How Musk and Trump are flooding the zone

Musk raids a dizzying swath of agencies with the goal of ‘slashing waste and fraud’ as the two deploy brinkmanship. Hello, and welcome back to TechScape. This week in tech: Elon Musk and Donald Trump flood the zone and deploy brinkmanship as a negotiating tactic; US Immigration and Customs Enforcement learns search engine optimization amid arrests and deportations; and Spotify tries to soften its algorithmic image with human-centric public relations. Thank you for reading.

Donald Trump has issued a record number of executive orders since his presidency began: ending birthright citizenship, banning gender transitions for anyone under 19, pardoning the rioters of the January 6 attack, and more. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man in charge of the “department of government efficiency”, has raided an equally dizzying swath of federal agencies with the stated goal of “slashing waste, fraud, and abuse”. Among the half-dozen bureaus are the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Department of Education, Department of Labor and, most viciously, the US Agency for International Development (USAid). Trump and Musk are doing their utmost to “flood the zone” – a tactic that the former Trump administration strategist Steve Bannon has touted as one that will purposefully overwhelm the opposition and the media. Bannon is right; it’s tough to keep up.

Trump and Musk share a flair for brinkmanship. They force their opponents to accept a version of what they want by forcing negotiations to the point of mutually assured destruction, then retreating. Trump declared he would use executive orders to impose 25% tariffs on all goods imported to the US from Mexico and Canada, enormous penalties to exact from the country’s two biggest trading partners that threaten to send all three economies into tailspins. However, Trump delayed the tariffs a month after Canada and Mexico each agreed to staff up their borders with the US with 10,000 troops.

Musk preaches that he’s dissolving USAid. He might yet – the agency’s name has been taken off its door – but the likelier outcome seems like a diminished version of the agency will be folded into the state department. Secretary of state Marco Rubio has declared himself head of the agency as workers are locked out. Musk’s fingerprints were visible on the “fork in the road” email received by all 2 million employees of the US government. Will they all resign, evacuating and disabling the government? Extremely improbable. Does a partial buyout of a workforce achieve the same result as a layoff? Yes.

Musk has used this playbook many times before, most notably with X, née Twitter. He yanked office leases so fast that the company failed to pay rent it still owed. He fired about three-quarters of the workforce and left the question of severance to the courts after some ex-employees sued. It seems inevitable Musk will owe less after negotiating payouts via lawsuits. The edgy approach hasn’t always worked out for Musk, though. With X, he tweeted often about how bad the social network was to gain attention, threatened to buy it, signed a contract for the $44bn purchase, then did his best to pull out of the agreement. He was forced to go through with it, though, and acknowledged X was overvalued in a recent interview. When a judge invalidated his $56bn pay package at Tesla, he said he would consider walking away from the company without the compensation. The judge didn’t blink and ruled his pay excessive a second time. Musk has neither left Tesla, nor does he have an existing pay package.

Silicon Valley software companies like to say they move fast and break things, iterating their products in service of innovation. I would call what Elon Musk does moving so fast he might break everything. It seems to be one of the things Trump likes best about him. The president himself is not so different. Remember when the US almost went to war with Iran? He called off airstrikes while the planes were in the air.

Musk’s next target seems to be Medicare and Medicaid. What will break there, and who will it break?. Read about who is helping Elon Musk lay waste to the US government here. There are several ways to game Google search to boost a website to the top of the results page, the most valuable real estate on the internet. In fact, a whole field is built around it called search engine optimization, or SEO. Google’s algorithm works by looking at various factors on a webpage to determine if it is relevant and authoritative. Government web domains already get authoritative bonus points.

SEO tactics are in the hands of every middling recipe blogger in the United States, why wouldn’t the government know about them? US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) updated thousands of press releases on 24 January, making old press releases seem new in Google search results, befuddling a longtime immigration lawyer’s search for enforcement actions. My colleague Dara Kerr reports:. News of mass immigration arrests has swept across the US over the past couple of weeks. Reports from Massachusetts to Idaho have described agents from Ice spreading through communities and rounding people up. Quick Google searches for Ice operations, raids and arrests return a deluge of government press releases. Headlines include ICE arrests 85 during 4-day Colorado operation, New Orleans focuses targeted operations on 123 criminal noncitizens and, in Wisconsin, ICE arrests 83 criminal aliens.