Washington Gets the Full Musk Treatment
Plus: Biden officials cash out, AI tarpits, Trump vs Colombia, Trump vs Gaza protesters, cold war watch, and more!
Note: Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that this week brought a new development in NonZero land. After years of using a Substack URL, we decided to make the switch to a slimmer web address: nonzero.org (though we’re still on the Substack platform). This change may bring benefits on Twitter (OK, OK, on “X”), whose algorithm is said to discriminate against Substack URLs. And this change will in any event mark another small step in our journey to becoming a global media behemoth.
Also: Don't forget to mark your calendars for this Thursday, February 6, at 8 pm US Eastern Time, when I’ll hold a Q&A Zoom call with NZN members (aka “paid subscribers”). The main topic of discussion will be the first three weeks of Trump 2.0, but other subjects (including NZN itself!) are fair game, too. The Zoom link can be found at the bottom of this newsletter, below the paywall.
—Bob
—A plurality of Americans believes the United States is an oligarchy, according to the results of a poll that defined oligarchy as “a form of government in which all power is vested in a few persons or in a dominant class or clique.” YouGov, which conducted the survey in the days after Trump’s inauguration, had never before polled Americans on the topic, so a comparison with past opinion isn’t possible. (More on the influence of America’s billionaire class below.)
—Though Tesla chief Elon Musk is an ally of America’s very pro-tariff president and a de facto member of his administration, Tesla joined Chinese automakers and BMW in a court challenge of European Union tariffs on electric vehicles produced in China. Most of the Teslas imported by the EU are produced in China.
—Some website proprietors, faced with AI companies that ignore rules against scraping their sites for data, are fighting back with “tarpits”—software that traps web crawler bots in endless loops of decoy URLs. As Ars Technica explains, these tools, adapted from long-standing cybersecurity tactics, can also “poison” training datasets by feeding gibberish text to the crawlers.
—Senate Democrats thwarted passage of a bill that would have sanctioned International Criminal Court officials who had charged Israeli leaders with war crimes. Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer condemned “the ICC’s deep bias against Israel” but said the bill could be used to sanction US companies and allies—and so would have to be revised before getting enough Democratic support to pass.
—An international panel of scientists and policy experts—backed by 30 countries and the European Union—released a report on the state of AI safety that will serve as a basis for talks at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris next month. The Paris summit will continue the dialogue begun at the 2023 Bletchley Park AI Summit, notable for the participation of both the US and China, notwithstanding tension between them over AI and other issues. (More on AI and the new cold war below.)
—President Trump pledged to find and deport foreign students who participated in “pro-jihadist” protests, an apparent reference to demonstrations on college campuses against Israel’s war in Gaza. Many lawyers and free speech advocates cast doubt on the legality of Trump’s plans, with one legal scholar arguing that “deporting non-citizens on the basis of their political speech would be unconstitutional.” (More on Trump’s Middle East-related policy moves below.)
When Elon Musk took over Twitter in 2022, he issued an ultimatum to his entire staff: They could either commit to an “extremely hardcore” vision for remaking the company, or they could take a buyout and move on with their lives. In the end, Twitter's workforce shrank by about 80 percent.
Just a week after taking office, President Trump issued a similar ultimatum to all federal employees: They could either return to working in the office—and promise to adhere to “high standards” of conduct—or take a (legally dubious) “buyout” and get out of government. Members of America’s federal bureaucracy now have until next Thursday to make up their mind.
The pair of memos shared a title: “Fork in the Road.” They may well have shared an author, too. Several employees from Musk’s companies have taken up top posts at the Office of Personnel Management, which issued the ultimatum. And Musk himself visited that office last Friday, according to the Washington Post, which also reports that the memo “blindsided some advisers to President Donald Trump.”
The layoff scheme is just one example of how, in the early days of Trump 2.0, the federal government is getting the full Musk treatment. As the journalist Walter Isaacson has chronicled, Musk has a multi-step process for making organizations more effective. The first—to question every requirement—has played out on Musk’s X feed over the past few months. Now, we appear to have moved on to step two: Delete any part or process you can.
And delete Trump has done. Over the weekend, the State Department announced a broad freeze on foreign aid, drawing backlash from governments and NGOs around the world. The order, which included carve-outs for emergency food aid operations and for funds going to Israel and Egypt, has created “an earthquake across the aid sector, with life-saving programs in ruins,” an anonymous international aid worker told the BBC. NGOs can request waivers to keep their funding intact, but it’s unclear who will process those requests, given that Trump has also furloughed or placed on administrative leave many of the American bureaucrats in charge of global aid programs.
But the biggest shock came on Monday, when the administration said it was freezing all federal grants and loans, apparently including funding for everything from cancer research to Meals on Wheels. A federal judge issued a temporary block on the order, which led the administration to rescind the proposal, but officials insist that a comprehensive review of federal funding will move forward regardless. This back-and-forth was likely no surprise for Musk, whose approach to downsizing embraces some room for error. According to Isaacson, Musk believes that if you have to undo any less than 10 percent of your cuts, you probably didn't cut enough.
Going forward, the question is whether the Trump-Musk connection will last long enough for Musk to see his plans through. For now, Trump shares an interest in taming the federal bureaucracy and rooting out what he sees as a “deep state” of political actors who thwarted his policies the first time around. Over the longer term, though, relations could fizzle. Trump fired consigliere Steve Bannon just four months into his first term, after Bannon earned a reputation as the brain behind Trump’s ascent. A similar fate awaits many people who seek to share the spotlight with the president. At the same time, Musk—with his boundless wealth and extraordinary power over public discourse—may wind up being harder to push aside.
This week Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic (one of the “big three” US makers of proprietary large language models), offered an update on his feelings about America’s “chip war” on China. He said these US export controls—which, if successful, would completely cut off China’s supply of advanced microchips—are “even more existentially important than they were a week ago.”
Amodei was reacting to the release of DeepSeek-R1, a Chinese LLM that surprised AI watchers with its combination of capability and affordability. Some observers had called this advance an indictment of the chip war; export controls seemed to have spurred AI progress in China, as its researchers figured out ways to get more out of their limited chip supply. Amodei, in a post on his website, argued to the contrary and said America must sustain its AI lead so the West can dominate the world.
Amodei thinks sufficiently stringent export controls can keep China from building the most advanced AI models—and that will mean we get to live in “a unipolar world, where only the US and its allies have these models.” Granted, “it’s unclear whether the unipolar world will last, but there's at least the possibility that, because AI systems can eventually help make even smarter AI systems, a temporary lead could be parlayed into a durable advantage.” Then, “the US and its allies might take a commanding and long-lasting lead on the global stage.”
AI safety advocates were quick to dredge up a video clip of Amodei, back in 2017, warning about the perils of a US-China AI race—which, he had said, could “create the perfect storm for safety catastrophes to happen… If we’re racing really hard to do something and maybe even some of those things are adversarial, that creates exactly the conditions under which something can happen that not only our adversary doesn’t want to happen but we don’t want to happen either.”
(Note: DeepSeek-R1 and its implications for the pace of AI progress were discussed in last week’s Earthling; R1’s implications for US-China relations were discussed in yesterday’s NonZero podcast; and the possibility that the “chip war” could lead to war in Taiwan was the subject of a NonZero sermon posted this week.)
In December, Jonathan Martin of Politico reported that some officials in the Biden White House were so worried about potential legal harassment from the incoming Trump administration that they were “already considering taking the best-paying jobs next year.” The plight of these ex-officials has since become clearer, given how many former White House staffers are resurfacing in upscale jobs with enormous compensation packages.
They can at least take comfort in all the familiar faces around the office. By NonZero’s count, no fewer than 19 former Biden appointees have landed at WestExec Advisors, a self-described “strategic advisory” firm that “brings the Situation Room to the Board Room.”