Did you hear about the Friday coup?

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Story updated Monday 2/3 at 10:45pm AM

This week felt like the first battle of a long war—and that’s because it was. On Monday the White House Office of Management and Budget announced a freeze on all federal funding, and—aside from that order being blocked by a judge later in the week—it was all downhill from there. The enormity of the week culminated in a deluge of distressing developments on Friday that you may or may not have heard about.

Elon Musk has, for all intents and purposes, taken control of the inner-workings of the federal government. As the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), he’s been given a mandate by President Trump to severely cut the number of federal government workers by whatever means he sees fit, like pressuring them to retire early or accept a deferred resignation. He’s also been tasked with slashing spending—and if it benefits him personally as well, that’s fine, too.

Friday began with the news that the highest ranking nonpolitical staffer and acting director at the US Department of Treasury was retiring after a dispute with Musk’s henchmen. They wanted access to the payment system that the government uses to disburse trillions of dollars, and David Lebryk, a career civil servant, was not having it. 

Lebryk was the only thing standing between DOGE taking control of the system that pays out Social Security and Medicare benefits, federal salaries, tax refunds, among many other crucial systems. And on Saturday, we learned DOGE has, in fact, been handed full access to the nation’s wallet by newly-confirmed Department of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

“Mr. Musk, who has been given wide latitude by President Trump to find ways to slash government spending, has recently fixated on Treasury’s payment processes, criticizing the department in a social media post on Saturday for not rejecting more payments as fraudulent or improper,” the New York Times wrote. “It is not clear whether the team led by Mr. Musk, the world’s wealthiest man, has blocked any payments since gaining access to the system.

“It’s like a bank heist and the bank is America,” a source in the federal government told me. “Not really being hyperbolic to say control of those systems would allow an extremely fast collapse of the economy. Imagine it’s a plumbing system and someone takes a sledgehammer to the central pipe.”

While remarkably shocking, Musk was open about choreographing these moves ahead of time. “We have to reduce spending to live within our means,” Musk said at a virtual pro-Trump town hall in late October. “And, you know, that necessarily involves some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity.”

Now the hardship is in full swing.

We also learned Friday that Musk aides had locked out some career civil servants at the Office of Personnel Management—the federal government’s human resources arm—from their computer systems and agency databases containing sensitive information about millions of Americans. 

“We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems," one of the officials told Reuters, who broke the story. "That is creating great concern. There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications."

In another stage of the takeover, Wired reported Friday that Musk and friends had infiltrated yet another agency:

“I believe these people do not want to help the federal government provide services to the American people,” a current GSA employee told Wired. “They are acting like this is a takeover of a tech company.”

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has been under direct attack since day one of the administration as part of the executive order banning foreign aid—but Friday, things escalated. Per ProPublica:

On top of all of these harrowing developments, many government agencies got word that their websites would be taken down if they did not scrub any mention of DEI in compliance with Trump’s Executive Order by 5pm ET Friday. Most major agency websites appeared to stay online after the deadline, but people noticed that specific pages or information within specific pages had been removed. 

Over at the Federal Health Resources and Services Administration website, the page for their Advisory Committee on Infant and Maternal Mortality had been noticeably edited. All links to letters and recommendations from the committee had been removed, a source said, including recommendations on issues facing Black women and American Indian/Alaskan Native women. You can view those reports here and here. 

The Bureau of Land Management has taken down two articles about a highly respected Civil War-era Army laundress who, only upon her death, was found to have been assigned male at birth. “From a modern understanding, ‘Ma’ Nash seems to fall under the umbrella of transgender identities,” one of the articles about the quest to learn Mrs. Nash’s full story, a copy of which I reviewed, reads. It is an active effort to erase transgender history. 

Some federal staffers were notified late Friday night that they’d been put on administrative leave, also in compliance with Trump’s DEIA executive order. Staffers at the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights who had been part of the office’s Equity committee were emailed a letter stating, “Effective January 31, 2025, you will be placed on administrative leave with full pay and benefits pursuant to the President's executive order on DEIA and further guidance from OPM. This administrative leave is not being done for any disciplinary purpose.”

To be clear, they did not actually work in DEIA—it was a voluntary group of employees and supervisors. It’s an active effort to rid the federal government of people from marginalized communities.

Federal agencies also received guidance Friday that an action was being deployed to wipe all existing saved email signatures. “Please update your signature without gender pronouns (such as "he/him," "she/her" or "they/them*) by close of business on Monday, February 3rd,” one version of the announcement said. It’s just one of many attacks on transgender Americans, which have exploded since the moment Trump took office. Musk’s hatred of trans people has been well-documented—particularly by his daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, who is trans and has spoken publicly about it.

It’s essential to reiterate that all of this is illegal. What remains to be seen is how broadly the legality of it will be challenged, and whether Trump-appointed judges will rubber stamp Musk’s actions anyway.

At the end of a historically hellish Friday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer could only offer toothless posts on Bluesky. Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar told the New York Times, “If there is a middle of all of this hot mess of division, Americans want us to work together when we can and find common ground.”

The impotence is as staggering as the abdication is sickening. But the current message from elected Democrats is loud and clear: You’re on your own. And the message from the Musk/Trump administration is even clearer: You’re next.

As someone wrote to me today, "The first coup was violent insurrection. The second coup is administrative. We failed to ensure Donald Trump could never return to power again after the first coup; our job right now in this moment is to acknowledge reality and halt the second."

Organizers are trying to get the wheels in motion for a real opposition. Sunday night at 8pm ET there will be a virtual call hosted by Indivisible, a group that rose to national prominence during the first Trump administration. RSVP here if you’d like to join.

And on a personal note, Friday was a terrifying culmination of an exhausting and demoralizing week as a journalist. My inbox has been a firehose of federal employees sharing whatever they can in absence of very few public officials standing up for their rights. Some have told me shocking and previously unreported news; others have simply needed a place to vent their warranted frustrations. It’s been an honor to be trusted to receive it all. 

It’s not even two weeks into the second Trump administration, but the breadth of the destruction is clear. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say we’re witnessing a coup by an unelected billionaire propped up by a felonious president, and we must treat it as such. Even if, as some have reported, it wasn’t even featured on Friday’s nightly news.

Update:

An earlier version of this story stated that a page on the National Parks Service about DC’s Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism During World War II no longer exists. It appears the page is now available.

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