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Elon Musk's mayhem is still being felt across the government [1]
['Daily Kos Staff']
Date: 2025-07-15
Elon Musk might have left his job running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, but he and DOGE remain entangled with the government. Now DOGE is leaking data, and a Musk-owned AI is set to run wild at the Department of Defense, all while the right-wing billionaire continues to line his pockets with your tax dollars.
On Monday, independent security researcher Brian Krebs reported that a DOGE worker accidentally posted a private Application Programming Interface for xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, on GitHub, a public repository for code. APIs let computers talk to one another and transfer data easily. Because of this, literally anyone could access over four dozen of xAI’s large language models, including Grok, which you may know from its integration on X.
Which big-brained genius did this? Marko Elez.
Thousands of protesters gather at the Washington Monument on April 5.
If that name sounds familiar, it’s because earlier this year, Elez resigned after his history of racist online posts surfaced, but he was reinstated by Musk and Vance because they are racists too. Elez is the same dude who “mistakenly” got full access to sensitive Treasury Department data, then reportedly emailed a spreadsheet with unencrypted private data to officials at the General Services Administration. So this racist 25-year-old continues to have expansive access to government data but can’t take basic security precautions.
Of course, Elez isn’t the only DOGE employee who is now burrowed into the government as a regular employee. Nineteen-year-old Edward “Big Balls” Coristine is still around, as is Ethan Shaotran, who publicly whined about how people ostracized him because of his work with DOGE. Yeah, buddy, people tend not to like it when you wreck their government.
On top of this, the Department of Defense gave Musk a sweetheart contract on Monday that could net his xAI up to $200 million. To be scrupulously fair to Musk, three other companies—Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI—are also eligible for $200 million each.
It’s exceedingly vague what xAI and the rest of these companies will do. The government announcement is full of language about leveraging technology, mission areas, and supporting warfighters, but it features no information about what those private companies are required to do with their $200 million.
It was definitely odd timing for the government to give Musk $200 million to “address critical national security challenges” with his xAI technology. The award was announced mere days after Musk had to shut off Grok, his chatbot, for going full Nazi, with posts praising Adolf Hitler and detailing violent rape fantasies. This was a result of Musk reportedly changing Grok’s prompt to “not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, so long as they are well substantiated.”
President Donald Trump, left, and Elon Musk depart the White House on March 21.
It seems bad that Musk’s changes turned Grok into a 4Chan poster, basically. Never fear, though. Musk has an explanation of how that’s not his fault: He made Grok too eager to please users.
Per Musk, when Grok received a racist prompt from an X user, those users were “manipulat[ing]” Grok into giving racist answers. This explanation probably does not make you feel better about Musk’s chatbots being turned loose in the Department of Defense. If you’d like to feel even worse, recall that Musk also programmed Grok to check in with him before answering questions.
It’s likely that xAI and other tech companies will net more than their initial awards. The award announcement goes on about it at length, saying that DOD is implementing a “commercial-first approach to accelerating DOD adoption of AI” and “leveraging commercially available solutions.” But what the announcement is clear about is that the government is planning on streamlining its own ability to give Musk and other tech bros money by making it easier for the government to purchase private AI tools through the General Services Administration.
xAI also announced on Monday that it is developing Grok for Government, which will bring “strong reasoning capabilities with extensive pretraining models.” Buddy, Grok went full fascist in front of God and everyone just a few days ago and is not displaying any “strong reasoning capabilities.”
Overall, the Trump administration's approach to accelerate the use of AI in the government is to pay private companies vast sums to do a thing that the government was already doing until Trump shuttered 18F, the agency tasked with making government digital services more efficient. That team had created a National Security and Intelligence Portfolio nearly six years ago, helping defense agencies get new digital solutions. But they had to get wiped out so private companies could take their place.
Now your private data is at risk thanks to the incompetence of DOGE, and Musk is going to make a ton of money shoveling that data into his racist chatbot. Totally normal way to run the government, yes indeed.
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