By PAUL KRUGMAN*

In Elon Musk's worldview, simply trying to help people in need makes you a radical left-wing Marxist who hates America.

Here’s where we are as a nation right now: (i) We may be in the middle of a trade war. Or maybe not. (ii) We are in the middle of a constitutional crisis. No, maybe. (iii) We may be in the middle of a kind of digital coup, which may, as a collateral consequence, cause much of the federal government to cease functioning.

The unifying theme here, I think, is that the federal government has been taken over by bad people who are also incredibly ignorant.

Start with the maybe/maybe not trade war. The Trump administration was apparently ready to impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico. That would have been self-defeating (and also a violation of previous agreements), even if our neighbors didn't retaliate. And both have made it clear that would retaliate. These are real countries, with real patriotism and pride, and they were not ready to be intimidated.

Donald Trump has given up. OK, so the tariffs are supposedly only suspended for a month, but some are already joking that “tariff month” will become the new “tariff month.”infrastructure week".

And supposedly, both Mexico and Canada have made some concessions in exchange for tariff retention. But there’s really nothing there; neither country is doing anything it wouldn’t have done without the tariff threat. The US, on the other hand, has agreed to clamp down on arms shipments to Mexico. Donald Trump will spin this as a victory; poorly informed voters and some intimidated media outlets may go along with the lie. But basically, America has backed down.

So, is Donald Trump the classic bully who runs away when someone stands up to him? It definitely seems that way.

Let’s be clear, though: This is not a case of no harm, no foul. By making the tariff threat in the first place, Donald Trump made it clear that the United States is no longer a nation that honors its agreements. By caving in at the first sign of opposition, he also made himself look weak. China must be very pleased with how this all played out.

And as I argued the other day, the now ever-present threat of tariffs will have a chilling effect on business planning, inhibiting economic integration and undermining the manufacture.

Still, the trade war has not happened, at least not yet. But the constitutional crisis is in full swing.

Elon Musk, after spending a weekend denouncing the U.S. Agency for International Development as “evil,” a “nest of vipers of radical left-wing Marxists who hate America,” and a “criminal organization,” announced that the agency was being shut down. Now, Elon Musk is not the president—at least I don’t think he is; he’s not even a government employee.

But Donald Trump has confirmed the measure, which is illegal and unconstitutional. No qualifying language, no evasions of “may be” or “some say,” please. Congress passed a law establishing USAID as an independent agency, and the president cannot abolish it unless Congress passes new legislation to that effect.

It seems almost irrelevant to ask what it's about, but still: what is it about?

So why is Elon Musk such a vocal enemy of the agency whose primary purpose is to provide humanitarian aid? There may be some backstory here, in which USAID somehow interfered with an Elon Musk project. And Elon Musk is certainly banking on public numeracy: abolishing an agency seems that will save a lot of money, and few voters understand how small $40 billion is in the federal context.

But my guess is that in Elon Musk's worldview, simply trying to help people in need makes you a radical left-wing Marxist who hates America.

My final point is a little more complicated, because we don't yet know how it will end. Elon Musk's associates have had access to the US Treasury systems that control all federal payments, from donations to nonprofits, Social Security checks, and federal employee salaries.

The potential for mischief here is immense. The courts may have told the Trump administration that it can’t freeze spending mandated by Congress, but Elon Musk’s people, who have shown little reverence for the law, may well simply ignore the courts and not cut the checks.

And they could go beyond cutting programs that the Elon Musk/Donald Trump administration doesn’t like. Imagine you’re a federal contractor who made campaign donations to Democrats; suddenly the government stops paying you what it owes you and ignores your questions by saying it’s working on the problem. Or you’re a federal employee who, according to someone in your office who has a personal grievance, expressed sympathy for DEI; somehow your regularly scheduled paychecks stop being deposited into your bank account. Or even imagine you’re a retiree who campaigned for Kamala Harris and for some reason your Social Security checks stop arriving.

Don't say they wouldn't do these things. We've seen these people in action, and of course they would if they could.

Right now, they probably can’t. The federal payments system is immensely complex and, like most government infrastructure, has been financially stressed for decades. So it’s cobbled together, much of it running on old hardware and even older software, kept running by old hands and institutional memory. The 20-somethings that Elon Musk is deploying to take over, blocking out the veterans and sidelining the people who know how the system works, almost certainly don’t understand it well enough to politicize payments right away.

As Nathan Tankus, the expert on these matters, diz: “I 100% believe that the main barrier to Elon Musk gaining control of the Treasury payments system is COBOL.”

For readers puzzled by the reference, COBOL is a very old programming language that was once widespread in the business world but that almost no one under 60 knows how to program in—yet it’s still widely used in government. (During Covid, the state of New Jersey made a frantic plea for people who knew COBOL to implement expanded unemployment benefits.)

But this observation raises another concern. What if the Musk people—Muskovites?—try to tinker with systems they don’t understand, believing they’re super-smart and can master everything with the help of a little AI? It’s not hard to imagine the entire federal payments system—including, by the way, federal debt service—crashing.

So much damage – to America’s credibility, to the Constitution and the rule of law, and possibly even to the very functioning of government. And Donald Trump has only been in office for less than a month.

* Paul Krugman is a professor at Princeton University (USA). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2008.

Translation: Marilia Pacheco Fiorillo.

Published on the author's social networks.

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