AMY GOODMAN: Legal experts are warning of a constitutional crisis as the Trump administration hints it may ignore a federal judge’s ruling temporarily blocking Elon Musk and his DOGE associates from accessing the Treasury Department’s payment systems and sensitive data. Over the weekend, Elon Musk lashed out at Judge Paul Engelmayer, referring to him on X as a, quote, “corrupt judge protecting corruption,” calling for Engelmayer to be impeached. In his ruling, Engelmayer warned of irreparable harm presented by DOGE’s access to sensitive information and of the, quote, “heightened risk that the systems in question will be more vulnerable than before to hacking,” unquote.

In response, Vice President JD Vance said on X, quote, “If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” said the vice president of the United States, a graduate of Yale Law School, JD Vance.

Meanwhile, President Trump on Friday said nearly every federal agency in the U.S. government could fall under the scrutiny of DOGE. Trump was questioned by Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And we’re going to be doing more and more of that. We’re going to be looking at Department of Education. We’re going to be looking at even our military. We’re going to be looking at tremendous amounts of money, Peter, being spent on things that bear no relationship to anything and have no value. We’re talking about trillions of dollars. It will be, in the end, trillions of dollars being absolutely wasted, and perhaps illegally.

AMY GOODMAN: Democratic Senator Chris Murphy appeared on ABC This Week Sunday and warned against what he called the billionaire takeover of government.

SEN. CHRIS MURPHY: I think this is the most serious constitutional crisis the country has faced, certainly since Watergate. The president is attempting to seize control of power and for corrupt purposes. The president wants to be able to decide how and where money is spent, so that he can reward his political friends, he can punish his political enemies. That is the evisceration of democracy.

AMY GOODMAN: This all comes as more details have emerged of DOGE’s young so-called engineers, who are playing a key role in Musk’s overhaul of federal agencies, including Edward Coristine. He’s 19 years old, a college dropout. He graduated from Rye Country Day High School last June. Other DOGE engineers have been identified as 21-year-old Akash Bobba, who has been listed as an expert at the Office of Personnel Management and reportedly has been able to access internal databases; 23-year-old Luke Farritor, a former intern at Musk’s SpaceX; 24-year-old Gautier Cole Killian; 25-year-old Gavin Kliger, who described Trump’s failed U.S. attorney general nominee and accused sexual abuser Matt Gaetz as a victim of the deep state; and 22-year-old Ethan Shaotran. Musk said on Friday he will be rehiring 25-year-old DOGE staff member Marko Elez, who resigned last week after he was linked to a social media account that advocated racism and eugenics, writing, among other things, “Normalize Indian hate.” Both Trump and JD Vance called for Elez to be rehired.

For more, we’re joined here in New York by Vittoria Elliott, reporter for Wired covering platforms and power. She and her team have broken several major stories on Elon Musk and DOGE. Elliott’s recent piece is headlined “The Recruitment Effort That Helped Build Elon Musk’s DOGE Army.”

Welcome back to Democracy Now! — or, to Democracy Now! for the first time. Thank you for joining us. We know you are under the weather, tired for so much reporting on this firehose of presidential actions. Vittoria, what do you think is most important for us to understand of this DOGE army? You can refer to them by their names or by their various handles, which are quite amazing.

VITTORIA ELLIOTT: I mean, I think the most important thing is to note that, you know, what we’re really seeing is people coming out of either Musk’s companies or companies owned by Peter Thiel, another billionaire, who’s very close to Musk. He’s the chair of Palantir, a big data analytics company that is also a massive defense contractor. And so, what I think was really interesting for us when we reported that most recent story is the fact that, you know, these young people were sourcing within these already established networks of people who are very, very technically gifted, probably because they’ve worked at these companies, but that this sort of a closed network.

And what we’ve sort of learned, being tech reporters, in general, is that oftentimes people in the tech industry see the press as pretty adversarial. They see government, in some ways, as sometimes pretty adversarial with overreach and red tape. And so, I think what stuck out to me is that although Musk sort of put out this public call on X, it seems that a lot of the people who are part of this effort were people drawn from what he and people who are close to him would consider trusted networks. And in that way, you know, I think this sort of sense that DOGE is almost this parallel operation to sort of traditional government operations really feels very salient, particularly when these people have access to really sensitive data that people who are government contractors maybe would not often have or people who are new hires into government would not often have.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk more about who the young people are, like the Rye Country Day graduate from last year, his name, Edward Coristine. He’s referred to — he refers to himself as “Big Balls.” These are the people that the administration is referring to as these efficiency experts. He’s the one — senators aren’t allowed now into the Treasury Department to see what’s going on. They’re stopped by police. But he’s right there.

VITTORIA ELLIOTT: Yeah, I mean, again, I think a lot of these people, you know, if you look at their backgrounds, they’re people with really strong technical skills. You know, I think they all have, really, some impressive achievements on their résumés. I think Edward Coristine, as you mentioned, is quite young, and our team was able to sort of identify that he was — seemed to be associated with a possible DDoS, or distributed denial of service for hire situation. So, you know, that particularly is sketchy. And I think when we’re looking at that, even if these people —

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain —

VITTORIA ELLIOTT: — are particularly technically gifted, they may not —

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what that means, for people who are not digitally completely literate?

VITTORIA ELLIOTT: Sure. So, a DDoS thing is a sort of — distributed denial of service, it’s a form of attack. So, it’s when someone comes to — when your website is flooded with views at such a high rate that it basically shuts your whole website down. It’s sort of meant to overwhelm a technical system. And it’s a form of cyberattack.

And so, I think it’s one of those things where when we look at that type of instance, you know, even if these young men are very technically gifted — and they very well may be — you know, they do seem to have questionable — some of them seem to have questionable backgrounds. And if they were going through the regular process of, you know, doing a security clearance or getting background-checked for a government job to access the kind of sensitive data that they would seem to be having access to right now, they may not have actually been given that if they were adhering to the standard protocol that we have set up within the U.S. government for reasons to be able to vet people’s background, to be able to ensure that people who are touching this data or can manipulate this data are trustworthy, you know, have been sort of vetted.

And again, as I’ve said sort of multiple times, you know, even if these are incredibly technically gifted people who have nothing but the purest of intentions, they’ve only had access to these systems, at best, since January 20th. And anyone who’s started a new job anywhere at any time could tell you that is not enough time to be getting into a system and making substantial changes to it.

AMY GOODMAN: And, I mean, someone like Marko Elez, who was the focus this weekend because he was fired when it came out, that now-deleted social media account that advocated repealing the Civil Rights Act back to eugenic immigration policy and, quote, said, “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.” And he’s the one who advocated normalizing Indian hate. The front person advocating for him to be rehired, which he was, was Vice President JD Vance, whose wife, of course, Usha Vance, is Indian American, his children, his three children, Indian American. Vittoria?

VITTORIA ELLIOTT: Yeah, I think that’s a distraction. The reality is, you know, I think there’s — I don’t think that that’s — I think, obviously, his views would probably, again, if he had been properly background-checked, would have come up, would have been something that, you know, might have been flagged in the regular process, and if he was applying for a regular government job, he might not have been hired.

But I think the more critical issue is the fact that whether or not it’s Marko Elez or someone else on the DOGE team, it does seem that this, you know, parallel entity that is DOGE is accessing sensitive data that otherwise would not — would not be available to it. At least from our reporting, we saw that — or, it appeared that Marko did at some point have rewrite access to the code. And I think this is incredibly important, because we’ve already seen the way that the DOGE effort and the Trump administration has tried to get around paying out funds that have been allocated by Congress for agencies, for programs that have also been approved by Congress. You know, I think that is the most concerning thing.

AMY GOODMAN: In a piece that was headlined “A US Treasury Threat Intelligence Analysis Designates DOGE Staff as 'Insider Threat,'” talk about the significance of that, Vittoria.

VITTORIA ELLIOTT: I think it’s important just because it acknowledges that, at least in some capacity, the experts that the Treasury was working with acknowledged that having people in these systems who were not vetted, who had the ability to apparently read and write code and sort of be within — in these systems without much oversight, without much training, is an incredible risk.

AMY GOODMAN: And we’re going to talk in a moment about the — what’s been called the “PayPal mafia,” but I’d like you to go into Elon Musk — you’ve written about him extensively — as an international far-right leader. Talk about his ties to the far right in Germany, where there was just a mass protest, and how he’s used his digital platform.

VITTORIA ELLIOTT: I mean, he has platformed the leader of the AfD party in Germany in the same way he did with Trump, which is he sort of had an X Spaces with her. He has come out very publicly in support of the AfD, you know, the other weekend — and I apologize, I can’t remember the day, because they’re all blurring together. He posted “Make Europe great again.”

You know, it’s very clear that his ambitions for reshaping politics don’t end at U.S. borders. And I think, you know, even before the U.S. elections, we saw a taste of that with how he behaved in Brazil. You know, the Brazilian courts required him to — or, required X to take down accounts that they said were associated with their attempted overthrow of a free and fair election, and X refused to do it, until the Brazilian government banned the platform. But that resistance that X showed to try and keep up these right-wing accounts and to share the otherwise secret court orders with Congressman Jim Jordan, whose committee then made them public — you know, at the time, many Brazilian scholars and legal experts sort of said that they felt that X’s and Musk’s behavior was, essentially, trying to assault their democratic institutions and disobey their duly elected government.

And so, I think, you know, we’ve seen tastes of this even before Musk was part of the Trump administration. And I think that, you know, Musk is a global businessman. His interests extend far beyond the U.S. borders, and I think, therefore, his political interests extend beyond the U.S. borders, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me, finally, ask you about the difficulty of the — the challenges of reporting in this time. You have the interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Edward R. Martin threatening to go after people who identify or criticize individuals. Wired is breaking story after story. You are naming names, Vittoria. Are you concerned?

VITTORIA ELLIOTT: We’re just continuing to do the work.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you so much for being with us, Vittoria Elliott, reporter for Wired. One other question: Are they downloading this information? Do we know what they’re doing inside these agencies, these 19-, 20-year-old kids, kids who call themselves “Big Balls,” kids who talk about normalizing Indian hate? Are they downloading the private health and financial information of millions of people in this country?

VITTORIA ELLIOTT: We don’t know. And the lack of transparency is what’s concerning. My colleagues have also reported that — you know, my colleague Makena Kelly also reported that it does seem that they want to lean more — that DOGE, as a sort of mission, wants to lean more heavily into AI and automating systems. And it would follow — although we don’t know — that that kind of data would be needed to train an automated system. But again, we don’t know, and that is a big part of the issue, is just the lack of transparency.

AMY GOODMAN: Vittoria Elliott, we thank you so much for being with us, reporter for Wired. She and her team have broken a number of major stories on Elon Musk and DOGE. We’ll link to them. Vittoria’s recent headline, “The Recruitment Effort That Helped Build Elon Musk’s DOGE Army.”

Next up, in addition to heading DOGE, the South African-born richest man in the world Elon Musk is claiming white South Africans have been the victims of racist ownership laws. The U.S. government, Trump administration has just announced they’re cutting off all aid to South Africa. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: The musical legend Jon Batiste singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the start of the Super Bowl Sunday night. His performance came just days after President Trump fired him and others from serving on the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. In the audience at the Super Bowl was President Trump, the first president to attend a Super Bowl.