In Elon Musk’s first two weeks in government, his lieutenants gained access to closely held financial and data systems, casting aside career officials who warned that they were defying protocols. They moved swiftly to shutter specific programs — and even an entire agency that had come into Musk’s cross hairs. They bombarded federal employees with messages suggesting they were lazy and encouraging them to leave their jobs.

Empowered by President Donald Trump, Musk is waging a largely unchecked war against the federal bureaucracy — one that has already had far-reaching consequences.

Musk’s aggressive incursions into at least half a dozen government agencies have challenged congressional authority and potentially breached civil service protections.

Top officials at the Treasury Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development who objected to the actions of his representatives were swiftly pushed aside. And Musk’s efforts to shut down USAID, a key source of foreign assistance, have reverberated around the globe.

Musk, the world’s richest man, is sweeping through the federal government as a singular force, creating major upheaval as he looks to put an ideological stamp on the bureaucracy and rid the system of those who he and the president deride as “the deep state.”

The rapid moves by Musk, who has a multitude of financial interests before the government, have represented an extraordinary flexing of power by a private individual.

The speed and scale have shocked civil servants, who have been frantically exchanging information on encrypted chats, trying to discern what is unfolding.

Senior White House staff members have at times also found themselves in the dark, according to two officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions. One Trump official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said Musk was seen as operating with a level of autonomy that almost no one can control.

Musk, the leader of SpaceX, Tesla and X, is working with a frantic, around-the-clock energy familiar to the employees at his various companies, flanked by a cadre of young engineers, drawn in part from Silicon Valley. He has moved beds into the headquarters of the federal personnel office blocks from the White House, according to a person familiar with the situation, so he and his staff, working late into the night, could sleep there, reprising a tactic he deployed at Twitter and Tesla. But this time he carries the authority of the president, who has bristled at some of Musk’s ready-fire-aim impulses but has praised him publicly.

“He’s a big cost-cutter,” Trump told reporters Sunday. “Sometimes we won’t agree with it and we’ll not go where he wants to go. But I think he’s doing a great job. He’s a smart guy.”

There is no precedent for a government official to have Musk’s scale of conflicts of interest, which include domestic holdings and foreign connections such as business relationships in China. And there is no precedent for someone who is not a full-time employee to have such ability to reshape the federal workforce.

Historian Douglas Brinkley described Musk as a lone figure with limitless running room. He noted that the billionaire was operating “beyond scrutiny,” saying: “There is not one single entity holding Musk accountable. It’s a harbinger of the destruction of our basic institutions.”

Several former and current senior government officials — even those who like what he is doing — expressed a sense of helplessness about how to handle Musk’s level of unaccountability. Some hoped Congress would choose to reassert itself.

Since Trump’s inauguration, Musk and his allies took over the United States Digital Service, renamed United States DOGE Service, begun in 2014 to fix the government’s online services.

They have commandeered the federal government’s human resources department, the Office of Personnel Management.

They have gained access to the Treasury’s payment system — a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending.

Musk has also taken a keen interest in the federal government’s real estate portfolio, managed by the General Services Administration, moving to terminate leases. Internally, GSA leaders have started to discuss eliminating as much as 50% of the agency’s budget, according to people familiar with the conversations.

Perhaps most significant, Musk has sought to dismantle USAID, the government’s lead agency for humanitarian aid and development assistance. Trump has frozen foreign aid spending, but Musk has gone further.

Musk’s actions have astounded and alarmed Democrats and government watchdog groups. They question whether Musk is breaching federal laws that give Congress the final power to create or eliminate federal agencies and set their budgets, require public disclosure of government actions and prohibit individuals from taking actions that might benefit themselves personally.

At least four lawsuits have been filed in federal court to challenge his authority and the moves by the new administration, but it’s unclear if judicial review can keep up with Musk.

Musk has been thinking radically about ways to sharply reduce federal spending for the entire presidential transition. After canvassing budget experts, he eventually became fixated on a critical part of the country’s infrastructure: the Treasury Department payment system that disburses trillions of dollars a year on behalf of the federal government.

The Treasury Department’s proprietary system for paying the nation’s financial obligations is an operation traditionally run by a small group of career civil servants with deep technical expertise. The prospect of an intrusion into that system by outsiders such as Musk and his team has raised alarm among current and former Treasury officials that a mishap could lead to critical government obligations going unpaid, with consequences ranging from missed benefits payments to a federal default.

Musk has told friends that he considers the ultimate metric for his success to be the number of dollars saved per day, and he is sorting ideas based on that ranking.

“The more I have gotten to know President Trump, the more I like him. Frankly, I love the guy,” Musk said in a live audio conversation on X early Monday. “This is our shot. This is the best hand of cards we’re ever going to have.”