Musk resets Washington's permissions

Nearly every computer system draws a line between the right to look at files and the right to change them—but till now, the details barely mattered to most non-programmers. The early days of Trump's second administration—as Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) crew execute a hostile takeover of the federal government's digital infrastructure—are giving Washington a crash course in the importance of system permissions.

• With "read-only" permission, you can open, review and copy data and programs.
• With "read-write" access, you can delete files, alter data and rewrite code.

Much of the capital and the nation is still trying to figure out whether Musk is simply scouring the federal books to flag waste and fraud—as the Trump transition originally described the DOGE effort—or if he has unilaterally, and maybe unconstitutionally, seized a sort of line-item veto power over every dollar the government spends.