Musk's aides block civil servants from accessing important database - Reuters

Since taking office 11 days ago, US President Donald Trump has embarked on a major government overhaul. He has fired and suspended hundreds of civil servants as part of his first steps to reduce the bureaucracy and appoint more loyalists.

Billionaire Elon Musk, who has been tasked by Trump with cutting the 2.2 million civilian workforce, quickly found allies in the agency known as the US Office of Personnel Management.

2 officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters that certain senior career employees of the Office have been denied access to some of the agency's information systems.

According to the officials, these systems include a large database called the Enterprise Human Resources Integration. The database contains dates of birth, social security numbers, certifications, home addresses, salary levels, and length of service of civil servants.

“We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems. That is creating great concern. There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications,” said one official.

Officials affected by the decision can still log in and access functions such as email. However, they can no longer see the huge data sets covering all aspects of the federal workforce.

The Office of Personnel Management has sent out memos that eschew the usual dry wording of government messages as they encourage government employees to consider buyout offers to quit and take time off to a dream destination.

Don Moynihan, a professor at the University of Michigan's Ford School of Public Policy, said the actions within the Office raise concerns about congressional oversight of the agency and how Trump and Musk view the federal bureaucracy.

“This makes it much harder for anyone outside Musk's inner circle at OPM to know what's going on,” Moynihan said.

Elon Musk's influence

A team of current and former Musk employees took command of the Office of Personnel Management on January 20, the day Trump took office.

According to one of the Office's employees, they moved the sofa beds to the fifth floor of the agency's headquarters, where the director's office is located and can only be accessed with a pass or with security guards. The sofa beds were installed so that the team could work around the clock.

Elon Musk, a big backer of his notoriously demanding boss, installed beds in Office X for employees to work longer hours when he took over the social media platform formerly known as Twitter in 2022.

“It's like a hostile takeover,” an official at the office told the agency.

According to the officials, the new leaders of the Office of Personnel Management have moved the agency's general manager, Katie Malague, from her office to a new office on another floor.

The move of Musk's aides to the Office and the riots at the Treasury building on Friday, provoked by other aides to the businessman, underscore his enormous influence in the government.

David Lebryk, a senior career official at the US Treasury Department, will leave his post after a conflict with Musk's allies. They asked for access to payment systems.

The new team of the Office includes software engineers, including Brian Bjelde, who joined Musk's SpaceX company in 2003 as an avionics engineer and later became the company's vice president of human resources. In the Office, Bjelde holds the position of Senior Advisor.

The acting head of the Office of Personnel Management, Charles Ezell, has been sending memos to all government employees since Trump took office. In particular, on Tuesday, he offered federal employees the opportunity to resign with eight months' pay.

“No-one here knew that the memos were coming out. We are finding out about these memos the same time as the rest of the world,” one official told Reuters.

Amanda Scales, a former employee of Musk's who is now his chief of staff, is also among the members of the Office's leadership team.

In one of the memos sent out by Ezell on January 20 and 21, Scales ordered agencies to identify federal employees on probation and asked agency heads to write to her email address in the Office.

Another senior adviser is Riccardo Biasini, a former Tesla engineer and most recently director of The Boring Company, Musk's company that builds tunnels in Las Vegas.

High-profile decisions of Donald Trump administration

After Donald Trump took office as President of the United States, his administration made many decisions that caused a scandal.

On January 24, the United States suspended the issuance of financial assistance grants to other countries.

On January 27, the media reported that these programs had been unblocked, but the White House denied this information.

In addition, the Trump administration is considering cutting the US Agency for International Development (USAID). It may be placed under the control of the State Department.