Musk’s Shock Troops: AI, Plutocracy, and the Erosion of American Governance
I spent over two decades working in government, including two years on Capitol Hill and 25 at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. During this time, I witnessed firsthand the critical role of knowledgeable, ethical civil servants in safeguarding the public interest. I observed how lobbyists, influenced by industry, often held more sway with policymakers than scientists, even when decisions involved potentially dangerous products like pesticides.
As I worked on Capitol Hill and at the EPA, I saw how industry sought government decisions on a variety of products. Some of these, such as pesticides, required EPA approval and could be lethal to humans and wildlife. Consequently, government experts evaluating them needed detailed, advanced knowledge of chemistry, biology, and toxicology. Unfortunately, the environment often favored politics rather than science with lobbyists, and not scientists, gaining the upper hand.
I experienced this conflict directly. Scientists presented arguments in detailed memos to protect human and environmental health. Simultaneously, lobbyists representing corporations, manufacturers, and powerful legal firms argued their products would benefit farmers and increase prosperity. This cacophony of competing interests, coupled with the troubling trend of deregulation, disturbed me.
I attended countless meetings of EPA scientists, industry lobbyists, and senior EPA policymakers. While the public interest sometimes prevailed, particularly in the early years of the EPA during the 1970s, the political appointees frequently made decisions that favored industry. Under both Democratic and Republican administrations, these decisions led to conventional, non-organic food being potentially tainted with neurotoxins and carcinogens, while ecosystems and wildlife faced threats of disease and destruction.
This stance led to accusations of being a “non-team player” and even attempts to have me fired. My life at the EPA became precarious, with constant scrutiny and even a plant in my office. Speaking out was both hazardous and expensive.
Despite this opposition, I refused to accept the prevailing deregulation, which compromised science and public health to benefit agribusiness. This moral dilemma angered and frustrated me. I found it difficult to accept that the U.S. was abandoning the rule of law and endangering its citizens and the environment.
Some colleagues shared my concerns, and they provided me with memos and reports over many years. This information and my personal experiences became the foundation for my 2014 book, Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA.
Today, in 2025, the current leadership of America continues to erode environmental policies in ways reminiscent of the Reagan administration of the 1980s. President Donald Trump, alongside his advisor Elon Musk, are actively dismantling the federal government, not for efficiency’s sake, but to fundamentally disrupt political and ecological systems.
Musk, often portrayed as a “wrecking ball,” embraces the idea of billionaires working long hours to justify their wealth. As David Brooks of The New York Times observed, Musk’s “DOGE boys”—the Department of Government Efficiency—“are mostly incompetent, so the fiscal effect will probably be tiny, but they are unleashing a reign of terror and intimidation that will affect the psychology of all federal workers.”
DOGE has demoralized and fired thousands of civil servants. In response to the actions of Musk, twenty-one government workers with expertise in data and digital services resigned, citing their commitment to serving all Americans, regardless of political affiliation. They wrote in their resignation letter of February 25, 2025, “We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations. However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments…[The] removal of highly skilled civil servants…endangers millions of Americans who rely on these services every day. The sudden loss of their technology expertise makes critical systems and Americans’ data less safe…[DOGE’s] actions are not compatible with the mission we joined the United States Digital Service to carry out: to deliver better services to the American people through technology and design. We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services. We will not lend our expertise to carry out or legitimize DOGE’s actions.”
I understand their courageous actions. The government will not be able to make informed decisions with the data scientists removed.
Erik Baker, a historian of science at Harvard, offers insight into Musk’s behavior, stating that Musk’s experiences in the tech industry, “have taught him that if you work harder than everyone else, you should be rewarded with unquestioned rule over your dominion. Now he is seeking to extend this logic into our government, transforming it, like one of his companies, into another personal fief.”
Musk brings the same deskilling and debilitating forces already seen in the private sector to the running of the federal government. Musk is an expert at replacing workers with machines. Baker suggests that, after Musk acquired Twitter, “he fired half its employees and informed those who remained that he would be imposing an ‘extremely hard-core’ management style; many of them took his offer to resign in exchange for three months of severance. Now Mr. Musk is applying the same playbook to the federal government, seeking to replace career officials with DOGE shock troops and machine learning algorithms.”
Firing workers increases profits for billionaires like Musk, and deregulation has downsides, from ecocide to diseases such as cancer, that take time to manifest. Climate chaos, however, is different. And the effects of the climate crisis manifest with an unprecedented rapidity.
I recall what I wrote in the Chicago Tribune in October 1989 where I pointed to petroleum companies for causing climate chaos. I did not know then that the US was warming 68 percent faster than any other country on Earth. The news came out in November 14, 2023, from the US Fifth National Climate Assessment. I wonder how politicians like Trump and Elon Musk, as well as most Republican politicians, can ignore such calamities and existential dangers after a decade of climate fires, heat waves on land and sea, ice melting, permafrost thawing, floods, droughts, and destruction of property costing hundreds of billions.
The Trump administration withdrew from the 2015 Paris Climate Accord. Are they extraterrestrials? Don’t they read? Do they hate science? And, finally, don’t they care about their children and grandchildren?
I remember the immoral effort of the Ronald Reagan administration to freeze the federal government. Vice President George Walker Bush demanded that federal agencies rethink projects costing over $100,000. Deregulation was a key Republican policy. Reagan dismantled the solar panels President Jimmy Carter had installed on the roof of the White House. His EPA administrator, Anne Gorsuch, fired the agency’s lawyers responsible for enforcing environmental laws.
Both Republican and Democratic politicians were blind to the industry corruption my EPA colleague, Adrian Gross, revealed. Gross, a pathologist, exposed longstanding chemical industry practices of falsifying data, including the International Bio-Test Laboratory (IBT) near Chicago, which provided fraudulent clean reports for hazardous pesticides and other chemicals tested for companies, states, and governments. EPA approved these dangerous chemicals based on IBT’s fake reports. Gross’s findings led to IBT being shut down in 1983, yet deregulation continues year after year.
By the early twenty-first century, the EPA was a shadow of its former self. Deregulation became official policy. Companies still “test” their pesticides and other chemicals. EPA scientists and even their own laboratories, were shut down. One of the laboratories closed tested the efficacy of antibiotics.
The EPA even removed public access to hundreds of studies it had funded.
As in Iowa, agribusiness lobbyists are convincing legislators to give immunity to pesticide merchants, preventing Iowans from suing companies for failing to warn about cancer risks. What Trump and Musk are doing are accelerating the toxic policies of the Reagan administration.
The industries will repeat the lies cigarette companies promoted, while our farmers sterilize the land, almost wiping out biodiversity, and even threatening honeybees with extinction, and animal farms become factories of disease, potential pandemics, and contaminated meat.
Frank Bruni of the New York Times observed, “Everything in Trump’s world is extreme, absolute, unnuanced, superlative. Worst ever. Best ever. “Like nothing that has ever been seen before.””
With diminished, dispirited, and frightened federal workers, industries will do exactly what cigarette companies did for over a century.
Trump and Musk talk about MAGA. But do they understand greatness? Alexander the Great earned that honor because of his strategic thinking and unparalleled courage, and he united the ecumene. He built cities all over Asia, with Greek institutions of civilization.
Trump and Musk are not building civilization; they are destroying it. They know that deregulation increases risk, corruption, disease and violence. These co-emperors intend to discard democratic American institutions, converting the country officially to a plutocracy. This means setting aside the rule of law and returning to lawless rule by weapons and wealth.
