the system, which processes everything from Social Security and Medicare to government contracts.

Musk’s team now has full access to the Treasury’s payment system, a vast infrastructure responsible for disbursing Social Security checks, Medicare benefits, tax refunds, and government contracts—essentially the financial arteries of the federal government. This unprecedented move grants Musk’s unelected operatives the ability to monitor, delay, or even block payments, giving them de facto control over trillions in government spending with no oversight, a level of power that could reshape the very function of the state.

Musk’s allies—former Twitter enforcers, Tesla engineers, and xAI interns—are now embedded in key agencies. Companies tied to Musk, including Palantir, Neuralink, and The Boring Company, are influencing White House policy, using government access to consolidate power and implement sweeping cuts under the guise of “efficiency.”

As outlined by Lindsay Owens, if Musk gets his way, he could freeze payments to programs Trump opposes—bypassing Congress, sidestepping the courts, and enacting de facto budget cuts unilaterally:

The richest man in the world, whom no one elected to any government position, is seeking unprecedented access to confidential information, including information pertaining to his own business interests, and seems hell-bent on cutting off as much funding as possible for the programs that matter to the rest of us.

The Playbook

Nathan Tankus lays out how the administration’s recent memo, issued by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), attempted to freeze all federal financial assistance with just 24 hours' notice. The legal foundation was so weak that a federal judge was already moving toward an injunction when the administration quietly rescinded the memo. But this was just a test run. Musk’s team, led by OMB General Counsel Mark Paoletta—who has openly argued that the Impoundment Control Act itself is unconstitutional—is working to build a legal justification for broader executive authority to pick and choose which federal programs survive.

The Supreme Court has historically upheld Congress’s power of the purse. But Trump’s legal team argues presidents have broad discretion over spending, especially in times of fiscal crisis. And, as Tankus notes, the administration could use the debt ceiling as a pretext to create indefinite “programmatic delays” in spending—essentially starving government programs while avoiding outright legal defiance of congressional appropriations.

But the playbook is clear: push the boundaries of executive control over spending, dare the courts to intervene, and keep refining the legal justification for stripping Congress of its constitutional authority. Musk’s operatives, now embedded in key federal agencies, are laying the groundwork for an aggressive expansion of impoundment, arguing that the president, not Congress, should dictate federal spending. Trump’s team isn’t improvising—they’re executing a well-honed strategy to seize control of government spending, one legal gray area at a time.

The Orbán Model: Dismantle, Disorient, Dominate

What’s happening isn’t just Trump returning to his old habits. It’s something more systematic and strategic—a deliberate effort to remake the federal government, not just run it differently. This is Viktor Orbán’s playbook: seize control of the levers of power, neutralize independent oversight, and make sure that even if the opposition wins an election down the line, they inherit a system so broken it can’t function.

This is why Musk’s influence is so dangerous. Unlike previous Republican presidents who chafed against bureaucracy but ultimately played by the rules, Trump now has a billionaire technocrat who wants to dismantle the system itself. The purge of career officials, the seizure of financial systems, the sidelining of congressional spending authority—it all points to a government where power is concentrated in a small, unaccountable circle, and where even basic functions like Social Security payments or Medicaid funding become subject to the whims of the executive branch.

This coup doesn’t come with a banner. No tanks on Pennsylvania Avenue, no balcony speeches. Just a billionaire CEO waltzing into the Treasury, a president gutting the DOJ, and government workers locked out of their offices while a former Twitter exec resets their passwords.

And the opposition? Refreshing their feeds, voting with Trump’s party to expedite deportations, drafting another fundraising email, offering solemn warnings from the floor of Congress. As Seth Masket writes, there are tools at their disposal—rules to obstruct, courts to overwhelm, bodies to stand in the way—but instead, we get statements about norms and faith in institutions already hollowed out. Meanwhile, Musk and Trump dismantle the government in plain sight, looting the state and blaming “diversity” for the wreckage, and the only real question left is whether anyone will make them stop.

The question isn’t whether Congress or the courts will act—it’s whether they’ll act before the damage is irreversible, before power is fully privatized, before it’s too late.