By Todd Lassa

Trump tariffs of 25% on our USMCA partners Canada and Mexico were front and center as World’s Richest Man Elon Musk took over the payment system of the United States Treasury and accused the US Agency for International Development (USAID) Monday of not cooperating with requests for information on how it spends taxpayer dollars. The Trump White House – or was it Musk himself? – handed control of USAID to Secretary of State Marco Rubio as he was flying from Panama, where the administration wants to retake control of the canal, to El Salvador to negotiate over that country taking back undocumented immigrants to our country.

The Alliance for Retired Americans, whose Social Security and Medicare payments are now visible to DOGE, along with the American Federation of Government Employees AFL-CIO, and Service Employees International Union, AFL-CIO, have filed suit against Treasury and its secretary, Scott Bessent, to stop the handover to Musk and his group of 19-24-year-old insurgents.

Meanwhile, the White House has named Musk, who was not elected to anything or been subject to confirmation hearings or security clearances but did contribute a quarter-billion-dollars to the Trump campaign a “special government employee,” status that’s good for 130 days, according to NPR’s Morning Edition.

In just the 16 days since Trump’s inauguration, the special government employee has granted Marko Elez, a 25-year-old engineer who has worked for two of Musk’s companies, direct access to the Treasury Department systems “responsible for nearly all payments made by the US government,” WIRED reports, citing two sources.

After Rubio met with Panamanian officials, he said of USAID; “Everything they do has to be in alignment with the national interests and the foreign policy of the United States.”

The Trump White House seeks to retake the Panama Canal because the president says it’s under Chinese control. (It’s not – China operates two ports at the canal.) While tariffs against Canada and Mexico were put on-hold Monday, presumably so Trump could re-negotiate a USMCA treaty that does more to change the North American Free Trade Agreement signed under President Clinton than rearrange countries’ names so that “US” is first, the 10% tariff on Chinese goods has stuck. China responded with targeted tariffs of 10% on coal, crude oil, farm equipment and some SUVs, Minnesota Public Radio’s Marketplace reports. China also has placed export controls on such vital metals as tungsten and is investigating Google as a monopoly.  

Meanwhile, China’s Belt and Road Initiative is gaining power and influence in much of the African continent, which is where USAID has concentrated much of its non-military assistance since it was established in 1961.

This raises the question of whether Musk, who grew up in Apartheid South Africa, thinks he knows what he is doing, whether his financial interests are guiding his work as DOGE chief and special government employee (Forbes reports that USAID spent $1 million on terminals from his satellite Internet provider Starlink last year) or whether he is misinformed because he is listening to President Trump?

For the last half-year at least, anti-Trump Republicans and Democrats have been warning of a technoligopoly and of the danger to our democracy of a second Trump term. 

The technoligopoly took over in the time between the presidential election and the inauguration. It turns out that since the inauguration, we have not been able to keep our democracy.