The administration in Washington, D.C. is running amok, or rather aMusk. Colorado is missing out on $570 million in federal government commitments. Our U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper have written a letter to the Office of Management and Budget to release the funds. The federal government is burning down. They wrote a letter to the OMB. Well done!

President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are dismantling great gobs of the federal government without a look back. USAID is flushed. The Department of Education is on the block. The Environmental Protection Agency is about to disappear into a smoggy cloud. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is squashed. The man responsible for overseeing ethics in the federal system is gone.

The U.S. Department of Treasury has been invaded by software coders stopping payments to authorized parties, including us. Their mission, as reported by The Wire and The Lever, is to take over the systems that manage more than $4 trillion the U.S. Congress has committed to people (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, etc.), programs such as Head Start and Title 1 in the Department of Education, student loans, and everything else.

These payment platforms are supposed to be carefully protected from interference. The systems are built on legacy code such as COBOL (remember that from the 1960s?). The advantage of the legacy system now is no one except specialists have experience in keeping the software running and secure.

Trump via Musk has infiltrated the Bureau of Fiscal Service with 25-year-old coders to take over the legacy platforms and “update” them using AI. Anyone who has dealt with transforming an old software platform into a “current” software platform knows the process is fraught with problems. Miracles don’t cover these risks.

Closer to home, if you’re a Coloradan on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid or you pay taxes, your personally identifiable information is now available to these young, unvetted coders. If you’re supposed to be on the receiving end of a payment for a service to the government, kiss that money goodbye.

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Much of this dismantling is to eradicate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) from the federal government. President Trump and Musk believe our nation’s executive branch has no obligation to reflect the people who pay the taxes that support White House salaries (Musk, the richest man in the world by the dollar metric, is not taking a salary). In their view, DEI violates principles of employment by merit which is, of course, how Trump got his start in the world of work. These two celebrate homogeneity, elitism and exclusion (HEE) under the disguise of merit. An additional plus to using DEI as an excuse to fire federal workers is the diminishing of federal unions that annoy Musk beyond all other annoyances.

Trump and Musk believe federal workers are a lazy lot. Federal employees who defend the nation, keep dams and reservoirs safe and full, support national parks, find cures for diseases, confine contagion, clean up air and water, oversee the safety of our food supply, get seniors into Social Security and Medicare programs, offer low-income toddlers a place to learn, secure public safety, support the safety of workers on the job, identify and round up terrorists before they terrorize, etc., are inconsequential. Their work is a drag on us citizens, especially since the people who perform this work, according to the disrupters, have allowed so much fraud and waste they have personally created our multi-trillion-dollar budget deficit.

According to Trump and Musk, the nation’s deficit has nothing to do with reducing tax rates for the wealthy, tolerating tax avoiders, and shoveling out corporate, energy and agriculture subsidies in large quantities. Nor does the debt have anything to do with the hotel rates the Trump enterprise charges the secret service and other federal employees when they lazily protect and serve him in residence at his pricey resorts. Our taxpayer dollars have surely been spent super-wisely by Musk’s various companies with federal contracts, especially the project to put a man (Musk?) on Mars.

When the Confederacy separated from the Union to protect slavery, the Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, stood up for the republic. For five years he led the nation in a civil war to defeat slavery and secure the nation.

It’s unclear at this pivotal point whether the Trump aggression against the federal government and its civil servants is as threatening to the nation as the Civil War. He has set up a constitutional crisis that veers in that direction. Will Republicans and Democrats stand up to this tyranny by executive order?

Courts have ruled against Trump’s and Musk’s actions. They have stayed the president’s demolition of USAID and other programs. A federal court has told Trump to pay the nation’s bills. What happens next is critical. If the courts continue to declare presidential executive orders unconstitutional, will the U.S. Congress back the courts or President Trump?

Our U.S. Sens. Bennet and Hickenlooper and Colorado’s members of the U.S. Congress can’t just stand flat-footed, sending letters hither and yon. It’s their turn to step up to save the republic and the nation.

Paula Noonan owns Colorado Capitol Watch, the state’s premier legislature tracking platform.