Turning the White House into a chop shop Anand Giridharadas’s The Ink this morning announces: Musk’s hostile takeover It’s hard to know just how destructive this will be in the long run, but for now, this is arguably the most troubling development in a day of extremely troubling developments. Elon Musk appears to be trying to do to the federal government what he did at Twitter/X: massively disrupt its functioning and drive out experienced employees not on board with his transformations and his personality cult. [Tusk] Musk bought his way into the White House complex and now means to, as they say, “have his way” with the federal government. If you haven’t heard, Musk locked Office of Personnel and Management (OPM) civil servants “out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees” (Reuters): The two officials, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said some senior career employees at OPM have had their access revoked to some of the department’s data systems. The systems include a vast database called Enterprise Human Resources Integration, which contains dates of birth, Social Security numbers, appraisals, home addresses, pay grades and length of service of government workers, the officials said. “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.” As Digby noted, some of Musk’s aides are barely…