I haven't looked into this in detail, and I'm not actually sure how unique a situation this is.

It's pretty gosh-darned unheard of in the modern era.

Before the civil service system was instituted, every time you got a new President, you'd get random wholesale replacements... but the government was a lot smaller then.

To have the President,

• creating task forces of random people apparently selected mostly for personal loyalty, and
• sending them into legislatively established agencies,
• with the power to stop things from getting done or change how things are done, including things central to the missions of those agencies,
• as an intentional way of getting around the chain of command,
• explicitly because of systemic distrust in the civil service,
• actively tasked to suddenly and radically disrupt the prevailing procedures,
• without thinking about legislative mandates, let alone established regulations, that assume the normal chain of command in describing how things are to be done and who's allowed to do them,
• justified by an at-best-controversial view of what powers the President actually has?

Yeah, that's beyond unusual. It's not even slightly normal. And it is in fact very coup-like behavior if you look at coups in other countries.

On edit: Oh, and if you're asking about the approach to computer security specifically? That part is absolutely insane and goes against the way everything is done in essentially every large organization.

Take my comments with a grain of salt because I haven't thought too deeply about this, but if I think to myself what I would do if I was tasked with cutting government waste and modernizing IT systems, it would probably look something like what Musk is doing.

You have a sprawling complex of legacy systems, a federal bureaucracy that (let's face it) is institutionally obsessed with process, often at the expense of getting thigns done. You're tasked with cutting out fraud and bloat and increasing efficiency but everything is all over the place. So the first place you go is directly to the treasury, because at least government payments are centralized.

Could the power they've been given be abused? Yes of course. And I think it's worth keeping an idea of signs that the team Musk has hired is abusing its authority.

If someone knows something I'm missing, such as clear signs that they're using their power for self-dealing or to target political rivals, please let me know. But until I see such signs my attitude is mostly just "wait and see".

EDIT: After talking about this more with a friend, I'm more concerned about DOGE. I think many of the things they're doing are pretty blatantly unconstitional (changing allocation of funds in ways that a pretty obvious violations of article 1).

I personally find the defunding of USAID (especially PEPFAR) to be pretty horrible. That's one of the best programs the government invests money in.

I think a lot of their actions will get thrown out by the courts. But they'll do some damage in the meantime.

Huh, I came at this with the background of doing data analysis in large organizations and had a very different take.

You're a data scientist.  You want to analyze what this huge organization (US government) is spending its money on in concrete terms.  That information is spread across 400 mutually incompatible ancient payment systems.  I'm not sure if you've viscerally felt the frustration of being blocked, spending all your time trying to get permission to read from 5 incompatible systems, let alone 400.  But it would take months or years.

Fortunately, your boss is exceptionally good at Getting Things Done.  You tell him that there's one system (BFS) that has all the data you need in one place.  But BFS is protected by an army of bureaucrats, most of whom are named Florence, who are Very Particular, are Very Good at their job, Will Not let this system go down, Will Not let you potentially expose personally identifiably information by violating Section 3 subparagraph 2 of code 5, Will Not let you sweet talk her into bypassing the safety systems she has spent the past 30 years setting up to protect oh-just-$6.13 trillion from fraud, embezzlement, and abuse, and if you manage somehow manage to get around these barriers she will Stop You.

Your boss Gets Things Done and threatens Florence's boss Mervin that if he does not give you absolutely all the permissions you ask for, Mervin will become the particular object of attention of two people named Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

You get absolutely all the permissions you want and go on with your day.

Ah, to have a boss like that!
 

EDIT TL/DR: I think this looks weirder in Far mode?  Near mode (near to data science, not near government), giving outside consultant data scientists admin permissions for important databases does not seem weird or nefarious.  It's the sort of thing that happens when the data scientist's boss is intimidatingly high in an organization, like the President/CEO hiring a management consultant.

Sample questions I would ask if I was a security auditor, which I'm not.

Does Elez have anytime admin access, or for approved time blocks for specific tasks where there is no non-admin alternative? Is his use of the system while using admin rights logged to a separate tamper proof record? What data egress controls are in place on the workstation he uses to remotely access the system as an admin? Is Elez security screened, not a spy, not vulnerable to blackmail? Is Elez trained on secure practices?

Depending on the answers this could be done in a way that would pass an audit with no concerns, or it could be illegal, or something in between.

Avoiding further commentary that would be more political.

I don't endorse the term "henchmen", these are not my markets. I offer these as an opportunity to orient by making predictions. Marko Elez is not currently on the list, but I will ask if he is included.

The President is the chief executive of the United States and is supposed to control all the government agencies operating inside of it. Theoretically, Trump has the power to walk into any government office and start doing whatever jobs he wants to do himself. There is no reason why he can't hire people to do this for him instead. He also has the power to grant security clearances to whoever he wants to. The chief executive of the US has a lot of power.

Trump is doing an end-run around the old chain of command because US case law has set the legal precedent that government employees can't be fired at-will. This is why Trump is offering to buyout government employees instead of just firing them. This is also why Trump has a separate team directly accessing the systems at the treasury and other departments. If he just sent word down the chain of command to 'find government corruption and spending on stupid things and eliminate it' nothing would get done. Much of that preexisting, unfirable chain of command is either incompetent or participating in the corruption themselves.

Obviously if the new CEO of a private company wanted to shakeup the old system he would just fire the old workforce like Musk did with Twitter.

What would a problem solving approach to this in the form of LW comments even look like?

I know people who have gotten access to similarly important governmental systems at younger ages. 

Don't worry about it too much. 

If they abuse it,  it'll cost their group lots of political goodwill. (Recursive remove for example)

There's another blogger, Nathan Tankus, who is also reporting accounts directly from his sources within the BFS. He wears his bias on his sleeve and goes wild with the hyperbole, but he is a prolific public intellectual of some sort so he may be accurately reporting the basic facts. He also did an interview on Odd Lots but it didn't really have anything new.

Bureaucracy and red tape are often written into law by Congress based on actual and theoretical damage to people and systems. To bypass them is to bypass all protections. The risk is enormous.