Elon Musk Says Naming Specific Government Workers Is Illegal, After Doing Exactly That Himself

Elon Musk is really, really mad that journalists at Wired revealed the names of a cohort of extremely young engineers he's tasked with firing federal employees, assisting in dismantling congressionally-created agencies like USAID, and clomping through the federal government's wide-ranging and sensitive troves of data.

His whole operation at the definitely-not-a-real-government-agency Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is operating in dubious territory to start with, with many charging that parts of it are wholly illegal.

All that data vacuumed up by DOGE contains massive amounts of information about American agencies and even the personal data of American citizens, Social Security numbers included. And now, new reporting from Wired has revealed that one 25-year-old DOGE lackey indeed has administrative access to the code underpinning the essential functions of the US Treasury (despite the newly-appointed Treasury Secretary Scott Bennett's insistence that DOGE's access was "read-only.")

Musk has spent the last day or so decrying the naming of the young employees, who do not come from government backgrounds and reportedly range in age between 19 and 25, as illegal and even worthy of prosecution. Allies like fellow tech billionaire Marc Andreessen have also weighed in, with Andreessen taking to X last night to remark that he's "so old" that he recalls "when doxxing and threatening federal employees was considered bad."

"It is against the law," Musk replied.

To be clear: doxxing and harassment — publishing someone's address online, sending threatening emails, etc. — are indeed bad! But journalists revealing the names and ages of the young men now knees-deep in a widely decried and possibly illegal romp into the infrastructure of our government is baseline transparency. Especially because, again, DOGE is not even a real government agency, and currently seems to be enjoying little to no guardrails or oversight.

The SpaceX CEO's decrying of basic transparency as unlawful is particularly hollow given that Musk himself has a well-documented history of singling out specific federal employees by name, promoting an X post as recently as November that shared the name of a federal employee singled out for her work in "climate diversification" — and, as a result, launched a throng of woefully ill-informed harassment her way.

Demands from secrecy by Musk, still a private citizen — despite the White House's hasty declaration yesterday that the billionaire is now a "special government employee" — and the the richest man in the world, is a small, ridiculous piece of what's unfortunately a big and serious assault on constitutional authority and the checks and balances on executive power.

But did we expect anything better from the guy currently clearcutting his way through both the federal government and the democratic process itself? Sadly, the answer is no.

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