USA Today: Elon Musk will decide the fates of millions of Americans… It’s time to panic!

An eccentric billionaire likely has access to all your personal information and can control your vital government payments, USA Today columnist Rex Huppke wrote.

If you rely on Social Security or Medicare, it’s time to panic, and if you’re concerned about your personal information — like your Social Security number or banking information — it’s time to panic, too.

Thanks to President Donald Trump and a tolerant Republican Party, billionaire eccentric Elon Musk and his gang of random tech experts have likely gained access to your most private information and gotten their dirty hands on the tap from which vital government payments flow.

I guess you didn’t vote to give Musk free rein over computer systems across the federal government that are normally handled by highly trained people who have passed extensive background checks.

Unfortunately, with people like that in power, rules and norms are for losers only.

Musk, under the guise of what is essentially a made-up government agency called the Department of Government Efficiency, has hired people we know nothing about to do things we know nothing about without any congressional authorization or oversight.

Colbert King of The Washington Post described Musk and his associates’ hijacking of federal systems as follows, Musk and his agents are gaining access to vast amounts of privileged and restricted government information on a scale never seen before in our nation’s capital.

The Treasury Department, where I once worked, has given the Energy Department a license to audit the federal payment systems that each year handle trillions of dollars in government spending.

The systems also contain a trove of sensitive information about hundreds of millions of Americans: information that private commercial interests and foreign governments would pay a high price to obtain.

“Social Security recipients and their families have every reason to be concerned about Elon Musk’s takeover of the US Treasury’s payment system, which is responsible for disbursing Social Security benefits,” wrote Max Richman, chairman of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare.

“The unelected billionaire, who has no legal role in the US government but heads Trump’s unofficial Department of Government Efficiency, and his new henchmen at the Treasury Department now have access to the personal information of every Social Security beneficiary, and the ability to stop payments to any federal programs they don’t like,” Richman continued.

In conclusion, there is one phrase that describes what the actual president of the country, Elon Musk, is doing: what he is doing is very bad.