Tech billionaire Elon Musk is stepping up the threats against anyone who leaks internal discussions or embarrassing information out of his Department of Government Efficiency task force — but it's having the opposite effect he was hoping for, Politico reported on Friday.
In particular, Musk was enraged that The New York Times received a scoop that he was given access to top-secret plans for how the United States would fight a war against China — which he denies happened.
“I look forward to the prosecutions of those at the Pentagon who are leaking maliciously false information to NYT,” Musk wrote on social media.
"But Musk’s post is not having the chilling effect on leakers he’d intended, according to conversations with more than half a dozen government employees who had previously spoken to POLITICO. If anything, it might be the other way around," wrote Sophia Cai, Danny Nguyen, Daniel Payne, Amy Mackinnon and Eli Stokols.
"'We are public servants, not Elon’s servants,' said one Food and Drug Administration employee who, like all people interviewed for this story, was granted anonymity to speak candidly about internal dynamics. 'The public deserves to know how dysfunctional, destructive, and deceptive all of this has been and continues to be.'"
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A U.S. Department of Agriculture employee agreed, telling Politico, “Leakers are patriots,” and adding, “If the Biden administration or Obama had acted like this, no one would have tolerated it. The Trump administration doesn’t get a pass.”
Moreover, the employee noted, the whole point of DOGE is supposed to be auditing the government and rooting out corruption, which is exactly what the leakers spilling the beans on Musk are doing.
President Donald Trump has long been enraged by leakers revealing details about his administration, which has occurred not just at high levels within DOGE and the White House but all the way down to lower offices, including Trump's pick for D.C. District Attorney getting his emails leaked by career staff frustrated by his litany of apparent ethics violations.
Ironically, one of Musk's staffers on the DOGE project is a teenager who was fired from a previous job for leaking company secrets.