In 1917, U.S. journalist Jack Reed, a naive but talented communist ideologue with a blue-blood education, was in Russia to watch and cheer on a revolution. He was there in October when the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky held power—Czar Nicholas II had been overthrown—but refused to pull the nation out of the murderous World War I or otherwise reform.
That book and the events it valorized has now been superseded by another 10 days that have shaken the world. Donald Trump took the oath of office to become U.S. president on Jan. 20, 2025, following a sweeping and decisive victory that the entire establishment fought ferociously.
I’m typing this 10 days later. It is clear to me and many others that nothing will ever be the same, not in the United States and not anywhere in the world that is watching the exciting events unfold. It’s nothing like we’ve ever seen, and far beyond anything we had expected or even been promised.
Whereas Reed’s 10 days were about the building of the Leviathan state, our own 10 days are about tearing it down and restoring freedom. Already what has been uncovered and stopped is for the ages, to the point that as I write, the United States has plugged a scandalous spending leakage at a rate of $4 billion per day, thanks to the work of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency.
That appears to be just the beginning. Agencies and funding sources are being shut down by the day and hour. The whole spending machine was shut down for a few days before a federal judge intervened. Even that did not stop the push to shut down the spigots: It took a second judge to intervene and finally restart it all. Even then, it was just the beginning.
What is popularly known as the “deep state” has never faced such disruption.
Hardly a minute goes by when we do not get news of various outrages operating in all agencies of government, spending that gives new meaning to the word “decadence.” It’s all been happening for many years, even decades, even as the U.S. middle class has been hollowed out, real incomes have declined, and economic opportunities for average people have thinned out to create culture-wide despair and ill health.
The excitement began minutes after the inauguration, when Elon Musk’s team, tasked by Trump to figure out what is going on with this empire of lies, unfurled a plan that had long been in the works but never announced. The team installed sofa beds on the fifth floor of the Office of Personnel Management and tossed out the chief of staff. The plan was to work 24/7 to get the job done, never leaving the offices. Yes, in the parlance of “The Godfather,” the team members literally “went to the mattresses.”
They gained access to the computer system and sent a memo to 2.3 million federal government employees. It invited all of them to resign immediately and get eight months of severance. They only needed to hit reply and type “resign.” The expectation going into this was that 10 percent would flee but that it could be more. We are still waiting for the numbers.
All the while, the Trump administration was issuing executive orders, more than 300 in these magical 10 days. It froze regulations. It froze spending. It issued a universal fatwa against all diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and abolished “affirmative action”—all while heralding the single principle of nondiscrimination. It proclaimed that no government agency may ever again tell private media and social media accounts how to operate, either directly or indirectly through third-party cutouts. It banned the absurdities of the transgender movement and made adolescent mutilation illegal.
The orders were so sensible that they generated almost no resistance other than predictable sputtering. There were of course mutterings that Trump was behaving like an authoritarian. If so, it is an odd form of authoritarianism that uses power to take power away from government and give it back to the people. The driving motivation of all these efforts was to reboot the promise of 2016 to drain the swamp. This time the Trump administration was serious.
Following the takeover of the Office of Personnel Management, the truly great challenge was to get to the source of the largesse, the spigot spilling so much money that it was creating $1 trillion in debt every 100 days. This has gotten worse decade after decade. It is the determination of DOGE to get to the bottom of it.
The team—which converted itself quickly into an official government office to evade that obvious criticism—headed to the Department of the Treasury and announced an audit of the entire government. In order to conduct that, it would need the logins to the system. The auditors had already figured out that the whole government was operating on auto pay, with billions flowing to enemy regimes and rackets of all sorts. Shutting that down had to be priority No. 1.
What they found was an acting head of the U.S. Treasury named David A. Lebryk, who turned out to be the highest-ranking person in the civil service. Lebryk had been promoted to that position on Jan. 20, but his former boss was the deputy secretary of the Treasury Department, a Nigerian émigré named Wally Adeyemo, who had at one time been head of the Obama Foundation. His resignation put Lebryk in the driver’s seat of the world’s biggest outgoing payroll system.
That’s right, you cannot make this stuff up!
Lebryk absolutely refused to turn over the passwords. After what was said to be a shouting match, he resigned on the spot. Then Musk’s crew took control of the passwords to the system that was sending out $6 trillion on auto pay.
This action generated panicked headlines in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal claiming that the Trump administration had gotten hold of the control center of government spending, strongly suggesting that nothing like this had ever happened before. For reasons that are unclear, regime media seemed shocked and alarmed that the Trump administration had broken into the “sanctum sanctorum.”
When regular people think about this, they start asking serious questions. Why is it not a normal thing for the new administration to be in control of the spending systems? Why is this such a shocking thing to have happened? Isn’t auditing the books just what any new president would do?
Most likely, it is shocking simply because it has never happened. For all the world, this looks like a situation in which we are witnessing the very first actual transition of power in our lifetimes.
There will be more court challenges, claims, and counterclaims, but mainly we can look forward to an information flood of finding out precisely how our tax dollars have been used for many years, if not for decades. This is in many ways the ultimate nightmare of any entrenched bureaucracy that has been unburdened by accountability for a very long time.
Change is now here, and it appears that the Trump administration is not letting up. All the while, Trump’s Cabinet picks have been facing a brutal grilling from senators. This time, however, we have the means to discover the hand in the glove. We have tools such as Open the Books, Open Secrets, and others to reveal precisely what industrial interests are behind these politicians. It appears as of this writing that public pressure is going to push all of Trump’s picks through.
No one can say for sure how this story ends, but we are getting an intuition. The Trump administration, barring some unforeseen disaster, is well positioned to go down in history as the regime that saved the country from secret and systematic pillaging that has been going on without a check for years.
Is that an exaggeration? Sadly, it does not appear to be so based on what we are learning by the hour. These are the new 10 days that shook the world. The first time around, history was set on a path toward the disaster of communism and totalitarianism. This time, the revolution is being reversed—the people are really taking over from an elite class that has enjoyed unchecked rule in the Western world for all of living memory.
