The band of semi-anonymous young software engineers doing Elon Musk’s bidding in Washington are soldiers recruited into a murderous stike team that is directly and violently assaulting the federal government of the United States. They must be stopped, immediately.

I do not speak in metaphor. These men could not be doing more damage to the country even if they were soldiers of the traditional variety, kicking office doors down and shooting anyone they find, Three Days of the Condor-style. They conduct their shock violence with software rather than bullets, which might be less bloody in the short term—but which promises to be truly catastrophic for not just national security but national identity.

Their code changes, deployed directly to production before the eyes of horrified civil servants, are even now ripping through the guts of the digital infrastructure of the United States, for extralegal purposes that we can only guess at—and with ultimate consequences that we can scarcely imagine.

Even in the very best case, which assumes that these young men are such superheroic engineers that they are injecting completely ironclad-secure and bug-free code into a stupefyingly complicated legacy system in one try and with no testing, they are modifying software that distributes trillions of dollars towards ends known only to themselves and Elon Musk.

Because that level of engineering perfection does not exist outside of the movies, the real situation is almost certainly much, much worse than that. We can surely expect sloppy security holes that subsequent malefactors can take advantage of. Or, perhaps, the whole system might simply break, resulting in the national cash-flow going in directions nobody intended, perhaps following the president’s lead with reservoir management and dumping itself straight into the ground.

I call upon American lawmakers and law enforcers to stop these men immediately, applying the same level of urgency they would to any other band of violent insurgents hewing their way through the national capital.

“Bombed buildings” by Hugo Sundström is licensed under CC BY 4.0 .