Poster from a protest against Elon Musk by MoveOn, February 4, 2025. Geoff Livingston, Flickr, Creative Commons.
I worked for 2 years on Capitol Hill and 25 years for the US Environmental Protection Agency. During those 27 years I met many bureaucrats and a few Congressmen and Senators. I even met the mother of President Jimmy Carter and the Secretary of Agriculture, Bob Bergland.
This experience opened my eyes to the advantages of government served by well-educated, competent, honest, and dedicated civil servants. The industry perpetually seeks decisions from government agencies on their products. Some of those products seeking and requiring approval by the US EPA, for example, pesticides, can be lethal to wildlife and humans alike. So, government experts evaluating such chemicals must possess advanced knowledge of chemistry, biology, and toxicology. Unfortunately, these experts work in an environment dominated largely by politics, not science. This means that the lobbyists, not scientists, have the ear of policy makers. I came across and lived through this chaos: scientists making their arguments for human and environmental health protection in technical memos; the opposition from lobbyists representing companies, manufacturers, and powerful legal firms saying their products would save the farmers and increase prosperity. The cacophony and lies of deregulation disturbed me.
I attended hundreds of meetings of EPA scientists, and industry lobbyists and senior EPA policy makers. At times, the public interest of safety prevailed, as in the early years of the EPA, 1970s. But many times, the political appointees made decisions that favored the industry. These decisions, under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, explain why conventional, not certified organic, food is probably laced by neurotoxins and carcinogens while ecosystems and wildlife have been threatened with diseases, destruction, and extinction. I protested such policies and, immediately, senior people branded me with a slander of not being a “team player” and, worse, tried firing me. In 1990, they took steps for firing me, but the administrator, William Reilly, rejected their efforts.
My life at EPA became precarious. I had to be very careful. Senior managers even planted a spy in my office who provoked me and, no doubt, reported me to his bosses. A colleague warned me about the spy. The consequences of this treatment were severe. I was promoted only once. So, speaking out was very hazardous and expensive. Despite the antagonism between me and a few senior officials over policy, I persevered. I simply could not accept fashionable deregulation, which compromised science and public and environmental health in order to profit agribusiness. This moral dilemma angered and astonished me. For some time, I refused to accept the US was falling from the rule of law and civilization. No civilized society would willfully feed its people tainted food and risk life on Earth.
Some of my colleagues shared my frustrations. They suspected I was going to write about corruption at EPA. At appropriate times spanning more than 2 decades, they gave me their memos and other reports they authored. The information and knowledge in those documents and my personal experience helped me write my 2014 book, Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA.
Public good
I never gave in to the corrupt temptations for career advancement. Call it stubbornness or moral commitments to science-based decisions for the protection of human and environmental health. I came out of Greek culture centered around the propositions of “the beautiful and the good” and “know yourself” that necessitate the virtues of the supremacy of truth and the public good.
I still have the best memories of the civil servants I worked with. They were my friends. They were certainly more diplomatic than I was, but they did serve the public good with their scientific reports. Now, in 2025, the leadership of America is outdoing the corrupt environmental policies of the Ronald Reagan administration of the 1980s. President Donald Trump and his billionaire co-ruler, Elon Musk, are unravelling the federal government. Their purpose is not efficiency. It is political and ecological disruption. Musk is the “wrecking ball” of “crucial institutions.” He picked up on the fashionable idea of billionaires working long and hard for their ill-gotten wealth.
David Brooks of the New York Times hit the nail on the head, saying: “The “DOGE boys” [of Elon Musk’s 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.”
True. DOGE has been demoralizing and firing thousands of civil servants. However, twenty-one government workers with expertise in data and digital services resigned to protest the vandalism of the billionaire Musk. They said they came to government from holding senior technology positions in private companies. Their goal and mission was to serve all Americans no matter their political affiliation. But seeing the ruthlessness of Musk and his young assistants, they decided that resignation was better than disavowing their oath to serve America. They explained why they left the government in their letter of resignation dated 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 these courageous technologists. I, too, lived through a reign of terror and intimidation, so I fully sympathize with them. And while in my case, “whistleblowers” were treated harshly, in the Trump / Musk administration most government workers are treated like whistleblowers for reasons unrelated to informing the public about corruption in the government and industry.
Erik Baker, historian of science at Harvard, gives us useful insights for trying to explain the bizarre behavior of Musk. He says, “Mr. Musk’s decades in the highest echelons of the tech industry, surrounded by other executives who justified their lordship over their private empires by trumpeting their inexhaustible work ethic, 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.”
Artificial Intelligence fuels the fiefdom of the tech billionaires
With large companies the world over firing workers and replacing them with machines, Musk is bringing this deskilling and debilitating force for the running of the federal government. Musk is an expert in dumping workers for machines. He culled the workers of the companies he purchased. Erik Baker says that after Musk took over 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.”
Climate chaos
Firing workers increases the profits of billionaires like Musk. It’s the same thing with deregulation. The downsides, ecocide and diseases like cancer, take time to manifest themselves. Climate chaos, however, is different. Hurricanes, fires, and flooding hit hard. Yet for a long time, we failed to connect nature’s anthropogenic fury to human actions. Petroleum companies, which knew since the 1970s of the consequences of ceaseless burning of their product, polluted the atmosphere and muddled waters by funding / bribing academics to keep raising doubts about the causes of climate change.
Indeed, the 1990 effort at the US EPA to dismiss me from the civil service was directly associated to an article I wrote for the Chicago Tribune (Oct. 10, 1989), in which I pointed my finger at the petroleum companies for causing climate chaos.
What I did not know in 1989 was that the US was warming 68 percent faster than any other country on Earth. The bad news came out in November 14, 2023 by the US Fifth National Climate Assessment.
I wonder how is it possible 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, how politicians like Trump and Elon Musk, as well as most Republican politicians, dare ignore such calamities and existential dangers? The Trump administration even withdrew from the 2015 Paris Climate Accord. It’s mind-boggling. Are they extraterrestrials? Don’t they read? Do they hate science? And, finally, don’t they care about their children and grandchildren? Is America dropping to another dark age?
Freezing the government
As I already said, I remember my days at the US Environmental Protection Agency, starting with the immoral effort to freeze the federal government by the Ronald Reagan administration. Vice President George Walker Bush used to go to government agencies demanding that they rethink any project they funded that cost more than $ 100,000. Deregulation was the most fashionable policy of the Republicans. Reagan even 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 the laws.
The Republican and Democratic politicians were blind to the industry corruption my EPA colleague, Adrian Gross, had revealed. Gross, a capable and dedicated pathologist, brought to light decades-long criminal chemical industry practices of making data out of thin air. That is, Gross caught a giant laboratory, International Bio-test Laboratory (IBT) near Chicago, giving clean reports to hazardous pesticides and other chemicals it tested for companies, states, and even governments. In other words, farmers used those dangerous carcinogenic and neurotoxic chemicals “tested” by IBT and other corrupt laboratories. Those dangerous chemicals had been approved by the EPA because of the fake reports of IBT and the climate of corruption. But the findings of Gross made some difference, and, in 1983, the US EPA and the Justice Department put IBT out of business. Yet, the Republicans and not a few Democrats continue to push their deregulation year after year. By the early twenty-first century, the US EPA was a skeleton of its early 1970s self. Deregulation became policy. Companies still “test” their pesticides and other chemicals. EPA was forced to shut down its own laboratories and do away with its scientists who inspected laboratories. One of those laboratories that closed tested the efficacy of antibiotics. The EPA even deleted public access to hundreds of studies it had funded. Corruption became the law of the land. For example, agribusiness lobbyists are convincing Iowa legislators to give immunity from prosecution to pesticide merchants. The proposed legislation would not allow Iowans suing pesticide companies for failing to warn their products might cause cancer.
What Trump and Musk are doing are accelerating the toxic policies of the Reagan administration. With diminished, dispirited, and frightened federal workers, the industries will do exactly what the cigarette companies did for more than a century. Their advertisements will continue to repeat the lie that American food is the safest in the planet. Meanwhile, our “safe” farmers are sterilizing the land, almost wiping out biodiversity, and even threatening honeybees with extinction. Their animal farms are dormant factories of disease, potential pandemics, and contaminated meat.
Apparently, these dire threats are beyond Trump. His speech to Congress, March 3, 2025, was more of the same rhetoric of deceit and hubris. Frank Bruni of the New York Times, said that “Everything in Trump’s world is extreme, absolute, unnuanced, superlative. Worst ever. Best ever. “Like nothing that has ever been seen before.” Over and over. It’s juvenile. It’s narcissistic.” And yet, Trump and his billionaire advisor, Musk, keep talking about MAGA. But do they understand the word greatness?
Alexander the Great earned that honor because of his genius in strategic thinking and unparalleled courage and virtues. He united the ecumene. He built 70 poleis (cities) all over Asia. Those cities had Greek institutions of civilization: schools, libraries, the rule of law, theaters, athletic games and festivals.
Sliding back to another dark age?
Trump and Musk, however, are not building civilization. They are wrecking it. They know that deregulation increases risk, corruption, disease, and violence. It enables factory owners to profit at the expense of public and environmental health. Seeing Musk wielding a chain saw like a weapon unmasked him and his collaborator and enabler, Trump. These co-emperors intend to discard the already weak democratic institutions of America, thus converting the country officially to a plutocracy. This means setting aside the rule of law and returning to the lawless rule of weapons and wealth.
The post Elon Musk’s Shock Troops, AI and Plutocracy appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Evaggelos Vallianatos.
Evaggelos Vallianatos | Radio Free (2025-03-06T06:57:48+00:00) Elon Musk’s Shock Troops, AI and Plutocracy. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/06/elon-musks-shock-troops-ai-and-plutocracy/
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