The concerns he points out — especially about hostile or enemy nations and actors getting a better chance to gather data and understand how to subvert or attach the country — seem valid.
There is a difference between elected officials doing stupid or insecure things vs. unelected people being able to do this without any checks and balances.
(Off topic: I’m upvoting this post to counter the flagging that seems to be going on for all posts on this topic. I respect Bruce Schneier and his opinions on several things.)
Even elected officials are not allowed to do stupid or insecure things! I seem to remember something about a quite famous incident involving a private email server.
Which boggles the mind when you compare it to what's going on right now.
lawsuits are rolling in. Let's hope the executive branch actually furfills its ideal in being shielded from political atmosphere and properly access the situation.
> There is a difference between elected officials doing stupid or insecure things vs. unelected people being able to do this without any checks and balances.
Isn't the Treasury dept and most of the federal employees with access to this data unelected as well? They are appointed or hired as government officials and civil servants.
>. Article II, Section 2
empowers the President to nominate and, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to
appoint the principal officers of the United States, as well as some subordinate officers .
yes... and apointees usually need to have or undergo clearance. It is also a tradition to get Senate's approval. Those are the good faith checks and balances.
There may be an error in Schneier's reasoning here:
`They are also reportedly training AI software on all of this sensitive data.`
Running inference isn't the same as training.
That said, I don't think this should be flagged, that seems counter free-speech. He's got plenty of other well voted articles here on HN, a lot of HN clearly value his insights. Disagreement would be better expressed as a comment rather than trying to make it go away.
Yeah I think the articles make it sound like it's just inference.
However my theory is the goal is to actually train on what is essentially the output of all of these departments.
I honestly think what we are seeing in terms of the tech execution side basically boils down to BigBalls and co. asking an LLM what they should do next. If they ever get prosecuted I'd bet you good money that will be the defense...ROFL.
The premise of the article is that DOGE are "the attackers" and preventing them from accessing the data is something "career officials" in the government ought to be doing. That's obviously a partisan framing. The other party's position is that they've just been elected to audit and reduce government waste and direct access to data is necessary to prevent the principal-agent problem in which government officials shape their reports to protect their budgets and activities from undesired scrutiny and oversight.
The problem with framing it that way is that it's a request to get flagged by the opposing partisans even if there is some point to be made about maintaining change control etc.
There is nothing partisan about resistance to Trump. Resisting illegal acts causing damage yo the nation is not in any way partisan. I'm sure there are Republicans pushing for this as well.
Blindly following Trump is partisan.
Pretending Trump cares about waste isn't just silly its ridiculous and should be dismissed out of hand.
> There is nothing partisan about resistance to Trump.
Trying to characterize undifferentiated resistance to the leader of a party as non-partisan seems like a stretch.
> Resisting illegal acts causing damage yo the nation is not in any way partisan.
There are so many laws that basically everything is now illegal. If you want "illegal" to mean something you'd first need a legal system in which a non-zero number of people exist who follow the laws.
Choosing which laws to care about in a partisan way is partisan.
> Pretending Trump cares about waste isn't just silly its ridiculous and should be dismissed out of hand.
> Trying to characterize undifferentiated resistance to the leader of a party
Has nothing to do with party, has a lot to do with authoritarianism and opposing destruction of the government. many people resisting Trump have been Republicans far longer then he has and have more invested in it then he does. See former Republican Colorado head of state senate and head of state house https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norma_Anderson
I personally am a democrat and a mildly to moderately partisan one buy opposition to Trump isn't partisan.
> Choosing which laws to care about in a partisan way is partisan.
Trying to compare laws against
Jaywalking or pot to those against government malfeasance and corruption is ridiculous.
> This is your non-partisan argument?
Yes. Its based on facts not on partisanship. Trump is the most corrupt president we've ever had.
He welcomes the government spending stuff on him or his buddies. He sold access ay Margo Largo and not jusy for campaign contributions.
Also the closest he got to compromise was on the stupid and wasteful wall debacle, which was not stopped by democrats or concerns about waste but by resistance to even minor concessions wrt Dreamers.
I also don't find this part necessarily bad but Trump is less opposed to spending wasteful or not wasteful then previous Republican politicians.
The core of the problem might go to his "redefinition" of waste. Where a could of million specifically going towards minority groups or the environment (even when i5 has obvious value) is the swamp, while billions going towards corrupt implementation of a stupid and pointless thing like the wall are not waste.
> Has nothing to do with party, has a lot to do with authoritarianism and opposing destruction of the government.
Destruction of the government would be something like suspending elections or the executive using the military to disappear judges who make unfavorable rulings.
Destruction of the federal administrative state is fairly well inside the Republican platform at this point. It's what they said they were going to do and then people voted for them so now they're trying to do it.
> See former Republican Colorado head of state senate and head of state house
Parties change and then people change parties. "Former Republican opposes Republican" is the thing you'd expect them to do as implied by the word "former".
> Trying to compare laws against Jaywalking or pot to those against government malfeasance and corruption is ridiculous.
The laws against jaywalking or pot don't even scratch the surface. They're just the ones people know they're violating.
People have this problem where the law is supposed to specify ahead of time what is and isn't illegal, but doing that is hard and people also hate it when somebody is doing something they don't like but it turns out that thing isn't illegal. So what they've been doing, for a long time, is passing a lot of laws broad enough to encompass common behavior and then only enforcing them when somebody offends them, or rocks the boat.
There is also a variant of this for politicians where they pass a law that sounds good, and should be enforced against everyone, but is set up in such a way that enforcement is hard without the cooperation of insiders. So a politician is not allowed to solicit a bribe, but if someone pays them and then they pass a law that the someone likes, that's just fine, and if the bribe was solicited off-camera then neither of them have any incentive to report it because they both want the arrangement to continue. Which is how you get this:
> Trump is the most corrupt president we've ever had.
The amount of corruption in Washington is staggering. The place runs on it. The primary difference with Trump is that he has no shame.
It would be great if something was done about this, but nobody wants to throw the first stone because of all the glass houses, and targeting only Trump while ignoring all the rest of it is evidence of not liking Trump rather than not liking corruption.
> I also don't find this part necessarily bad but Trump is less opposed to spending wasteful or not wasteful then previous Republican politicians.
The true measure of this is whether government spending goes up or down during their administration, and by this measure every President of every party has been failing for generations.
But this is also the first time in a while that anything like DOGE has even been seriously attempted, and it's plausible that at least Musk wants it to actually do the thing. The real test is what they remove from the budget in a few months.
>There are so many laws that basically everything is now illegal
this is really your best retort? Just dismissing 250 years of the constitution, interpretations of the constitution, case studies, and various federal laws passed along the way?
Fine, let's throw away everything except the good old constitution... it's still illegal in 1790.
>Under Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 of the Constitution , Congress is granted the power to lay and collect taxes in order “ to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States. ”
These aren't some niche pockets of local law being defied here.
The clause you're referring to is the one granting Congress the power to collect taxes, and then limiting how that tax money can be spent. You can tell that it's a limitation rather than a grant because "provide for the common defense" would otherwise make the subsequent clauses redundant:
> To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;
> To provide and maintain a Navy;
Which wouldn't make much sense given that they're in the same article and were passed at the same time.
But let's suppose we're talking about a law where Congress is allocating tax money to something within their enumerated powers. Then that money goes to the executive. It would be pretty hard to argue that the executive could then spend the money on something else, but what if they don't spend it at all? Congress gave them money with the condition that they do a particular thing with it, and they don't want the money? It's not obviously true that they're required to take it, and would be consistent with the notion of checks and balances that they could turn it down.
This would make a lot more sense if there was a way to benchmark the effectiveness of a department. There are lots of edge cases in both directions that get ridiculous, but there must be a workable middle ground.
Schenier should not be flagged. I have been waiting for someone to come up with a calm collected assessment of the Cybersecurity risk, for days now. This is as close as we will get.
I'd hope any reasonable senior programmer has hit enough landmines to understand why such a fence is necessary. Especially for legacy code.
Doesn't matter how well you trace the behavior, you will hit some random quirk in your refactor because of some incocuous hotfix done over a decadde ago by an employee who no longer works there somehow keeping the entire repository from crashing in on itself. If you're lucky, there will be a:
If the nation survives this insanity, the software will have to be rewritten from scratch, otherwise it is impossible to know which actors, both foreign and domestic, have the knowledge of the systems.
Has everyone forgotten the lessons of open-source cryptography all of a sudden? Just because the systems are public does not mean that they are vulnerable, and "security through obscurity" is no security at all.
Corporations are the unoffical 4th branch of government. If the stock market tanks they’ll be gone like that snaps fingers. The campaign donations and lobbyist spigot will turn off for these politicians, panic and leadership will change. I know Citizens United allows for dark money to flow in from anywhere to prop up their campaigns indefinitely but not enough to offset a tanked stock market due to lack of trust in the US dollar and markets.
This is the correct answer. Trump won because of the current economy. Biden's margin over Trump in 2020 was double Trump's margin over Kamala. Democrats did better than expected in 2022 despite Republicans running with the same DEI garbage.
What's baffling is Trump seems to be fumbling the autocrat's handbook at first glance. There are existing autocrats still around that wrote the book on this. Purging the administrative state requires multi-term government domination. First, you're supposed get the economy or quality of life on track ASAP so you can cement your (or you successor's) seat at the top. Then you use the power the people voluntarily give you over multiple terms to dismantle any checks on your power while lining the pockets and minds of your base. After that, even if the economy tanks you've boiled the frog of resistance in such a way that no one can dethrone you. And then you start designing the opposition in such a way so that there's semblance of "political freedom" you can point to when people start whining about it.
Trump seems to be going about it in reverse. First feeding his base instead of focusing on the economy -- which is a higher risk strategy comparatively. But it hasn't even been a month yet so there is still time for him to start following the handbook properly.
First of all, I doubt it. Trump will likely blame economic damage on everyone else (namely, the Fed), and his sycophants will eat it up. Second, even if they are ejected, the damage will already be done.
we have a proof that this is not right - see 2018 and 2020.
it is somewhat “easy” to run against an incumbent, especially one as fradulent as Biden (not to mention Kamala…) but when you are an incumbent THE BUCK STOP with you. while portion of the US electorate is dumb beyond repair they alone are not enough to win an election. if shit isn’t right come 2026 and 2028 the blame-everyone-else-nothing-is-ever-my-fault Donald will suffer the ass kicking much worse than 2018 and especially 2020 when he got demolished by a senile corrupt lifelong politician grandpa Joe
sad part of many people's reasoning in America: "I got mine, good luck!". And these people always seem to rise to power over the honest leaders performing their duties as a public servant.
Why would there be consequences? The majority of voting Americans wanted this to happen. Let's not pretend this wasn't the likely conclusion and voters were solely focused on the price of eggs.
By modifying core systems, the attackers have not only compromised current operations, but have also left behind vulnerabilities that could be exploited in future attacks—giving adversaries such as Russia and China an unprecedented opportunity. These countries have long targeted these systems. And they don’t just want to gather intelligence—they also want to understand how to disrupt these systems in a crisis.
It's really hard to imagine this whole coup isn't some type of Russian / Chinese attack on the western world at this stage. It's too unbelievably good for them to just be a coincidence.
I agree, but I lament how voters quickly forget the chaos from the first Trump administration, and how much they didn't care about the DOGE agenda. They think they voted for a lower inflation (which is a very questionable premise by itself), but they didn't realize they were voting for the whole package. I definitely wasn't surprised, and American people deserve this.
Hopefully the voters come to their mind in the next election, and hope it's not too late.
And yet those people are so quiet at best. At worst they think "it has to get worse before it gets better".
But yes, I do wish some signifigant portion of the voter base would simply inquire one step further on their represenatives. Trump had no action plans for this, and when sworn in he passed 100 EO's and left Inflation as "tbd". Still is, as far as I know.
even more stupid are Democrat party leadership who could have won past elections in a slam dunk, have they had thought about transition strategy in advance
They did... It's clear their strategies are at best outdated, or at worst more focused on a neoliberal policy over a proper socialist strategy (hence, them blocking Sanders out twice).
I know it's small fries given current issues, but this is part of why I think (or thoght) the biggest focus for the people should be getting more states to adopt ranked choice voting. That's the only way out of this game theory disaster.
how disappointinig. Yet another front to battle on.A bit insane how a position like "I want my vote to matter more!" can become a partisan stance with the right propaganda.
1) There is a group of voters, typically younger men, who would very much want to see things burn to the ground. A form of nihilism of outlook.
2) People never want the bad things, which is why voters tend to ignore information that tells them that things will be bad.
People didnt realize that Biden had stepped down after the election. Voters were not aware that Obamacare and the ACA are the same thing.
Information that this was going to happen, was shared, repeated and told over and over again.
This is basically leopards-eating-face territory.
Sugar coating it, leaving people berefet of their own authorship of their life, of their choices? I have no idea how that results in anything other than a way to feel nice about each other.
RFK Jr's book "The Real Anthony Fauci"[1], where he exposes the long history behind the creating custom designer viruses under the NIH umbrella, which led to COVID pandemic, and how every mainstream journo called him "conspiracy theorist". Turns out it was the lab leak after all, according to the CIA[2]
This is the most important one, once we get to the bottom of who created virus that killed millions and caused tens of trillions in economic damage, it will cause other more significant events.
Another one, how he explained the nature behind the Ukraine war, and how military industrial complex is stealing US government money and profiting off of artificially prolonging the Ukraine-Russia war[3]. Everyone called him conspiracy theorist, when he said BlackRock, Monsanto, DuPont have bought Ukrainian land, turns out it was true.
new faces but we have the oldest president in history. anti-establishent so they root on the literal richest man in the world to take more money from them. Too poor but they aren't out on the street protesting hunreds of billions in tax cuts to the corporate chains they are binded by.
I completely get being rebellious. But is any of this "fun" for them? Just saying they are nihilistic makes more sense at this point.
it is what it is. As Marx said: "the working class people have nothing to lose, but their chains".
The Democrat party can blame the other side for being stupid, or they can blame themselves for losing, what could have been a slam dunk election win, had they understood and addressed the concerns of the voter base.
Which is weird because by the numbers, the economy was doing wonderfully. Maybe you meant to say. People were told an economy prophecy and believed it ?
Even during campaigning the republicans literally warned people their vision would incur economy hardships but that it would be worth it in the long run.
I get the frustration that the price of daily goods was too high but the incumbents did present an actual feasible plan to deal with it. So I’m not really sure it was about “the economy”.
Anyway everything outlined in this article seemed pretty likely to happen, they literally told people their plans ?
> I get the frustration that the price of daily goods was too high but the incumbents did present an actual feasible plan to deal with it. So I’m not really sure it was about “the economy”.
As usual, it's about the allocation of surplus value.
The US has enjoyed a great economy over the past four years, and really, even longer. I'm in my 30s and most of my life has been marked by economic expansion. The problem comes from the fact that we take all of the money generated by that economic expansion and pipe it to shareholders instead of labor. The average person cannot live solely off the returns from their equity investments; they have to work in order to pay bills. That work essentially started buying less over the last half-decade.
Now, is that partially because of the Biden administration? Yes. Any time you print money, it devalues the money that already exists.
But it's also, and more fundamentally, the fault of the first Trump administration. The PPP, funded with printed money, was a massive subsidy to upper-middle class Americans, and 35-ish years of GOP revenue policy made sure it has to be printed. The US had no reserves of cash to pay for an emergency like COVID. Why? Because we haven't had a real federal tax discussion since George HW Bush said "read my lips: no new taxes".
That, of course, doesn't matter: the buck stops at the Oval Office, and Biden didn't have the likely personality disorder necessary to shove the buck back in people's faces on the order that Trump does. Neither did Harris. So back to the "glory" years of 2016-2019 we go, reckless monetary policy and all.
>Let's not pretend this wasn't the likely conclusion and voters were solely focused on the price of eggs.
Maybe I'm still naive, but I believe maybe 30-40% (At least) of trump voters simply 1) really wanted immprovements in their lives or 2)thought any pf the negatives of trump would not happen to them. Trump got the simple votes and discorded such people promptly. We'll see how long they, one by one, realize such a fact.
Likewise, I doubt that many supporters voted with the idea that Trump would be put back in as a Sino-Ruso puppet. They would dimiss any such talk as conspiracy, no matter how many calls he makes/takes from Putin and how many docs he mishandles.
It wasn't announced as 'DOGE' but it was not a surprise; from August: "Former President Donald Trump signaled his willingness to offer Elon Musk a role in his administration in a proposed “government efficiency commission” if he wins the presidential election in November"[1].
In the Republican Party Platform 2024: "2. Rein in Wasteful Federal Spending. Republicans will immediately stabilize the Economy by slashing wasteful Government spending"[2]
There have been plenty of government commissions in the past. None of them functioned anything like DOGE, not even the ones instituted by the current President during his first term.
I think this is a surprise to many…even Trump’s more ardent supporters. After all, they thought they were voting for President Trump, not Assistant (to the) President Trump.
Hindsight is 20/20, but what's scarier to me is the approval ratings[0]
There's still apparently 40% of the population that approves of this behavior. staggering 72% of republicans still approve of this behavior.
This did spike his approval ratings, but such an utter breach in the government really should be much closer to democrat's 10% here instead of the normally middling behavior of "bad" president's 40%. There's stll way too many people approving of this. For reference, Nixon's ratings right before resigning was 24%.
I wonder how that would work out. It's a bit of an inverse-Ouroboros where the people that are the government keep saying they are 'doing something about the government' without realising that that's them. Maybe they see themselves as something that is not the government, but the whole race they took part in was the race to get elected for government work.
At some point, enough destruction will have happened where the tools for useful government functionality no longer exist in usable capacity.
I tell you more. They don't just consider themselves as a government, they don't consider themselves as humans either. They want to be a different kind of species, they want to be above humans, just like humans are above the cattle. And in some sense they are, if so many people were stupid enough to get them elected.
>without any one of import actually going to jail.
I'd argue these kids won't "be of import" in the long scheme of things. Maybe in future software ethics/security classes at best. I sadly don't think Musk will ever be in a jailcell, but I'll settle for him never stepping foot in a federal facility again.
>There's a reason Musk brought in younglings to do the illegal stuff.
You can pardon people of any age. And Trump even in this future of "there won't be any more elections" probaby isn't living much longer than this presidential term at his health.
Worse, JD Vance has said repeatedly that they WANT courts to rule against them, so that they can directly challenge the court's power. I believe his exact words were "Let the court enforce it." Which of course is a sick joke - courts have no enforcement power without the executive branch.
They fully intend to cause a constitutional crisis on purpose. It's all in plain sight, in their own words. America will get what it voted for.
A related article: "Treasury was warned DOGE access to payments marked an ‘insider threat’"
> The assessment, done by the contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, came before Treasury tapped an ally of Elon Musk to oversee the sensitive payment system.
> The government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton on Friday night said it had dismissed a subcontractor who prepared a draft report saying that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency access to the Treasury’s payment system poses an “unprecedented insider threat risk” and should be suspended immediately.
What is really sad to read in this whole debacle is all the nihilists who think that the US government "should burn". These people are largely ignorant of all the ways their government works for them. One could say the government has been working too well, much like vaccines.
Why this isn't front-page news in every Western country is the press' failure to understand technical matters, or perhaps the public's utter disinterest in unglamorous infrastructure. This is the US' own Sulla moment, an incident that will be quoted in future history books as the beginning of the end of the republic.
Why isn't it front-page news on HN rather than being flagged? Is it just because Musk's "DOGE" is in the title? I think it's pretty significant that a number of agencies have handed root access to people who shouldn't have it and have made changes that could have significant unintended consequences. This is could end up being a case study in why you don't allow unfettered access even when ordered by the incoming regime (be it POTUS or CEO) because there be dragons and the new people don't know where they are yet.
LOL... wow! I thought the "national cyberattack" and the root override/hijacking was far more relevant than the connection with the organization which shall not be named which is nominally led by he who shall not be named.
It's very sad and a stark commentary on the current state of Hacker News that a post by Bruce Schneier on cyber security is still flagged over an hour after it was posted.
The flagging system has good intentions, but seems like it was designed assuming good faith behavior from users. It does not appear to be resistant to partisan brigading.
I think it's working as intended in terms of HN not being a place for partisan issues and discussion in the vast majority of cases. There's literally an automatic downvoting of submissions where the comment to vote ratio is too high. It's not the type of discussion HN wants or is intended for.
This is one of the unspoken assumptions of online communities, that will cease to be true, and lead to the implosion or imposition of rules on HN, which will lead to its fracturing.
There is no running away from certain conversations, especially when your information ecosystem is intentionally made partisan. The flavor of american political discourse is architechtured to achieve very clear rhetorical and emotional goals.
At best, HN can choose how it wants to handle the schism. For that everyone needs to realize it is coming.
> In the span of just weeks, the US government has experienced what may be the most consequential security breach in its history
Which is a ridiculous level of hyperbole and just factually not even close to accurate. Solarwinds, the 2014 OPM breach, snowden leaks, chelsea manning leaks, the DNC email leak, moonlight maze - there's a massive list of real, consequential security incidents that are nowhere nearly as bad as Elon and whatever his dumb team are doing.
The key words being "may be." The fact is that a bunch of kids working for an essentially unofficial department of the government were given root access to all sorts of systems with no oversight. We simply have no idea how deep the damage goes.
You seem to have a different definition of hyperbole to most people. I think everyone here understands the security implications of physical access to a server, the protocols that are usually put in place surrounding that and the reasons for them being there. The servers gave been compromised. We know that. To downplay the dangers of that surely makes someone guilty of the kind of misrepresentation that you're concerned about
There are so, so many posts on HN about this and they're getting flagged, I would guess, because people can see this content on literally any corporate news site or a million different subreddits, and there's not much value to it being on HN specifically, and the conversation around these topics is never interesting or productive. I flag it because for these reasons, and also I'm ridiculously tired of seeing 6 different posts about Trump and Elon every single day.
How many people on all those subreddits know what root access means, how many journalists havea technical understanding of what is possible with the access given to the DOGE team? How does that compare to the demographic on Hacker News?
There are any number of places people can talk about this but the same is true of literally anything that gets discussed here. What value does HN ever add? What's ever the benefit of sharing something here?
Personally speaking this is the number one place I want to see these conversations happen because I have a deep respect for the technical understanding of my peers here. It's disturbing that at such an important juncture in history so many people are jumping up to say "go elsewhere, there's nothing of value for you here."
Knowledge about the technical concepts means nothing if we're not getting real, meaningful information about what's actually happening. It's all rampant and unfounded speculation at this point.
No, common security practice would be to consider your servers compromised if an unvetted outside entity gained physical access to them. If this happened at your workplace you know that you would assume the worst because you would have no other choice. Everybody here understands that and so do you.
This is Bruce Schneier, talking about the event in the most technical, calm and even handed manner around.
I have been looking for such a post since last week!
And this is hacker news, the exact site that is absolutely about this. We haven't even gotten to the part where people see the actual code that has been slung around here.
I would like to take this moment to point out that Obama created the framework that trump is using.
Here is a quote from NPR:
"The USDS launched in 2014 by the Obama administration in the aftermath of the botched rollout of HeathCare.gov as an office to boost the digital capabilities of the federal government.
It has operated like a digital strike team of sorts, recruiting private sector experts in design and technology to work collaboratively with federal agencies on projects that make public-facing parts of the government more efficient, modern and user-friendly."
The Obama initiative did not override security protocols though (what the article describes). It was basically installing modern IT management for the government.
The question is not whether it is good to have such a digital strike team.
The questions include: is the strike team in question being transparent, is it violating any laws, is it protecting data in the way the law requires, is the team composed of people who have been vetted at a level corresponding to the access they've been granted, are any of them potentially compromised or plausibly so, does anyone on the team have conflicts of interest, is there oversight and auditability of their actions?
The reason, I think, these are good questions is simply that these are things we should demand of our public servants, regardless of political affiliation.
Yep. Sulla didn't come out of nowhere, marching on Rome was only possible because the Senate had been corrupt for a long time, and institutions had already started decaying - but it was the arson that put an end to any hope of restoring the house.
There's also multiple existing federal agencies that aggregate data across multiple federal agencies (OBM oversees federal data collecting https://strategy.data.gov/overview/, GSA also centralizes federal datasets, OPM collects gov wide workforce data, etc). Aggregating gov spending data in a similar way is not a totally alien idea or even a new one... even if the concerns on data security and transparency are valid.
It all started with Alan Turing, and let's not forget to put some blame on Charles Babbage and even Ada Lovelace who started it all. After all, anything deflecting blame from the beloved tech leader and his beloved leader is more than welcome.
See, they said the FRAMEWORK was created by Obama.
In these cases, just jump to the end, and if possible go a step further. The Dems couldn't be corrupt efficiently! They created this framework, and didn't use it to drain the swamp?? See, the dems are always wrong.
(Underlying any such point is an emotional fear, that the country was brought to the bring by liberals and democrats. This is what is actually triggering the nation wide fight or flight response. Address this)
This is like inventing a knife and using it to to more efficiently cut off hide and cook meals. Then later some other dude comes along and says "oh hey, I can kill people with this!" Who's to blame?
(Things are really dire when I need to make a 2nd amendment appeal as a metaphor for a government system).
These discussions are not about logic or facts. They are about emotions and content.
Most people are arguing from conclusions.
I won’t go into why “the dems are wrong” is a conclusion, or why it’s so common - it’s just got that feel of being right.
But by jumping to the end, there’s a chance to break the endless cycle of arguments online. Or at least have some fun with it.
When you jump to the end, the current argument is the same as the conclusion, creating cognitive dissonance, and often forcing the brain to actually engage to understand what’s going on.
In your example - you are saying that the dems were good. They didn’t use the knife to kill.
This only leads to more argument. Consensus depends on the other side agreeing that not killing people is good.
Which they can’t, because - see point 1. Arguing from conclusions.
So they will be forced to take more complex positions, carve out exceptions and generally create frustration.
well, I'm a democrat but I never cared much for "hurting people's feelings" on the internet when I'm simply posting comparisons and links. I purposely try to involve as little of the user into my arguments as possible: I'm attacking their argument, not them.
I'm ultimately to others, a piece of text on the internet with a semi-anonymous handle. There is very little I can do to cheer people up. It is a magnitude harder to make people happy on the internet than making people mad. I'm already at a disadvantadge by not having a face attached to my words.
>it’s just got that feel of being right.
Likewise, I don't stop at "it feels right" when I scrutinize myself. I introspect and say "why do I feel good/bad from this" and I've overtime gotten good at elaboring on my feelings. Sometimes I even defuse myself when I realize my feelings aren't rational. I don't like riling myself up over trivial issues. Not when theres so many non-trivial issues in my life to deal with.
>In your example - you are saying that the dems were good. They didn’t use the knife to kill.
I never explicitly said the dems were good. But yes, the assumption from many people are "making food and clothes is good. This is a good tool". But the knife is a tool and a tool is as good as its weilder. Whether it was effective is a much ore subjective argument.
>This only leads to more argument. Consensus depends on the other side agreeing that not killing people is good.
Well those are not people I engage in discussion with. I know these topics are polarized but I still am trying to maintain the ethos of HN in exploring curiosity. People who simply want to preach is not someone to see curiosity from. Likewise, a closed mind with their conclusion set is not someone who's ready to discuss.
It seems to be decreasing as of late. But I "discussed" on Reddit for years and year, and even on 4chan. It's like a gold rush, but reading those few times where you actually convince someone, you get convinced of a point, or you simply have an insightful comment chime in does give me hope in discussions like this.
Is it to argue for your own benefit? If so then this makes sense.
If it is to convince the other person, then what matters is understanding them and how to get to them.
>It seems to be decreasing as of late.
You seem like a person who aims to be thoughtful. I will speak from my own actions - I anticipated and called this escalation out, probably a decade ago by now.
I am not very smart. If this is obvious to me, it should be obvious to any other thinking person, perhaps after moving some assumptions around.
This is how I work to continue to communicate and uphold my principles, in an environment that is changing.
If something ceases to work, and to repeat the behavior, is .. well its many things, but lets call it frustrating.
So I ask again - what is the point? You end with the goal of convincing someone.
I won't urge you to use my techniques, or my crack brained approach.
But is it fair to point out to you - that something is rotten in the state of Denmark, that people are increasingly immunized to our typical attempts at reason?
If you agree so, and if you also believe in the spirit of inquiry, the search for truth and the pursuit of progress (lots of "ifs"), then would it be a stretch to say new tools, approaches are needed?
(Side note - I read tons of stuff on misinformation, indoctrination, and communities. So I am not exactly completely flying high without a tether)
And Trump has signed an executive order making all their actions secret, which is suspicious for a president who campaigned for transparent government that wouldn't need Freedom of Information requests, and for a department which is supposed to be uncovering and revealing things: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/us/politics/trump-musk-do...
In short, I don't believe it. (That's not to say 'I believe there is no corruption' or even 'I believe there is little corruption'. It is to say 'I believe an employee sends Musk an email saying they found $10M spent on <whatever> and Musk gives it three seconds of attention then declares it is fraud and announces that on Twitter').
The problem is not The Privacy but the consequences of non-vetted, inexperienced kids allowed to access systems and processes that are vital to the nation.
Kids that because of the lack of vetting could be susceptible to approaches by enemies—private or state actors—for the knowledge and access they now hold.
Have you personally looked into the claims made by Leavitt during her briefings? It doesn't take much digging to see that they are much more nuanced than we are being led to believe.
For there to be fraud that means they are bringing charges and the court will decide if it is fraud. Fraud has a very specific meaning. If it is waste then it's in the eye of the beholder thus nuanced. I doubt Elon and his script kiddies would even know how to find actual fraud.
why are we comparing the end of one president's term to the beginning (aka, the honyemon period) of another president. At least compare the first year
February 13th, 2021: Unfavorable: 35% Favorable: 53%
>Notice how favorability is increasing.
Are we reading the same charts? Trump's Peak approval ratinig was 50% and is currently 49%. His nadir was 48.8%.
It's a stretch to say it's moving either way. The only real data here is that his diaapproval rating is rising at the same point as Biden's first month (which is interestin, given that Biden came in at the height of COVID and his mandates really riled up red states. Trump has nothing to blame but himself)
>Readout of President Donald J. Trump’s Meeting with King Abdullah II of Jordan
> Statement from the National Security Advisor [This is about Russia]
>Presidential Message on Super Bowl LIX
> United States-Japan Joint Leaders’ Statement
>Statement from the Press Secretary on January’s Jobs Reports
>Readout of President Donald J. Trump’s Call with President el-Sisi of Egypt
So yeah, where are all these briefings of corruption? It's only been 3 weeks, so I didn't take long to exahaust all the briefings. None of them talked about DOGE
Pretending this is some goo-goo (good government) initiative is ridiculous. Trump is the opposite of good government movement, he is literally the most corrupt president we've ever had. His administation is full of lies and attacks on the press and lack of transparency even when it is legally mandated.
"Totally unrelatedly" he has spoken out against the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which such actions likely violate.
Claiming this will save money is also ridiculous, its just about destroying large parts of the government. Some of which they dislike, other parts which they don't care about. Because they don't care about making things better.
The President can certainly do things that are both legal and Constitutional. If the team is, as you say, auditing government spending there is probably no debate. The question before us is: are they doing that, and only that? To that question the answer appears to be 'no'. To the extent that they are doing more than auditing, there are serious legal and Constitutional questions. And these questions cannot simply be brushed aside by asserting 'most people voted for this'.
Well, there are checks and balances, if I understand correctly, all these changes are being done by executive order which needs to be approved by congress and is passive of being questioned by the justice system.
Let's not forget that the Vice-President did post a tweet with the literally saying:
“Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power.”[0]
There isn't a spec of transparency from the efforts of DOGE, no evidence presented from them about fraud they're finding. Just initiatives they don't believe in or like.
How did the USDS have the power to recover FEMA money sent to NY? Just to think of a single headline in the past 24 hours.
Not to mention barring entry to members of congress in federal buildings.
Or to accessing secure infrastructure without passing a security check? Or following any number of security policies that have been developed by America.
Did the platform include tidbits like "DOGE will trust sensitive personal information of millions of Americans to lackwits that got already fired for leaking personal information"?
> If the President can't execute his mandate [..]
"Executing his mandate" doesn't mean "doing a whole bunch of dumb shit while ignoring the rule of law and becoming a puppet to an unelected piece of human garbage".
You’ve drawn a false dichotomy. It is possible both for the existing system to be full of waste and for the process of shining the sun onto “blight” (good word) to raise significant, even catastrophic, security concerns with lasting implications. Bad + bad doesn’t necessarily = good.
Your comment brings no evidence and goes in a rhetoric that has not yet to be proven, it's like saying that Potomac River mid-air collision was caused by DEI affirmative laws/actions[0].
If you change things without the consent of stakeholders, you will find the changes undone in short order (or even overreacted to) despite their potential. The early wins are pyrrhic and take on a new opportunity cost as the community churns through events of no confidence.
Federal agencies are regularly audited - internally by their own inspectors general, and externally by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) - and most of those reports are publicly available. There are numerous checks on these agencies including management by the president, who can typically fire at will, and oversight by Congress.
Like him or not, Elon Musk is not an auditor, has no relevant experience or expertise and is deeply compromised as he profits from large federal contracts. Giving him unchecked power with no accountability is not the proper way to shine a light on fraud, it's a way to get more of it.
GAO audit is not a perfect tool, the evidence is a $2 trillion deficit that is ballooning every year. Very easy to pass GAO audit as long as there is some "paperwork" backing the expense.
What DOGE/Musk is doing is auditing expenses not in terms of "have these expenses been properly authorized with the paper trail?", but rather "are these expenses vital for the US taxpayer, can we remove them?"
GAO can only find some bogus expenses without paper trail
DOGE is funding expenses with proper and perfect paper trail, but ultimately unnecessary for the US taxpayer
The deficit is a result of deficit spending authorized by Congress. Audits have nothing to do with reducing the deficit.
DOGE is literally one deeply compromised person deciding what is "necessary" or "unnecessary" to spend, after Congress already authorized it. That is blatantly unconstitutional. There are checks and balances in the system for a reason.
I have news for you. The Republican budget plan will increase the debt by about 4 trillion [1], an unprecedented amount. They're slashing spending in tiny departments and then handing out multiples of that as tax breaks, mostly to very wealthy people. So if you're relying on "DOGE" and the Trump administration to bring down the debt, you're going to be disappointed.
Don't let someone "fix" things that is clearly looting the government for his own gain as part of a coup. There are endless ways to address your concerns without supporting someone throwing around literal nazi salutes.
From a security standpoint, we have a private citizen who is a) not American born, b) didn't apply to work for the government and hasn't been vetted, c) an apartheid sympathizing nazi who did a sieg heil on national television, d) shows anti-democratic tendencies, e) insists he and he alone can save the world, privately, f) hired programmers who are literally stealing the government on thumb drives and personal devices with untold security implications, g) making government entities who are in charge of personal data breach their own TOS and privacy policies, h) doesn't have any SOPs for what he's doing, and doesn't seem to see the value in them, i) isn't revealing any details, reports, or data despite claiming he is, j) is dismantling institutions that were put in place by bipartisan acts of congress, k) is dismantling institutions that benefit Americans, l) is dismantling institutions that would otherwise prevent him from committing fraud, m) ignores the judicial branch, n) is the wealthiest person in the world with countless conflicts of interest, o) is in a position to pursuade the government to do business exclusively with his companies, p) is going to funnel resources to his companies, q) is taking rights and liberties away from Americans......
I mean I'm just gonna stop. The icing on the cake is he's the richest man alive. This is literally a page from a dystopian non-fiction novel and you're passive aggressively playing devils advocate, or you're honestly oblivious.
There is no rationale. It’s all ideological fear based thinking.
Every objection shown here and elsewhere on the internet is all hypothetical that have applied for the last 100 years.
I also think people are in shock that there is a president who is actually doing their job. Doing a real service to the American people by exposing fraud and corruption.
One tell tell sign we have is wedging the democrats try to rebrand them selfs and holding rallies and marches. You see they would not need to be on the streets if they believe any of what they were saying, as they are in congress and have actual power.
Just in case you missed it. When your congress members are heading up rallies and protests and in front of the camera yelling “we will win”, you always know they have no leg to stand on.
Furthermore you can fact check anything they say and find it be categorically wrong.
People are in fear that their world view will be shattered if the man and men they hate the most actually do something good.
Democrats, i.e. politicians associated with the DNC, are generally fine with this because they've been bought out by corporate interests, which expect to profit under fascism.
Your average person is very concerned, for very good reason.
He listed 15 points. How many do you need for "rationale"
>Every objection shown here and elsewhere on the internet is all hypothetical
No, Musk publically did most of the actions listed. he admits to at least half of them and then doesn't deny a few others.
>I also think people are in shock that there is a president who is actually doing their job.
No, they are in fear of being deported, having their data comprommised, antagonizing our neighbors unnecessarily, not understanding how tarriffs actually work, cancelling funding that congress already appropriated (and in in NY's case, stealing their money), leaving WHO and silencing the CDC as we have a transforming Bird Flu, theatening SS and Medicaid... Need I go on? It's been a month.
>One tell tell sign we have is wedging the democrats try to rebrand them selfs and holding rallies and marches.
How so? people are always protesting, and if you dig deep enough you can find anyone talking about anything. That's always the process; people protest, get the attention of reps, reps propose stuff, and repeat. A closed mouth doesn't get fed.
I saw people talking about California seceding from the US. How viable is that? basically.
>Just in case you missed it. When your congress members are heading up rallies and protests and in front of the camera yelling “we will win”, you always know they have no leg to stand on.
So we all lose? It's a rally, not a formal press conference. That's the definition of a rally:
>a mass meeting of people making a political protest or showing support for a cause.
It's an awareness and morale step between the boring meetings.
>Furthermore you can fact check anything they say and find it be categorically wrong.
okay, I'm waiting for you to fact check one of the above 15 points.
>People are in fear that their world view will be shattered if the man and men they hate the most actually do something good.
we're in 2025 now, not 2021. You said a lot but this was just all drivel with no sort of backing. Some of it is just outright wrong.
> Doing a real service to the American people by exposing fraud and corruption.
Musk spent $260,000,000 of his personal money funding the Trump presidential campaign and has been rewarded with a new government agency, its actions kept confidential by Executive Order, with himself appointed to police his own conflicts of interest. That is corruption.
It's a very powerful person deliberately sabotaging the checks and levers they've to adhere to, with the reasonable possibility that they'll get to outright create the new ones and the probability that they'll at the very least get to heavily influence the new ones from the ground up.
The State Department just decided to order $400 million in "armored Teslas". [1] (Hastily changed to "armored electric vehicles" once it was caught out.[2] As if that fools anyone but fools.)
He's doing it for power, which enables wealth acquisition. Shutting down regulatory agencies that would prevent him from exploiting people for even more gain is the same as a paycheck.
He is getting paid in the sense he has a lot of power over everything that happens financially, it's how he will make a lot of money going forwards (if he doesn't get ousted somehow).
Such a funny take. It is nominated by the legally elected president. If you want to emphasize their financial status, why don't you look at Soros, some democrats who officially have salaries in the range of $100k-$200k yet have net worth in tenths of millions?
On the other hand it'd be strange to see that no one involved in corruption that DOGE tries to reveal would do something to attack it.
Many seem to fear the brutality of these methods.
But could massive institutions be reformed continuously by fixing every problem carefully à la Chesterton's Fence ? I think not: admistrations only grow like a cancer until they are such a complicated knot that no one can disentangle them.
See Europe's fossilization, accelerated by the fact that we have put an administration of bureaucrats over countries to add one layer of rules.
I'd love a DOGE in Eurppe because our administrations can only be cut brutally, like the Gordian knot. That may destroy some good things, but I'll happily pay that to get rid of the bad things.
>But could massive institutions be reformed continuously by fixing every problem carefully à la Chesterton's Fence ? I think not:
I do think so. But we need proper leaders voted in first. We've been quite horrible at that, to be frank. But I guess it represents us: a political gridlock too busy fighting each other (often o petty issues) to proper come together and identify what's actually wrong in our lives.
> See Europe's fossilization, accelerated by the fact that we have put an administration of bureaucrats over countries to add one layer of rules
you mean the institution where a bad fall doesn't put you in debt? That mandate 30 days vacation a year? that doesn't just roll over and let technocrats steal and sell your data without consent?
Yea, caring for one another is such a fossilized concept.
>I'd love a DOGE in Eurppe because our administrations can only be cut brutally, like the Gordian knot. That may destroy some good things, but I'll happily pay that to get rid of the bad things.
I'll put this in your language: you're esssentially trying to make a proposal to a business to shut down its main product while your engineering team takes time to make a new, efficient product that guarantees a 10x ROI.
Now, maybe there's a chance you're right. But there's no way in high hell any business would ever agree to that. You may be willing to pay, but you're not the only one paying. That reboot will lose shareholder value, piss off and permanently turn off customers, and may even make you vulnerable to security breaches. It makes no sense.
Meanwhile, we can simply revisit our lovely fence and start things off the right way. You can make your own module and show how efficient it is before deprecating the old one. and you repeat that until you fully optimized the legacy code. There was no shutdown, you worked incrementally to prove your changes worked, and satisfied customers along the way. That's all I'm suggesting for such an "efficiency" process here.
> Yea, caring for one another is such a fossilized concept.
Do not conflate "being efficient" that I was suggesting, and "being mean" that I never suggested. I don't think that social security is a bad concept. And anyway we'll probably all need UBI when AIs are more efficient than us at everything.
Btw, conflating these two concepts of "efficient" and "mean" is one of the roots of Europe's fall.
> You can make your own module and show how efficient it is before deprecating the old one.
Are you suggesting doing A/B testing with laws? Maybe you were trying again to "put this in [my] language", but your proposal sounds delusional. A country's not a product, you can't have two parallel versions.
Then you'll get similar parasites.
Good luck with no healthcare on upcoming natural disasters.
Good luck with the avian flu and measles.
When corpos rule everything, y'all pray.
The split of opinion on this in tech circles is quite surprising.
No agency would voluntarily modernize systems, which would inevitably reduce head count and put half of them out of jobs. This has been a on-going fight for 30 years. Every politician who previously tried to modernize agencies failed due to intense internal resistance.
Everyone in tech clearly fell on the modernization side. This is what many of us wanted since the 90s. Finally happening. In real time. Headed by one of the greatest tech disrupters since probably Edison. Now they act like the sky is falling?
I can’t find any steel-man argument against DOGE. No modernization plan proposed the traditional way through committees, consultants, contractors, has worked or will EVER work. You have to rip off the bandaid the hard way.
Only explanation I have for those opposing this is some combination of personality derangement spread by nefarious interests, financial incentive, or some crazy model of the world that glorifies bureaucratic power as some fundamental right enshrined in constitution.
Imagine being on the side of the Empire and trying to stop the rebels as they infiltrate the Death Star.
I respect that you have been a HN member since 2016, making it unlikely that this is a troll account.
However, your views read like propaganda.
The "internal resistance" you refer to is simply people trying to follow the law, while being constantly whipsawed by changing political winds. We see similar stories here on HN about work in large corporations. What do you think it is like in an org with 2.2 MILLION employees, where their actions have the power of government behind them often including access to extremely sensitive information?
HN talked about leaking any Youtuber's contact information for 10K, with suggestions that Google should better protect people's data.
HN frequently talks about the dangers of non-accountability for police. Would you like that same non-accountabilty spread to all aspects of the Federal government? (if so, merry christmas because now you have it)
If you cannot find any steel-man arguments against DOGE, may I suggest that you read the remainder of this HN article?
Why would you even suspect this is a troll account? These are clearly genuinely held opinions, stated plainly and without the normal wild rhetoric I typically hear in comments in such threads, yet you read it as propaganda.
This is why I flag all articles on DOGE/etc, because genuine conversation is assumed to be in bad faith.
Expecting someone to read an article having an obvious propaganda hit-piece title like "DOGE as a National Cyberattack" is silly.
Would you read an article titled "technology is the mark of the beast" and take your time to debate its merits?
I personally hold the belief that DOGE and president Trump are acting in good-faith to keep his campaign promises as best as they're able, in a messy and tumultuous environment.
At the same time, I have a lot of empathy for the great number of people that are afraid and hurting right now for a multitude of reasons. People are facing food/job/business insecurity, genuine threats to various core ideological beliefs, an environment of fear and uncertainty for many affected people, threats to the desired direction of our laws and societal moral compass, etc. I hurt for those affected, and I do what I can within my spheres of influence to help.
I don't see why we can't have an honest conversation with each other without assuming that the other is operating in bad-faith. I think BOTH sides should stop using propaganda, and start LISTENING to each other, that eventually we might determine paths forward together without cancelling each other.
Why is it silly? Is it reasonable to hold the opinion that DOGE should not have been given access to these systems (note: this doesn't mean that the opposite view isn't also reasonable)? If it's a reasonable position to hold, then getting access to these systems can be reasonably construed as an attack, can it not?
I don't really think this argument merits a comparison to "technology is the mark of the beast" or that the only people that can be opposed to DOGE suffers from "personality derangement" or "glorifies bureaucratic power"
> Is it reasonable to hold the opinion that DOGE should not have been given access to these systems
"We audited ourselves" typically doesn't fly, so no, I'd say not a reasonable position. Someone external has to do it, and DOGE is the one tasked by the president to do so.
Audit are already conducted by outsiders, but the objection to DOGE is less the concept of auditing but how they’re doing it by bypassing all kinds of policies. Normally auditors would be qualified, have passed background checks, and agree to follow the same security and privacy policies.
The outrage is because they’re taking a lot of risk and clearly treating it as a political exercise when it shouldn’t be.
>I don't see why we can't have an honest conversation with each other without assuming that the other is operating in bad-faith.
>I think BOTH sides should stop using propaganda
Well you proved it right here. You're "both sides"-ing this when the responsibiliry and power at the moment is horribly disproprtionate. It isn't at all. We can throw all the links we want, but I've yet to see any "liberal propaganda" posted in response to suggest that Democrats are "playing dirty".
If we can't even talk about objective facts like "Musk retaliated on Judges who gave him court order", then we can't talk much. We're not in the same reality and facts like that aren't even denied by Musk. You're defending someone who is outright saying "I want to take down the courts". He isn't even defending himself.
Same with ICE raids. People are upset because they built their house on sand and have to start again. Businesses are upset because they can't get around labour laws
I find it funny that you're getting downvoted though. Maybe in a few years it'll all blow over
This is speculative based on an idea that you have about what must be true. It can be shown to be untrue by one example: NASA, NOAA, and other agencies now host applications and data in a cloud environment. Before this, they were hosted at various NASA data centers. You can now search for, download, and operate on data in the cloud. In contrast, twenty-five years ago someone was required to order a physical magnetic tape. They could have kept those systems running, but they didn't.
Much better user experience--and in these examples the users could be high school students or teachers, college students, grad students, PIs, public policymakers, etc--users can do complex searching, filtering, previewing data images & plots, and selecting data over a wide variety of spatial and temporal bounds. They can also either directly download the data in a self-describing format (with metadata), or they can describe various kinds of post-processing that is done efficiently and quickly.
You're moving the goalposts to leave your internal narrative unchanged. Look, I've worked for huge corps and for the government. There's no particular difference in efficiency between the two; efficiency goes down with scale and legacy rather than with public/privateness. The only non-ideological choices that matter are how much you de/centralise decisions and recording (trading decision efficiency for implementation efficiency) and whether you make those decisions and records at all (moot, someone will anyway, that's valuable data).
This feels like hyperbole. Nobody is arguing to destroy the village, the federal government is not going to disappear due to 20% spending reduction. Reducing spending from ~$6T/year to ~$4T/year is not the end of government, which is the explicitly stated goal of DOGE.
it's already happening. Does it have to literally already be on fire to see it?
>he federal government is not going to disappear due to 20% spending reduction
Yes, that's more than enough to throw the country into chaos, 20% of 2024 spending is 1.3 TRILLION dollars.
I don't think you understand how much money "20%" is in this scale.
>Reducing spending from ~$6T/year to ~$4T/year is not the end of government, which is the explicitly stated goal of DOGE.
1. depends on where we make the cuts. 20% from the military? Maybe we'll be fine. 20% from Social security? There will be blood in the streets. Even the most diehard trump supporter won't like their income being reduced out of nowhere.
2. where do you think that 2 trillion dollars is going? Hint: we're not getting it. They are reducing spending by not taxing billionaires as much. So no, we're not paying off a defecit, Corporate America isn't paying its share.It will still increase and nothing was accomplished. Just the rich getting richer.
> Only explanation I have for those opposing this is some combination of personality derangement spread by nefarious interests, financial incentive, or some crazy model of the world that glorifies bureaucratic power as some fundamental right enshrined in constitution.
If you're interested, I could give you some reasons, and other commenters here already have done so.
> No modernization plan proposed the traditional way through committees, consultants, contractors, has worked or will EVER work. You have to rip off the bandaid the hard way.
This, by way of the same example in my sibling comment, is also not true.
> No agency would voluntarily modernize systems, which would inevitably reduce head count and put half of them out of jobs.
What facts are you basing this on? Have you worked at one of those agencies? Do you have reason the believe that the many agencies whose senior leadership have asked Congress to fund modernization programs were being disingenuous?
If not, consider that the people who told you this were not acting in good faith and had motives other than government efficiency.
Real modernization of systems would result in efficiencies that allow for reduction in staff. Tech exists to be a lever on productivity. This almost never happens; historically bureaucratic modernization efforts only proceed if absolutely necessary for core functions, and strangely seem to result in higher head counts. IRS is a great example of this. Their headcount has doubled while they supposedly "modernized". Digital systems should increase productivity of the average IRS employee, instead they just invent more busy work.
Do you have any experience with this or are you just basing it on vibes? For example, I know people who’ve worked on modernization projects and they’ve never had opposition on the grounds you’re claiming: the problems are usually funding (Congress has to allocate money for it) and the significant cost and risk due to contracting the work out rather than hiring technical staff (also Congress).
The IRS is notable because they’ve been requesting funding for modernization since the 90s.
1. yes, we do. DOGE was renamed from Obama Appointed DSA, which inevitably reduced other agencies as we centralized IT. How about you be specific and suggest what agencies are past their usefulness?
1.5 but no. The government doesn't just lay off people. They tend to move people around for their work when their old resposibilities decline. The government is not a tech company trying to maximize profit.
2. that's why we have actual audit agencies. Each agency audits itself and then the GOA is the government's general auditor.
>Everyone in tech clearly fell on the modernization side
Not necessarily, because again: the government isn't a tech company. And that's a good thing. You can't move fast and break the treasury. That's how you cause the next stock market crash.
>Headed by one of the greatest tech disrupters since probably Edison. Now they act like the sky is falling?
Yes, because you just equated a businessman in tech who's never touched anything in the domain to one of the most important innovators in history.
Read up on your history and Tell me Musk is some tech visionar. You may not have noticed, but this isn't 2017 anymore and Musk's persona has long faded. He's not exactly hailed here as a tech genius anymore
>I can’t find any steel-man argument against DOGE.
You're not looking then. How about this: they are breaking the law. A lot. And then antagonizing judges who reel them in.
Ignore everything else; how can you excuse this? What's the steelman argument around "well it's okay to break the law?" this isn't civil disobediance (quite the contrary), lives were not in danger at the OPM, USAID, and Treasury. What is your justification? How far does this need to go before you'd admit that they are breaking too many laws.
>Only explanation I have for those opposing this is some combination of personality derangement
You say this and wonder why we cannot have a civil conversation? A conversation is two way. Statements like this is inflammatory and preaching.
> or some crazy model of the world that glorifies bureaucratic power as some fundamental right enshrined in constitution.
If you even care, my viewpoint is this: your solutions change as your problem scales. inevitably, larger problem spaces need more time and nuance to resolve.
exmaple 1: is it okay for me to go back to my toy renderer and rewrite it from scratch? Yes. No one's using it, I know the scope of the code, and sometimes when you visit old code like that, it's best for me to just start over. I got my value out of that code (and my first job!)
example 2: I'm contracted to work on some existing project. They put abou a year into it. You want to rewrite from scratch. Is that okay? It can really go either way. Maybe the code is truly horrible and you're experienced enough to handle this rewrite. it works out. Maybe the work needed is minor and you're basically working against their best interests. They may resist without a good reason, not hire you on, reduce your pay for the contract, etc. You won't simply get your way without some sort of credentials or reasoning. But it may be the right call.
Example 3: I'm working at a multibillion dollar company and am touching a 15 year old codebase with 10m+ lines of code. You dont like a certain system and offer to optimize it (let's say you worked here a year). Will you get approved? Absolutely not. You need to at best go through a huge procedure to even get access to that part of the repo, propose a very smart plan, and then implement it slowly. Then you'll talk with various stakeholders for each commit. It maybe would take you a month if you went in yourself. It ends up taking a year of discussions and iteration.
So, the government is example 3. Is the right call to ignore your lead, product managers, release managers, and build engineers and put in your code, break the version contol, and jam in your barely tested code into Prod? I fail to see how any result short of multiple miracles keeping you from not only being fired, but blacklisted locally from any other software firm in that area. If you broke it enough, you may even be retaliated against for damages to the business. No programmer would sympathize with that.
-----
So, back to reality; why am I seeing people celebrate not only all of the above, but then threaning your boss's life for doing their job and keeping you from destroying the business? Why am I being called "deranged" for being aware of my data and not appreciating it being accessed without my consent, for no good reason (what is my social security going to do to fix the government? Request as little data as you need for your function)?
Using your odd comparison, Why would I sit by while someone destroys the death star? I'm in the Death Star (I don't know why, but I'm rolling with it)! I don' have a Pod Racer to get off like the rebels do. They are trying to kill me! Why is self-preservation derangement now?
There is a difference between elected officials doing stupid or insecure things vs. unelected people being able to do this without any checks and balances.
(Off topic: I’m upvoting this post to counter the flagging that seems to be going on for all posts on this topic. I respect Bruce Schneier and his opinions on several things.)