This isn't a payments crisis; this is an auditing crisis. There's no way to ensure proper accounting procedures are being followed. At this point, Congress' continued inaction is bordering on criminal.
It sounds like you think SOX auditing means “super secure and careful accounting”.
SOX is a specific law with the motivation of giving markets more confidence in public stocks (for example must hire external auditors, certain board member rules, how certain assets must be valued, etc).
The SOX audit is to make sure that law is followed.
One criticism of SOX is that encouraged many startups and other businesses to remain private.
So long story short, no. Our government does not resemble a public stock corporation and these things don’t have an analog.
Yes, rules and roles for reporting, ie accounting.
I don't know what you think you are implying with the "super secure and careful" comment, we are looking for the roles that ensure the accountability of SOX.
Your complaint is that SOX "nationalizes" companies because apparently it becomes so transparent, or something? If that's what you mean by "nationalize" shouldn't that be used for our nation's accounting?
I specifically meant the parts of SOX related to access controls, infrastructure, and codebase management to ensure a baseline level of security for processing payments and PII to ensure this does not represent a risk to the valuation of the enterprise.
These measures are universal to running any payment platform, not a public/private issue.
*No, I'm not thinking of PCI, but that is also a valid measure here. There are recent updates to SOX in the past few years covering these aspects of payment operations. Some old-school SOX experts may not be familiar and the strictness on these aspects of the audit varies by auditor in my experience. I recently helped a client navigate these developing and responding to a very strict audit process covering their entire IT landscape including process flows, deployment planning and user/role management.
To be fair, no 19 year old in the world concerns himself with audits or proper regulatory procedure, including law students. There is a reason proper structure exists
I've read in multiple articles that people were placed on leave for trying to require proper clearances from him and his team as obligated to by law, and this article also references how clearances impact the fact that nobody knows what they're actually doing.
As someone who has had to clear an SF86 for a USDS hiring cycle (IRS and DHS systems), I would be shocked if you can get this access without a clearance.
If they don't have clearance aren't they committing a number of offences under various acts of national security and computer misuse and thus liable for arrest?
>If they don't have clearance aren't they committing a number of offences under various acts of national security and computer misuse and thus liable for arrest?
Arrested by who? The executive branch who ordered his actions? Americans voted for this, and now we have to live with it.
>No, the judicial branch which is supposed to enforce the law regardless of who was voted for…
The judiciary has zero enforcement power. They make the laws which the executive is meant to enforce. If the executive fails to enforce a law, congress can impeach. That's not happening.
The legislative branch makes the laws. The Judicial branch judges whether laws were broken. The executive branch has the power to enforce laws (or to not enforce them, as they see fit).
The current executive branch will not enforce laws against itself, and nobody else is legally allowed to enforce the laws, so all the courts & congress can do is write strongly worded letters.
You're almost right. The thing is that Congress absolutely has the power to impeach the president and strip them of all legal office. Of course, most of Congress is perfectly happy with what's going on, so this won't happen.
The judicial branch can't prosecute, that's what the executive branch does, and it's the executive branch that's doing these things. The legislative branch has the power to keep the executive branch in check, but they're not exercising that power - which I'm saying is bordering on criminal. Obviously, the executive branch is unlikely to prosecute the legislative branch for not taking action against the executive branch. Our constitution has the implicit assumption that all three branches wouldn't be in cahoots with one another, and should they be, the electorate was expected to have enough sense to vote out the legislators and replace them with ones that would keep the executive in check. The million dollar question is how much pain and destruction will be endured until that happens?
Two years - Congress is replaced every two years. 1/3 of the Senate is replaced every two years. Given that they've only been in office for two weeks, two years seems like a long way off.
Arrests need warrants. And if you're thinking about the police, that's also part of the executive, mostly. Judges can't do anything unless some other branch of the government asks them to.
Arrests need probable cause. They can either be done on a warrant or without a warrant (in the latter case, in the federal system, a complaint must be filed and the arrested person must be brought before a magistrate for a hearing on probable cause within 72 hours after arrest.)
No, we did not vote for this. Show me the campaign ad that said Trump was going to give Musk and his gang of losers complete control over the treasury.
If you think that a politicians advertisements are the full picture of what they will do, I have a bridge you may be interested in buying.
That said, DOGE was well announced and widely publicized prior to the election, by Musk and the media. Musk was up on the stage with Trump quite a bit.
Those who did not know this was going to happen are either easily fooled or were paying no attention.
I'm over across the pond - it was pretty obvious to me that Elon was going to take a wrecking ball to the ship of government. if it wasn't clear to you, I'm afraid you can only blame yourself and possibly your diet of information.
Trump said Elon would get to run a new department called "department of government efficiency". if you know what he did at Twitter, you can easily join the dots.
It’s all spelled out in the project 2025 doc that was widely publicized as the game plan.
Also, trump was impeached last time because he tried to shut down funding approved by congress. So, if you’re surprised it’s happening again, I suppose you can’t be helped
Oh, the one that Trump heavily distanced himself from? Project 2025 was something skeptics pointed out as being the game plan, but Trump denied (or agreed, then denied).
If we are going to discuss this, we should be clear about the details. "Americans voted for this" is a hot take. Some did. Many did not vote at all. Of those who voted, Trump barely won those votes. It was just enough to get the electoral college votes. Even those who did vote for him did not vote for his current Project 2025-based plan. On the contrary, his campaign denied he was going to do all this.
If you don't vote, you effectively vote for the winner.
When the 49ers lost the 2024 Super Bowl, the second and third string players didn't go around saying they didn't really lose because they never hit the field. No, they lost.
Trump has been the dominant figure in American politics for almost a decade now. It's quite obvious who he is and what he stands for. And he's more popular now than ever before. That's the reality. Accepting that and planning around it is the first step to countering it. Burying your head in the sand and saying "people don't actually want this!" is unactionable talk.
While they are absolutely committing crimes, the complicit Trump administration justice department and Republican congress are happy to let it go, at least thus far.
You misunderstand how clearance works. Any one can get "read-on" to anything with the proper authorities giving them access.
It is an administrative step. It might undergo review but access does not need to be prevent until the review happens. It is all about who is granting the access.
The commander in chief has considerable authority to provide access.
Clearance could be granted on a whim by POTUS, as far as I can tell, so that has no leg to stand on. The biggest threat would be that one of the DOGE employees is a foreign actor. Hope they did some vetting...
He's an illegal immigrant from South Africa. I don't know the diplomatic status of the USA with South Africa, but the current party in power would certainly not agree to the idea that illegal immigrants should be given total control of the Treasury.
It remains a matter of import. It is both true that they don't have clearance and true that in a more functional environment that they would not have earned it.
He can' (but shouldn't). But there's no word that was granted to Musk. Since, he didn't name them. He probably doesn't though, because he should not have been stopped at USAID with the right credentials. Unless...
>Hope they did some vetting...
we both know he didn't. If he does have clearance, his interns definitely don't. Hence the kerfluffle at USAID.
This was not the case when I worked in the Federal government. There were different levels and kinds of clearances and while it was true that you could work with less sensitive stuff while the background check process worked its way through, you couldn't go into and view anything elevated w/o the right clearance, or even be in the room pretty much.
This has always been the case, though you generally need to be a US citizen as a practical matter. Whether or not you are exposed to it likely depends on which part of the government and who you are. The common case is when they need the help of outside subject matter experts.
For the sake of timeliness and being able to move quickly, some people in government are authorized to make a judgment about the risk/benefit tradeoff when someone doesn't have an active clearance. It isn't a case of waiting for a background check process, you don't even need to apply. Some organizations will do an informal check of their own in the background if they don't already know who you are. Sure, they would prefer if you already had formal clearance, but it isn't strictly necessary.
I could see many people with this abstract concept of a system that governs itself with it's own rules and policies, not quite understanding that it's all customary.
It's like people thinking that the President can't declassify a document or make foreign policy decisions without the NSC's advice or consent.
I guess I know why you're getting downvoted. Saying Twitter is at death's door is like saying that sanctions are going to crush Russia any day now. People really really want to believe it despite all the evidence. Twitter is very much alive, and it's doing exactly what Musk wants it to do.
Exactly. When he fired 90% of the employees everyone here and on Reddit said it would fall apart within days due to the complexity of the systems that Elon’s employees and the remaining traitor engineers had no hope of maintaining.
When it didn’t fall apart in days, the goalposts were moved to “technical issues won’t become obvious right away, give it a few months”.
It’s been over 2 years and on a technical level running better than ever. You can disagree with the content and users all you wish, but pretending it’s dying because you hate the bad orange and mars man is delusional.
>"It’s been over 2 years and on a technical level running better than ever"
Isn't it also simply doing less? Weren't some APIs shut off or reduced? My limited memory is having me think they reduced or shut down some functionality altogether, which would also help something run smoother. Fewer things running means fewer things can break.
They just closed a single API which was also abused by botfarms. Closing the API immediately improved the site from a spam perspective and was welcome by most actual users, likely all users who understood the impact.
This is pure cope - the site is doing a TON more than it used to, and more stable than ever.
Also arguing that a site that is designed to scrape and re-represent a website without ads or other stuff 'was likely a huge load' is a very weird argument to try and claim the site is no longer being used.
I can say anecdotally I used to use nitter, and while it didn't work for a few days I switched to the regular site. Now I would never go back. The actual site works better now, I have no need. On old twitter 1.0, nitter worked better.
Thats a black eye on Dorsey twitter, not the new twitter (or X or whatever you prefer)
>It’s been over 2 years and on a technical level running better than ever.
Ask the worker's how they are doing, and then maybe I'll be convinced that it's "running better". When you grind 10x the users into the dirt, you can make up for cutting 90% of your staff. For a while. Especially in a crap economy like this where job hopping is harder.
I also agree that most of the cuts may have been managerial and logistics. It's probably a clown circus trying to do anything more than maintain.
I agree only on a surface level that it looks better. But old tech dies very hard. Digg is technically still up today. Myspace is technically still up today. hell, 4chan is still arguably bustling.
“Move fast and break things” seems like a horrible approach when things like Social Security and Medicare payments are on the line. If a few thousand random tweets get lost in a refactor, nobody cares. If somebody stops receiving their checks because Whiz Kid #3 doesn’t know how to work with an enterprise database system, what does that person do? Who do they escalate to?
TWTR -- the publicly traded company -- dipped so badly that Musk needed to make it private. It's effectively less of a public commons now than it is Musk's investment on manipulating information.
From "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45", an interview with a German about what it was like living during the rise of the Nazis:
Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk alone; you don’t want to “go out of your way to make trouble.” Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, “everyone” is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.”
And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.
But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.
But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions, would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all of the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jewish swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.
But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early morning meetings of your department when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.
Hitler started by imprisoning those suspected of being in opposition. First concentration camps started right after he took power. The estimation is that they locked 50,000 of political opponents arresting 100,000. Purge of SA happened a year later.
In 1933, right after getting power, Jews were excluded from civil service, their numbers in schools were limited and a year later they could not be actors. The restrictions came in quick and were felt a lot by their targets.
So, this extract kind of underplays the beginning of it all. It was violent from the start.
I'm going to assume (foolishly) that this is an honest question. The answer would be: The DOGE situation as described in the article this comment chain is about.
I think Elon Musk and his lackeys' action is literally criminal, but law enforcement work for the same team. And Congress is controlled by the same team.
That is literally the power of the Executive, to choose which laws to enforce and which to not. Congress makes the laws, and the Courts adjudicate. That is the whole basis of the federal government.
I mean that's what they teach 8th graders but it's reductive. Congress makes plenty of laws that restrict how the executive performs its functions (including how they allow people within the executive to do so), and it's an open question over how much power the executive has to create departments and appoint people to run them.
At the moment though, what they're doing is very much illegal. They just have a bunch of collaborators in the DOJ who won't bring charges or arrest anyone, because they're co-conspirators.
The 8th-grader understanding is that each branch does what it's supposed to do with virtuous motives. The adult understanding is that they exercise as much power as they can until forced to stop.
I mean if that was true then the current situation wouldn't be happening. The story of the US Congress over the last two decades (probably longer) is they have ceded an enormous amount of power to the Executive via inaction, and continue to do so.
The problem with simplistic narratives where you give stuff names is it masks what's actually happening: the Executive is near enough to a dictatorship - power and authority is deliberate vested in one person. This makes it very different to Congress, which only wields power by the collective decision making of hundreds via majority or even super-majority vote.
So "Congress" doesn't really exist as an entity: because there is no guiding consciousness or collective in it which is deliberately trying to seize more power, and the story of its power is the exact opposite: it keeps giving it away (because the individual members of Congress can only retain that position and it's local benefits by staying in Congress, best accomplished by deliberately avoiding responsibility of any kind).
If you've ever tried to get 4 people to decide what to get for dinner, the guy who simply says "Let's get tacos" usually gets his way because everyone else keeps deferring.
The executive is formally required to execute all constitutional laws by the take care clause of article two. It's been politically expedient for most presidents to ignore a few policies they dislike, but it's very much not a central pillar of the American government to grant them that power.
>but law enforcement work for the same team. And Congress is controlled by the same team.
And I'll never understand why. There's a lot of partisan issues but I thought "not fucking around with our money" was as bipartisan as a plutocracy could get?
It's not that simple. Congress can't specify every pen and pencil expense, so they allocate large buckets. The executive can decide how each bucket is spent. Like when your mom gives you $20 to go to the movies. She doesn't care what movie you see, but she'd be mad if you skipped the movies and spent it on weed.
And what they are doing now is "skipping the movies and spending it on weed." Shutting down USAID, even if eventually Rubio came in and rolled that back is what you just described. That was an office created by congress.
A better analogy might be that mom bought groceries for the starving family down the road with a check and you cancelled the check, stole the checkbook, and changed the bank account password.
But clearly: did not spend it. Did not misappropriate it. That is much different.
To me it’s more like mom gave me money to pay the rent but my landlord is likely violating laws so in the meantime I am putting the rent in escrow while we sort out the facts.
But that wasn’t your decision to make. Maybe your picture of the landlord is incomplete, and you act as the hot-headed, short-sighted teenager your are, instead of sitting down with mom to discuss the situation.
Disagree. You are allowed to have agency. Mom would be proud of you for not wasting her money. If there is no crime, the landlord will be made whole. Maybe with a little interest at the prevailing rate.
And that's where the analogy falls apart, because yes, maybe it's okay for a teenager to have an agency, but billionaire friends of the president are not, in fact, allowed to have an agency on government spending! People who waltz in and have no fucking clue of how things work generally are not allowed to have an agency!
Remember when Musk built the submarine to save the kids in the cave, was absolutely useless, even actively obstructed others from saving them, and finally resorted to denigrate the diver saving them as a pedophile? That's exactly the same thing he is doing right now.
He’s not a “billionaire friend” in this role. He was asked by the president to do a job and he’s doing it. You expect the president to do everything by himself? Trump likes businessmen. Steve Mnuchin was another “billionaire friend” and it’s hard find fault in his tenure running treasury.
> He was asked by the president to do a job and he’s doing it.
1. And he did it in an illegal way, yes. If you wanna go back to Mom, you can go to the grocery but you cannot throw a bank heist and lock all employees out of the store so you can grab some bread
2. He doesn't have access to the store. Mom sent him to Costo without her card. You can't just storm into Costco. Go back to mom and get her card, if possible.
Is it illegal? My understanding is that paused appropriations are tied to the fiscal year. That’s September 30th. Are you sure they are not? Or are you just being an ideologue?
Nobody stormed anything. They just filed a dispute with their credit card company. Costco will get the funds if they win the dispute. If there is malfeasance at Costco don’t you want to know? What exactly are you afraid of?
Meanwhile the laywer refuses because the constitution says that you cannot "save up money" that "your mom" allocated. Let alone choose to spend it on a lawyer instead of groceries. You need to argue with Mom about lawyer Money next quarter.
If they find serious issues they can likely go to congress and have them canceled outright. If not, they need to distribute the funds during the fiscal year.
I don’t understand the pearl clutching. The government shuts down often due to spending issues. Payments pause when this happens. Moreover, everybody has known for decades that nobody is reading these 50,000 page appropriations bills.
I’m willing to give musk and his guys some time to sort this out.
The president has asked them to do this. If they go against his wishes there is no reason they will not be thrown under the bus. If he pardons them for obvious malfeasance it will make big political waves and likely change the outcome of the midterm elections, where a congress could begin impeachment.
>If they find serious issues they can likely go to congress and have them canceled outright
uhh, no they can't. Those are also government elected representatives. Checks and balances. To "cancel congress", you need the courts to charge and convict them. You're going to find it very hard to do that from treasury records alone (AKA, how the executive branch spends the money allocated).
>I don’t understand the pearl clutching. The government shuts down often due to spending issues.
With that dismissal, you're not opening yourself up to understanding. Maybe there's wrongdoing; The answer isn't to charge into the treasury and hack it.
That's the stupid part: Musk doesn't need to. He's clearly not TSI/TS clearance level, so he just needs trump to go in and look. Or have trump hire someone with that clearance to look in on his orders. Remember, this is the executive branch; Trump has all access powers here (within reason).
>I’m willing to give musk and his guys some time to sort this out.
I'm not. I didn't vote for him. You didn't. He was not approved by Senate, as is executive apointee tradition. He does not have clearance. "Asking" isn't enough. Where's this willingness coming from? Even if you just like the guy, you really want the man who laid off 80% of his staff to handle your money?
>If they go against his wishes there is no reason they will not be thrown under the bus
You are just wrong here. You misread my comment. The “them” in my 3rd paragraph refers to the paused payments. If it turns out that what congress appropriated funds for is actually fraud, congress will want to know, and can amend that spending retroactive to this fiscal year. How is this controversial to you?
Elon Musk was hand picked by the president to do this job. Clearly you do not like the president nor Elon but that is a personal view not held by a majority of voters in the last election.
> Correct, the executive branch can always opt to not spend the money it was allocated.
No, they cannot. Trump was impeached during his first term over this very issue. Congress had appropriated funding for the Ukraine, Trump didn't want to provide it without obtaining concessions from Zelenski. Just like Trump doesn't want to provide California any FEMA money for the LA fires without concessions. Trump has been through this before, he knows it's illegal, but he doesn't care. It's kinda funny that people expect a felon to care about the law.
Well, Biden tried to not spend money to build a wall on the border. And he essentially ran out the clock in that one, so I guess there has been recent success.
The false equivalence is so tiring. It’s okay to admit things are unprecedented.
When asked about the news on Oct. 5 that new border wall construction would indeed commence under his administration, Biden told reporters: “The border wall — the money was appropriated for the border wall. I tried to get to them to reappropriate it, to redirect that money. They didn’t. They wouldn’t. And in the meantime, there’s nothing under the law other than they have to use the money for what it was appropriated. I can’t stop that.”
Trump intended to build the wall with no environmental assessments or permits and congress wrote in a waiver since the border was “an emergency” but Biden chose to rescind the emergency declaration and follow the long-established federal construction process instead of using the waivers which does indeed slow things down.
That’s nothing like what is happening with Musk “deleting” entire departments or unilaterally stopping funding because he doesn’t like the phrasing of the grants.
I wasn’t trying to claim any equivalence. I was replying to “It's just that as far as I can recall no one has ever really tried to spend less in the government.” Biden did, in fact, try to spend less than was appropriated.
I'll just be in good faith and believe you wholesale. Yes, that is one way to fight the spending. Make the government argue until a deadline is hit and then they either shut down or compromise. Happens much too often.
But that's the point: the budget wasn't made yet. Trump wants to argue over funding that was already in place. If he wanted this chaos legally, he'd have been stalling out the March funding next quarter. But once it's finalized, it's finalized and many challenges over the centuries were shot down.
Congress mandated the creation of USAID in 1961. I don't hthink the executive branch has the legal authority to just abolish it by fiat or change its status from independent to a subordinate organ of the state department.
We are a nation of laws still. At least three judges have told Trump/Musk to stop what they are doing. The problem we are running into right now is who enforces the laws when the Executive branch decides they don't want to follow them?
I get how the system works but I also don't understand how congress can force the executive branch to take out a loan but also sets a debt ceiling which could shut down the government unless it's raised by congress. So congress blames the president for taking out debt, which they force, and refuse to raise taxes to reduce the deficit. Something in that loop is broken. I don't think the president should have unilateral power but I also don't think congress should be able to set both the spending and the debt limit.
I agree. I just think we need to focus more on congress' role in this. The checks and balances only work if we force congress to act as a check and as long as congress keeps voting along party lines and doing the president's bidding, not much is going to change. It shouldn't be normal for the senate to confirm radically unqualified people to positions of power just because the president nominates them.
we can focus on the future when the present isn't tearing down before us.
Sad thing is no one is really talking about this in any branch, so it's just theory crafting until then.
if you want to change that you need a huge voter base that is anti-partisan. Given that we can barely mobilize within parties to protest properly: good luck.
That disconnect is why some people argue the debt limit is unconstitutional - Congress authorized the spending and if they didn’t authorize enough revenue the executive is still obligated to spend regardless.
To do otherwise the executive has to pick and choose what to fund.
The topic usually gets raised every time we get close to a debt limit. If we truly broached the limit it’s possible the Biden and Obama administrations would have just ignored the limit since the consequences of the full faith and credit of the US failing are so dire and there’s a solid argument it’s the least bad option Constitutionally.
It's shocking how many billions of spending are completely unaudited. Official gov't auditors have tried for years, but the target agencies stall and stall. You have to assume there is some malfeasance there.
Doing an audit starting with the treasury department seems like the right first step. Every outflow of money ultimately has to start there. It's the root node of the Sankey diagram. Then you follow the money outwards from there.
No we don't. They get small arms. Fighter jets, aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and the like are commanded by much older and experienced people. An M16 is not "billions in military hardware."
Audits can be done 'read only'. Audits don't actually have to impact the behaviour and operation of an organization either. Stopping all activity because of an 'audit' is ... wrong.
> a top DOGE employee, 25 year old former SpaceX employee Marko Elez, has not only read but write access to BFS servers
> One senior IT source can see Mark retrieving “close to a thousand rows of data” but they can’t see the content because the system is “top secret” even to them. No source I have has knowledge of what DOGE is doing with the data they are retrieving
You think the treasury doesn’t have a metric ton of procedures, and laws, on data management, integrity, access, backup and retention?
Breaking these protocols by giving unfettered write access to this data to ridiculously inexperienced and ignorant goons exponentially increases the risk of data tampering and corruption…
It makes any kind of audit LESS likely to be accurate.
But they’re very obviously not doing any kind of credible audit. As mentioned, that’s literally impossible and nonsensical to do this way.
Not if the company had up-to-date audited financials, no. You'd start with those.
The problem is agencies that haven't been audited in a decade. The agencies literally don't report how much money they get, their current balances, or where it goes.
I’m all for better accounting practices and better tracking of government spending as well as eliminating waste. Absolutely.
But pretending that Musk and co are doing an audit by accessing treasury records and payment systems or that it will help with government waste in any way is laughable.
Again, literally no one would be able to make any kind of credible department spending audit out of the bank records of a mid-sized company.
This is the US government’s treasury we’re talking about here! This is several orders of magnitude bigger and more complicated!
Not to mention an audit would not require any write access.
If only there were a part of the government whose job it was to proactively and continuously crawl the interiors of the bureaucracy to identify opportunities for improvement...
If only they had a standing list of more than 5000 such improvement opportunities...
Based on Musk’s tweets, the depth of this “audit” seems to be entirely surface level, e.g. “Lutheran in the name? DELETE.” (Not that they could do any better even if they wanted to given the blitzkrieg nature of the audit, size of the team, and complete lack of expertise.)
If you were panicked when a developer at GitLab accidentally deleted the production database, just wait until some coder merges a half-tested patch into the Treasury’s production environment. The Musk bros might lose the US ability to reassure the global bond market... Hopefully Spacex has policies with this Dutch Insurance company...:https://youtu.be/3r7mIDycJsE
The voters don't directly decide what is a crime. At best, they elect congress that can change the laws and constitution that in turn rules out what is or isn't illegal. None of this was done, none of this is democratic. This is nothing else than a coup perpetrated by the richest man on Earth.
I’m sure the current Supreme Court (which was selected by elected Presidents and Senators) will have no trouble explaining how recent events have been "reasonable" and 100% followed constitutional procedures.
>the voters decide (through their elected representatives) what is a crime
In the long term yes, in the short term, no. That's the check and balance of the Judicial branch. In theory they should be insulated from the politics of the world and properly interpret laws based on various cases.
So you can't just, say, repeal the first amendment just because all your voters suddenly became anti-1A. They need to work to make a represenative base that can eventually vote in that new amendment. And that all takes time (in terms of culture and the bill proposal).
As far as I can tell Elon has had security clearance since 2019 because Space X was (and still is) contracted to do work for the DOD. However I don't know what kind of clearance it was at that time.
> The Wall Street Journal reported citing people familiar with the matter that SpaceX lawyers recommended that the company's leadership not pursue a higher security clearance for Musk because he would have been asked about contacts with foreign officials as well as his prior drug use.
Not a lawyer, but it would seem that Elon and Doge employees are exposing themselves up to significant legal liability here. Maybe Trump pardons Elon (if they don't fall out before then), but is he going to pardon everyone who has a hand in this? And it seems likely that state crimes are being committed as well. The president may have broad immunity, but Elon does not.
Ideally, not electing a person who would abuse those powers. Secondarily, the “immune from prosecution” was a supreme court decision as a result of the events of January 6th, so the 2024 election was a pretty important one.
The current legal method available now is an impeachment process, iterated until we have a president who values societal norms and stable government. (Depending on how you feel about JD Vance not also pulling this shit.)
Currently 28 of the 51 republicans in the Senate are up for re-election in November of 2026; this is a possibility for a makeup change, but a remote one.
It appears a large enough percentage of americans want this that there’s no real possibility of changing course at this point; even the assassination attempts have failed. Understand that over 40% of americans do want what is happening now, as backed up by current polling. Never comply in advance, do not follow illegal orders, and make good friends with your neighbours.
I think one aspect not covered in your comment is whether or not all voters are getting an accurate representation of what's happening. If what they read/see just confirms their favoured view, it might be hard to say with confidence that any portion of the population do want what is actually happening at any given point.
Or separately, whether they feel very strongly about some things that are happening, enough to overlook other things that they'd likely disagree with but don't understand or care about as much.
The legal way to stop it is impeachment. Full stop. Nothing else can do with a president that’s gone this far rogue; the courts can at best slow him down, but at worst nothing stops Trump from ignoring them.
> That’s the beauty of a pardon. There’s not a limit, as many people can be pardoned as Mr. Trump wants.
It's really quite an odd power; very few developed democracies have a _personal_ pardon power today (some kind of vaguely pretend to; in the UK pardons are done by the monarch _at the direction of the government_, say). I think the US just stuck it on the presidency because at the time of independence the president was kind of a stand-in for the monarch, and the British monarchy had it at the time. The US then failed to get rid of it when everyone else did, instead relying on norms and basically on everyone behaving themselves to regulate it.
I mean, with the extreme politicization of DOJ and FBI already under way by Trump and his cronies, and the dismantling of safeguards like inspector generals there's literally no chance that these people get indicted or even investigated under this administration.
> is he going to pardon everyone who has a hand in this?
How can anyone have any doubts after the jan 6 pardons?
Clearly it's not happening tomorrow, but eventually Democrats (and maybe even Republicans who want to uphold the constitution!) will be in the majority.
Yep. For all of these sensational headlines we're seeing recently, we need to keep in mind that we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg of what's happening, and that we are seeing exactly nothing of what's happening behind closed doors. In fact, the fiascoes may be specifically intended to keep the public's eye off the ball.
I would be very surprised to learn that there are not teams working in every state to weaken the integrity of the electoral process.
If that were the case then no dictatorship anywhere would ever get embedded. Contrary to the widespread cultural belief in the US, people everywhere like freedom and integrity in public life; they're just not as individualistic about it, because most countries were settled many centuries earlier, and there is not an ethos of pioneering based on the idea of infinite free land and resources.
The problem with dictatorship is that of first-mover advantage; once a dictatorship becomes embedded it's hard to dislodge. There's de facto control of the legal, electoral, and cultural infrastructure which the regime can use to (ostensibly) re-legitimize itself every few years, while in the meantime suppressing dissent through violence and fear. That would be very much in line with the stated goals and actions of the administration so far. And I don't mean this hyperbolically; Trump stated that he would be a dictator on day one, and while his supporters brushed this off as a joke his autocratic behavior since entering office is wholly consistent with that.
Barring abrupt reversals in the next month or two, I think this is going to become a long-term situation, and there is simply no way the US can go back to two party pendulum politics after this. It would be like getting out of hospital after a stroke or a heart attack and heading straight back to an all-you-can-eat steakhouse.
- Acting Trump lackeys will simply ignore any court orders that block the EOs that Trump has issued.
- Congress isn't doing anything.
- In all likelihood, DOJ isn't going to enforce anything, so long they're aligned with Trump.
- Should some lowly law-enforcement officer decide to play hero, and arrest anyone that any federal judge issues an arrest on, I'd fully expect them to be removed, or meet resistance from any bodyguards/protection that the DOGE boys will receive.
- Even if anyone decides to pursue, Trump can issue pre-emptive pardons for all past federal crimes.
It is sort of a crisis, because the few checks and balances that were put in place, simply aren't functioning.
A lot of people are very concerned about it. but what am I supposed to do about it? I voted, canvassed, and donated as hard as I could already. and I lost.
Not OP, but someone with a significant national platform and an explicit call (dates, details, support from other prominent folks), not a generic "we should do something!" hint.
I'd find calls from, say, AOC or Taylor Swift more interesting than rando red rose LARPers.
They're not gonna push for it without grassroots organization, which means doing things at the local and online level to get the idea in wide circulation. It's not a startup.
Absent this, people will get more and more frustrated which will eventually manifest as riots as it did in 2020. So if you prefer a more peaceable outcome, I think it's better to talk up the idea of a general strike rather than talk it down.
If you wait for someone else to do the hard work nothing will happen, look at the French yellow vests, it started from nothing, and the causes were laughable compared to what the US is going through now
You do not wait for an order, because there is no central authority for a general strike. That's what gives it legitimacy.. You canvass, wheatpaste, recruit or whatever sort of political organizing/agitating you find appropriate. You have to meme it into existence.
Call your senator. Republican or Democrat or Independent or whatever. Call them, tell them you expect them to cease all routine business in the senate until accountability is restored. They do listen, it does matter.
I know using the phone can be uncomfortable if you don't do it often and that's okay. It gets easier the more you do it, and you don't need to word everything perfectly. The important thing is that you get your point across. "My name is x, I live in county y, and I'm calling to say I expect a yes/no vote on issue z."
I just did this for the first time, I found all three of mine had websites with a form to fill in which I used to leave my message. I hope filling in the form counts as much as a phone call? I left one a phone message too, but do kind of hate calling people...
Email is NOT as good! Phone calls are the most effective means by far. I know it's uncomfortable, it is for me too, but you need to power through that feeling. It gets easier the more you do it.
I called and kept calling until I got through. There were busy signals for 30 minutes before I got in. Be persistent. Keep trying!
To add, as someone who’s called offices to share opinions over the last several years:
You may get either voicemail or someone will pick up. A staffer will be who gets these messages, so be polite. Simply being polite means you’d be doing better than a lot of other callers.
I state my name, that I am a constituent, my city+ZIP, a brief message stating that I urge the congressperson to support/oppose an action and why.
If you’re talking to a human, give them a moment to jot it down and you’re done.
Also, you don’t have to call their DC office. If that line is busy, try a field office.
If those people hit the streets they'll be hit by chemical weapons (i.e. tear gas) that are illegal for our government to use in war but perfectly legal to use on peaceful protesters. Just something to keep in mind in case anyone is wondering why Americans don't really protest.
French police use tear gas on protestors, and in 1980, the South Korean government fired on and killed protestors. I don't think it's just the tear gas; I think it has more to do with the fact that we're way more distributed (it's very practical for most French people to descend on Paris than it is for US residents to descend on DC) and culturally not in the habit.
Tear gas is illegal to use in war because of a fear of escalation/retaliatory strikes due to an enemy thinking you're using other more dangerous chemical/biological weapons (chlorine, sarin, mustard, phosgene, etc).
It's not banned in war because it's as dangerous as chemical weapons, it's banned in war so people don't think you're using chemical weapons.
There is a reason why people, especially those outside the US, are treating the series of events of past few days as if it were a regime change, and the reason is it satisfies most criteria for it. From [1]:
“Regulations, basically, should be default gone,” Musk said. “Not default there, default gone. And if it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in.”
“These regulations are added willy-nilly all the time. So we’ve just got to do a wholesale, spring cleaning of regulation and get the government off the backs of everyday Americans so people can get things done,” Musk said, adding later: “If the government has millions of regulations holding everyone back, well, it’s not freedom. We’ve got to restore freedom.”
It takes a critical mass to be unmanageable by any amount of tear gas. Even if they use various types of anti-protest weapons, so what? Do you want to cry at home or on the streets?
The womans march was one of the largest protests in DC history and I think it was only about 470k. 75 million, man a quarter of that would shut the country down.
Wherever you are, find friends, bring family, go to the closest government building, camp in front of it. Block the main street of your city, block highways, block ports, &c.
It really isn't rocket science, German hardcore ecologists put more efforts on a random Tuesday morning than Americans during a coup, it's mind boggling.
They gave you an online "public square" so that you can all scream in its void, get the fuck out and protect what's yours
I'd wager a solid 20%-30% of the people who voted for Trump were poorly informed, or deliberately misinformed, and simply wanted "change" because they weren't pleased with the current state of their life / country. Unfortunately they didn't take the time to appropriately attribute the cause of their ills and made the grave mistake of thinking Trump and his administration would do anything at all to help them and their kind, not recognizing the narcissistic sociopath in front of them, and realizing that such people are wholly incapable of caring about any other person, under any circumstance. They were conned by a lifetime expert conman. Sad!
Ideally, trying to reform the government & its activities shouldn't require a team to burrow all the way down to the literal payments system & call individual balls and strikes.
But I assume that is indicative of how unresponsive the bureaucracy has become to political direction from the president & secretaries.
Bureaucracy is there to protect us from people like Trump and Elon. Congress can pass laws and the president can issue orders. This action threatens the US financial system, which threatens the economic stability of most of the world. In terms of human suffering this could have massive impact. We now have a psychopath (well, at least one) with his fingers around our throats. We're all waiting to see what comes next, but it won't be good.
No there hasn't. When someone named the 6 DOGE guys kicking in doors at OPM and TReasury Musk spluttered on his social media platform that the person was committing a crime by naming them and then deleted the person's account.
What have you actually learned? And consider that there's no way for anyone to argue that information was already available to the public, because the main activity of DOGE so far ahs been taking government web pages or entire domains offline. With no organized archival process, how do you equate significantly less availability of information with 'transparency'?
I mean, I've been watching my feed scroll by with the various monetary alotments they've discovered. Finally, someone's taking a critical glance at the $$ dedicated to increasing atheism in Tibet (no, I'm not kidding).
Wow, your feed tells you you're better informed now? Compared to what? As I pointed out, you have no way to check how much of this information was previously published, a point you chose to ignore.
I'm curious about whether you ever attempted to find details of USAID spending, pulled budget docs from their site or filed a FOIA request or anything like that. If you had done so and run into a brick wall, I would understand your saying that there had been a lack of prior transparency. But your posts reads as if someone just drew your attention to something you weren't aware of before, and you've mistaken that for transparency when in fact it's just a talking point designed to grab your attention.
Look I get where you're coming from, but those "checks and balances" can't be the thing you defend because they've largely done neither and in fact allowed this insanity in the first place.
The important risk is a runaway executive that feels completely unconstrained by law, with the blessing of both other branches of government. Today, it's blocking members of the legislature from entering government buildings and is unilaterally shutting down an agency that exists on a directive of Congress.
Tomorrow, will it carry out any legislature that congress passes?
Does this treasury department payment system not also cover the payments made to bondholders?
Every time Congress delays raising the debt ceiling until the last minute, people get anxious and worry about a default and the full faith and credit of the US, etc. Are we now saying that the US could default even when funds are available if an un-elected guy and some junior programmers decide that would be a good idea or just mess up when dealing with a complex and arcane legacy system, and that's not scary to markets?
I would think every financial model that references a "risk-free rate" now has to be revisited while people consider whether any information visible to the Treasury Department might link their account to someone who has said something disparaging about Musk on twitter.
You are over-estimating the financial sector. They don't model these things. Models are rather simple (US 0% risk, this country x% risk because a handful of institutions said, etc...). There is really not much science, research or sophistication there. Take the stock market, pretty much everyone is following everyone else.
The blatant ignoring of laws shows that Trump thinks it's fine to be lawless as long as it serves his chaotic agenda to sew discord and distrust in the government so he and his Elon goon squad can install more autocracy into the system.
My worry is it could
become a political issue. Agency you don’t like? Employee you don’t like? US state you don’t like? Just don’t pay them any more. And who would be able to do anything about it?
Musk already gained access to everyone's private Twitter data. He also gathers data from Tesla sensors. Now he has access to private citizen's federal data. Very dangerous for any private, unaccountable individual to have this level of access and especially someone as malicious as Musk.
The government has to appoint somebody to actually carry out law. There must always be an executive branch to execute the law.
The people running these agencies are all appointed by congress. If congress didn't want DOGE to have access to these systems then they wouldn't've confirmed the appointment of people who would give them access. Or conversely, they would impeach the appointees if the didn't like it.
This is the strength and weakness of a single-party system (grant US has multiple parties but one party is actually in control currently). The party does what the party wants and if it's not what you want then it's tough.
The US Constitution at its heart is based on a system of checks and balances, both between branches of government and the Federal government and States:
> The US Constitution at its heart is based on a system of checks and balances, both between branches of government and the Federal government and States:
First, this is all a non-sequitur to my argument. When the 3 branches are all in agreement on something then there is no reason for any of them to attempt to stop another branch. This is the case when a party has control over all 3 branches. It's not like China, North Korea, or Russia don't have legislatures and judges; it's just they're in agreement with their president.
But to your point, the constitution is not a document of checks and balances. It's just the agreed upon manor that the government will execute and Congress really has no checks on it's power. Congress can impeach/remove the president and judges; it's supposed to be the supreme branch.
Control-f check [1] => 0 hits
Control-f balance [1] => 0 hits
Some of these things that people call "checks and balances" are just straight up not in the constitution. "Judicial review" is not in the constitution.
I believe most people will understand that there is an extraordinarily long and vast tradition and literature on US Constitutional checks and balances, as my earlier link should have amply demonstrated. Google Scholar presently turns up another 359,000 results should that not have proven sufficiently persuasive:
At the time the US Constitution was written, political parties did not exist, nor were they anticipated, though they did in fact develop rather quickly as the US political system evolved. As such, the idea that a party might control one or more branches of government was not anticipated, and might be considered variously a misfeature of politics-as-instituted, or a grievous oversight of the framers. Probably some of A, some of B.
Rather, states and branches were anticipated to have their own interests and act on their accordance. To some extent that's emerged, but the overwhelming power has resided with parties since the late 18th century.
As with other doctrines (e.g., judicial review, a concept fiercely wielded by so-called "originalists"), much if not most US legal and common law theory has evolved over time, occasionally through amendments but far more often through case law and simple convention.
Or something like when the sub routine compounds the interest and uses all these extra decimal places that just get rounded off and so they round them all down, and drop the remainder into an account they opened
Unless the systems are so fragile that they can remove all traces of it (and I want to believe the systems are so complex and redundant that no infiltrator like these people can see the whole picture), they would / should face severe consequences for defrauding the state. They are not above the law, and if Trump pardons them for it (assuming he's still in office by then), the pardon should not apply because he'd be in on it. I don't know what checks and balances are available for that case though.
> they would / should face severe consequences for defrauding the state. They are not above the law
I don't know how to reply to a statement this naive. What about the past 8 years makes you think these people are not above the law?
> I don't know what checks and balances are available for that case though.
SCOTUS declared the president immune to prosecution. The only check on a rogue president is a 60+ seat majority of the opposite party in the Senate, which hasn't happened since the 1980s.
I'm not from the US, so I don't really have a direct horse in this race. Don't you think that polarization like this is exactly what led to the current situation? Culture begets counter culture and demonizing the other side turns into a rallying call in turn.
There's also a lot more nuance here and I definitely wouldn't say demonization of Democrats as a party is what lead to the current situation, that's seems a very oversimplified take. I would say more demonization of LGBT people, immigrants, scientists, government workers, media, etc. and demonization of those people is very different than demonizing the partisan apparatuses. I'm honestly on board with hating the Democrat political apparatus.
You should be allowed to hate on a political party, it's weird to think that's inherently an issue (especially in the current climate). I think a big part of the problem is in the US we're only allowed 2 parties so if one doesn't stuff you find unacceptable you sorta just need to support the other. Gotta love the "land of the free".
That's all fair, but you do understand that a large part of your point boils down to saying the problem isn't us demonizing them, the problem is them demonizing us, right?
I'm saying demonizing political organizations isn't a problem, demonizing broad classes of people is.
For example: there's a difference between saying immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country" (direct Trump quote) and "I would never vote for a Republican". The latter is generally fine and expected in any democracy. People have party preferences.
Edit: there's also context and matters of degree that matter here but this is an HN comment and I'm not gonna write an essay.
This out of context take was started by Hasan Piker, a billionaire (or maybe multimillionaire I forget) zoomer streamer self professed 'socialist' lol:
"I was up in New Hampshire the other day. The biggest complaint they have—it’s with all of the problems going on in the world, many of the problems caused by Hillary Clinton and by Barack Obama. All of the problems—the single biggest problem is heroin that pours across our southern border. It’s just pouring and destroying their youth. It’s poisoning the blood of their youth and plenty of other people. We have to have strong borders. We have to keep the drugs out of our country. We are—right now, we’re getting the drugs, they’re getting the cash. We need strong borders. We need absolute—we cannot give amnesty."
I don't really like the phrase because it is definitely easy to use out of context - but heroin and fentanyl are in fact poisoing the blood of this country, and eliminating that is an admirable goal.
There is another quote where he uses the phrase and you can see the full video/context, but the bottom line is not even snopes can get on board with this interpretation and they definitely would if they could manage.
They once claimed a convicted terrorist wasn't a terrorist because there was no universally accepted definition of terrorism, since 'The Weather Underground' were a democrat-aligned group and they will bow down to anything left.
And yet, they still don't agree with what is being claimed here....
The other quote was also in reference to drugs:
"TRUMP: No, nobody has ever seen anything like this. And I think we could say worldwide. I think you could go to the... you could go to a banana republic and pick the worst one, and you're not going to see what we're witnessing now. No control whatsoever. Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from, and we know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions [and] insane asylums. We know they're terrorists. Nobody has ever seen anything like we're witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It's poisoning the blood of our country. It's so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have. And I got to know a lot of the heads of these countries. They're very cunning people. Very street-smart people. If they're not street-smart, they're not going to be there very long. And when they send up those caravans, and I had it ended, we had the safest border in the history of our country, meaning the history, over the last 80 years. Before that, I assume it was probably not so bad. There was nobody around. But, we had the safest in recorded history by far. The least amount of drugs in many, many decades.*"
Can you make a fake argument that this is implying race mixing is bad? I guess, but you'd be a liar. It is very clear he was using what is in my opinion a terribly worded phrase due to the ease of taking it out of context.... but you would be a liar if you said whattdb7893 said.
He's used this language many times and the snopes article doesn't capture all of the times he's used it since he has used it since then. Some of the times he was clear in referring to drugs but some other times it seemed clear to me he was referring to illegal aliens doing it. It's not really worth it to me litigating how he thinks they are poisoning our blood since saying that a whole group of people is poisoning our blood is a good example of what I was talking about about regardless.
Edit: also you mention some Streamer named Hasan but your Snopes article references some news host with it looks like a last name of Hasan and I don't think they are the same person
Yes; but in my view, one of the political parties in the country has gone completely off the rails. I was raised right and actually have some core values, so how can I respect someone who enthusiastically voted for president “grab ‘em by the pussy”? There is nothing left to demonize: his sins and crimes are completely out in the open and his followers love 'em. An impeached felon and rapist who tried to blatantly steal the last election is our head of state, and I feel like I have nothing in common with half the country anymore.
In truth, though, I don't think much of this is organic. Right-wing TV and radio (Gingrich, Limbaugh, Carlson, etc.) have been rotting brains around the country for decades. Our current situation is the result of a concerted propaganda campaign by the powerful and wealthy going all the way back to the Nixon impeachment, not some day-to-day disagreements about taxes or culture war issues.
"Polarization" is an awful, borderline evil way to understand the world today. I hate that is mainstream.
Every single time an extreme right-wing populist runs against any opponent who is _not_ extreme right-wing, the media portrays the election as a "sad reminder of our polarized world". That is absolute bullshit.
Anywhere in the world, the histrionics, the deranged conspiracy theories, the chtonic racialism always come from one side alone, while the other side - which is more often than not garden variety right-wing, mind you - mumbles "let's not do that". But somehow mainstream media successfully portrays this dynamic as "polarization" and "a fight between two extremes".
Blue no matter who is exactly how we got here. DNC needs to start now coming up with a platform and a viable candidate. They need to retire the geriatrics and start cultivating new young blood.
Blue geriatrics are the ones doing the damage... this is all made up, using circular references to anonymous third party sources.
This is an active propaganda campaign with no basis in reality, and you are eating it up because you want it to be true to justify your emotions.
13 articles analyzed so far. All regurgitating the same anonymous sources. It would appear Project Mockinbird is alive and well, and doing a number on folks.
with the voting system present in the US, it is essentially impossible for a 3rd party to come into existence that has any hope of significant federal or even state level power.
The USA is the opposite of pluralistic. No third party has managed to build any serious political infrastructure at the local level and expand it regionally or nationally. That's why there are so many frivolous third party candidates for president; they're desperate to get a percentage of votes that will generate some federal funding to sustain organizational growth, and running for President is one of the few ways to get sufficient attention for that nationally.
The third party in the US is an amalgamation of the leftover scraps of losers that couldn't make it in the other parties. Because that's exactly what the Greens and to a lesser extent Libertarians are. To be fair it is wonderful that Howie Hawkins has managed to get the Greens on the ballot in 36 or so states. Its crazy that you can't even vote for this party in all states.
But the vote count is horrendous. The best this country has ever done in recent memory was Ralph Nader and he was a someone famous that could move the needle....he still only got 2.74% of the vote.
I'll go farther. To a degree, Democrats caused this by offering such terrible options.
(I mean, no, they are not the Single Root Cause - clearly not. They're a part of the causal chain, though. If they had run a solid candidate in any of the last three elections, we wouldn't be here.)
Do you think Trump is better? Because that is what you're getting from a policy of holding out for a good enough opponent
You're free to be a Trump supporter of course, but if you're not and you're still enabling Trump to win because you don't like the Democrats "enough", your actions aren't aligning with your best interests
The lesser of 2 evils argument will always get you to the point you're in now where you're like "I can't believe you let bad guy win, you should voted slightly less bad guy".
If you want to break the cycle, you vote your interests and not fall for this crap.
And no, Trump is not the end of the world. It wasn't last time around the US Democrat leaning desperately pretended it was, nor is it now.
For people who see through the partisan bullshit, change is usually good and it's always interesting to separate those people who have consistent views no matter who is in power and those who change to fit the new partisan narrative, no matter their past positions.
In essence, world and murrica... take a fucking chill pill. The TDS wore off the second time around and bipartisan war machine is red and blue, no matter who.
1. I am paying far more attention throughout than you and have always been instead of just when it's politically convenient.
2. Oh no! Pray god I'm not an active supporter! Imagine if there was someone with "republican/commie/<insert political blacklist> leanings". The horror!
I don't think you guys are getting it.
All you can do is accuse people of "being the enemy" and you just lost a democratic election and keep doubling down.
How about some reflection? How about internal analysis around consistency of political views instead of pure partisanship?
Yeah, I think everyone knows this was preventable.
The idea that "people failed the Dems" causes me a lot of anger at this point, because the folks who had the power to prevent this preferred to slip ever rightward in their platform instead of recognizing any number of highly popular non-conservative positions.
People often say "elections have consequences" but they are rarely saying "the democrats need to take this as an objective lesson about how badly they failed to represent their constituencies".
Instead Democratic party apologists go into fantasies about Bernie Bros and Russian Interference, while they materially fail to do literally anything useful about the very real current issues.
The Democrats need to understand that the election was so close that they could have won if they hadn't worked against themselves at the party level at every turn- if they had a primary of any kind they might have won.
I absolutely don't agree that "voting blue" would have fixed this- I think this is the consequence of "voting blue" in 2020 and giving the DNC the idea that they can literally run a piece of toast and win against trump.
I tend to agree. I think the early energy of the Harris campaign was in part because the highly paid centrist consultants hadn't gotten their hooks in yet; there was a notable shift in tone as "these people are fucking weird" disappeared and "we've got Cheney endorsing us!" replaced it.
I get, to some extent, why they're gun shy on this; centrism feels like it should be compelling with a crazy person on the other end... but I think the party needs to run an AOC style firebrand soon. Time to at least attempt being a bit leftist for once.
I mean if you're going to be for "leftism" it might need to be redefined because the reason your side lost (the side I used to be on) is that it went fucking nuts.
The next person to suggest the Dems need to swing right needs to be thrown in a volcano, or at least outed as an obvious fifth columnist. Harris ran so far to the right she was campaigning with Liz Cheney on being tough on immigration, and she lost the election to a geriatric felon autocrat with no coherent plans because Democratic turnout was down. There’s no credible argument for that style of campaign anymore, and anyone suggesting otherwise is either dangerously incompetent or dangerously disingenuous.
"Centrism" is doing a lot of work. I call it "slow fascism", in contrast with the "fast fascism" of Trump. Believe me, while centrists pretend to like rules and procedures, those procedures can rapidly melt away when it's in their interest to. There's a lot of people in the Democratic Party who were personally responsible for, say, selling out the working & middle classes[0]. Hell, Ronald Reagan was a Democrat that jumped ship because the Republican Party is easier to infiltrate.
In the middle of the Harris campaign, there was a concerted effort by cryptocurrency whales to primary electorally successful Democrats, purely to send a message: "we will absolutely fuck with you if you don't get in line with us". It was up in the air whether or not Harris would even keep Lina Khan on. The Harris campaign blinked so hard their eyes were stuck shut for the rest of the election.
We need an actually progressive party, not just a handful of progressive politicians acting as veneer over the centrist turd that is the DNC. We had that once before with Obama, who was very good at virtue-signalling progress while letting his own party tell him "no" at every juncture. We need to purge the DNC of people who think only about narrowly winning the electoral game so that their machine can perpetuate itself.
To be clear, this doesn't mean purity tests. It means doing shit so obviously good and beneficial for everyone that it makes your opponent's rainbow coalition of fascists second-guess why they're brown-nosing a good candidate for the biblical Antichrist just to get one thing out of him. I happen to be in a family full of Trump bootlickers, and every single one of them wants trust-busting back on the menu. They want right to repair. They want click to cancel. That's shit the Democrats should have been howling from the rooftops. But they didn't, because the Democratic Party does not want it.
Until the DNC can be proud of what they do for the country, instead of ashamed that they didn't loot it hard enough, they will continue to lose to a coalition of the weirdest weirdos America has to offer.
[0] To be clear, in America, "middle class" just means "working class and lying to themselves about it.
No, people who caused this are the ones who picked Trump for candidate and then voted for him. Conservatives did not had to pick Trump and his fellow travelers, they did. It should not be responsibility of democrats to become moderate republicans. It should be responsibility of moderate republicans to moderate their party. If you are moderate republican who voted Trump because you cant stomach the democrat establishment allows transexuals to transition or whatever, then you are someone who knowingly voted someone who you knew will do exactly what is going on now. There is nothing new or shocking about Trump or conservatives being anti-democratic or breaking the law.
It is absurd that all the bad stuff conservatives do ends up being blamed on left and center. But somehow, when left do something bad, conservatives are never blamed.
> the democrats need to take this as an objective lesson about how badly they failed to represent their constituencies
The elections were quite close. They failed to represent moderate republicans who prefer fascists anyway. They lost in elections. But the constituency voting for Trump was not theirs.
It would be cool if anti-Trump right would stop blaming everyone but themeselves. Especially when those anti-Trump people voted for Trump second time.
"It would be cool if anti-Trump right would stop blaming everyone but themeselves."
I agree, but from where I stand to the left, the Democrats -are- the anti-Trump right.
"It should not be responsibility of democrats to become moderate republicans."
I also agree with this, and I think that they would have won if they had not tried to be come GOP-Lite.
"It would be cool if anti-Trump right would stop blaming everyone but themselves. Especially when those anti-Trump people voted for Trump second time."
It'd be cool, from my far-left anti-war, pro-LGBTQ+, anti-capitalist position, if the Democrats would "stop blaming everyone but themselves." Especially when they keep losing because they don't run moderate right-wing candidates who don't represent their constituencies- that's explicitly the reason why they lost, not because a lot of folks voted for DT, but because a big chunk of folks realized that they weren't served by voting for Harris.
The Dems didn't have to run Harris. Or they could have setup a platform to appeal to the folks who ultimately didn't trust her.
But they didn't do those things and they lost an election they could have won.
I am actively balking at this. The Democrats did this to the country by having zero likable or relatable candidates and alienating the actual left of this country. Tim Walz was likable and relatable to middle America but he wasn’t running for president.
The DNC has acted so undemocratic it is flabbergasting.
We need a different party comprised of working class Americans who want to take care of the working class and not corporate interests. Reject culture war nonsense and frame this for what it is, a class war. If the response to Luigi wasn’t telling enough, I don’t know. The sentiment is there. Just need to fan the flames.
Sounds great, how do you propose we do this? I'd like to hear your thoughts as the Sanders people have probably already tried it in the last eight years. You haven't seen the Democratic party perform at their best until you have seen them block and destroy an outsider that threatens them. Ask Sanders, ask anyone in the Squad. Hell there is even an excellent documentary on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCSo2hZRcXk
> following democratic processes to achieve the desired ends
That has been failing for a while now. Congressional approval is in the 20% range, much lower than even Trump's. An odd fact never mentioned in the media. The U.S. is toast if it can't reverse Citizen's United.
Political pundits for major outlets (538, New York Times, Washington Post) reference this constantly. It's mentioned all the time in media to the point where when people talk about congressional approval I turn my brain off because I know they'll say some version of "congressional approval is low but people generally approve of their congressman".
Those democratic processes stopped working decades ago. They're marginally more effective than the "close door" button on an elevator, but not by much. Everyone in Congress is either too bought or too old to listen to you. The Presidency is a glorified popularity contest that the Democratic Party[0] has figured out how to consistently lose with razor-thin margins. And the judicial branch was never democratically accountable to begin with.
Elon was never going to follow democratic processes, that's not how moneybag men think. Do you think he ran X.com, PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, or Twitter as democracies? Hell no. Musk fires or buys-out people who disagree with him. Same with the healthcare CEO Luigi assassinated. There is no process in the current version of America that would allow the people to counter the power of billionaires. The people have been routed.
The difference between the two is that Luigi targeted a thing that actively hurts people and, in any democratic world, would have been illegal. Elon is burning down the things that stop him from hurting people.
[0] Which isn't democratic; nor is the Republican Party republican. Canada and Australia's Liberal Parties aren't liberal, either. Hell, Japan has a two-fer: a Liberal Democratic Party that's neither liberal nor democratic.
There's a good article in the NYT saying it's a bit like when the US tried to remake the Iraq government after invading and sent in a handful of young people to rearrange everything who did't know what they were doing
It seems much closer to what's happening than calling it a coup.
It was odd as a Brit seeing him going on about the grooming scandal in the UK. I mean it was a bad thing but he was getting a lot of his facts wrong and wanting to fire the wrong people etc. I'm not quite sure what's up with him.
Elon explicitly has a leadership style that advocated to "remove everything, add back if needed" that completely ignores history. He does not give two shits about regulations being written in blood.
Elon is in this purely to remove all regulations, which he views as a hinder to his businesses. He also wants a private takeover of core gov. functions, which then he (or allies) can provide.
turns out, a lot of tech took a hard right turn in the last decade or two.
I think it is explained by the idea that, when tech overtook finance as the best shot at accumulating supra-human wealth and power, the young sociopaths started going into tech instead of finance.
This coming from the same people who shut OPM employees out of an HR database, citing (legitimate) security and oversight concerns, because they had broad un-auditable access.
How can this department turn around and do this and still maintain they're doing the right thing? By their own admission they know this a bad idea
> Overnight Wired reported that contrary to published reports that DOGE operatives at the Treasury Department are limited to ‘read only’ access to department payment systems, this is not true. A 25 year old DOGE operative named Marko Elez in fact has admin privileges on these critical systems which directly control and pay out roughly 95% of payments made by the US government including Social Security checks, tax refunds and virtually all contract payments. I can independently confirm these details based on going back to the weekend. I can further report that Elez not only has full access to these systems and has already made extensive changes to the code base for this critical payment system.
> Josh, are you a little crestfallen they beat you to it? Well, sure but this is a business is an ocean of ‘arrgghhs’ and honestly the information being out is the big thing. Here are the additional details.
> I’m told that Elez and possibly other DOGE operatives received full admin level access on Friday January 31st. The claim of ‘read only’ access was either false from the start or later fell through. The DOGE team, which appears to be mainly or only Elez for the purposes of this project, has already made extensive changes to the code base for the payment system. They have not locked out the existing programmer/engineering staff but have rather leaned on them for assistance which they appear to have painedly provided hoping to prevent as much damage as possible – ‘damage’ in the sense not of preventing the intended changes but avoiding crashes or a system-wide breakdown caused by rapidly pushing new code into production with a limited knowledge of the system and its dependencies across the federal government.
> Phrases like “freaking out” are, not surprisingly, used to describe the reaction of the engineers who were responsible for maintaining the code base until a week ago. The changes that have been made all seem to relate to creating new paths to block payments and possibly leave less visibility into what has been blocked. I want to emphasize that the described changed are not being tested in a dev environment (i.e., not live) but have already been pushed into production. This is code that appears to be mainly the work of Elez who was first introduced to the system probably roughly a week ago and certainly not before the second Trump inauguration. The most recent information I have is that no payments have as yet been blocked and that the incumbent engineering team was able to convince Marko to push the code live to impact only a subset of the universe of payments the system controls. I have also heard no specific information about this access being used to drill down into the private financial or proprietary information of payment recipients, though it appears that the incumbent staff has only limited visibility into what Elez is doing with the access. They have however looked into extensively into the categories and identity of payees to see how certain payments can be blocked.
I sure hope none of the systems the DOGE boys are recklessly accessing end up having some dangerous malware like StuxNet on them that ends up disabling or destroying the DOGE systems.
Just asking for a friend. Are CIA and NSA salaries being paid by the systems that are being fraudited right now? Does this extend to payments to intermediaries inclusive of foreign intermediaries / banks?
I think the nasty parts of the TLAs will be fine with just the money they make off drugs, human trafficking and so on. I assume there are a significant number of "straight" employees that would be fucked by the whole system blowing up, but maybe they'd just pay them with cash too. AFAIK it's still legal to pay people that way as long as they get a proper pay slip with the cash envelope. Alternatively they might move them to contractor positions in regime-friendly firms.
But not realistically it seems like the goal is to be more targeted: pay your shooters, cut off your enemies'.
The takeaway should be that every government administration has access to all of this, so maybe we shouldn't be doing the mass surveillance that causes it all to exist in a central database.
Musk got himself into this hole, so if a democrat president comes in 2029, there's a high chance now, he'd be deported. Can happen sooner as well, depending on midterms.
Yeah thats a good point. You never know, the pendulum might swing far to the left and his billions might not save him. I do concede thats its really unlikely.
In order for him to be prosecuted, several highly unlikely things have to occur.
Trump doesn't pardon him. I can't really see this happening. If they have a falling out, then Elon will just pay him off. It's not like Trump will turn down a bribe.
A democrat is elected president in 2028. After that, demographics substantially reduce their chances of being elected (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/democrats-future-crisi...). They would have to either abandon progressive views and move right or offer an incredibly compelling candidate. Both of these seem unlikely to me. After that, people in red states will determine the future of this country.
So I just found this a few pages down at rank 129, where its ended up in only 3 hours, despite garnering 250 points in that time. That's abnormal for such a popular post. What gives?
It's probably because absolutely no one is using real sources in these articles.
I won't muddy the comments repeating myself - but I have been fascinated by how quickly people latched on to this, have been absolutely incapable of finding any first party sourcing, and asked CoPilot to analyze each of these stories (13 so far!) and every single one is 'trust me bro, I heard it in a convo'.
I really really hope this isn't true for all the same reasons as people are freaking out... but at this point it has as much merit as saying "the sky is always green, I heard a guy say it the other week who I won't name but it's true"
Ctrl-F 'astroid' or click my last post in this thread for the complete breakdown of every source referenced, and ask yourself if there is enough info to warrant entertaining this fantasy.
Honestly I am shocked at how little critical thinking is being applied here. I know this website hates these guys, but there is usually a facade of critical thinking at the least.
It is annoying that the more inflammatory and 'breaking news(?)' articles are what remain. All of the articles from reputable news sources citing their sources this last weekend got flagged in minutes. I think only the Wired article that outed the people involved in the federal payments system takeover managed to get unflagged (again, inflammatory).
Honestly the wired one should have gotten flagged too - it's as unsourced as the other 12:
"Wired: Reports that Marko Elez, a 25-year-old engineer linked to Elon Musk, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the U.S. government. The sources are unnamed, and they claim Elez has administrator-level privileges, including the ability to write code on the Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System."
It's an endless circle. No one is willing to stand behind the reporting, no one is willing to go on record. I almost regret wasting as much time trying to get to the bottom of the story because I feel stupid for trying to peel back on these layers and finding nothing -- like they were trying to take people on a ride and I fell for it.
I guess it could be worse though - I could have just taken them all at face value. Even the 'anonymous sources' appear to be second or third party on TOP of being anonymous.
EDIT: To clarify, if you were referring to https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-associate-bfs-federal-... that is the one with no real sources. If you meant another source about the audit in general I shouldn't have assumed -- it's just in the list of the 13 I have reviewed with no substance.
Yes, and I've generally not considered Wired a reputable news source in any case. If you are interested in names, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/02/elon-musk... is one article (flagged several times here) citing "Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator from Oregon and the ranking member of the Senate finance committee", and contains links to several other posts from alternative news organizations that may also be helpful.
(Politics? Interesting that The Guardian files this under Technology)
The fact that no one will go on the record can mean two things: that there is no story or that people are afraid bad things will happen to them if they do. "Bad things" being rather unbounded if this is effectively a coup.
So it's either lots of news outlets (journos but also fact checkers) being fooled, or that people are only willing to speak of the record because they fear for their career/freedom/life. All feds fear at the minimum for their career right now...
Rather than rely on upvotes to organically populate the front pages with content users are interested in, there are a number of users censoring the site by flagging content they personally don't want to see. Lots of political stuff gets censored in minutes, and absolutely everything critical of Elon Musk. Nothing about Musk in particular lasted on the front page from this last weekend, despite the high profile actions. Lots of 'don't make me tap the sign' comments pointing to the guidelines, but flagging is just going to be weaponized like this unless its use is better defined and enforced somehow. Even the discussion on the bot-like flaggings got flagged. And it is all counter productive, because if users want to discuss a topic they are going to end up doing it in inappropriate places when the appropriate places have been taken down. Like we are here.
Weird that the first instinct of his is to eliminate all aid local and international. No mention of looking at the military spending. I guess cutting elsewhere will help funnel that into spacex and whatever ai insanity musk comes up with to "serve the government"
Ha of course.. they never cut the cash cows. Make shit up and create new means of warfare even though there is no need. Just a cash grab and cash funnel. There has to be space involved now because elon.
Still, it's not a logical fallacy to think "someone very successful at X is more likely to be successful at Y", in many cases. Do you think that there is literally zero correlation between massive business success and success at whatever-it-is Musk is trying to do now?
(I agree it's a fallacy if you think is' assured he will succeed, as opposed to this just being a correlation in your mind. I just bumped on the use of "logical fallacy" to describe something that is not a fallacy at all!)
Look, if you're trying to argue that Musk isn't a successful person in many ways, my only question is "then who is?". You're talking about literally the richest person in the world, and one that has had several successful companies.
And having failures is not that uncommon, especially for serial entrepreneurs. You've gotta accept some failures to get to successes.
As for the whole "he bought his way into Tesla" thing, this is just making the idea of a "founder" some kind of sacrosanct thing. By most histories I've read, he is the reason the company is the success it is today.
The local Bodega down the street has been profitable for 40 years. They seem to be doing just fine and as a bonus they haven't burned billions in subsidies or hijacked public transportation initiatives.
There are plenty of successful people. How do you want to define success? Elon got rich by turning TSLA into a meme stock. Do you think he would be rich or as rich right now if twitter never existed? He got rich on paper once, with TSLA stock, every other attempt at making a business has been a failure. He doesnt have a track record, and the financials for tsla are not inline with how the company is actually doing. Sales now are slipping.
> And having failures is not that uncommon, especially for serial entrepreneurs.
IDK how you can call this anything else but luck. He got forced out of paypal with a ton of money and was able to keep taking risks because of the safety nets he had that most do not.
He also threw a fit and left openai, that was a poor business decision.
The way you word it makes it seem like him being considered a neo nazi is a failure of marketing on his part, rather than a very intentional public display.
People still believe that he's been some sort of business genius.
One could actually argue that the biggest business wins for Trump, have been those AFTER he became president. Through nothing but grift, he's managed to build up a fortune that surpassed the one he tried to make and maintain in his semi-legit days.
So let me get this straight-- there is a box in a Treasury building that, if the janitor accidentally unplugs it-- immediate financial apocalypse and a fifth of the US economy "stops."
Why isn't the very existence of this box the problem?
>> So let me get this straight-- there is a box in a Treasury building that, if the janitor accidentally unplugs it-- immediate financial apocalypse and a fifth of the US economy "stops."
It is mission-critical finance system. Guaranteed it's multiple redundant boxes in an highly access-controlled data center. No one should have access without serious vetting.
>> Why isn't the very existence of this box the problem?
The money doesn't move around on magic and rainbows. What were you expecting?
If Trump's suitcase were broken, the result would not be Armageddon.
Also, apparently there are redundant "red buttons" mirroring the succession plan.[1]
So a more appropriate analogy would be a dead-man trigger in a bureaucrat's hand, programmed in obsolete technology, that if handled other than by expert hands at all times would result in immediate "Armageddon."
>include the ability not just to read but to write code on two of the most sensitive systems in the US government.
...
>All that is known is that Marko can “access and query” SPS and that there was someone who gave Marko a “tour” of the facilities. We do not know where they are in operationalizing any control. One senior IT source can see Mark retrieving “close to a thousand rows of data” but they can’t see the content because the system is “top secret” even to them. No source I have has knowledge of what DOGE is doing with the data they are retrieving.
So the (d)evil remains hidden in every one of their details! What does 'write code' actually mean? A DB query? What exactly are these 'most sensitive' systems in the US government? A COBOL DB??
The most likely explanation is that the system either doesn't have the capacity to provide full read access without write access, or they were ordered to be provided "full access" and then the part of the bureaucracy implementing that directive interpreted it as including write access.
This is obviously not ideal, but the real question is, are they actually modifying anything (and if so , what?), or it is just a permissions level they're not actually using for anything?
We also can't rule out media hysteria yet, e.g. "write code" could plausibly be something like "write SQL queries" which doesn't inherently imply any modification to the database tables.
Oh, can't wait for the article on Medium on how they rewrote that old COBOL thing in React Native and NodeJS in 3 days and saved bilions (by not delivering them).
So to me this seems like an issue, set aside the constitutional/legal issues.
It sounds like, from the reporting, one person is modifying a large complex system that handles trillions of dollars and pushing directly to production.
Also he is not familiar with the system, having first encountered it a week ago.
Also the people who do normally have access to this system do not know what he is exactly doing, because normally, it is illegal for them to even access the system in the same way.
It seems read-only access has been given to audit expenses. So there is no modification. In fact it's the read-only access that will allow to become familiar with the system and make informed decisions.
> Wired beat me to the punch of reporting that a top DOGE employee, 25 year old former SpaceX employee Marko Elez, has not only read but write access to BFS servers.
Clearly if someone grant them write privilegies it means someone else had admin privilegies as well to that system.
How many people have normally access to it? Why is it particularly weird that someone working in the government have access to a system about payments?
It seems to me that generic fear is being mentioned rather than very tangible and clear dangers. It makes me feel like the people wanting to create panic have a hidden agenda and they just want to avoid someone from the opposition to audit the budgets.
How can DOGE find out if there are expenses that should be cut if it doesn't even have access to what is actually being paid?
I think everyone is generically afraid that their department is gonna get the cut and just doesn't want the audit to happen.
Okay this is the third article I have seen posted on HN about this - and once again, it is just a circular mish-mash of anonymous second hand sources.
These articles are all so circular I have resorted to asking CoPilot to analyze them and tell me what each source is, if they are 1st 2nd or 3rd party, and whether or not they are anonymous.
In this article, the analysis came out with:
Let's break down the claims and sources in this article:
Crises Notes: Reports that the Trump-Musk Treasury payments crisis of 2025 involves the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) gaining access to the Treasury Department's payment system. The article mentions concerns about the potential for irreversible damage to the systems and the exposure of sensitive personal and financial information1. The sources are unnamed, and there is no direct evidence provided.
CBS News: Reports that DOGE has access to the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, which disburses trillions in payments each year, including Social Security checks and federal salaries. The article mentions concerns from consumer advocates and Democratic lawmakers about the potential risks of this access2. The sources are unnamed, and there is no direct evidence provided.
Truthout: Reports that labor unions and an advocacy group have sued the U.S. Treasury Department to halt DOGE's access to the critical government payment system. The article mentions concerns about the scale of the intrusion into individuals' privacy and the potential for unauthorized access to sensitive information3. The sources are unnamed, and there is no direct evidence provided.
In summary, all the sources cited in the article are anonymous, and there are no first-party sources or direct evidence provided. This makes it difficult to verify the claims independently. The lack of named sources and concrete evidence raises questions about the credibility of the claims.
Also, I will go ahead and paste my previous output from the other articles below (I'm going to post them as child comments so this isn't just a huge wall of text):
I did the same manual analysis I did on the OP one, and could not find a first party source or non-anonymous claim.
I asked CoPilot to analyze the sources and identify the individual claims, and their proximity to a 'first party source'.
Once again, there is 0 evidence this is actually happening -- there are however a lot of news organizations ready to throw their reputations away over a few 'anonymous sources' that aren't even primary.
Here is the analysis of your source, AND the linked sources in that article:
Wired: Reports that Marko Elez, a 25-year-old engineer linked to Elon Musk, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the U.S. government. The sources are unnamed, and they claim Elez has administrator-level privileges, including the ability to write code on the Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System1.
Talking Points Memo: Confirms Wired's reporting, adding that Elez has already made extensive changes to the code base for the payment systems. Again, the sources are unnamed1.
The New Republic: Details that Elez has complete access to critical payment systems at the Department of the Treasury, despite being only 25 years old. The sources are unnamed, and the article mentions that senior government officials have been locked out of employee databases1.
Raw Story: Reports that Elez has been given full control over the computer code that directs Social Security payments, tax returns, and other payments owed to Americans. The sources are unnamed, and the article mentions that federal IT workers are concerned about the potential for irreversible damage to the systems2.
In summary, all the sources cited in the article are anonymous, and there are no first-party sources or direct evidence provided. This makes it difficult to verify the claims independently. The lack of named sources and concrete evidence raises questions about the credibility of the claims.
Sure, let's break down the key witnesses and their claims:
David Lebryk: Former acting Deputy Secretary of the Treasury. He resigned after resisting granting DOGE access to the Treasury data1. His claim is based on his direct experience and position within the Treasury Department, making him a first party witness.
Ron Wyden: The highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee. He expressed concerns about the potential misuse of the data by DOGE1. Wyden is a second party witness, as he is commenting on the situation based on his oversight role but not direct involvement.
Anonymous AP Sources: Two people familiar with the situation spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. They claim that DOGE has gained access to sensitive Treasury data1. These sources are second party witnesses, as they have indirect knowledge of the situation.
X User (@rayinsideout): Revealed names of alleged DOGE employees who accessed the Treasury payment system. Musk accused this user of committing a crime by sharing private information2. This user is a third party witness, as they are relaying information they claim to have obtained from other sources.
NOTE: The rawstory article DID NOT mention Scott Bessent, but CoPilot 'thoughtfully' added this for context:
Scott Bessent: Treasury Secretary who granted DOGE access to the data. His actions are central to the claims, but he hasn't made public statements about the specifics of the access3. Bessent is a first party witness due to his direct involvement in the decision.
So altogether that is 13 sources -- and NONE of them have actually used any first party sources.
AI (CoPilot) had to infer a first party source, who has NOT made this claim.
You are all getting spun up over what is almost certainly fake news, and since it fits your confirmation bias it does not matter.
If this story was about anyone else, there is absolutely no way all of these 'news' sources would be willing to publish these claims with such flimsy evidence.
Frankly, this is pathetic. I -really- hope this isn't true because of how egregious a breach it would be. The audaciousness / outrageousness of the base claim combined with the circular references really SHOULD be raising red flags for everyone taking the bait though... but for some reason this site full of highly technical people is suddenly fine with "well I overheard it in a conversation over the weekend" as gospel truth.
I also decided to ask CoPilot for a probability this is true, and to explain it's reasoning. I think it's being generous... but it's a lot less than a coinflip:
"
given everything you have ingested on this topic assisting me so far, if you had to assign a probability % to this being a true story what would you assign it? Answer only witha number from 0-100
35
Can you explain your reasoning?
Of course! Here’s the breakdown of my reasoning:
Lack of Named Sources: All the articles referenced rely heavily on unnamed and anonymous sources. Without concrete evidence or named individuals to corroborate the claims, it’s difficult to ascertain the accuracy of the information.
Extraordinary Claims: The claims being made are quite extraordinary, involving a 25-year-old with no prior experience having access to critical government systems and rewriting COBOL code on the fly. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, which seems to be lacking in this case.
Consistency Across Sources: While multiple sources report on the story, they all seem to echo similar details without providing additional or unique evidence. This repetition might indicate a reliance on the same set of unverified sources, rather than independent verification.
Skepticism from Lack of First-Party Evidence: The articles fail to provide first-party evidence or verifiable documentation to support the claims. This raises doubts about the overall credibility of the story.
Putting these factors together, I estimated a 35% probability that the story is true. While there is a possibility that elements of the story are accurate, the lack of solid evidence and reliance on anonymous sources make it difficult to fully trust the claims. Does that make sense?
"
I worry/wonder how strong the public hunger for blood in the streets would become if they accidentally delay or otherwise modify more than a handful of Social Security payments. This is as close to juggling chainsaws as anyone can get.
Elon doesn't have a strong track record of getting things right the first time.
1) Trump issues some unconstitutional EO to abolish a federal department
2) Musk and DOGE go to work
3) Some federal judge blocks the EO
4) Some acting lackey of Trump ignores the court order. DOGE continues to dismantle the department from within
5) Even if the judge orders an arrests, no-one will enforce it
6) Congress does nothing
By the time anyone actually gets held accountable, the departments will have been pillaged and dismantled. DOJ and the AG will not go after anyone involved, Trump orders pre-emptive pardons for all involved in federal crimes.
taylodl | 1 year, 10 days ago
toomuchtodo | 1 year, 10 days ago
weard_beard | 1 year, 10 days ago
liontwist | 1 year, 10 days ago
hyperbrainer | 1 year, 10 days ago
liontwist | 1 year, 10 days ago
SOX is a specific law with the motivation of giving markets more confidence in public stocks (for example must hire external auditors, certain board member rules, how certain assets must be valued, etc).
The SOX audit is to make sure that law is followed.
One criticism of SOX is that encouraged many startups and other businesses to remain private.
So long story short, no. Our government does not resemble a public stock corporation and these things don’t have an analog.
epistasis | 1 year, 10 days ago
If that is a criticism of SOX for private companies, then it would mean that it should be a baseline for national accounting, no?
liontwist | 1 year, 10 days ago
What does this mean? Let me repeat. SOX is not a method of accounting, its rules about roles and reporting for public corporations
> It sounds like you think SOX auditing means “super secure and careful accounting”.
epistasis | 1 year, 10 days ago
I don't know what you think you are implying with the "super secure and careful" comment, we are looking for the roles that ensure the accountability of SOX.
Your complaint is that SOX "nationalizes" companies because apparently it becomes so transparent, or something? If that's what you mean by "nationalize" shouldn't that be used for our nation's accounting?
weard_beard | 1 year, 10 days ago
These measures are universal to running any payment platform, not a public/private issue.
*No, I'm not thinking of PCI, but that is also a valid measure here. There are recent updates to SOX in the past few years covering these aspects of payment operations. Some old-school SOX experts may not be familiar and the strictness on these aspects of the audit varies by auditor in my experience. I recently helped a client navigate these developing and responding to a very strict audit process covering their entire IT landscape including process flows, deployment planning and user/role management.
liontwist | 1 year, 10 days ago
> I specifically meant
You didn’t leave the comment. Was that your alt account?
weard_beard | 1 year, 10 days ago
amluto | 1 year, 10 days ago
Bloating | 1 year, 10 days ago
cdme | 1 year, 10 days ago
liontwist | 1 year, 10 days ago
hyperbrainer | 1 year, 10 days ago
fastball | 1 year, 10 days ago
[1] https://breakingdefense.com/2024/11/pentagon-fails-7th-audit...
cdme | 1 year, 10 days ago
fastball | 1 year, 10 days ago
Glyptodon | 1 year, 10 days ago
toomuchtodo | 1 year, 10 days ago
mathw | 1 year, 10 days ago
malfist | 1 year, 10 days ago
cdme | 1 year, 10 days ago
gigatexal | 1 year, 10 days ago
ramesh31 | 1 year, 10 days ago
Arrested by who? The executive branch who ordered his actions? Americans voted for this, and now we have to live with it.
dartos | 1 year, 10 days ago
Yknow… the branch that’s supposed to check the power of the executive branch…
tyre | 1 year, 10 days ago
The president can replace them.
ramesh31 | 1 year, 10 days ago
The judiciary has zero enforcement power. They make the laws which the executive is meant to enforce. If the executive fails to enforce a law, congress can impeach. That's not happening.
dartos | 1 year, 10 days ago
The executive branch runs the country.
The legislative branch makes the laws.
The judicial branch enforces them…
SAI_Peregrinus | 1 year, 10 days ago
The current executive branch will not enforce laws against itself, and nobody else is legally allowed to enforce the laws, so all the courts & congress can do is write strongly worded letters.
tsimionescu | 1 year, 10 days ago
dboreham | 1 year, 10 days ago
4ndrewl | 1 year, 10 days ago
taylodl | 1 year, 10 days ago
taylodl | 1 year, 10 days ago
WOTERMEON | 1 year, 10 days ago
taylodl | 1 year, 10 days ago
pseudalopex | 1 year, 10 days ago
lazyasciiart | 1 year, 10 days ago
tsimionescu | 1 year, 10 days ago
dragonwriter | 1 year, 10 days ago
Arrests need probable cause. They can either be done on a warrant or without a warrant (in the latter case, in the federal system, a complaint must be filed and the arrested person must be brought before a magistrate for a hearing on probable cause within 72 hours after arrest.)
lazyasciiart | 1 year, 10 days ago
sundaeofshock | 1 year, 10 days ago
epistasis | 1 year, 10 days ago
That said, DOGE was well announced and widely publicized prior to the election, by Musk and the media. Musk was up on the stage with Trump quite a bit.
Those who did not know this was going to happen are either easily fooled or were paying no attention.
exe34 | 1 year, 10 days ago
Trump said Elon would get to run a new department called "department of government efficiency". if you know what he did at Twitter, you can easily join the dots.
jethro_tell | 1 year, 10 days ago
Also, trump was impeached last time because he tried to shut down funding approved by congress. So, if you’re surprised it’s happening again, I suppose you can’t be helped
FireBeyond | 1 year, 10 days ago
jethro_tell | 1 year, 10 days ago
johnnyanmac | 1 year, 10 days ago
Do I really have to explain how much of his 100+ EO's come from Project 2025?
johnnyanmac | 1 year, 10 days ago
Let's see: Trump appointed it the day after he won:
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/12/g-s1-33972/trump-elon-musk-vi...
And Musk announced DOGE on September 2024:
https://news.bitcoin.com/elon-musk-agrees-to-head-donald-tru...
So yes, this was not some secret. If you (royal you) trusted that photo in the 2nd link to make america efficient, I have no words.
codingdave | 1 year, 10 days ago
9283409232 | 1 year, 10 days ago
People believed the wolf when he said he wasn't going to hurt the sheep.
Blackthorn | 1 year, 10 days ago
When the 49ers lost the 2024 Super Bowl, the second and third string players didn't go around saying they didn't really lose because they never hit the field. No, they lost.
taylodl | 1 year, 10 days ago
subsection1h | 1 year, 10 days ago
Yes, if the Electoral College wasn't a thing.
johnnyanmac | 1 year, 10 days ago
But you'd also be surprised how many non-swings could swing if they had enough non-voters vote.
the_snooze | 1 year, 10 days ago
troyvit | 1 year, 10 days ago
If they didn't vote they voted for the winner. America (including me, because voting wasn't enough) earned this 100%.
throw0101c | 1 year, 10 days ago
If these are federal statues they can be pardoned by the President (like the January 6 folks were).
voisin | 1 year, 10 days ago
Glyptodon | 1 year, 10 days ago
bradarner | 1 year, 10 days ago
It is an administrative step. It might undergo review but access does not need to be prevent until the review happens. It is all about who is granting the access.
The commander in chief has considerable authority to provide access.
queuebert | 1 year, 10 days ago
cdme | 1 year, 10 days ago
immibis | 1 year, 10 days ago
michaelmrose | 1 year, 10 days ago
johnnyanmac | 1 year, 10 days ago
He can' (but shouldn't). But there's no word that was granted to Musk. Since, he didn't name them. He probably doesn't though, because he should not have been stopped at USAID with the right credentials. Unless...
>Hope they did some vetting...
we both know he didn't. If he does have clearance, his interns definitely don't. Hence the kerfluffle at USAID.
belter | 1 year, 10 days ago
dredmorbius | 1 year, 10 days ago
jandrewrogers | 1 year, 10 days ago
There seem to be a lot of misconceptions flying around about what "government access" entails.
Glyptodon | 1 year, 10 days ago
kdmtctl | 1 year, 10 days ago
jandrewrogers | 1 year, 10 days ago
For the sake of timeliness and being able to move quickly, some people in government are authorized to make a judgment about the risk/benefit tradeoff when someone doesn't have an active clearance. It isn't a case of waiting for a background check process, you don't even need to apply. Some organizations will do an informal check of their own in the background if they don't already know who you are. Sure, they would prefer if you already had formal clearance, but it isn't strictly necessary.
paleotrope | 1 year, 10 days ago
It's like people thinking that the President can't declassify a document or make foreign policy decisions without the NSC's advice or consent.
liontwist | 1 year, 10 days ago
cdme | 1 year, 10 days ago
helge9210 | 1 year, 10 days ago
cdme | 1 year, 10 days ago
queuebert | 1 year, 10 days ago
lawn | 1 year, 10 days ago
Not truly dead but a shell of it's former self.
troyvit | 1 year, 10 days ago
transcriptase | 1 year, 10 days ago
When it didn’t fall apart in days, the goalposts were moved to “technical issues won’t become obvious right away, give it a few months”.
It’s been over 2 years and on a technical level running better than ever. You can disagree with the content and users all you wish, but pretending it’s dying because you hate the bad orange and mars man is delusional.
lowercased | 1 year, 10 days ago
Isn't it also simply doing less? Weren't some APIs shut off or reduced? My limited memory is having me think they reduced or shut down some functionality altogether, which would also help something run smoother. Fewer things running means fewer things can break.
ceejayoz | 1 year, 10 days ago
transcriptase | 1 year, 10 days ago
dicknuckle | 1 year, 10 days ago
astroid | 1 year, 10 days ago
They just closed a single API which was also abused by botfarms. Closing the API immediately improved the site from a spam perspective and was welcome by most actual users, likely all users who understood the impact.
This is pure cope - the site is doing a TON more than it used to, and more stable than ever.
Also arguing that a site that is designed to scrape and re-represent a website without ads or other stuff 'was likely a huge load' is a very weird argument to try and claim the site is no longer being used.
I can say anecdotally I used to use nitter, and while it didn't work for a few days I switched to the regular site. Now I would never go back. The actual site works better now, I have no need. On old twitter 1.0, nitter worked better.
Thats a black eye on Dorsey twitter, not the new twitter (or X or whatever you prefer)
mandeepj | 1 year, 10 days ago
transcriptase | 1 year, 10 days ago
johnnyanmac | 1 year, 10 days ago
Ask the worker's how they are doing, and then maybe I'll be convinced that it's "running better". When you grind 10x the users into the dirt, you can make up for cutting 90% of your staff. For a while. Especially in a crap economy like this where job hopping is harder.
I also agree that most of the cuts may have been managerial and logistics. It's probably a clown circus trying to do anything more than maintain.
I agree only on a surface level that it looks better. But old tech dies very hard. Digg is technically still up today. Myspace is technically still up today. hell, 4chan is still arguably bustling.
Paradigma11 | 1 year, 10 days ago
archagon | 1 year, 10 days ago
rcpt | 1 year, 10 days ago
tayo42 | 1 year, 10 days ago
smitelli | 1 year, 10 days ago
Twitter -- the community -- is dead and rotting.
maxerickson | 1 year, 10 days ago
Maybe that's influenced by me blocking a lot of garbage ads? IDK.
tbrownaw | 1 year, 10 days ago
maxerickson | 1 year, 10 days ago
johnnyanmac | 1 year, 10 days ago
solumunus | 1 year, 10 days ago
zikduruqe | 1 year, 10 days ago
Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk alone; you don’t want to “go out of your way to make trouble.” Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, “everyone” is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.”
And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.
But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.
But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions, would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all of the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jewish swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.
But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early morning meetings of your department when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.
https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
watwut | 1 year, 10 days ago
In 1933, right after getting power, Jews were excluded from civil service, their numbers in schools were limited and a year later they could not be actors. The restrictions came in quick and were felt a lot by their targets.
So, this extract kind of underplays the beginning of it all. It was violent from the start.
dwpdwpdwpdwpdwp | 1 year, 10 days ago
https://apnews.com/article/deportation-flights-military-indi...
ceejayoz | 1 year, 10 days ago
lif | 1 year, 10 days ago
nessbot | 1 year, 10 days ago
duped | 1 year, 10 days ago
queuebert | 1 year, 10 days ago
duped | 1 year, 10 days ago
At the moment though, what they're doing is very much illegal. They just have a bunch of collaborators in the DOJ who won't bring charges or arrest anyone, because they're co-conspirators.
queuebert | 1 year, 10 days ago
XorNot | 1 year, 10 days ago
The problem with simplistic narratives where you give stuff names is it masks what's actually happening: the Executive is near enough to a dictatorship - power and authority is deliberate vested in one person. This makes it very different to Congress, which only wields power by the collective decision making of hundreds via majority or even super-majority vote.
So "Congress" doesn't really exist as an entity: because there is no guiding consciousness or collective in it which is deliberately trying to seize more power, and the story of its power is the exact opposite: it keeps giving it away (because the individual members of Congress can only retain that position and it's local benefits by staying in Congress, best accomplished by deliberately avoiding responsibility of any kind).
If you've ever tried to get 4 people to decide what to get for dinner, the guy who simply says "Let's get tacos" usually gets his way because everyone else keeps deferring.
johnnyanmac | 1 year, 10 days ago
AlotOfReading | 1 year, 10 days ago
johnnyanmac | 1 year, 10 days ago
And I'll never understand why. There's a lot of partisan issues but I thought "not fucking around with our money" was as bipartisan as a plutocracy could get?
nessbot | 1 year, 10 days ago
queuebert | 1 year, 10 days ago
nessbot | 1 year, 10 days ago
Its in the first article of the constitution.
queuebert | 1 year, 10 days ago
nessbot | 1 year, 10 days ago
bbarnett | 1 year, 10 days ago
abracadaniel | 1 year, 10 days ago
encoderer | 1 year, 10 days ago
To me it’s more like mom gave me money to pay the rent but my landlord is likely violating laws so in the meantime I am putting the rent in escrow while we sort out the facts.
9dev | 1 year, 10 days ago
encoderer | 1 year, 10 days ago
9dev | 1 year, 10 days ago
Remember when Musk built the submarine to save the kids in the cave, was absolutely useless, even actively obstructed others from saving them, and finally resorted to denigrate the diver saving them as a pedophile? That's exactly the same thing he is doing right now.
encoderer | 1 year, 10 days ago
johnnyanmac | 1 year, 10 days ago
Yes he is.
> He was asked by the president to do a job and he’s doing it.
1. And he did it in an illegal way, yes. If you wanna go back to Mom, you can go to the grocery but you cannot throw a bank heist and lock all employees out of the store so you can grab some bread
2. He doesn't have access to the store. Mom sent him to Costo without her card. You can't just storm into Costco. Go back to mom and get her card, if possible.
encoderer | 1 year, 10 days ago
Nobody stormed anything. They just filed a dispute with their credit card company. Costco will get the funds if they win the dispute. If there is malfeasance at Costco don’t you want to know? What exactly are you afraid of?
johnnyanmac | 1 year, 10 days ago
Which is stupid because you Uncle Orange has access to the spending records.
encoderer | 1 year, 10 days ago
johnnyanmac | 1 year, 10 days ago
Man, March is going to be bloody.
encoderer | 1 year, 10 days ago
For now, they are just pausing payments.
If they find serious issues they can likely go to congress and have them canceled outright. If not, they need to distribute the funds during the fiscal year.
I don’t understand the pearl clutching. The government shuts down often due to spending issues. Payments pause when this happens. Moreover, everybody has known for decades that nobody is reading these 50,000 page appropriations bills.
I’m willing to give musk and his guys some time to sort this out.
The president has asked them to do this. If they go against his wishes there is no reason they will not be thrown under the bus. If he pardons them for obvious malfeasance it will make big political waves and likely change the outcome of the midterm elections, where a congress could begin impeachment.
johnnyanmac | 1 year, 10 days ago
uhh, no they can't. Those are also government elected representatives. Checks and balances. To "cancel congress", you need the courts to charge and convict them. You're going to find it very hard to do that from treasury records alone (AKA, how the executive branch spends the money allocated).
>I don’t understand the pearl clutching. The government shuts down often due to spending issues.
With that dismissal, you're not opening yourself up to understanding. Maybe there's wrongdoing; The answer isn't to charge into the treasury and hack it.
That's the stupid part: Musk doesn't need to. He's clearly not TSI/TS clearance level, so he just needs trump to go in and look. Or have trump hire someone with that clearance to look in on his orders. Remember, this is the executive branch; Trump has all access powers here (within reason).
>I’m willing to give musk and his guys some time to sort this out.
I'm not. I didn't vote for him. You didn't. He was not approved by Senate, as is executive apointee tradition. He does not have clearance. "Asking" isn't enough. Where's this willingness coming from? Even if you just like the guy, you really want the man who laid off 80% of his staff to handle your money?
>If they go against his wishes there is no reason they will not be thrown under the bus
I can think of 8 or 9 figures why he wouldn't.
encoderer | 1 year, 10 days ago
Elon Musk was hand picked by the president to do this job. Clearly you do not like the president nor Elon but that is a personal view not held by a majority of voters in the last election.
normalaccess | 1 year, 10 days ago
It's just that as far as I can recall no one has ever really tried to spend less in the government.
EDIT: I was mistaken, please look up Impoundment of appropriated funds
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impoundment_of_appropriated_fu...
nessbot | 1 year, 10 days ago
normalaccess | 1 year, 10 days ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impoundment_of_appropriated_fu...
hamburga | 1 year, 10 days ago
normalaccess | 1 year, 10 days ago
lesuorac | 1 year, 10 days ago
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/02/nx-s1-5281438/understanding-t...
johnnyanmac | 1 year, 10 days ago
taylodl | 1 year, 10 days ago
No, they cannot. Trump was impeached during his first term over this very issue. Congress had appropriated funding for the Ukraine, Trump didn't want to provide it without obtaining concessions from Zelenski. Just like Trump doesn't want to provide California any FEMA money for the LA fires without concessions. Trump has been through this before, he knows it's illegal, but he doesn't care. It's kinda funny that people expect a felon to care about the law.
maxlybbert | 1 year, 10 days ago
mikeyouse | 1 year, 10 days ago
When asked about the news on Oct. 5 that new border wall construction would indeed commence under his administration, Biden told reporters: “The border wall — the money was appropriated for the border wall. I tried to get to them to reappropriate it, to redirect that money. They didn’t. They wouldn’t. And in the meantime, there’s nothing under the law other than they have to use the money for what it was appropriated. I can’t stop that.”
Trump intended to build the wall with no environmental assessments or permits and congress wrote in a waiver since the border was “an emergency” but Biden chose to rescind the emergency declaration and follow the long-established federal construction process instead of using the waivers which does indeed slow things down.
That’s nothing like what is happening with Musk “deleting” entire departments or unilaterally stopping funding because he doesn’t like the phrasing of the grants.
maxlybbert | 1 year, 10 days ago
daveguy | 1 year, 10 days ago
https://www.factcheck.org/2023/10/bidens-border-wall-explain...
Biden tried to get congress to re-appropriate the funds. They wouldn't, so he spent it as he was obligated.
johnnyanmac | 1 year, 10 days ago
I'll just be in good faith and believe you wholesale. Yes, that is one way to fight the spending. Make the government argue until a deadline is hit and then they either shut down or compromise. Happens much too often.
But that's the point: the budget wasn't made yet. Trump wants to argue over funding that was already in place. If he wanted this chaos legally, he'd have been stalling out the March funding next quarter. But once it's finalized, it's finalized and many challenges over the centuries were shot down.
anigbrowl | 1 year, 10 days ago
labster | 1 year, 10 days ago
America is no longer a nation of laws. Period. We are a nation ruled by Trump and Musk.
llamaimperative | 1 year, 10 days ago
We are in fact a nation of laws and we ought to demand enforcement.
nessbot | 1 year, 10 days ago
johnnyanmac | 1 year, 10 days ago
brewdad | 1 year, 10 days ago
cyanydeez | 1 year, 10 days ago
xmprt | 1 year, 10 days ago
nessbot | 1 year, 10 days ago
xmprt | 1 year, 10 days ago
johnnyanmac | 1 year, 10 days ago
Sad thing is no one is really talking about this in any branch, so it's just theory crafting until then.
if you want to change that you need a huge voter base that is anti-partisan. Given that we can barely mobilize within parties to protest properly: good luck.
generj | 1 year, 10 days ago
To do otherwise the executive has to pick and choose what to fund.
The topic usually gets raised every time we get close to a debt limit. If we truly broached the limit it’s possible the Biden and Obama administrations would have just ignored the limit since the consequences of the full faith and credit of the US failing are so dire and there’s a solid argument it’s the least bad option Constitutionally.
tlb | 1 year, 10 days ago
Doing an audit starting with the treasury department seems like the right first step. Every outflow of money ultimately has to start there. It's the root node of the Sankey diagram. Then you follow the money outwards from there.
cdme | 1 year, 10 days ago
reustle | 1 year, 10 days ago
cdme | 1 year, 10 days ago
ubercore | 1 year, 10 days ago
krainboltgreene | 1 year, 10 days ago
MisterTea | 1 year, 10 days ago
BobaFloutist | 1 year, 10 days ago
llamaimperative | 1 year, 10 days ago
taylodl | 1 year, 10 days ago
lowercased | 1 year, 10 days ago
kdmtctl | 1 year, 10 days ago
Naklin | 1 year, 10 days ago
franktankbank | 1 year, 10 days ago
Might be the first data you secure though.
saghm | 1 year, 10 days ago
> a top DOGE employee, 25 year old former SpaceX employee Marko Elez, has not only read but write access to BFS servers
> One senior IT source can see Mark retrieving “close to a thousand rows of data” but they can’t see the content because the system is “top secret” even to them. No source I have has knowledge of what DOGE is doing with the data they are retrieving
Naklin | 1 year, 10 days ago
franktankbank | 1 year, 10 days ago
Naklin | 1 year, 10 days ago
You think the treasury doesn’t have a metric ton of procedures, and laws, on data management, integrity, access, backup and retention?
Breaking these protocols by giving unfettered write access to this data to ridiculously inexperienced and ignorant goons exponentially increases the risk of data tampering and corruption…
It makes any kind of audit LESS likely to be accurate.
But they’re very obviously not doing any kind of credible audit. As mentioned, that’s literally impossible and nonsensical to do this way.
taylodl | 1 year, 10 days ago
llamaimperative | 1 year, 10 days ago
tlb | 1 year, 10 days ago
The problem is agencies that haven't been audited in a decade. The agencies literally don't report how much money they get, their current balances, or where it goes.
Here's the DOD proudly announcing that they now have clean audits for 11 of their 28 departments: https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/39.... Surely nothing bad is happening in the other 17.
Naklin | 1 year, 10 days ago
But pretending that Musk and co are doing an audit by accessing treasury records and payment systems or that it will help with government waste in any way is laughable.
Again, literally no one would be able to make any kind of credible department spending audit out of the bank records of a mid-sized company.
This is the US government’s treasury we’re talking about here! This is several orders of magnitude bigger and more complicated!
Not to mention an audit would not require any write access.
llamaimperative | 1 year, 10 days ago
If only they had a standing list of more than 5000 such improvement opportunities...
Welcome to the Government Accountability Office!
archagon | 1 year, 10 days ago
taylodl | 1 year, 10 days ago
cozzyd | 1 year, 10 days ago
mikeodds | 1 year, 10 days ago
dwpdwpdwpdwpdwp | 1 year, 10 days ago
okay then...how many billions are completely unaudited?
llamaimperative | 1 year, 10 days ago
cozzyd | 1 year, 10 days ago
llamaimperative | 1 year, 10 days ago
cyanydeez | 1 year, 10 days ago
cherryteastain | 1 year, 10 days ago
belter | 1 year, 10 days ago
basementcat | 1 year, 10 days ago
thrance | 1 year, 10 days ago
basementcat | 1 year, 10 days ago
lazyasciiart | 1 year, 10 days ago
johnnyanmac | 1 year, 10 days ago
In the long term yes, in the short term, no. That's the check and balance of the Judicial branch. In theory they should be insulated from the politics of the world and properly interpret laws based on various cases.
So you can't just, say, repeal the first amendment just because all your voters suddenly became anti-1A. They need to work to make a represenative base that can eventually vote in that new amendment. And that all takes time (in terms of culture and the bill proposal).
normalaccess | 1 year, 10 days ago
Please correct me If I'm wrong.
cozzyd | 1 year, 10 days ago
nosioptar | 1 year, 10 days ago
> The Wall Street Journal reported citing people familiar with the matter that SpaceX lawyers recommended that the company's leadership not pursue a higher security clearance for Musk because he would have been asked about contacts with foreign officials as well as his prior drug use.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/why-elon-musk-doesnt-ha...
(Didn't link WSJ article due to paywall.)
tmaly | 1 year, 10 days ago
skepticATX | 1 year, 10 days ago
freeone3000 | 1 year, 10 days ago
And you can’t arrest the president because he’s immune from prosecution for official acts: pardoning is an enumerated constitutional power!
So what’s left is impeachment for the president and congress does not want to do this.
And none of that will fall on Musk or DOGE. The government has made itself unable to prevent this.
thesuperbigfrog | 1 year, 10 days ago
If the current legal framework were software, I would say that this is an exploit chain that gives root access to the government / country.
If there is not legal way to stop it, what is the alternative?
freeone3000 | 1 year, 10 days ago
The current legal method available now is an impeachment process, iterated until we have a president who values societal norms and stable government. (Depending on how you feel about JD Vance not also pulling this shit.)
Currently 28 of the 51 republicans in the Senate are up for re-election in November of 2026; this is a possibility for a makeup change, but a remote one.
It appears a large enough percentage of americans want this that there’s no real possibility of changing course at this point; even the assassination attempts have failed. Understand that over 40% of americans do want what is happening now, as backed up by current polling. Never comply in advance, do not follow illegal orders, and make good friends with your neighbours.
prawn | 1 year, 10 days ago
Or separately, whether they feel very strongly about some things that are happening, enough to overlook other things that they'd likely disagree with but don't understand or care about as much.
Filligree | 1 year, 10 days ago
rsynnott | 1 year, 10 days ago
It's really quite an odd power; very few developed democracies have a _personal_ pardon power today (some kind of vaguely pretend to; in the UK pardons are done by the monarch _at the direction of the government_, say). I think the US just stuck it on the presidency because at the time of independence the president was kind of a stand-in for the monarch, and the British monarchy had it at the time. The US then failed to get rid of it when everyone else did, instead relying on norms and basically on everyone behaving themselves to regulate it.
timbit42 | 1 year, 10 days ago
anigbrowl | 1 year, 10 days ago
PaulDavisThe1st | 1 year, 10 days ago
Naklin | 1 year, 10 days ago
> is he going to pardon everyone who has a hand in this?
How can anyone have any doubts after the jan 6 pardons?
skepticATX | 1 year, 10 days ago
apothegm | 1 year, 10 days ago
jordanpg | 1 year, 10 days ago
I would be very surprised to learn that there are not teams working in every state to weaken the integrity of the electoral process.
throw16180339 | 1 year, 10 days ago
klooney | 1 year, 10 days ago
anigbrowl | 1 year, 10 days ago
The problem with dictatorship is that of first-mover advantage; once a dictatorship becomes embedded it's hard to dislodge. There's de facto control of the legal, electoral, and cultural infrastructure which the regime can use to (ostensibly) re-legitimize itself every few years, while in the meantime suppressing dissent through violence and fear. That would be very much in line with the stated goals and actions of the administration so far. And I don't mean this hyperbolically; Trump stated that he would be a dictator on day one, and while his supporters brushed this off as a joke his autocratic behavior since entering office is wholly consistent with that.
Barring abrupt reversals in the next month or two, I think this is going to become a long-term situation, and there is simply no way the US can go back to two party pendulum politics after this. It would be like getting out of hospital after a stroke or a heart attack and heading straight back to an all-you-can-eat steakhouse.
dboreham | 1 year, 10 days ago
jordanpg | 1 year, 10 days ago
TrackerFF | 1 year, 10 days ago
- Acting Trump lackeys will simply ignore any court orders that block the EOs that Trump has issued.
- Congress isn't doing anything.
- In all likelihood, DOJ isn't going to enforce anything, so long they're aligned with Trump.
- Should some lowly law-enforcement officer decide to play hero, and arrest anyone that any federal judge issues an arrest on, I'd fully expect them to be removed, or meet resistance from any bodyguards/protection that the DOGE boys will receive.
- Even if anyone decides to pursue, Trump can issue pre-emptive pardons for all past federal crimes.
It is sort of a crisis, because the few checks and balances that were put in place, simply aren't functioning.
malfist | 1 year, 10 days ago
Elected or unelected, politicians with an agenda should not be in charge here.
affinepplan | 1 year, 10 days ago
kjkjadksj | 1 year, 10 days ago
EForEndeavour | 1 year, 10 days ago
ceejayoz | 1 year, 10 days ago
I'd find calls from, say, AOC or Taylor Swift more interesting than rando red rose LARPers.
rsanek | 1 year, 10 days ago
ceejayoz | 1 year, 10 days ago
anigbrowl | 1 year, 10 days ago
Absent this, people will get more and more frustrated which will eventually manifest as riots as it did in 2020. So if you prefer a more peaceable outcome, I think it's better to talk up the idea of a general strike rather than talk it down.
morkalork | 1 year, 10 days ago
lm28469 | 1 year, 10 days ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests
anigbrowl | 1 year, 10 days ago
mostlysimilar | 1 year, 10 days ago
residentraspber | 1 year, 10 days ago
I remember a while back with SOAP and PIPA there were templates you could read, do those exist for this case?
mostlysimilar | 1 year, 10 days ago
I know using the phone can be uncomfortable if you don't do it often and that's okay. It gets easier the more you do it, and you don't need to word everything perfectly. The important thing is that you get your point across. "My name is x, I live in county y, and I'm calling to say I expect a yes/no vote on issue z."
bens74 | 1 year, 10 days ago
mostlysimilar | 1 year, 10 days ago
I called and kept calling until I got through. There were busy signals for 30 minutes before I got in. Be persistent. Keep trying!
redserk | 1 year, 10 days ago
You may get either voicemail or someone will pick up. A staffer will be who gets these messages, so be polite. Simply being polite means you’d be doing better than a lot of other callers.
I state my name, that I am a constituent, my city+ZIP, a brief message stating that I urge the congressperson to support/oppose an action and why.
If you’re talking to a human, give them a moment to jot it down and you’re done.
Also, you don’t have to call their DC office. If that line is busy, try a field office.
atoav | 1 year, 10 days ago
Or how do you think your ancestors got democracy and kept it in the first place?
eCa | 1 year, 10 days ago
Watching from Europe, I think you are getting close to the point where 75 million people need to hit the streets (preferably in DC).
It appears they are trying to beat the 53 days record.
pastureofplenty | 1 year, 10 days ago
kace91 | 1 year, 10 days ago
BryantD | 1 year, 10 days ago
barnas2 | 1 year, 10 days ago
It's not banned in war because it's as dangerous as chemical weapons, it's banned in war so people don't think you're using chemical weapons.
numpad0 | 1 year, 10 days ago
tiborsaas | 1 year, 10 days ago
rcpt | 1 year, 10 days ago
saturn8601 | 1 year, 10 days ago
lm28469 | 1 year, 10 days ago
It really isn't rocket science, German hardcore ecologists put more efforts on a random Tuesday morning than Americans during a coup, it's mind boggling.
They gave you an online "public square" so that you can all scream in its void, get the fuck out and protect what's yours
foxyv | 1 year, 10 days ago
johnnyanmac | 1 year, 10 days ago
I'd rather stay and fight.
anigbrowl | 1 year, 10 days ago
tayo42 | 1 year, 10 days ago
We can't convince the other half that wants this...
rcpt | 1 year, 10 days ago
Also DT had a minority of the popular vote after you account for 3rd party.
kccoder | 1 year, 10 days ago
CrimsonRain | 1 year, 10 days ago
latentcall | 1 year, 10 days ago
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/
Organize into a political party. Spread pro worker information and convince the working class to join. Democratic Party is not it, in my opinion.
spacemanspiff01 | 1 year, 10 days ago
If enough people do it, maybe MAGA 401ks going down will make people care.
brtkdotse | 1 year, 10 days ago
Hayvok | 1 year, 10 days ago
But I assume that is indicative of how unresponsive the bureaucracy has become to political direction from the president & secretaries.
drawkward | 1 year, 10 days ago
jenkstom | 1 year, 10 days ago
dionian | 1 year, 10 days ago
anigbrowl | 1 year, 10 days ago
generalizations | 1 year, 10 days ago
hypothesis | 1 year, 10 days ago
anigbrowl | 1 year, 10 days ago
What have you actually learned? And consider that there's no way for anyone to argue that information was already available to the public, because the main activity of DOGE so far ahs been taking government web pages or entire domains offline. With no organized archival process, how do you equate significantly less availability of information with 'transparency'?
generalizations | 1 year, 10 days ago
I mean, I've been watching my feed scroll by with the various monetary alotments they've discovered. Finally, someone's taking a critical glance at the $$ dedicated to increasing atheism in Tibet (no, I'm not kidding).
anigbrowl | 1 year, 10 days ago
I'm curious about whether you ever attempted to find details of USAID spending, pulled budget docs from their site or filed a FOIA request or anything like that. If you had done so and run into a brick wall, I would understand your saying that there had been a lack of prior transparency. But your posts reads as if someone just drew your attention to something you weren't aware of before, and you've mistaken that for transparency when in fact it's just a talking point designed to grab your attention.
CrimsonRain | 1 year, 10 days ago
kuschku | 1 year, 10 days ago
You call it unresponsive, the founding fathers called it "checks and balances"
krainboltgreene | 1 year, 10 days ago
vkou | 1 year, 10 days ago
The SP500 is normal today, institutional money is fine with this.
archagon | 1 year, 10 days ago
vkou | 1 year, 10 days ago
The important risk is a runaway executive that feels completely unconstrained by law, with the blessing of both other branches of government. Today, it's blocking members of the legislature from entering government buildings and is unilaterally shutting down an agency that exists on a directive of Congress.
Tomorrow, will it carry out any legislature that congress passes?
In a year, will it comply with an impeachment?
jghn | 1 year, 10 days ago
abeppu | 1 year, 10 days ago
Does this treasury department payment system not also cover the payments made to bondholders?
Every time Congress delays raising the debt ceiling until the last minute, people get anxious and worry about a default and the full faith and credit of the US, etc. Are we now saying that the US could default even when funds are available if an un-elected guy and some junior programmers decide that would be a good idea or just mess up when dealing with a complex and arcane legacy system, and that's not scary to markets?
I would think every financial model that references a "risk-free rate" now has to be revisited while people consider whether any information visible to the Treasury Department might link their account to someone who has said something disparaging about Musk on twitter.
csomar | 1 year, 10 days ago
EasyMark | 1 year, 10 days ago
nielsbot | 1 year, 10 days ago
bbor | 1 year, 10 days ago
esafak | 1 year, 10 days ago
rsynnott | 1 year, 10 days ago
GeoAtreides | 1 year, 10 days ago
bbqfog | 1 year, 10 days ago
gammarator | 1 year, 10 days ago
fastball | 1 year, 10 days ago
wtfwhateven | 1 year, 10 days ago
fastball | 1 year, 10 days ago
apothegm | 1 year, 10 days ago
lesuorac | 1 year, 10 days ago
The government has to appoint somebody to actually carry out law. There must always be an executive branch to execute the law.
The people running these agencies are all appointed by congress. If congress didn't want DOGE to have access to these systems then they wouldn't've confirmed the appointment of people who would give them access. Or conversely, they would impeach the appointees if the didn't like it.
This is the strength and weakness of a single-party system (grant US has multiple parties but one party is actually in control currently). The party does what the party wants and if it's not what you want then it's tough.
dredmorbius | 1 year, 10 days ago
"Checks and Balances in the Constitution"
<https://www.usconstitution.net/checks-and-balances-in-the-co...>
That balance has been largely eviscerated presently.
lesuorac | 1 year, 10 days ago
First, this is all a non-sequitur to my argument. When the 3 branches are all in agreement on something then there is no reason for any of them to attempt to stop another branch. This is the case when a party has control over all 3 branches. It's not like China, North Korea, or Russia don't have legislatures and judges; it's just they're in agreement with their president.
But to your point, the constitution is not a document of checks and balances. It's just the agreed upon manor that the government will execute and Congress really has no checks on it's power. Congress can impeach/remove the president and judges; it's supposed to be the supreme branch.
Control-f check [1] => 0 hits
Control-f balance [1] => 0 hits
Some of these things that people call "checks and balances" are just straight up not in the constitution. "Judicial review" is not in the constitution.
[1]: https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcri...
dredmorbius | 1 year, 10 days ago
<https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=constitution%20checks%2...>
At the time the US Constitution was written, political parties did not exist, nor were they anticipated, though they did in fact develop rather quickly as the US political system evolved. As such, the idea that a party might control one or more branches of government was not anticipated, and might be considered variously a misfeature of politics-as-instituted, or a grievous oversight of the framers. Probably some of A, some of B.
Rather, states and branches were anticipated to have their own interests and act on their accordance. To some extent that's emerged, but the overwhelming power has resided with parties since the late 18th century.
As with other doctrines (e.g., judicial review, a concept fiercely wielded by so-called "originalists"), much if not most US legal and common law theory has evolved over time, occasionally through amendments but far more often through case law and simple convention.
anigbrowl | 1 year, 10 days ago
belter | 1 year, 10 days ago
nicce | 1 year, 10 days ago
drawkward | 1 year, 10 days ago
soupfordummies | 1 year, 10 days ago
kurthr | 1 year, 10 days ago
headsman771 | 1 year, 10 days ago
Cthulhu_ | 1 year, 10 days ago
coldpie | 1 year, 10 days ago
I don't know how to reply to a statement this naive. What about the past 8 years makes you think these people are not above the law?
> I don't know what checks and balances are available for that case though.
SCOTUS declared the president immune to prosecution. The only check on a rogue president is a 60+ seat majority of the opposite party in the Senate, which hasn't happened since the 1980s.
drawkward | 1 year, 10 days ago
sdenton4 | 1 year, 10 days ago
throw16180339 | 1 year, 10 days ago
LorenDB | 1 year, 10 days ago
[OP] shinryuu | 1 year, 10 days ago
DinoDad13 | 1 year, 10 days ago
indoordin0saur | 1 year, 10 days ago
"It's a democracy when I like it and a coup when I don't!"
01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 1 year, 10 days ago
Etheryte | 1 year, 10 days ago
tdb7893 | 1 year, 10 days ago
You should be allowed to hate on a political party, it's weird to think that's inherently an issue (especially in the current climate). I think a big part of the problem is in the US we're only allowed 2 parties so if one doesn't stuff you find unacceptable you sorta just need to support the other. Gotta love the "land of the free".
Etheryte | 1 year, 10 days ago
tdb7893 | 1 year, 10 days ago
For example: there's a difference between saying immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country" (direct Trump quote) and "I would never vote for a Republican". The latter is generally fine and expected in any democracy. People have party preferences.
Edit: there's also context and matters of degree that matter here but this is an HN comment and I'm not gonna write an essay.
astroid | 1 year, 10 days ago
https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/10/04/trump-poison-blood-qu... -- not even Snopes agrees with this take, and it is wildly out of context.
This out of context take was started by Hasan Piker, a billionaire (or maybe multimillionaire I forget) zoomer streamer self professed 'socialist' lol:
"I was up in New Hampshire the other day. The biggest complaint they have—it’s with all of the problems going on in the world, many of the problems caused by Hillary Clinton and by Barack Obama. All of the problems—the single biggest problem is heroin that pours across our southern border. It’s just pouring and destroying their youth. It’s poisoning the blood of their youth and plenty of other people. We have to have strong borders. We have to keep the drugs out of our country. We are—right now, we’re getting the drugs, they’re getting the cash. We need strong borders. We need absolute—we cannot give amnesty."
I don't really like the phrase because it is definitely easy to use out of context - but heroin and fentanyl are in fact poisoing the blood of this country, and eliminating that is an admirable goal.
There is another quote where he uses the phrase and you can see the full video/context, but the bottom line is not even snopes can get on board with this interpretation and they definitely would if they could manage.
They once claimed a convicted terrorist wasn't a terrorist because there was no universally accepted definition of terrorism, since 'The Weather Underground' were a democrat-aligned group and they will bow down to anything left.
And yet, they still don't agree with what is being claimed here....
The other quote was also in reference to drugs:
"TRUMP: No, nobody has ever seen anything like this. And I think we could say worldwide. I think you could go to the... you could go to a banana republic and pick the worst one, and you're not going to see what we're witnessing now. No control whatsoever. Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from, and we know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions [and] insane asylums. We know they're terrorists. Nobody has ever seen anything like we're witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It's poisoning the blood of our country. It's so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have. And I got to know a lot of the heads of these countries. They're very cunning people. Very street-smart people. If they're not street-smart, they're not going to be there very long. And when they send up those caravans, and I had it ended, we had the safest border in the history of our country, meaning the history, over the last 80 years. Before that, I assume it was probably not so bad. There was nobody around. But, we had the safest in recorded history by far. The least amount of drugs in many, many decades.*"
Can you make a fake argument that this is implying race mixing is bad? I guess, but you'd be a liar. It is very clear he was using what is in my opinion a terribly worded phrase due to the ease of taking it out of context.... but you would be a liar if you said whattdb7893 said.
tdb7893 | 1 year, 10 days ago
Here's an NBC article that mentions some other times he's said it after that article you linked. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-doubles-...
Edit: also you mention some Streamer named Hasan but your Snopes article references some news host with it looks like a last name of Hasan and I don't think they are the same person
cannabis_sam | 1 year, 10 days ago
archagon | 1 year, 10 days ago
In truth, though, I don't think much of this is organic. Right-wing TV and radio (Gingrich, Limbaugh, Carlson, etc.) have been rotting brains around the country for decades. Our current situation is the result of a concerted propaganda campaign by the powerful and wealthy going all the way back to the Nixon impeachment, not some day-to-day disagreements about taxes or culture war issues.
lbrito | 1 year, 10 days ago
Every single time an extreme right-wing populist runs against any opponent who is _not_ extreme right-wing, the media portrays the election as a "sad reminder of our polarized world". That is absolute bullshit.
Anywhere in the world, the histrionics, the deranged conspiracy theories, the chtonic racialism always come from one side alone, while the other side - which is more often than not garden variety right-wing, mind you - mumbles "let's not do that". But somehow mainstream media successfully portrays this dynamic as "polarization" and "a fight between two extremes".
watwut | 1 year, 10 days ago
queuebert | 1 year, 10 days ago
chikere232 | 1 year, 10 days ago
Also, don't wait for an election, start protesting now. There may never be a free election again
astroid | 1 year, 10 days ago
This is an active propaganda campaign with no basis in reality, and you are eating it up because you want it to be true to justify your emotions.
13 articles analyzed so far. All regurgitating the same anonymous sources. It would appear Project Mockinbird is alive and well, and doing a number on folks.
This is BlueAnon tier reporting.
drawkward | 1 year, 10 days ago
yladiz | 1 year, 10 days ago
jayGlow | 1 year, 10 days ago
PaulDavisThe1st | 1 year, 10 days ago
anigbrowl | 1 year, 10 days ago
timeon | 1 year, 10 days ago
saturn8601 | 1 year, 10 days ago
But the vote count is horrendous. The best this country has ever done in recent memory was Ralph Nader and he was a someone famous that could move the needle....he still only got 2.74% of the vote.
drawkward | 1 year, 10 days ago
AnimalMuppet | 1 year, 10 days ago
(I mean, no, they are not the Single Root Cause - clearly not. They're a part of the causal chain, though. If they had run a solid candidate in any of the last three elections, we wouldn't be here.)
chikere232 | 1 year, 10 days ago
almosthere | 1 year, 10 days ago
chikere232 | 1 year, 10 days ago
You're free to be a Trump supporter of course, but if you're not and you're still enabling Trump to win because you don't like the Democrats "enough", your actions aren't aligning with your best interests
isaacremuant | 1 year, 10 days ago
If you want to break the cycle, you vote your interests and not fall for this crap.
And no, Trump is not the end of the world. It wasn't last time around the US Democrat leaning desperately pretended it was, nor is it now.
For people who see through the partisan bullshit, change is usually good and it's always interesting to separate those people who have consistent views no matter who is in power and those who change to fit the new partisan narrative, no matter their past positions.
In essence, world and murrica... take a fucking chill pill. The TDS wore off the second time around and bipartisan war machine is red and blue, no matter who.
drawkward | 1 year, 10 days ago
chikere232 | 1 year, 10 days ago
isaacremuant | 1 year, 10 days ago
2. Oh no! Pray god I'm not an active supporter! Imagine if there was someone with "republican/commie/<insert political blacklist> leanings". The horror!
I don't think you guys are getting it.
All you can do is accuse people of "being the enemy" and you just lost a democratic election and keep doubling down.
How about some reflection? How about internal analysis around consistency of political views instead of pure partisanship?
chikere232 | 1 year, 10 days ago
oh, active supporter it is I guess
drawkward | 1 year, 10 days ago
chikere232 | 1 year, 10 days ago
code_for_monkey | 1 year, 10 days ago
scarecrowbob | 1 year, 10 days ago
The idea that "people failed the Dems" causes me a lot of anger at this point, because the folks who had the power to prevent this preferred to slip ever rightward in their platform instead of recognizing any number of highly popular non-conservative positions.
People often say "elections have consequences" but they are rarely saying "the democrats need to take this as an objective lesson about how badly they failed to represent their constituencies".
Instead Democratic party apologists go into fantasies about Bernie Bros and Russian Interference, while they materially fail to do literally anything useful about the very real current issues.
The Democrats need to understand that the election was so close that they could have won if they hadn't worked against themselves at the party level at every turn- if they had a primary of any kind they might have won.
I absolutely don't agree that "voting blue" would have fixed this- I think this is the consequence of "voting blue" in 2020 and giving the DNC the idea that they can literally run a piece of toast and win against trump.
ceejayoz | 1 year, 10 days ago
I get, to some extent, why they're gun shy on this; centrism feels like it should be compelling with a crazy person on the other end... but I think the party needs to run an AOC style firebrand soon. Time to at least attempt being a bit leftist for once.
almosthere | 1 year, 10 days ago
roughly | 1 year, 10 days ago
kmeisthax | 1 year, 10 days ago
In the middle of the Harris campaign, there was a concerted effort by cryptocurrency whales to primary electorally successful Democrats, purely to send a message: "we will absolutely fuck with you if you don't get in line with us". It was up in the air whether or not Harris would even keep Lina Khan on. The Harris campaign blinked so hard their eyes were stuck shut for the rest of the election.
We need an actually progressive party, not just a handful of progressive politicians acting as veneer over the centrist turd that is the DNC. We had that once before with Obama, who was very good at virtue-signalling progress while letting his own party tell him "no" at every juncture. We need to purge the DNC of people who think only about narrowly winning the electoral game so that their machine can perpetuate itself.
To be clear, this doesn't mean purity tests. It means doing shit so obviously good and beneficial for everyone that it makes your opponent's rainbow coalition of fascists second-guess why they're brown-nosing a good candidate for the biblical Antichrist just to get one thing out of him. I happen to be in a family full of Trump bootlickers, and every single one of them wants trust-busting back on the menu. They want right to repair. They want click to cancel. That's shit the Democrats should have been howling from the rooftops. But they didn't, because the Democratic Party does not want it.
Until the DNC can be proud of what they do for the country, instead of ashamed that they didn't loot it hard enough, they will continue to lose to a coalition of the weirdest weirdos America has to offer.
[0] To be clear, in America, "middle class" just means "working class and lying to themselves about it.
watwut | 1 year, 10 days ago
It is absurd that all the bad stuff conservatives do ends up being blamed on left and center. But somehow, when left do something bad, conservatives are never blamed.
> the democrats need to take this as an objective lesson about how badly they failed to represent their constituencies
The elections were quite close. They failed to represent moderate republicans who prefer fascists anyway. They lost in elections. But the constituency voting for Trump was not theirs.
It would be cool if anti-Trump right would stop blaming everyone but themeselves. Especially when those anti-Trump people voted for Trump second time.
scarecrowbob | 1 year, 10 days ago
I agree, but from where I stand to the left, the Democrats -are- the anti-Trump right.
"It should not be responsibility of democrats to become moderate republicans."
I also agree with this, and I think that they would have won if they had not tried to be come GOP-Lite.
"It would be cool if anti-Trump right would stop blaming everyone but themselves. Especially when those anti-Trump people voted for Trump second time."
It'd be cool, from my far-left anti-war, pro-LGBTQ+, anti-capitalist position, if the Democrats would "stop blaming everyone but themselves." Especially when they keep losing because they don't run moderate right-wing candidates who don't represent their constituencies- that's explicitly the reason why they lost, not because a lot of folks voted for DT, but because a big chunk of folks realized that they weren't served by voting for Harris.
The Dems didn't have to run Harris. Or they could have setup a platform to appeal to the folks who ultimately didn't trust her.
But they didn't do those things and they lost an election they could have won.
latentcall | 1 year, 10 days ago
The DNC has acted so undemocratic it is flabbergasting.
We need a different party comprised of working class Americans who want to take care of the working class and not corporate interests. Reject culture war nonsense and frame this for what it is, a class war. If the response to Luigi wasn’t telling enough, I don’t know. The sentiment is there. Just need to fan the flames.
saturn8601 | 1 year, 10 days ago
resters | 1 year, 10 days ago
I used to respect Elon for risking a lot of his own capital on new ventures. But now he's turned into a socially conservative internet troll.
Bloating | 1 year, 10 days ago
ceejayoz | 1 year, 10 days ago
The correct term, IMO, is regressive.
orwin | 1 year, 10 days ago
pseudalopex | 1 year, 10 days ago
queuebert | 1 year, 10 days ago
That has been failing for a while now. Congressional approval is in the 20% range, much lower than even Trump's. An odd fact never mentioned in the media. The U.S. is toast if it can't reverse Citizen's United.
tdb7893 | 1 year, 10 days ago
code_for_monkey | 1 year, 10 days ago
resters | 1 year, 10 days ago
kmeisthax | 1 year, 10 days ago
Elon was never going to follow democratic processes, that's not how moneybag men think. Do you think he ran X.com, PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, or Twitter as democracies? Hell no. Musk fires or buys-out people who disagree with him. Same with the healthcare CEO Luigi assassinated. There is no process in the current version of America that would allow the people to counter the power of billionaires. The people have been routed.
The difference between the two is that Luigi targeted a thing that actively hurts people and, in any democratic world, would have been illegal. Elon is burning down the things that stop him from hurting people.
[0] Which isn't democratic; nor is the Republican Party republican. Canada and Australia's Liberal Parties aren't liberal, either. Hell, Japan has a two-fer: a Liberal Democratic Party that's neither liberal nor democratic.
tim333 | 1 year, 10 days ago
resters | 1 year, 10 days ago
He declares entire programs to be fraud and declares them cancelled, seemingly taking only minutes to unilaterally make that declaration.
If he respected the people and the democratic process he'd create transparency and (if he's right) have massive public support behind his efforts.
But he's offered ZERO transparency, only name calling.
tim333 | 1 year, 10 days ago
There's a good article in the NYT saying it's a bit like when the US tried to remake the Iraq government after invading and sent in a handful of young people to rearrange everything who did't know what they were doing
"The Familiar Arrogance of Musk’s Young Apparatchiks" https://archive.ph/jnTG3
It seems much closer to what's happening than calling it a coup.
It was odd as a Brit seeing him going on about the grooming scandal in the UK. I mean it was a bad thing but he was getting a lot of his facts wrong and wanting to fire the wrong people etc. I'm not quite sure what's up with him.
TrackerFF | 1 year, 10 days ago
Elon is in this purely to remove all regulations, which he views as a hinder to his businesses. He also wants a private takeover of core gov. functions, which then he (or allies) can provide.
code_for_monkey | 1 year, 10 days ago
who tf downvoted this show yourself groyper
drawkward | 1 year, 10 days ago
code_for_monkey | 1 year, 10 days ago
drawkward | 1 year, 10 days ago
I think it is explained by the idea that, when tech overtook finance as the best shot at accumulating supra-human wealth and power, the young sociopaths started going into tech instead of finance.
olelele | 1 year, 10 days ago
desumeku | 1 year, 10 days ago
invalidOrTaken | 1 year, 10 days ago
dredmorbius | 1 year, 10 days ago
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groypers>
flaminHotSpeedo | 1 year, 10 days ago
How can this department turn around and do this and still maintain they're doing the right thing? By their own admission they know this a bad idea
archagon | 1 year, 10 days ago
> Josh, are you a little crestfallen they beat you to it? Well, sure but this is a business is an ocean of ‘arrgghhs’ and honestly the information being out is the big thing. Here are the additional details.
> I’m told that Elez and possibly other DOGE operatives received full admin level access on Friday January 31st. The claim of ‘read only’ access was either false from the start or later fell through. The DOGE team, which appears to be mainly or only Elez for the purposes of this project, has already made extensive changes to the code base for the payment system. They have not locked out the existing programmer/engineering staff but have rather leaned on them for assistance which they appear to have painedly provided hoping to prevent as much damage as possible – ‘damage’ in the sense not of preventing the intended changes but avoiding crashes or a system-wide breakdown caused by rapidly pushing new code into production with a limited knowledge of the system and its dependencies across the federal government.
> Phrases like “freaking out” are, not surprisingly, used to describe the reaction of the engineers who were responsible for maintaining the code base until a week ago. The changes that have been made all seem to relate to creating new paths to block payments and possibly leave less visibility into what has been blocked. I want to emphasize that the described changed are not being tested in a dev environment (i.e., not live) but have already been pushed into production. This is code that appears to be mainly the work of Elez who was first introduced to the system probably roughly a week ago and certainly not before the second Trump inauguration. The most recent information I have is that no payments have as yet been blocked and that the incumbent engineering team was able to convince Marko to push the code live to impact only a subset of the universe of payments the system controls. I have also heard no specific information about this access being used to drill down into the private financial or proprietary information of payment recipients, though it appears that the incumbent staff has only limited visibility into what Elez is doing with the access. They have however looked into extensively into the categories and identity of payees to see how certain payments can be blocked.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100219987126
cratermoon | 1 year, 10 days ago
hamburga | 1 year, 10 days ago
throw16180339 | 1 year, 10 days ago
rsynnott | 1 year, 10 days ago
indoordin0saur | 1 year, 10 days ago
yodsanklai | 1 year, 10 days ago
I usually flag anything related to the US political circus.
polotics | 1 year, 10 days ago
ElevenLathe | 1 year, 10 days ago
But not realistically it seems like the goal is to be more targeted: pay your shooters, cut off your enemies'.
macawfish | 1 year, 10 days ago
belter | 1 year, 10 days ago
- Tax Return Info: Name, SSN, address, income, deductions, payments/refunds.
- Enforcement Records: Audit trails, payment plans, liens/levies.
- Federal payments (e.g., tax refunds, Social Security), direct deposit info, delinquent debt details.
- Accounts for U.S. Treasury securities (personal data, account activity).
- Sanctions Enforcement: Basic identifiers (name, address), transaction details for compliance checks.
- Financial Crime Data: Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs), Currency Transaction Reports (CTRs), limited personal/transaction info tied to money laundering or terrorist financing investigations.
- Investigative files related to Treasury programs (potentially includes personal data).
black_puppydog | 1 year, 10 days ago
rsynnott | 1 year, 10 days ago
offmycloud | 1 year, 10 days ago
Can you please provide a source for the claim of release of IRS taxpayer confidential data?
anigbrowl | 1 year, 10 days ago
AnthonyMouse | 1 year, 10 days ago
mandeepj | 1 year, 10 days ago
NotYourLawyer | 1 year, 10 days ago
mmastrac | 1 year, 10 days ago
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0jn5291p52o
saturn8601 | 1 year, 10 days ago
[1]: https://youtu.be/CgV2KzyWKx0?t=794
He often talks about the most ironic outcome being the most likely so this could fit lol.
throw16180339 | 1 year, 10 days ago
saturn8601 | 1 year, 10 days ago
throw16180339 | 1 year, 10 days ago
Trump doesn't pardon him. I can't really see this happening. If they have a falling out, then Elon will just pay him off. It's not like Trump will turn down a bribe.
A democrat is elected president in 2028. After that, demographics substantially reduce their chances of being elected (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/democrats-future-crisi...). They would have to either abandon progressive views and move right or offer an incredibly compelling candidate. Both of these seem unlikely to me. After that, people in red states will determine the future of this country.
erentz | 1 year, 10 days ago
EasyMark | 1 year, 10 days ago
[OP] shinryuu | 1 year, 10 days ago
prawn | 1 year, 10 days ago
astroid | 1 year, 10 days ago
I won't muddy the comments repeating myself - but I have been fascinated by how quickly people latched on to this, have been absolutely incapable of finding any first party sourcing, and asked CoPilot to analyze each of these stories (13 so far!) and every single one is 'trust me bro, I heard it in a convo'.
I really really hope this isn't true for all the same reasons as people are freaking out... but at this point it has as much merit as saying "the sky is always green, I heard a guy say it the other week who I won't name but it's true"
Ctrl-F 'astroid' or click my last post in this thread for the complete breakdown of every source referenced, and ask yourself if there is enough info to warrant entertaining this fantasy.
Honestly I am shocked at how little critical thinking is being applied here. I know this website hates these guys, but there is usually a facade of critical thinking at the least.
stubish | 1 year, 10 days ago
astroid | 1 year, 10 days ago
"Wired: Reports that Marko Elez, a 25-year-old engineer linked to Elon Musk, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the U.S. government. The sources are unnamed, and they claim Elez has administrator-level privileges, including the ability to write code on the Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System."
It's an endless circle. No one is willing to stand behind the reporting, no one is willing to go on record. I almost regret wasting as much time trying to get to the bottom of the story because I feel stupid for trying to peel back on these layers and finding nothing -- like they were trying to take people on a ride and I fell for it.
I guess it could be worse though - I could have just taken them all at face value. Even the 'anonymous sources' appear to be second or third party on TOP of being anonymous.
EDIT: To clarify, if you were referring to https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-associate-bfs-federal-... that is the one with no real sources. If you meant another source about the audit in general I shouldn't have assumed -- it's just in the list of the 13 I have reviewed with no substance.
stubish | 1 year, 10 days ago
(Politics? Interesting that The Guardian files this under Technology)
brohee | 1 year, 10 days ago
So it's either lots of news outlets (journos but also fact checkers) being fooled, or that people are only willing to speak of the record because they fear for their career/freedom/life. All feds fear at the minimum for their career right now...
stubish | 1 year, 10 days ago
tim333 | 1 year, 10 days ago
yalogin | 1 year, 10 days ago
Havoc | 1 year, 10 days ago
So no military spending will not be cut
yalogin | 1 year, 10 days ago
HumblyTossed | 1 year, 10 days ago
edanm | 1 year, 10 days ago
lm28469 | 1 year, 10 days ago
edanm | 1 year, 10 days ago
Still, it's not a logical fallacy to think "someone very successful at X is more likely to be successful at Y", in many cases. Do you think that there is literally zero correlation between massive business success and success at whatever-it-is Musk is trying to do now?
(I agree it's a fallacy if you think is' assured he will succeed, as opposed to this just being a correlation in your mind. I just bumped on the use of "logical fallacy" to describe something that is not a fallacy at all!)
thecosas | 1 year, 10 days ago
That it's not entirely clear makes it impossible to know if it might be something he could have success in.
tayo42 | 1 year, 10 days ago
Fired from PayPal, Twitter, neurolink, the tunnel thing
He bought his way into Tesla, and SpaceX, though suppsedly he's not actually the one running it (believable I think there's not enough time)
indoordin0saur | 1 year, 10 days ago
thecosas | 1 year, 10 days ago
edanm | 1 year, 10 days ago
And having failures is not that uncommon, especially for serial entrepreneurs. You've gotta accept some failures to get to successes.
As for the whole "he bought his way into Tesla" thing, this is just making the idea of a "founder" some kind of sacrosanct thing. By most histories I've read, he is the reason the company is the success it is today.
krainboltgreene | 1 year, 10 days ago
The local Bodega down the street has been profitable for 40 years. They seem to be doing just fine and as a bonus they haven't burned billions in subsidies or hijacked public transportation initiatives.
tayo42 | 1 year, 10 days ago
> And having failures is not that uncommon, especially for serial entrepreneurs.
IDK how you can call this anything else but luck. He got forced out of paypal with a ton of money and was able to keep taking risks because of the safety nets he had that most do not.
He also threw a fit and left openai, that was a poor business decision.
mihaaly | 1 year, 10 days ago
hoppp | 1 year, 10 days ago
He does not have success with public opinion.
kace91 | 1 year, 10 days ago
dionian | 1 year, 10 days ago
TrackerFF | 1 year, 10 days ago
People still believe that he's been some sort of business genius.
One could actually argue that the biggest business wins for Trump, have been those AFTER he became president. Through nothing but grift, he's managed to build up a fortune that surpassed the one he tried to make and maintain in his semi-legit days.
unyttigfjelltol | 1 year, 10 days ago
Why isn't the very existence of this box the problem?
thesuperbigfrog | 1 year, 10 days ago
It is mission-critical finance system. Guaranteed it's multiple redundant boxes in an highly access-controlled data center. No one should have access without serious vetting.
>> Why isn't the very existence of this box the problem?
The money doesn't move around on magic and rainbows. What were you expecting?
lm28469 | 1 year, 10 days ago
unyttigfjelltol | 1 year, 10 days ago
Also, apparently there are redundant "red buttons" mirroring the succession plan.[1]
So a more appropriate analogy would be a dead-man trigger in a bureaucrat's hand, programmed in obsolete technology, that if handled other than by expert hands at all times would result in immediate "Armageddon."
[1] https://apnews.com/article/nuclear-football-presidential-sat...
Havoc | 1 year, 10 days ago
1970-01-01 | 1 year, 10 days ago
...
>All that is known is that Marko can “access and query” SPS and that there was someone who gave Marko a “tour” of the facilities. We do not know where they are in operationalizing any control. One senior IT source can see Mark retrieving “close to a thousand rows of data” but they can’t see the content because the system is “top secret” even to them. No source I have has knowledge of what DOGE is doing with the data they are retrieving.
So the (d)evil remains hidden in every one of their details! What does 'write code' actually mean? A DB query? What exactly are these 'most sensitive' systems in the US government? A COBOL DB??
Compare the backups.
You DO have them off-site?
AnthonyMouse | 1 year, 10 days ago
This is obviously not ideal, but the real question is, are they actually modifying anything (and if so , what?), or it is just a permissions level they're not actually using for anything?
We also can't rule out media hysteria yet, e.g. "write code" could plausibly be something like "write SQL queries" which doesn't inherently imply any modification to the database tables.
samsk | 1 year, 10 days ago
liontwist | 1 year, 10 days ago
throw16180339 | 1 year, 10 days ago
spacemanspiff01 | 1 year, 10 days ago
It sounds like, from the reporting, one person is modifying a large complex system that handles trillions of dollars and pushing directly to production.
Also he is not familiar with the system, having first encountered it a week ago.
Also the people who do normally have access to this system do not know what he is exactly doing, because normally, it is illegal for them to even access the system in the same way.
giorgioz | 1 year, 10 days ago
mgillett54 | 1 year, 10 days ago
> Wired beat me to the punch of reporting that a top DOGE employee, 25 year old former SpaceX employee Marko Elez, has not only read but write access to BFS servers.
giorgioz | 1 year, 10 days ago
astroid | 1 year, 10 days ago
These articles are all so circular I have resorted to asking CoPilot to analyze them and tell me what each source is, if they are 1st 2nd or 3rd party, and whether or not they are anonymous.
In this article, the analysis came out with:
Let's break down the claims and sources in this article:
Crises Notes: Reports that the Trump-Musk Treasury payments crisis of 2025 involves the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) gaining access to the Treasury Department's payment system. The article mentions concerns about the potential for irreversible damage to the systems and the exposure of sensitive personal and financial information1. The sources are unnamed, and there is no direct evidence provided.
CBS News: Reports that DOGE has access to the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, which disburses trillions in payments each year, including Social Security checks and federal salaries. The article mentions concerns from consumer advocates and Democratic lawmakers about the potential risks of this access2. The sources are unnamed, and there is no direct evidence provided.
Truthout: Reports that labor unions and an advocacy group have sued the U.S. Treasury Department to halt DOGE's access to the critical government payment system. The article mentions concerns about the scale of the intrusion into individuals' privacy and the potential for unauthorized access to sensitive information3. The sources are unnamed, and there is no direct evidence provided.
In summary, all the sources cited in the article are anonymous, and there are no first-party sources or direct evidence provided. This makes it difficult to verify the claims independently. The lack of named sources and concrete evidence raises questions about the credibility of the claims.
Also, I will go ahead and paste my previous output from the other articles below (I'm going to post them as child comments so this isn't just a huge wall of text):
astroid | 1 year, 10 days ago
I did the same manual analysis I did on the OP one, and could not find a first party source or non-anonymous claim. I asked CoPilot to analyze the sources and identify the individual claims, and their proximity to a 'first party source'.
Once again, there is 0 evidence this is actually happening -- there are however a lot of news organizations ready to throw their reputations away over a few 'anonymous sources' that aren't even primary.
Here is the analysis of your source, AND the linked sources in that article:
Wired: Reports that Marko Elez, a 25-year-old engineer linked to Elon Musk, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the U.S. government. The sources are unnamed, and they claim Elez has administrator-level privileges, including the ability to write code on the Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System1.
Talking Points Memo: Confirms Wired's reporting, adding that Elez has already made extensive changes to the code base for the payment systems. Again, the sources are unnamed1.
The New Republic: Details that Elez has complete access to critical payment systems at the Department of the Treasury, despite being only 25 years old. The sources are unnamed, and the article mentions that senior government officials have been locked out of employee databases1.
Raw Story: Reports that Elez has been given full control over the computer code that directs Social Security payments, tax returns, and other payments owed to Americans. The sources are unnamed, and the article mentions that federal IT workers are concerned about the potential for irreversible damage to the systems2.
In summary, all the sources cited in the article are anonymous, and there are no first-party sources or direct evidence provided. This makes it difficult to verify the claims independently. The lack of named sources and concrete evidence raises questions about the credibility of the claims.
astroid | 1 year, 10 days ago
Sure, let's break down the key witnesses and their claims:
David Lebryk: Former acting Deputy Secretary of the Treasury. He resigned after resisting granting DOGE access to the Treasury data1. His claim is based on his direct experience and position within the Treasury Department, making him a first party witness.
Ron Wyden: The highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee. He expressed concerns about the potential misuse of the data by DOGE1. Wyden is a second party witness, as he is commenting on the situation based on his oversight role but not direct involvement.
Anonymous AP Sources: Two people familiar with the situation spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. They claim that DOGE has gained access to sensitive Treasury data1. These sources are second party witnesses, as they have indirect knowledge of the situation.
X User (@rayinsideout): Revealed names of alleged DOGE employees who accessed the Treasury payment system. Musk accused this user of committing a crime by sharing private information2. This user is a third party witness, as they are relaying information they claim to have obtained from other sources.
NOTE: The rawstory article DID NOT mention Scott Bessent, but CoPilot 'thoughtfully' added this for context:
Scott Bessent: Treasury Secretary who granted DOGE access to the data. His actions are central to the claims, but he hasn't made public statements about the specifics of the access3. Bessent is a first party witness due to his direct involvement in the decision.
astroid | 1 year, 10 days ago
AI (CoPilot) had to infer a first party source, who has NOT made this claim.
You are all getting spun up over what is almost certainly fake news, and since it fits your confirmation bias it does not matter.
If this story was about anyone else, there is absolutely no way all of these 'news' sources would be willing to publish these claims with such flimsy evidence.
Frankly, this is pathetic. I -really- hope this isn't true because of how egregious a breach it would be. The audaciousness / outrageousness of the base claim combined with the circular references really SHOULD be raising red flags for everyone taking the bait though... but for some reason this site full of highly technical people is suddenly fine with "well I overheard it in a conversation over the weekend" as gospel truth.
Get real.
astroid | 1 year, 10 days ago
" given everything you have ingested on this topic assisting me so far, if you had to assign a probability % to this being a true story what would you assign it? Answer only witha number from 0-100 35
Can you explain your reasoning? Of course! Here’s the breakdown of my reasoning:
Lack of Named Sources: All the articles referenced rely heavily on unnamed and anonymous sources. Without concrete evidence or named individuals to corroborate the claims, it’s difficult to ascertain the accuracy of the information.
Extraordinary Claims: The claims being made are quite extraordinary, involving a 25-year-old with no prior experience having access to critical government systems and rewriting COBOL code on the fly. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, which seems to be lacking in this case.
Consistency Across Sources: While multiple sources report on the story, they all seem to echo similar details without providing additional or unique evidence. This repetition might indicate a reliance on the same set of unverified sources, rather than independent verification.
Skepticism from Lack of First-Party Evidence: The articles fail to provide first-party evidence or verifiable documentation to support the claims. This raises doubts about the overall credibility of the story.
Putting these factors together, I estimated a 35% probability that the story is true. While there is a possibility that elements of the story are accurate, the lack of solid evidence and reliance on anonymous sources make it difficult to fully trust the claims. Does that make sense? "
Come on guys...
mikewarot | 1 year, 10 days ago
Elon doesn't have a strong track record of getting things right the first time.
nosioptar | 1 year, 10 days ago
treebeard901 | 1 year, 10 days ago
...DogeCoin??
TrackerFF | 1 year, 10 days ago
The strategy here is:
1) Trump issues some unconstitutional EO to abolish a federal department
2) Musk and DOGE go to work
3) Some federal judge blocks the EO
4) Some acting lackey of Trump ignores the court order. DOGE continues to dismantle the department from within
5) Even if the judge orders an arrests, no-one will enforce it
6) Congress does nothing
By the time anyone actually gets held accountable, the departments will have been pillaged and dismantled. DOJ and the AG will not go after anyone involved, Trump orders pre-emptive pardons for all involved in federal crimes.