By HERMAN MORRIS
The Year is 2025. The richest man in the world has gained full administrative access to and control of the U.S. Treasury payment system. He will go on to use that access in order to publicly brag on his privately owned blogging site about the next target he has chosen to be denied funds.
For his next trick, he plans to upload all the budget data for the U.S. Treasury into an AI platform in order to find other places to which he can unilaterally shut off funding. The entire political establishment is either too impotent to stop him or actively invested in helping him gut the public sector of the United States, including funds to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Department of Health and Human Services. While it is unknown yet if money has been directly transferred from the public coffers to private hands, there is really no way for anyone to know at this point until after it happens.
Unfortunately for working people, this is not the plot of a cyber punk thriller but the actual state of the U.S. government and what is possible in the hands of Elon Musk and Donald Trump. While this flexing of terrifying and unstoppable force on the government may seem to be simply a demonstration of the raw power that these men hold, it is also an expression of the deep crisis that Musk and tech specifically are in, as well as a reflection of the general decline of the United States as the top imperialist power of the world.
While the “Magnificent Seven” big tech companies have accounted for nearly all the growth in the public stock market for the past two years, these corporations are failing to find ways to productively invest their hoards of wealth. The so-called “Next Big Thing” that tech companies have been seeking out since the cloud and smartphone revolution spurred profits to new and dizzying heights has failed to materialize.
Self-driving cars, artificial general intelligence, augmented/virtual reality, and quantum computing are just a few examples of the kinds of research projects from the industry that promise levels of technology worthy of science fiction. While undeniable progress has been made in all of those fields, not one of them has reached the point where it can demonstrate a financial return that justifies their deep levels of research costs.
To add to their woes, the traditional bedrock technologies that have spurred the profits and valuations of these corporations are now under threat, with ad-tech losing money to new privacy tools, government regulation enforcing data protections, rising militancy from workers, antitrust scrutiny, and increasing competition from Chinese companies. This means that—while things may look good for tech for now—there are stormy waters ahead, and it’s unclear where and how they will be able to deploy their vast resources in a way that continues the breakneck growth they have historically enjoyed.
While some tech capitalists have been vocally reactionary their whole lives, the past few years have seen a significant growth both in how many tech CEOs have declared an allegiance to Trump’s Republican Party and in the overall extremism of their views. The most famous examples are Elon Musk’s support for the AfD in Germany (an anti-immigrant, far-right party that has repeatedly used Nazi slogans) and Mark Zuckerberg’s ending of all DEI programs at Meta while making the bizarre claim of needing more “masculine energy” at the corporation—which historically has been over 60% male, according to its own diversity reports.
While CEOs may talk about a change in values or other high-minded ideals on how they believe their companies should run, there is a material basis to these changes from the top. One is the profitability crisis that tech is facing. In short, they may have all the money in the world, but they don’t know how to put it to good use. Unless they can find that use, Wall Street and other investors are going to start wanting their money back in the form of buybacks or dividends, rather than having it just sitting in the bank.
The other is that Trump won, and in his first term he made it clear he would punish those who he felt had crossed him. This had disastrous implications for Amazon, where Jeff Bezos originally made it a point to antagonize Trump through The Washington Post, which he also owns. Trump retaliated by rewarding the JEDI military contract (a deal all but assumed to be gift-wrapped to Amazon) to Microsoft, costing them $10 billion dollars and the opportunity for more contracts in the future. Jeff Bezos doesn’t want to lose money, and so this time he saw to it that The Washington Post wouldn’t endorse Kamala Harris.
So, tech is weak. Where does the rest of the country stand? While the continuous growth of the national GDP might show that everything is “fine,” as mentioned above, most of the growth of the past several years can be solely chalked up to the tech revolution, with the rest of the U.S. industrial base either stagnating or contracting, up until the recent re-shoring efforts to combat Chinese competition. Even this effort, though, required hundreds of billions of dollars in state assistance and there are big questions on the profitability of such ventures without severe curtailment of workers’ rights.
Internationally, things aren’t looking good either. The last administration had to finally admit defeat in Afghanistan, and the U.S. has spent billions of dollars funding Israel’s military action against the Palestinians—which has failed to produce a clear victory. In simple terms, the United States is failing to find ways to use its immense hoards of wealth and power to keep itself economically ahead of the rest of the world, and is increasingly at risk of being dragged down from the number one spot into a field of having to contend with other major powers to carve up the world.
These conditions are ripe for a marriage between the most powerful and corrupt leaders in the U.S. today to try to identify some way to keep themselves on top. Now that the more “centrist” U.S. leaders have repeatedly failed to prescribe workable measures for the United States to stay ahead of China and Russia, some feel that it is time for more radical ideas to come forward. Enter Trump round two, except that this time, instead of the tacit working relationship he had with tech and other big arms of capital in the U.S., he is enjoying active cooperation and even some kickbacks. In return for the friendly approval and financial support in the form of million-dollar donations to his inauguration fund, Trump is doling out public support like candy: $500 billion for Stargate, a multi-company AI server investment where it’s unclear what role the federal government is even playing in it; a new government-specific AI chat bot provided by Open AI; with the capstone being the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
DOGE is a vague and ill-defined “Temporary Organization” (a classification fabricated to avoid saying it’s an executive department, which can only be formed by Congress). Its purpose is stated to “modernize federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” Its actual steps so far seem to consist of personally putting Elon Musk in charge of the executive branch of the U.S. government to conduct cost reductions and layoffs in the exact manner that Elon has pursued at his own corporations. These attacks have been wild and all over the place, with the only departments assured safety being ICE and the military—and even they have been subject to anti-DEI policies.
Will this strategy work, though? There are two very important factors at play here. While on the one hand, potentially massive amounts of contracts and funds may be siphoned from the public sector to the private sector, this is just one more acceleration of the same neoliberal policies that have been gutting the public sector of the U.S. government since the 1970s. This may temporarily free more capital to be invested, but it comes at a cost of more human misery in that basic services and needs are no longer fulfilled.
Additionally, the people carrying out these cuts still have no plan for where the money can be profitably spent once the smoke clears, other than continuing to invest in industrial research projects worthy of science fiction, as they did earlier, and praying for another breakthrough. Mostly, it will only mean more money for them, and less for the working class. This is the key lack of vision and imagination that the capitalist system has instilled in its most powerful leaders, and they must resort to deeply undemocratic means to carry them out because they know how unpopular they really are.
On the other hand, the way that these neoliberal reforms are being carried out represents an important shift in the nature of capitalist rule in America. There is no longer any pretending that what Congress passed into law today or yesterday will be carried out at all by the executive branch, if it is willing to leverage the payment system to unilaterally divert funding. The judicial branch of government is also staffed by Trump loyalists, who promise at best a slowing of the process, if not rubber-stamping aspects of it outright.
This can be seen as one layer of the U.S. capitalist class saying that traditional American “democracy” and its institutions are not useful enough for them to realize their aims. So far, no ruling-class opposition that could stop this effort has materialized. While there is immense oppression and injustice in the U.S. as it exists today, this new form of government with an executive branch that can work virtually unchecked, as proposed by segments of the far right, would obviously only be worse for working and oppressed people.
The unpopularity of these measures is very important to remember. Trump may have won the “popular” vote this time, but once again, he didn’t even win a majority of the electorate. While the Democratic Party has been extremely feeble and ineffectual in protesting these maneuvers, public reaction has been growing. On Feb. 5, thousands demonstrated around the country in loosely coordinated “50 Protests, 50 States, 1 Day” rallies, which expressed support for LGBTQ, reproductive, and immigrant rights, as well as outrage over Project 2025 and the onslaught by Trump and Musk. These events included spontaneous rallies by federal workers. In the meantime, immigrants and their allies have been building bigger and bigger demonstrations across the U.S. to fight back against deportations.
These demonstrations contain within them the kernel of building a mass democratic movement to provide a far stronger check on capitalist politicians than what Congress is capable of. For these demonstrations to grow, it will be essential to form broad coalitions that include labor unions, immigrant communities, civil liberties groups, and other mass organizations.
The attempts to dismantle federal departments threaten the jobs of federal workers and can severely diminish the important services that they provide; they also threaten to reduce the strength of some of the biggest unions in the United States. Only through building a movement in the streets and in the workplaces of those facing the worst threats can an effective fight against the Trump regime and his sycophants be mounted.
While the ruling class may live in its fantasy world of super-computers and infinite power, workers live in the real world. In this world, we know from history that mobilizing and building a broad, democratic fightback against the worst excesses of the state—from the Vietnam War to Jim Crow—can be successful. By studying our past and building this movement, working people have the power to put a stop to the capitalist agenda to gut workers’ rights and the democratic liberties that we enjoy today as the fruits of past struggles. Working-class power is in the streets, not in the halls of Congress, and only through bringing greater and greater masses of workers together, organized to fight back against cuts to federal jobs and social services, can workers take their destiny into their own hands.
