If you've watched any movie involving computer hacking made in the last three decades, you know the scene. The hero, who needs access to some sensitive files, meets up with a hacker, typically revealed to be an unkempt loner in a dark room. The hacker types rapidly, occasionally throwing out some technobabble about the firewall or the mainframe, and, boom, they're in.
The myth has stuck, even in Silicon Valley, and now it's threatening to unravel our government.
This is, of course, nonsense. Hackers working alone quickly has about as much to do with software programming as jumping out of a helicopter does with policing. But the myth has stuck, even in Silicon Valley, and now it's threatening to unravel our government.
According to multiple reports, billionaire federal contractor Elon Musk has taken over the U.S. Digital Service, essentially the IT department for the executive branch, with a small team of young computer programmers who are demanding access to sensitive government databases and payment programs. Details about their work remain sketchy, but critics worry that they are making changes to the underlying code or downloading sensitive information to unsecured laptops.
A Treasury Department official told Congress that the programmers had "read-only access," which would mean they could look at the code but not change it.
Without wading into various unconfirmed reports about how they are doing this work, let me just say: This is bad.
Musk's team — since renamed the U.S. DOGE Service, after a jokey cryptocurrency — is small and moving fast. Already, they appear to be looking at sensitive systems at the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Education Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Given the handful of staffers involved and the number of agencies, it's likely that any programming work they're doing would be much like that of the mythical movie hacker: fast and alone.
There's a term for this: cowboy coding. And while that sounds kind of cool, it’s actually extremely dangerous, especially in the wrong circumstances.
Cowboy coding is a method of computer programming in which a person works by themself, often in long shifts. The stereotypical cowboy coder works overnight surrounded by cans of Mountain Dew or Red Bull. This approach can work if you're developing, say, a simple app or an online tool where it's not hard to lose track of your own work. But for anything more complicated, it can quickly get out of hand, causing crashes and leaving programs vulnerable to viruses and hackers.
Cowboy coding grew out of the early years of Silicon Valley techies working in their garages on computers they built themselves. As programming matured, new processes developed. One is the slow but diligent waterfall, in which requirements are laid out and the overall design planned before any coding begins. More popular these days is agile, in which teams work closely in short sprints to make incremental improvements and test them constantly.
When he took over Twitter, he demanded in a late-night email that staff members commit to being "extremely hardcore."
Musk has long clung to the old mythology, though. He has claimed to work 120-hour weeks (while somehow constantly posting on X and playing video games competitively) serving as CEO of SpaceX and Tesla and helping run several other companies he owns, plus serve as a "special government employee" for President Donald Trump. He bragged about keeping a sleeping bag at a Tesla factory. When he took over Twitter (now X), he famously fired 80% of employees and demanded in a late-night email that staff members commit to being "extremely hardcore."
Anyone who used X before and after Musk can tell you how badly that went.
But DOGE isn't just tinkering with a social media app. It's dealing with the most sensitive and complex software in the federal government, handling nearly $7 trillion of spending. That's nearly one-fourth of U.S. gross domestic product, covering everything from military contracts to your older relative's Social Security check. A mistake in coding here wouldn't crash an app on your smartphone; it could crash the world economy.
But it gets worse. In recent days, Musk has been bragging — perhaps inaccurately — on X about "deleting" government programs he dislikes and ending waste and fraud in government spending that he claims he's uncovering. If true, that would mean giving the president the ability to completely control federal spending, which as any high schooler in an AP Government class can tell you is a power that the framers of the Constitution explicitly gave to Congress.
If Musk's group of cowboy coders are, in fact, doing what he seems to say they are doing, then they aren't just tinkering with the software that runs the federal government; they are making changes to the source code of democracy — the U.S. Constitution. If they succeed, we as a country may not be able to roll back those changes easily.
This is where cowboy coding overlaps with Trumpism. The president who vowed that "I alone can fix it" has hired a billionaire who believes that he can fix things alone. But both the framers and responsible programmers learned long ago that putting one person completely in charge just leads to disaster.
