A February 9th investigation reports that since January 2025, numerous critical U.S. government systems have become exposed to the public internet, coinciding with DOGE’s access to federal networks.
Over the past month, an unprecedented number of critical government systems, including those at the nation’s nuclear research labs, have been exposed to the open internet. This exposure jeopardizes both U.S. national security and the privacy of millions of Americans. Notably, this alarming trend seems to coincide with DOGE’s unrestricted access to federal networks.
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Between January 14 and February 8, servers belonging to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, and Fermi Accelerator National Laboratory have been found with Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) services exposed to the public internet. This grants malicious actors the opportunity to hack into servers hosting sensitive nuclear research data, a golden egg for spy agencies across the globe.
Alarmingly, a Department of Energy server allowed anonymous login with write access, raising the risk of hackers uploading malicious code or installing backdoors for persistent network access.
The investigation suggests these exposures, attributed to the DOGE skids (script kiddies), may violate multiple federal laws including the Privacy Act of 1974 and the Federal Information Security Management Act, potentially creating significant cybersecurity risks to national security and Americans’ privacy.
Soon after this was report was written exposing the DOGE insider breach of national security, the White House abruptly terminated hundreds of critical systems high-level security experts.
The Energy Department is seeking to bring back nuclear energy specialists after abruptly telling hundreds of workers that their jobs were eliminated, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The employees, responsible for designing and maintaining the nation’s cache of nuclear weapons at the National Nuclear Safety Administration (NNSA), were part of a larger wave of workers dismissed from the Energy Department, drawing alarm from national security experts. Between 300 and 400 NNSA workers were terminated, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The agency’s quick reversal was announced Friday in an all-staff meeting. The NNSA is seeking to recall the workers because they deal with sensitive national security secrets, according to the people, who weren’t authorized to talk about the matter, which is not public.
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The firings — part of a wave of terminations across the federal government this week spurred by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — underscore the chaos…
…some workers who were told they were being fired, received a second message telling them that they weren’t being terminated and that their jobs were safe — only to receive a third message telling them they were, in fact, out of a job.
The NNSA firings were part of a wider swath of dismissals across the Energy Department, which included … the group responsible for preventing cyberattacks against the power grid, and the department’s general counsel office.
Seven federal prosecutors have resigned in protest over attempts to use DOJ authority for political purposes. Among them, Hagen Scotten made the urgent defense of the Constitution crystal clear:
Prosecutor Hagen Scotten wrote in his resignation letter on Friday that US laws and traditions do not allow for “using prosecutorial power” to influence elected officials. “If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion,” Hagen wrote in the letter addressed to Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove. “But it was never going to be me.”
When the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh in 1975, they began their horrific “efficiency” campaign with a simple act: they emptied the cities. Within hours, professionals, intellectuals, and technical experts were marched out of their offices, given minutes to gather their belongings.
The forced evacuation of the Cambodian capital, sending 2 million people streaming into the countryside, was “an astonishing spectacle,” Schanberg acknowledged.
“A once-throbbing city became an echo chamber of silent streets lined with abandoned cars and gaping, empty shops,” he reported after making it out of Phnom Penh to Bangkok three weeks later. “Streetlights burned eerily for a population that was no longer there.”
The goal went far beyond political control – it was systematic destruction of technical and administrative capacity. History tells the rest. Over 2 million dead, many unaccounted for in the “killing fields” of mass genocide, labeled as “efficiency”.
…foreigners were later trucked to the Thai border and expelled. With their departure, Cambodia lost virtually the only outside witnesses to the horrors that were beginning in the country the Khmer Rouge would call “Democratic Kampuchea.”
Today’s events in Washington, with federal employees given 30 minutes to clear their desks, nuclear security experts terminated via Teams calls, and entire agencies effectively shuttered, bear disturbing parallels to these historical moments of state capacity destruction for racist aims.
This isn’t just another political purge of industrial-age planning – it’s something more technically sophisticated and potentially more devastating due to Elon Musk’s reckless applications of artificial intelligence operated by teenagers.
The Khmer Rouge were teenagers weilding the latest weapons technology to destroy a country from within
The targeting of nuclear security administration staff particularly echoes one of history’s most dangerous patterns in totalitarianism.
When the Khmer Rouge emptied Cambodia’s technical institutions, when Iran’s Cultural Revolution purged its universities, when Stalin’s “Engineers’ Affair” decimated Soviet technical expertise, the goal went far beyond the ideological cleansing rhetoric of “anti-woke” or “anti-DEI” – it was the destruction of the entire state’s ability to function at a technical level.
It was denial of state level protection of their populations, to enable targeted humanitarian crimes.
What makes the current American situation uniquely concerning is its precision in elimination of anyone capable of basic science and engineering (ethical professionals). The exemption of Defense and Homeland Security while gutting nuclear safety administration, health agencies, and oversight mechanisms suggests a peculiar understanding of how modern state capacity functions. This isn’t the blunt instrument of the Khmer Rouge pushing all the educated adults out of power into mass graves – it’s more akin to a targeted virus designed to destroy specific institutional capabilities of morality while leaving immoral others in position to enact harms.
The focus on probationary employees is particularly telling. In any technical institution, these newer employees represent not just current capacity but all future capability. They are the carriers of institutional knowledge to the next generation, the bridge between current expertise and future capability. By targeting them specifically, while maintaining more senior staff, a knowledge transfer gap is blasted into foundations that can take generations (or even foreign intervention and occupation) to repair.
Consider the nuclear security apparatus. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the sudden disruption of career pipelines and knowledge transfer systems created nuclear security vulnerabilities that persisted for decades. Today’s cuts to America’s nuclear security administration – 300 out of 1,800 staff – represent an eerily similar disruption of expertise continuity. It’s almost as if someone bitter about the Soviet collapse is ordering it to be done to America. This isn’t just about current capacity; it’s about ending future capability to maintain stability and order.
The use of modern technology to implement extremist war-like cuts adds the most disturbing dimension. Mass Teams calls, pre-recorded messages, 30-minute evacuation notices – these aren’t just methods of termination, they’re information warfare techniques of weaponized demoralization designed to break institutional cohesion.
When the Khmer Rouge marched people out of Phnom Penh, public humiliation was the point. Today’s digital equivalents by a vengeful apartheid South African serve the same purpose: to make American public service appear unstable, unreliable, and undesirable as a career.
This is the end game. Putin’s revenge for the Soviet collapse. Musk’s revenge for apartheid South Africa’s fall. Thiel’s dreams of Nazi Germany’s return. America’s enemies haven’t just gained insider access through Trump – they’ve purchased driving licenses for systematic revenge, achieving what John Birch only dreamed about.
The targeting of oversight mechanisms – inspectors general, ethics offices, regulatory agencies – mirrors another historical pattern. When authoritarian systems consolidate power, they often begin by dismantling the state’s self-monitoring capabilities.
But again, the American version shows a chilling understanding of the modern state function and how to make it the worst version. By targeting specific oversight mechanisms while leaving others intact, it creates an appearance of continuity while gutting actual oversight capacity.
The historical pattern of systematic attacks on state capacity says damage will persists long after any political changes. It is unlikely to lead to another free election, given overt comments by Musk that indicate the country is now run by him, as his personal bureaucracy that’s ending all opposition to racism.
When Cambodia finally emerged from the Khmer Rouge period, when Iran attempted to rebuild its technical institutions, when post-Soviet states tried to reconstitute their technical expertise, they discovered that some capabilities can’t be rebuilt easily. Knowledge gaps, broken career pipelines, destroyed institutional memory – these were vulnerabilities exploited to persist for generations.
Simple to see, this isn’t just another chapter in American political conflict – it’s a self-destructive campaign to fundamentally alter the state’s technical and administrative capacity. The combination of targeting critical technical expertise, disrupting knowledge transfer systems, and dismantling oversight mechanisms, all while maintaining an appearance of normal government function, represents a new AI-driven state capacity suicide.
When Musk destroys technical expertise, when Musk breaks knowledge transfer systems, when Musk dismantles oversight mechanisms, he create institutional vulnerabilities for Trump’s brand of failure to haunt him for decades. The sophistication of the current approach, combining historical techniques of state capacity destruction with modern technology and targeted precision, suggests we may be witnessing something unprecedented in the history of democratic governance – the systematic dismantling of state capacity from within by it’s most avowed enemies.
And so, today in 2025, as federal workers are given 30 minutes to clear their desks and nuclear security experts are terminated via Teams calls, the intellectual giant Walter Benjamin’s warning about fascism echoes with eerie precision. His analysis of how a Trump-like regime operates reads like a prophecy written for this moment:
Benjamin insisted that in their “mysticism of war” “what developed here, first in the guise of the World War volunteer and then in the mercenary of the postwar era, is in fact the dependable fascist class warrior. And what these authors mean by nation is a ruling class supported by this caste, a ruling class—accountable to no one, and least of all to itself, enthroned on high.
The parallel is useful to today’s federal workers caught between forces of fraudulent “efficiency” and ideological purge. Unlike Benjamin, who saw no escape at an obscure Spanish border surrounded by fascists, today’s experts must find ways to preserve and protect their knowledge and expertise even when driven from institutions and persecuted for disloyalty to a dictator.
The question isn’t whether to fight tyranny but how to ensure that technical knowledge and ethical expertise survive Musk’s fail-faster assault on state capacity. History shows that while fascists can swiftly seize institutions and undermine democracy, they cannot destroy knowledge itself unless its bearers surrender it. Benjamin correctly diagnosed the causes, while incorrectly choosing a tragic surrender to his despair. Let his fatal mistake in judging the moment to quit (he killed himself when blocked, yet would have been fine and survived 24 hours earlier or later) be an inspiration to fight, and fight, and fight for another day.
Remember also that by December 1978 the Vietnamese military had been given orders to roll into Phnom Penh and put an end to deadly and destructive “efficiency” of the Khmer Rouge.
Cambodia was an unpopular war for Vietnam, said Carlyle Thayer, an expert on Vietnam and emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra. “The Vietnamese military had been trained and experienced in overthrowing an occupying power and all of a sudden, the shoe was on the other foot. They had to invade Cambodia and occupy it, and succeed in setting up a government and engineer a withdrawal.”
Who will roll into DC and put an end to the pain of Elon Musk? The historical pattern of systematic state capacity destruction has shown consistent elements across different contexts, all which make it harder to recover the longer we delay:
Technical expertise elimination through targeted removal of professionals and experts
Systematic disruption of institutional knowledge transfer between generations
Dismantling of oversight mechanisms while maintaining facade of functionality
Deployment of public humiliation tactics to demoralize and deter future public service
These patterns serve as clear reminders that the destruction of state capacity often follows recognizable templates, even as the specific technologies and methods evolve. History demonstrates that while such expertise can be swiftly dismantled, its reconstruction requires sustained effort and institutional memory – resources that become scarcer with each wave of technical brain drain driven by men like Elon Musk.
