On Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly granted aides of Elon Musk access to the department’s payments system, which handles more than $5 trillion and sensitive data on Social Security and Medicare benefits and grants. The system also contains data on government contractors in direct competition with Mr. Musk’s own companies.
It was the latest troubling report of the administration’s interventions into practically every corner of the federal government that also include President Trump’s firing, sidelining and encouraging civil servants to quit.
The full picture of the government overhaul has yet to come into focus, and the contours of Mr. Musk’s role and mission in that transformation remain sketchy. (On Monday, President Trump tried to offer some clarity, saying that “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval.”)
But the cumulative effect of these stories offers at best a complicated answer to what should be an uncomplicated question: Who exactly is running the federal government?
It’s troubling enough not to be able to answer emphatically with “democratically elected leaders.” Even more troubling is the possibility that the actual answer is Mr. Musk — the world’s richest man — and other unaccountable, unelected, unconfirmed allies cozy with the president.
Political economists have a name for that: state capture. State capture occurs when wealthy private interests influence a government to such a degree that they can freely direct policy decisions and public funds for their own benefit or for the benefit of their ideological fellow travelers (or both).
Revelations of this especially pernicious, widespread form of corruption have occurred in other countries — a striking example occurred in the country of Mr. Musk’s birth, South Africa — and they offer cautionary tales for democratic governments everywhere.
The details vary by context, but the political scientist Elizabeth David-Barrett lays out three general mechanisms of state capture. They now sound familiar: shaping the rules of the game through law and policy; influencing administrative decisions by capturing the budget, appointments, government contracts and regulatory decisions; and disabling checks on power by dismantling accountability structures like the judiciary, law enforcement and prosecution, and audit institutions like the inspectors general and the media.
Some of these strategies could come straight from the Project 2025 playbook or Trump administration executive orders. This should disturb all Americans. According to Ms. David-Barrett, state capture creates broad, long-lasting systemic inequality and diminished public services. Changing the rules of the game to allow such collusion to flourish, she writes, “leaves those few holders of economic power in a strong position to influence future political elites, consolidating their dominance in a self-perpetuating dynamic.”
Mr. Musk’s recent stand against U.S.A.I.D., the federal agency responsible for administering foreign and development assistance since 1961, could have come directly from the state capture playbook — only often more brazen in intent. “U.S.A.I.D. is a criminal organization,” Mr. Musk posted over the weekend. “Time for it to die.” In that time, the agency’s website went offline, and its top two security officials were placed on administrative leave after refusing to allow members of Mr. Musk’s team access to secure U.S.A.I.D. systems. Finally, on Monday, Mr. Musk said that he had consulted Mr. Trump and that “we’re shutting it down.” (On Monday, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, announced that he is the acting administrator of the agency.)
The example from South Africa was detailed in a 2016 report actually called “State of Capture” from the country’s public protector, Thulisile Madonsela.
It described how, over a number of years, billions of dollars of public funding went into the pockets of a few elites, instead of supporting struggling health services and education systems. Ms. Madonsela’s office had received a series of allegations that the Guptas, a wealthy Indian family with deep business ties in South Africa (the Guptas have denied wrongdoing), had successfully pressured the president and other top officials into removing or appointing ministers of state-owned entities, “resulting in improper and possibly corrupt award of state contracts and benefits to the Gupta family’s businesses.”
State capture is not a condition endemic to post-apartheid South Africa. The so-called Operation Car Wash investigation in Brazil, for example, revealed secret, illicit relationships on the scale of state capture.
So what’s to be done in countries that face the threat of state capture?
First, as in South Africa, conduct a high-profile investigation run by elements of the government not yet captured. Though the United States has no office of the public protector, several federal government watchdog agencies could flex their investigative powers. Mr. Trump already culled as many as 17 inspectors general, but other agencies, including the Congressional Research Service, Government Accountability Office or the Congressional Budget Office, could step up.
Second, opposition leaders must raise alarms. Making the case that this is not run-of-the-mill, pay-to-play corruption will draw the scrutiny needed to raise the alarms. Democrats have been relatively silent since Jan. 20. State capture offers the emergency message largely missing as we enter the new administration’s third week.
Finally, descriptions of state capture must speak directly to its victims: the American people. “If we are guilty of underdescribing state capture in the media, it is perhaps a guilt that lies in our failure to draw a blunt connection between political jargon and real human beings,” the South African political analyst Eusebius McKaiser wrote in 2017. “We need simpler and more visceral depictions of the meaning of corruption and the opportunities it costs, including the grandest scale of corruption, which is all that state capture picks out.”
Mr. McKaiser demonstrated how it’s done. When a 5-year-old boy drowned in feces in a dilapidated pit toilet at his school while wealthy businessmen accused of siphoning money away from building things like school toilets, Mr. McKaiser simply declared that the student “died because of state capture.”
Americans should know who is in charge of their national government. If they can’t answer that simple question, government officials and civil society must recognize warning signs of state capture and take back what is ours.
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