Even if anyone had elected Elon Musk to anything, the past week would still be one of the most serious examples of executive branch malfeasance in American history.

Musk has seized hold of critical levers of power and authority within the federal government, apparently enabling him to destroy federal agencies at will, barring congressional action or judicial pushback.

Musk’s team, which includes a small gaggle of young aides, reportedly ages 19 to 24 — have taken control of the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration. They also have access to the Treasury Department’s payment system, which provides a direct line to sensitive information about tens of millions of Americans, including Social Security numbers and bank accounts. By his own account, Musk could use his access to the payments system — which disburses congressional appropriations to the many payees of the government — to effect a kind of personal line-item veto. If he does not believe that a program or grant is effective — if he thinks that it constitutes “waste, fraud and abuse” — then he will cancel its funding and leave it to starve on the vine.

The first casualty that we know of is the United States Agency for International Development, or U.S.A.I.D. Musk seems to hold a vendetta against the agency. He has called it a “radical-left political psy op,” a “criminal organization” and a “a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.” On Monday, shortly before 2 a.m., he bragged that he and his allies had spent the weekend “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” In addition to wreaking vengeance on an agency he hates for still undisclosed reasons (although it may be worth noting that U.S.A.I.D. supported the efforts of Black South Africans during and after apartheid), Musk believes that cutting government spending is the only way to reduce inflation and put the U.S. economy on firm footing.

“When you see prices go up at the grocery store, the prices are going up because of excess government spending,” he said in an online conversation with, among others, Vivek Ramaswamy and Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa. “It’s very important to connect these dots. The supermarkets are not taking advantage of you. It’s not price gouging; it’s that the government spent too much.” (This, it must be said, makes no sense.)

Again, if Musk had been elected to some office, this would still be one of the worst abuses of executive power in American history. No one in the executive branch has the legal authority to unilaterally cancel congressional appropriations. No one has the legal authority to turn the Treasury payments system into a means of political retribution. No one has the authority to summarily dismiss civil servants without cause. No one has the authority to take down and scrub government websites of public data, itself paid for by American taxpayers. And no private citizen has the authority to access the sensitive data of American citizens for either information gathering or their own, unknown purposes.