New Orleans        It’s not hard to follow the tactics of Elon Musk and his gang at the make-believe, unauthorized, so-called Department of Governmental Efficiency or DOGE, where he is without doubt the top dog.  We’ve seen it all before.

If you’ve watched any crime procedural on Netflix, Prime, or HBO, you’ve seen one drug gang come in, bust down the door, and, guns blazing, take over another crew’s territory.  In the corporate world this is common in mergers.  That’s why they call them “takeovers.”  One day, someone will be sitting at a desk, and the next day someone else is there.  They remove the people so they can go for the money, grab the records, and get control of the bank accounts.  Musk followed this playbook at Twitter to everyone’s shock.  It’s part of why X-Twitter now has competitors and has lost an estimated more than 70% or $44 billion of its value since Musk and his regime seized control.  Why would anyone think this is the way government and public service should work is beyond me?

This is also the way that many unions implement trusteeships.  A gang coordinates a mini-invasion of a local union, often in the dark of night or pre-dawn, with some hitting the banks to take over the accounts, and others breaking through the doors, changing the locks, dismissing all officers, and subjecting existing staff to termination or rehire.  Ostensibly, it’s supposed to be for good reason, like suspicion of financial mismanagement, failure to bargain and enforce contracts, and so forth, but often it looks like, and is exactly like, pure internal politics in dealing with a leader or a local out of step with the mother ship.

In its own way, that all felt uncomfortably thuggish, too, but even if it seems the same, there’s a big difference.   Local unions were part of national unions, just as various agencies are part of the federal government, but union constitutions and bylaws gave them this authority when they had cause, backed up by a required hearing that could be reviewed by the Department of Labor.  No one, nowhere, no how, has given this gangster Musk any such authority.  In fact, it seems crystal clear that he is breaking one law after another with impunity.  He’s ignoring Congressional prerogatives and separate statutes defining agency authorities.  He’s trying to jettison staff and expenditures explicitly approved by Congress.  He’s simply ignoring any system of laws and separation of powers, as he grabs power for himself and his gang.

In business and life there’s often a saying, that “if you broke it, you own it.”  Musk can be crazy as a loon at X-Twitter and crow about it.  He already owns that.  What he seems not to get, while heading his play-pretend unauthorized agency, is that the US government is not his to break, and absolutely not his to own, no matter how much he and his business stand to gain from these antics.  Admittedly, Republicans in Congress seem fine with losing power to Trump and Musk and become little more than a rubber stamp to chaos and wildness.  Soon we’ll find out whether this whole thing about the “rule of law” is just spin when it gets to the courts.