One of Elon Musk's kiddos from the Department of Government Efficiency is now mucking his way through the Energy Department — bringing him into ominous proximity to the nation's atomic arsenal.
As CNN reports, the 23-year-old DOGE staffer, a former SpaceX intern named Luke Farritor, was granted access to the DOE's IT system, despite protests from the department's general counsel and chief information office.
And guess what? The system, which includes email and Microsoft 365, is also used by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) — the folks in charge of safeguarding the US's stockpile of nuclear weapons.
This is, as the protesting bureaucrats called it, "a bad idea." Farritor wasn't subject to a standard background check that every other federal employee or contractor has to go through. He is, for all intents and purposes, just some kid.
"He's not cleared to be in DOE, on our systems," one of the employees from the general counsel and chief information offices told CNN. "None of those things have been done."
The good news is that the access, as currently reported, sounds fairly basic. Per the report, the chief information office only does a "small" amount of IT and cybersecurity for the NNSA, a semiautonomous agency within the DOE, including basic internet services.
And so, in a minor and increasingly rare victory in sane governance, the IT systems that the DOGE staffer is probing through are not the ones used by the NNSA's labs that control the US's nuclear stockpile. Phew.
Still, it'll be a little too close for comfort for some. There was no rigorous vetting behind the DOGE staffer's access, with no semblance of the meritocratic process that anti-DEI zealots love to harp on to be found.
Instead, Trump's Energy Secretary Chris Wright decreed that the DOGE dilettante should get access, according to CNN, and that was that.
This is the playbook being used at other agencies.
At the Treasury Department, Musk and his lieutenants forced out top officials to seize access to the government's sensitive payment system, a pipeline for trillions of dollars every year. Musk then declared his intent to shut down government payments he deemed unnecessary.
The security of this whole gutting operation is becoming more and more suspect, too. At the Education Department and possibly elsewhere, DOGE is reportedly feeding sensitive government data into AI software to determine what programs and spending should get cut.
In any case, this might just be the beginning of the chaos at the DOE. According to CNN, employees at the department and the NNSA have started receiving "buyout" emails, offering them a payout to leave their positions. Does the prospect of employees quitting the agency that manages nukes en masse sound like a stable way to manage things?
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