What North Carolina Loses When Elon Goes “Demon Mode”
Elon Musk has gone full “demon mode.”
Elon’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, once explained how Musk’s inner circle coined the term to describe the manic energy that he radiates while reshaping an organization.
He grows angry, channeling that anger into his work. He lives on the floors of his factories, stays up all night, implements mass layoffs, and sets unrealistic expectations for those that remain.
Right now, Musk is angry. He’s sleeping in his DOGE office. He’s mining millions of people’s sensitive data. He’s working to eliminate entire federal agencies and has encouraged over two million civil servants to leave their “unproductive” jobs for the private sector.
It’s all speed, no brakes. Significant disruption, little order. And all in the name of “efficiency.”
Musk’s fixation on cutting government spending will have real, tangible impacts on North Carolina. Here are just a few of the agencies he and Trump have proposed eliminating:
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
In the wake of Hurricane Helene, FEMA provided over $200 million in direct assistance to 126,000 North Carolina households, and granted another $200 million in for debris removal and other recovery efforts.
The Department of Education
The agency provides billions in financial support to students, including the Pell Grants that over 200,000 low-income North Carolinians use to help pay for college. It also provides Title I funding to help close achievement gaps in low-income elementary, middle, and high schools across the country. NC has 1,987 Title I schools serving roughly half of the state’s student population.
The Small Business Administration (SBA)
The 964,000 small businesses in North Carolina employ 1.7 million people, and many of those businesses received support from the SBA after Hurricane Helene, which provided low-interest loans and guidance to help with rebuilding from the storm.
This is not “America first.” These are cruel, intentional attempts to eliminate the support that is available to everyday people who are fighting to get by.
So what can we do? Call your Republican representatives. They have several staffers record each call with meticulous detail. They discuss the notes at staff meetings. Representatives care about each constituent message because their jobs depend on it. And so many people are calling Senate offices right now that their phone systems are malfunctioning.
The challenges our government is meant to address— wealth disparity, education gaps, natural disasters– they aren’t going to disappear. But if Musk and Trump get their way, the systems we’ve built to help solve those problems will disappear.
We must continue fighting back against this darkness, this cynical belief that government accomplishes little, that we must all fend for ourselves.
We’re better than this, and we must continue to hold fast to this belief as they fight to erode it.
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