Paul Krugman, writing on his Substack email, has a useful analogy to what Musk is currently doing to our government.

Last month SpaceX carried out a test launch of its in-development Starship rocket. Liftoff was achieved, but as the company later announced, “Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn.” In other words, it exploded.

It would be wrong to think of this explosion as a disaster; new products often experience failures during testing. That is, after all, why we test them. Still, the euphemistic language reeks of unwillingness to take responsibility and admit that things didn’t go as planned. But then again, what would you expect from a company owned by Elon Musk?

And here’s the thing: If a rocket blows up, you can build a new rocket and try again. “Move fast and break things” is sometimes an OK approach if the things in question are just hardware, which can be replaced. But what if the object that experiences “rapid unscheduled disassembly” is something whose continued functioning is crucial to people’s lives — say, something like the U.S. government?

This isn’t a hypothetical question: Musk, with backing from Donald Trump, is blowing up significant parts of the U.S. government as you read this. And we can already see the shape of multiple potential disasters.

The Muskenjugend — the mostly very young people Musk has hired to work at the Department of Government Efficiency, which isn’t actually a government department in any legal sense but which Trump has effectively given huge and probably unconstitutional power to remake federal agencies — generally seem to share three characteristics.

He goes on to explain exactly what Musk and his group are doing, why they are incredibly ignorant, stupid, and likely racist, and the consequences therein. I must admit I had to look up where “Muskenjugend” came from. If you don’t know, Krugman is playing with Hitlerjugend which is the German word for the Hitler Youth. So, there’s that lovely image.

The last week has shown not only how destructive this administration is, but also how incompetent. Elon doesn’t understand how COBOL works, the DOGE team doesn’t know how to secure their own website, and Trump accidentally fired the people safeguarding the country’s nuclear weapons.

If you need a short video, Hank Green describes the situation perfectly.

Basically, a lot of people are going to die from preventable mistakes in the next four years.