Did Musk Really "Leave"? NO

Unauthorized DOGE Is Still Operational and Dangerous

Photo by Parker Coffman on Unsplash

This week, while much of the media was busy running a full-scale PR rehabilitation tour for Elon Musk—casting him as a bold disruptor who stepped away from government and claiming that his unauthorized DOGE project had merely failed to “cut waste,”—the real story slipped past the headlines. Musk may no longer be the visible face of DOGE, but make no mistake: the project is not dead. It has been mutating, expanding, and embedding itself more deeply within the federal government. And as I wrote last month in The Authoritarian Playbook: DOGE, Surveillance, and the Collapse of Democracy, DOGE was never truly about cutting costs. The patterns I’ve been tracking pointed to something far more alarming—the construction of a centralized surveillance infrastructure designed to compile and fuse deeply personal information on every single American.

In truth, unauthorized DOGE didn’t fail at all—it succeeded in ways few were prepared to imagine.

We were told this was about eliminating waste, improving government workflows, and bringing a “Silicon Valley ethos” to the federal government. But in reality, what we’re witnessing is the modernization of authoritarianism under the guise of innovation. From the beginning, DOGE was a smokescreen—a Trojan horse allowing Musk and his political allies to quietly insert a sprawling network of unvetted operatives into nearly every major agency in government. These individuals were not subject to traditional background checks, security protocols, or federal hiring rules. They were ushered in under executive authority, given unprecedented access to sensitive data systems, and placed in institutions that hold the deepest personal records of every American: the IRS, the Social Security Administration, the Treasury, DHS, OPM, and beyond.

The majority of them came directly from Musk’s orbit— his employees, employees of Palantir, alumni of Thiel-funded startups, and loyalists with no public service background. And although Musk may have faded from view, the network he installed remains in place, operational and expanding, with the data pipelines fully active and infrastructure quietly advancing behind closed doors. That was always the plan.

We’ve seen this model before—in regimes that use data as a weapon against their own people.

Historically, surveillance has always been a pillar of state control. In Russia, after the Soviet Union’s collapse, the apparatus briefly fragmented—until Vladimir Putin took power and began rebuilding it. One of his earlier and more consequential moves was to modernize the informational core of the state, placing loyalists across government and merging once-fragmented databases into a seamless digital system of repression. What began as post-Soviet reform quickly became a sophisticated engine of authoritarian control—rewriting laws, eroding privacy, and using data as a weapon to monitor, isolate, and eliminate dissent. Year by year, the tools used by FSB (Federal Security Service) became more invasive and more essential to maintaining power. Today, Trump and Musk appear to be replicating that very model.

What they are building is not simply a modernized bureaucracy—it is the foundation of a digital autocracy. And the evidence is no longer theoretical but being tested in real time on the people least able to resist—federal workers, international students, and immigrants.

Inside key agencies, whistleblowers and alarmed staff describe a disturbing transformation. At USAID, group chats were quietly infiltrated by leadership with back-end IT access, allowing real-time monitoring of internal communications. Contractors fled official systems as it became clear that criticism of Musk, his operatives, or Trump could trigger retaliation. At the State Department and the EPA, employees reported software quietly recording meetings and scanning emails for “anti-DOGE” or “anti-Trump” sentiment. In one EPA case, partners were warned that every call was being transcribed by an AI trained to detect ideological noncompliance. Some staff began turning on faucets in breakrooms just to muffle conversations they feared were being captured.

At the National Labor Relations Board, it went even further. A whistleblower revealed that DOGE operatives accessed union organizing data and deliberately erased audit logs to cover their tracks—only for technical staff to later uncover login attempts traced to a Russian IP address. What’s unfolding is not just unauthorized surveillance, but the normalization of digital suppression inside the very institutions tasked with protecting civil liberties.

This has nothing to do with efficiency and everything to do with controlling those who refuse to fall in line.

While the public remains distracted by headlines, the surveillance state continues to expand quietly beyond federal agencies. At USCIS, a policy mandates screening immigrants’ social media for antisemitic content—framed as counter-extremism but functioning as a backdoor for ideological policing. Jewish advocacy groups quickly condemned it as a cynical use of identity politics to push an anti-immigrant, anti-dissent agenda. At the same time, DHS has reportedly requested access to IRS records on over seven million immigrants, setting the stage for mass detentions, denied visas, and unchecked targeting with virtually no oversight.

Recently uncovered documents reveal that Clearview AI—now working with ICE and the FBI—originally built its facial recognition system to target immigrants and the political left. As Mother Jones reported, its massive database, scraped from social media, is now used to match faces, flag beliefs, and monitor dissent across multiple federal agencies.

And according to 404 Media, ICE’s contractors are also using tools like ShadowDragon to pull data from hundreds of platforms—including Bluesky, Meta, and even OnlyFans—to map individuals’ movements, networks, and online activity in real-time.

Federal workers, immigrants, and international students are the testing ground—and once the system is perfected, it will be turned on the rest of us

Musk may have stepped back from DOGE publicly, but behind closed doors, the machine is accelerating. And it’s also being powered by Palantir—the data firm founded by Alex Karp and Peter Thiel.

As The New York Times just reported, Trump has quietly expanded Palantir’s contracts to nearly every corner of the federal government. Their flagship software, Foundry, is now in use at the IRS, DHS, and HHS, and is being pitched to the SSA and Department of Education. Its purpose? To merge government data—tax records, medical claims, Social Security files, student loans—into a single, searchable mega-database.

DOGE operatives—some of them former Palantir staff—were instrumental in selecting the company, further blurring the lines between private surveillance firms and federal power. The revolving door has vanished, replaced by a centralized control system that can be searched, analyzed, and weaponized as easily as a software query.

But backlash against Palantir is growing. This month, 13 former employees signed a public letter urging the company to sever ties with Trump, warning that its technology is being weaponized for authoritarian ends. Linda Xia, a former Palantir engineer, emphasized that the danger wasn’t in the software itself, but in how the regime intends to use it—by fusing massive datasets in ways that sharply increase the potential for abuse.

And yet the media continues to sell the fantasy that Musk is gone and DOGE has failed.

But this narrative is a distraction—one carefully designed to focus public attention on personality, while rehabilitating Musk and his companies, which have taken significant reputational and financial hits since his launch of unauthorized DOGE.

Meanwhile, the real operation continues unfolding in the background. The purging of federal employees, the use of private data by ICE, the silencing of agencies, and the rapid expansion of surveillance infrastructure are not isolated events. They are coordinated moves to dismantle the institutions of democratic governance and replace them with systems engineered for loyalty, obedience, and control.

Trump doesn’t need to rewrite the Constitution to build this system—he’s doing it in plain sight, without passing a single new law. The tools are already active, the structure is being built, data is flowing freely between agencies, and Musk and Palantir operatives are already embedded across the government. And once resistance is neutralized—once dissent is quietly flagged by algorithm and punished through administrative process—the full weight of this system will turn inward. It won’t stop at immigrants or federal workers; it will expand to journalists, civil society, organizations, and ultimately, anyone who dares to challenge the regime.

So no, DOGE didn’t fail. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do. And until we stop chasing the distractions and start dismantling the architecture, we will continue sleepwalking into a dictatorship that is already wiring itself into the very core of our life.

We must push back and demand answers from our congressional and state leaders—loudly, publicly, and relentlessly—before the surveillance state is fully operational.

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