Behind DOGE’s Many Conflicts of Interest and Elon Musk’s Weekend Email Chaos

WIRED Executive Editor Brian Barrett joins global editorial director Katie Drummond to talk about the many conflicts of interests within DOGE that are popping up across the federal government, including most recently at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Plus, they unpack the chaos that followed an email Elon Musk sent to federal workers over the weekend.

Articles mentioned in this episode:

• DOGE Staffers at HUD Are From an AI Real Estate Firm and a Mobile Home Operator
• These Are the SpaceX Engineers Already Working Inside the FAA
• DOGE Put Him in the Treasury Department. His Company Has Federal Contracts Worth Millions
• Elon Musk Threatens FBI Agents and Air Traffic Controllers With Forced Resignation if They Don’t Respond to an Email
• DOGE Email Throws Federal Agencies Into Chaos and Confusion
• No, 150-Year-Olds Aren’t Collecting Social Security Benefits
• The Delirious, Violent, Impossible True Story of the Zizians

You can follow Katie Drummond on Bluesky at @katie-drummond.bsky.social and Brian Barrett on @brbarrett.bsky.social. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.

How to Listen

You can always listen to this week’s podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here’s how:

If you’re on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts and search for “uncanny valley.” We’re on Spotify too.

Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Katie Drummond: Welcome to WIRED’s Uncanny Valley. I’m WIRED’s global editorial director, Katie Drummond. Today on the show the many conflicts of interest at the heart of DOGE and the email Elon Musk sent to federal workers over the weekend. I’m joined today by WIRED’s executive editor, Brian Barrett. Brian, welcome to Uncanny Valley.

Brian Barrett: Hey Katie. Thanks so much.

Katie Drummond: All right, so Brian, let’s get right into it. Over the last several weeks, we have been chronicling a number of conflicts of interest within DOGE that are popping up across federal agencies, across the federal government, including a story that we actually just published on WIRED.com today, one this time at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Tell everyone a little bit about this story in particular.

Brian Barrett: Sure. This is a story that I think speaks to some of the bigger issues around the conflict of interest that you were just talking about. What we are reporting has shown is that there are two people working at the Department of Housing Urban Development that both have ties to the real estate industry. One of them in fact is a guy named Scott Langmack. He is currently also the chief operating officer of a company called Kukun, which is spelled K-U-K-U-N.

Katie Drummond: Why not?

Brian Barrett: And so Kukun is a company that works to get information to homeowners and real estate investors about how much return on investment they’ll get if they renovate their properties. And it also helps them predict where property values are going to rise in the future so they can make smarter investments. Obviously all this involves a lot of data. And what does HUD have? A lot of data about housing. So what we’re seeing is that Langmack and another guy from DOGE, his name is Michael Mirsky, have access to three major systems within DOGE that gives them information about what kind of money is flowing through, who’s getting public housing assistance, who has permissions to which systems. It’s a lot, and I think there’s sort of a very apparent conflict of interest in that.

Katie Drummond: And tell me more about Michael Mirsky.

Brian Barrett: Yeah, so Michael Mirsky also has these ties. He works for a place called TCC Management. It’s a company based in Michigan that owns and operates mobile home parks across the U.S. And he also has some of these same privileges, he has write privileges to the systems that control who has access to what. And HUD does a lot of work that would implicate both these types of companies. HUD especially in terms of the mobile home business does a lot of work with lower income families and homeowners that intersects a lot with the mobile home industry. There’s just sort of these layers of potential conflicts, people getting data that could help them when they return to their jobs if they’re not currently working with their jobs, not really people that you would expect to be in these positions.

Katie Drummond: And just to be totally clear as far as our reporting shows, as far as what we know, both Langmack and Mirsky still hold their current roles in the private sector while working within this federal housing for DOGE.

Brian Barrett: So Kukun and Langmack did not get back to us, so his status is unknown, but as far as we can tell, his LinkedIn still has him there, all of his profiles still him there. And we did hear from the mobile home company. The company is called TCC Management. They say that he’s taking a six-month leave of absence, that he’ll be back in July. So he is on break it seems, but will be going right back to the company with whatever he has learned in the process.

And we’ve seen other instances across the government where representatives of DOGE are keeping two jobs at once. We’ve got Tom Krause of Treasury, who is also the CEO of the Cloud Software Group, which has millions of dollars of contracts with the Treasury Department. So it’s part of this pattern that we’re seeing of people who are in positions of power in the government with a lot of potential to benefit their private business lives. I think the focus of our reporting is just the fact of the conflict of interest and even the appearance of the conflict of interest used to be enough to sort of prevent these sorts of situations from happening. That has gone out the window with DOGE.

Katie Drummond: Absolutely. You would like to assume that someone working within a federal agency in a position that is essentially as a civil servant is working in the best interests of Americans, and that their intentions in a role like that are to serve the American people. That’s sort of the whole point. Obviously, and to your point, exactly whether or not he’s doing anything with the data that he has or with the sort of privileged position that he has within this agency, even the appearance of a conflict of interest is problematic enough.

Brian Barrett: And as we’ve been reporting on this at other agencies, we did some digging into sort of historical precedent. Then you really have to go back to World War I and World War II to a time when people worked two jobs at once. There were people called dollar a year men or whatever, who were helping out the government during war time and took a dollar salary from the government, also stayed at their companies. And that actually turned out to be pretty problematic. There were a lot of congressional investigations into issues that sprung up around that.

So we’re revisiting those sort of bad old days in some ways for no reason other than that people just don’t care anymore. There’s no national emergency that is causing this. It’s just Elon Musk thinks it’s fine, so it’s fine.

Katie Drummond: Right. Elon Musk thinks it’s fine. And let’s go back to what you mentioned about Treasury and Tom Krause a little bit because that was a story we published recently, sort of highlighting another specific instance of this kind of conflict of interest. So tell us a little more about what we know about Krause, his two jobs and what exactly he’s doing inside the Department of Treasury right now.

Brian Barrett: So Tom Krause is DOGE’s representative at Treasury. He is in charge of overseeing these systems as part of his job that are responsible for payouts in the trillions of dollars every year, the sort of main payout systems of the federal government. There’s been a lot of legal back and forth over whether he can actually access those systems directly. So that remains to be a little bit in flux.

But importantly, he is also openly also the CEO of Cloud Software Group. When he took the position, Cloud Software Group confirmed that he was still CEO there, Treasury sent out a note saying, yes, he’s still the CEO there. So he is, no bones about it, fully serving in both capacities. Why not do both? What we reported on more recently is that Cloud Software Group actually has tens of millions of dollars of active contracts with the US government, including over 10 million as I mentioned with the Treasury Department itself.

Again, there’s no indication yet that anything bad has happened yet, that there is any self-dealing. But when his company’s software comes up for renewal for a contract, do we think it’ll get it or do we think they’ll go with someone else? We’ll see. But it’s just so obviously, again, on its face, a conflict of interest. And again, the appearance of conflict of interest and that there’s no attempt to even pretend that there is a separation of church and state.

Katie Drummond: In sort of a bigger picture way, when we talk about DOGE and its operatives and Musk acolytes being installed in these agencies, I think the important bigger picture context there that you’ve alluded to is that Elon Musk himself is one giant conflict of interest within the federal government. This guy owns and operates a multitude of companies, many of which have a lot of dealings with various parts of the federal government, a lot of contracts, a lot of financial entanglements.

And I think one that is particularly interesting to me that we’ve reported on recently is actually the FAA. We’ve reported that SpaceX engineers are now working within that agency. Obviously that agency has had a lot to do with SpaceX and sort of what that company has been able to accomplish or not accomplish in the United States. The FAA has levied fines against SpaceX several times as far as I’m aware.

Can you talk a little bit more about the question of Elon, and particularly in the context of SpaceX, which is to be fair to him, I think one of the biggest success stories in the Musk empire is SpaceX, which has done some genuinely pretty incredible things, but obviously is now sort of right at the heart of this question of conflict of interest.

Brian Barrett: And so we’ll talk about the FAA specifically first because I think the circumstances under which people from SpaceX joined the FAA is just as interesting in some ways as what they’re doing. So a little bit of background, Sean Duffy, who is currently heading up the FAA the other week said, we’ve got some SpaceX engineers coming through. They’re just on a tour. They’re just on a tour. They’re just being given the lay of the land. Nothing more than that.

Our reporting shows that in fact, at least three of those engineers were being onboarded already. And not only that, they were being onboarded without getting the typical clearances you would expect because they use something called Schedule A to get them into the FAA. And Schedule A is designed to help expedite the hiring of people with disabilities.

Katie Drummond: Classy.

Brian Barrett: Yeah, very classy. And so they’ve been in there under sort of doubly cloudy circumstances. So that’s worth noting first of all. Second of all, yes, the people who are in there are engineers. Who knows what they’re working on. In some ways they’re probably not working on actual contracts, but they might be, we don’t know. And I think that’s the bigger problem is that we have these people going into these agencies doing who knows what? What are they doing with the data? Are they taking it somewhere else? Are they feeding it into the AI? At some agencies that’s true. If they can see all the contracts that the FAA has with SpaceX competitors, what are they doing with that information?

It is just giving themselves this fire hose under the auspices of we’re going to fix air traffic control. Meanwhile, they’re telling air traffic controllers, they’ll be fired if they don’t write back to an email. They’re firing thousands of FAA employees. It seems like there is just a very central failure to think through or to process what is actually holistically good for the FAA. It is this idea we’re going to chop off the FAA’s and we’re going to throw in these four dudes who are going to fix everything. It just doesn’t make sense.

And again, as you said, as we’ve said repeatedly raises so many questions about how much inside intel is Elon Musk getting at all of these agencies, and especially one where he has so much business.

Katie Drummond: Absolutely. And of course, important to mention here, as President Trump said a few weeks ago, if Elon does encounter a conflict of interest, he will simply recuse himself. Obviously that was said with a great deal of sarcasm. Remains to be seen what conflicts of interest will present themselves next from within DOGE because I have a feeling these are not the last stories that WIRED will be publishing on this topic. We’re going to take a short break. We’ll be back with Brian Barrett in a minute.

Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. So Brian, let’s talk about the email. Over the weekend, WIRED had a team of reporters furiously working to cover an email that went out from the Office of Personnel Management, so essentially the federal government’s HR apparatus, and that was touted by Elon Musk on X. So ostensibly, this email is coming from the heart and mind of Musk himself, is the impression that we have essentially telling federal workers to send a productivity report back to OPM by Monday at midnight or they would be fired. That’s how things started on Saturday. They unraveled pretty quickly after that. Brian, tell us a little bit more about what has transpired.

Brian Barrett: Well, and I’ll start, just to clarify too, I think an important part of this is the initial email didn’t say they would be fired if they didn’t respond. The email itself just said, send us a bulleted list of five things of what you did last week. And then Elon separately on X tweeted, by the way, if you don’t write back, you’re going to be forced to resign.

Katie Drummond: I hope that all sort of 2.3 million federal workers are checking X regularly or they will apparently miss important updates about their employment status from the government.

Brian Barrett: And truly, I talked to one person who works at the federal government who has muted Elon Musk on X and had not seen it until late Monday. So that’s just part of the chaos that ensued. The other part, and the bigger picture part is that leadership at all of these agencies seemed to have no idea this was coming. It was just a bomb dropped in the middle of the weekend on the federal workforce. And because of that, there was a scramble at every agency figuring out how to respond. At NOAA, there was a sense of don’t respond yet. It might be a phishing email. Let’s figure it out. Then once they decided=

Katie Drummond: It sure seems like spam.

Brian Barrett: Yeah, it does. At other agencies, there was sort of, in general there’s a sense of like, let’s hold, let’s wait until Monday and you’ll get more guidance. Then meanwhile, some people are already writing back to the email. Some people aren’t. Some people haven’t even seen it. Then some agencies started to take a stand, including reportedly the FBI, where Kash Patel, who is maybe the most loyal of Trump loyalists in these positions, apparently drew a line and said, “No, don’t write back to this.” The State Department also said, “Absolutely not. You’re not doing this.” And then we sort of saw mixed guidance at NIH. There was sort of yes but no but yes. Other agencies didn’t get any directives. In some cases, federal judges got this email.

It was a really shambolic episode that speaks to, I think, to how arbitrary, capricious, just silly, a lot of DOGE’s actions are, and I mean silly in the sense of not thought through, but with very serious implications obviously. In terms of where we landed on it, OPM later said, “Never mind. You’re not going to get fired. Don’t worry about it.” And Elon Musk helpfully tweeted after that, that people would get another chance, but next time, next time, they will be fired. Which again was just a tweet.

Katie Drummond: And I believe the president himself Monday afternoon said something to the effect of they better respond or they’ll be sort of semi-fired or fired. Which again, incredibly unclear, and to be serious for a minute, I mean, it’s a ridiculous email. It’s a ridiculous situation. But putting myself in the shoes of someone working for the federal government right now, this is their livelihood. This is how they support their family. This is how they get paid.

Imagine getting an email like that, seeing Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, seeing the president himself essentially threaten to terminate your employment at will at any moment if you don’t send five bullet points outlining your productivity from the previous week to some email address. It’s terrifying and incredibly destabilizing. And again, these are the millions of people who are in theory supposed to be spending their time focused on serving the American people working within these federal agencies. They’re instead spending their weekends and their Monday panicking over whether or not to send an email updating Elon Musk on their progress. So obviously that initial deadline has passed. Musk has said second chance. So where does this leave federal workers today?

Brian Barrett: Well, I think part of the problem is that they were already worried. We’re already seeing plans for massive reductions in force across the federal workforce. So I think this was a frustrating incident. I don’t think there’s relief. I think there is still this sense of dread because there is an ongoing assault on the federal workforce. This would’ve been a particularly dumb way to lose your job. But I think there is more coming and people know that. So I think everyone is concerned and everybody is scared, and that’s just not a productive way to run a business or a government. Government is not business. But if you’re going to run it, one, at least do it well.

And one other weird sort of sub note on this that I think is getting a little bit lost is both Elon Musk and Donald Trump said something to the effect that if you don’t write back, you probably don’t even exist. I think there is a big concern, who knows where it comes from, that Elon Musk and Donald Trump think that there are these phantom federal workers out there and that there are people who don’t exist in the payroll. Musk reportedly had the similar concerns when he took over Twitter. I don’t know where this comes from. It feels a little bit of a paranoiac view. Who knows if it’s sincere, but if that’s the basis on which this is being sent, that’s alarming. Just in terms of where these guys’ heads are at. I think that’s sort of something that is really concerning, because it’s not just the federal workforce, it’s all of the US government and what it does. And if that’s the lens through which these people are operating, it’s kind of terrifying.

Katie Drummond: Well, right, and it reminds me too of, I think it was just early last week that Musk repeatedly was commenting on 150-year-old Americans claiming Social Security benefits. And as David Gilbert reported for WIRED, there is no world in which there are sort of just massive numbers of dead people whose Social Security benefits are still being paid out. So it’s sort of between the Social Security paranoia and conspiratorial thinking and then sort of speculation about federal employees who don’t exist on the payroll. You’re right that it certainly calls into question sort of where the head space of the president and Musk is.

But I think too, one thing that’s interesting to me is that this sort of conspiratorial thinking very much plays into a part of their base. It’s the followers of Musk in particular, when I think about sort of X and what we see in terms of people responding to his posts there, they love a conspiracy. So this idea that there is rampant fraud playing out across the country, robbing taxpayers of their dollars going to dead people receiving Social Security benefits, going to fake government employees, it all sort of feeds into this misinformation vortex where Trump and Musk seem to feel very comfortable playing.

Brian Barrett: At some point, reality is going to sit in. You cannot fire thousands upon thousands of federal workers without there being real world impacts that are tangible, that are more than just a QAnon conspiracy or wherever you pull your information from. And so I think we’re starting to see that with people yelling at Republican senators and representatives at town halls when they go home. I think we’re going to see more of it when people realize that, oh, the federal government actually does something. It actually did something for me that I didn’t recognize. Whether it’s farmers who are losing programs under USDA, whether it is people who are hoping for a cure or prevention of diseases, whether it’s bird flu.

Katie Drummond: Oh, don’t say bird flu.

Brian Barrett: Ravaging the country in the next 12 to 18 months. Well, I think we’re in such early days of this. So much has happened that it feels like it must have been for a long time. We’re like three or four weeks in. The effects are going to be felt 12, 18, 24 months beyond, and I think it’s going to be too late to do anything about it.

Katie Drummond: Thank you for that, Brian. It’s all very reassuring.

Brian Barrett: Let’s end right there.

Katie Drummond: It’s all very reassuring.

Brian Barrett: Stop rolling. That’s it.

Katie Drummond: And we are going to take a short break. When we come back, what you need to read on WIRED.com today.

Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. I’m Katie Drummond, WIRED’s global editorial director. I’m joined by Brian Barrett, our executive editor. So Brian, before I let you go, and I promise I will, tell our listeners what they absolutely should read on WIRED.com today, other than all of the DOGE coverage that we’ve talked about in this episode.

Brian Barrett: You have to read “The Delirious, Violent, Impossible True Story of the Zizians.” I’m not going to give too much away because as the headline indicates, it’s a ride, but it is about a group of young people in the world of tech who eventually, as the story itself says, fell into an alleged descent into mayhem and death. So read that.

Katie Drummond: Yeah, read that guys.

Brian Barrett: On an upbeat note.

Katie Drummond: It is a fantastic story. Evan Ratliff, one of my long-time, long, long-time favorite writers, so I’m very happy to have him back on WIRED .com with such a fantastic story. I second that recommendation. It is an excellent read. Brian, thank you so much for joining me today.

Brian Barrett: Thank you, Katie.

Katie Drummond: All right, that’s our show for today. We will link to all the stories we talked about in the show notes. Make sure to check out Thursday’s episode of Uncanny Valley. We’ll be recapping some of our favorite stories from the past month, including the potential decline in Tesla, the state of Deep Fakes and chips.

If you like what you heard today, make sure to follow our show and rate it on your podcast app of choice. If you’d like to get in touch with any of us for questions, comments, or show suggestions, write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com. Amar Lal at Macrosound mixed this episode. Jake Lummus is our studio engineer. Jordan Bell is our executive producer. Conde Nast’s head of global audio is Chris Bannon. And I’m Katie Drummond, WIRED’s global editorial director. Goodbye.