JANUARY 31, 2025
FILE PHOTO: Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk arrives to the inauguration of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. Donald Trump takes office for his second term as the 47th president of the United States. Chip Somodevilla/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo
The aides Elon Musk brought to help him purge the federal workforce have locked staffers of a U.S. government human resources agency out of the computer systems with millions of employees’ personal information.
Reuters cited two agency officials revealing that Musk, who has not been hired, appointed, or confirmed to any government position, is at work trying to cut $2 trillion from the annual U.S. budget. Musk would still need to find over $1.3 trillion in additional cuts if every federal employee was cut. The cost of the entire federal workforce in 2022 was approximately $271 billion, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported.
The New York Times reported this week that billionaire Musk brought in his computer engineers to handle his ongoing demands.
As Musk brings his staff to the Office of Personnel Management, senior officials’ access to data systems is being revoked.
“We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems,” one of the officials said. “That is creating great concern. There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications.”
One key database, the officials cited, is Enterprise Human Resources Integration, which has “all of the birthdates, Social Security numbers, appraisals, home addresses, pay grades and lengths of service of government workers.”
Reuters spoke with University of Michigan Professor Don Moynihan, at the Ford School of Public Policy, who warned that there doesn’t seem to be any congressional oversight over Trump and Musk.
“This makes it much harder for anyone outside Musk’s inner circle at OPM to know what’s going on,” Moynihan said.
The officials said they still have the power to log on and access their emails but there’s no access to the massive datasets they managed.
Musk demands that his team work overnight and 80-hour weeks to find all of the necessary cuts, violating federal labor laws unless a worker is paid overtime. However, it’s unclear whether Musk or American taxpayers are paying those workers.
Musk had sofa beds brought into the OPM office on Jan. 20, the day Trump took office, to ensure his personal team could work non-stop. The area can only be accessed with a special security badge or a security escort, an OPM employee said.
Courtesy/Source: Raw Story
