Advisors with unlimited power and endless conflicts of interests with zero obligation for transparency?
Whether I like Musk or not has very little to do with it.
Apparently they have the power to fire people, ignore access clearance rules, get full read/write (this was already confirmed and documented by multiple sources) access to data, terminate federal programs and agencies. Or at least there's no executive opposition to them trying to, so... in practice they do have the power. So far a few judges are still holding the ground, but we'll see how long that is allowed. Musk announced a few big changes as done before they were officially confirmed by Trump.
> and endless conflicts of interests
Musk practically leads the efforts to cut government spending while receiving government funding in defence and comms spending. And with weird procurement entires appearing https://www.ttnews.com/articles/armored-teslas-government Those are conflicts of interest.
> with zero obligation for transparency?
There are no obligations for transparency. The agencies being reviewed don't get a report of things to implement and we don't see any of the audit reports.
I get you may like how this unfolds, but denying it happens is weird.
Why are there multiple examples of agency heads resigning, in series, until someone agrees to implement Musk’s advise? They report being pressured and bullied into doing so. This isn’t how advising typically works.
It's because this particular advisor has the full backing of the duly-elected President. It's absolutely wild to me that HN refuses to acknowledge this fact. This idea that the civil servants should defy the President (and his advisor) is substantiating the deep state critiques from the right.
As a Canadian I disagree entirely. Our prime minister Stephen Harper years ago muzzled scientists who had time sensitive, extremely pertinent research to act on. After he was replaced, that research was immediately put to use in policy making. Throughout his term, scientists in the public service spoke out about what was happening.
If justice is important to a democracy, these scientists did the right thing. That takes real courage.
I see no difference in what’s happening in the American public service. The processes occurring now are not democratic in nature. Musk’s role is extremely unorthodox and only ostensibly voted for ‘by the people’.
In the weeks since Trump took office, I see no hard evidence to support any kind of deep state corruption. I see inefficiency, and yet, I see that in how DOGE dismantles things as well. I see it in every organization I work in, in every industry, in every home. It’s inevitable.
Yes, but to the degree you believe in "democracy," then you believe the duly-elected President gets to come in and make changes, provided he's acting within the scope of the law. Trump specifically ran on the DOGE/Musk platform/strategy. It was a major component of his closing argument. This is, in fact, the exercise of popular will -- that is, "democracy."
Civil servants ultimately work for the President. That's how it works. There have been many reductions in force prompted by Presidents over time (my own grandfather took one in the seventies). I appreciate there is some disagreement about whether Trump is tripping over any specific laws, but to the degree he's not (the courts will answer that), then he's well within his right to take the direct advice of his advisors, and to act within the scope of his authorities. The President also has the power to get access to even the most confidential information (how could he not?), and to share that with his advisors who have the requisite security clearances (which in many cases he can dictate).
I'm just stunned by all the hand wringing about access to "government data." They're government employees!
> Musk does not have the authority to fire anyone, or terminate any programs. He's only an advisor
Sure, I agree he has no authority. He's only an advisor that seems to have any advice rubber-stamped. And he announces the changes personally before the executive action is announced. And opm employees get an email with basically the same wording as Twitter employees about a leave offer which legally cannot be offered to them.
We can pretend that "actually it's not Musk making those changes" but it's obvious he's telling others what to do. And not in an "advice" way. (He's obviously shielded from legal responsibility in this case.)
> The team aren't accessing data they don't have appropriate security clearances for.
He's an advisor with no lawful power to fire, no lawful security clearance for the DOGE team*, no lawful authority to terminate programs.
De facto, anyone standing in his way gets pushed.
Which is why nuclear weapons teams were let go.
* unless President said so. I think the office of President can do that, but has Trump actually done so, or is this like those classified documents he refused to return?
This is the line the White House told us, but it contradicts what Musk and Trump themselves have said. It's also clear from their actions and social media posts that if Musk is merely advising, then Trump is rubber stamp approving whatever Musk tells him without any independent verification.
"Trump tends to echo the words of whomever last spoke to him, making direct access to him even more valuable" is what people said about him in 2016 [1]. Being his advisor is an incredibly powerful role, much more so than with most other government leaders
He literally declared himself king multiple times yesterday.
He literally campaigned a promise that we wouldn't need future elections.
He literally states he is the one true interpreter of the law with respect to the federal bureaucracy.
This administration's legal theory is that executive power is concentrated entirely in the person of the president, which, to be fair, is because the Constitution says that it is.
That's not conducive to good government and is not the current precedent set by the Supreme Court, but it's been the conservative legal view since the 1980s and to be fair again, is again what the Constitution actually says. It will pretty much certainly be the prevailing view after this returns to the Supreme Court.
If that legal theory is true then Congress cannot create independent executive power and so it is not illegal for the President to fire anyone in the executive branch for any reason, including inspectors general, the chairman of the Fed, etc., regardless of any law to the contrary. Again, to be clear a third time, the effects of this will be bad, but the constitutional language isn't really ambiguous.
I don't like Musk. That's true. The reasoning is irrelevant.
Let's take someone I do like. Linus Torvalds. If Trump (or Harris or ...) appointed Linus, unilaterally, to do what Musk is doing, I'd still have a problem with it.
Now the two responses you might have are:
- I don't believe you.
- Linus wouldn't be bad either.
Both of which completely miss the point. Nobody should have singular, unilateral, unsupervised access to governmental systems like this.
Truly an incident where I couldn't tell how much of that was legitimate insanity, and how much of it was carefully curated fake-controversy-as-distraction. A common question I ask myself about conservatives every single day. Multiple times a day, lately.
It's objectively true no sane person would have cared about that issue.
I'm not a fan of Bill Gates in a lot of ways, but he actually has experience building and running a large, successful, long-lived organization. There's no way he'd come in and make drastic changes to an organization he knows absolutely nothing about in the name of "efficiency".
Yeah 99% is sour grapes from the other team. I like what doge has turned up so far and will give them the benefit of the doubt. My wife is a long time liberal Democrat and even she admits the main problem is Musk is just doing out in the open what is usually done behind closed doors and people don’t like it.
Do you like them turning up a wasteful $8 billion contract that turned out to be $8 million, but they’re a bunch of incompetent ninnies who can’t even verify they have the right number of zeroes in their figures before they tell the world?
Great that all of that information is getting published so we can judge for ourselves the efficacy of both the relevant agency or department, but also effectiveness of the DOGE.
> Are you saying that federal spending should always be done in chunks of less than $8 million?
I'm saying that focusing on an incorrect zero ($8b) distracts from the fact that $8m is easily spent wastefully by people (and systems) whose job it should be to be accurate.
Surely the people doing an audit should be just as accurate no? If they can't keep track of (several) zeros how can you trust them to accurately work through all the documentation involved in figuring out what is waste, what is fraud, and what is legitimate spending?
I'd actually support this effort if there was evidence any care was being taken. Instead I see wild statements like this, 100 million spent on condoms, people in the SSA database being too old with no discussion of if they are actually receiving payments or not (oh look they aren't!)
A real audit take time, discipline and attention to detail. I see none of that.
It reminds me of Tesla removing turn signal stalks from their cars because they're going to be self-driving real soon so why waste money on unnecessary controls? And then we're still years away from full self-driving and a bunch of human drivers are struggling with ridiculous capacitative touch sensors for their turn signals.
This is the sort of thing that happens when you refuse objectivity and spend all your time getting high on your own farts.
They brought back the stalk in the new Model Y, so they seem to agree with my assessment. A product can still be successful even if there’s something bad about it. I don’t like the capacitive turn signal buttons at all but it wouldn’t have stopped me from buying a Tesla.
> Surely the people doing an audit should be just as accurate no?
Yes they should. These are not auditors though. They have an axe to grind with confirmation bias driving the zealotry.
The plus side is that they are publishing information in real time so we can all judge it, which one could argue is an improvement over not publishing.
A counter argument would be that this is just to create the illusion of transparency, but I suspect they are not playing 5D chess.
Can you trust their assessment of wastefulness when you can't trust them to be within 1000x of the actual amount supposedly being wasted?
Beyond that, you're not going to make the Federal government efficient by cutting $8 million at a time. Musk's goal is $2 trillion in cuts. He said he thinks there's a good shot at achieving $1 trillion. The deficit in 2024 was $1.8 trillion. If your top item is $8 million, your task is utterly hopeless. Imagine being a family drowning in debt, with expenses exceeding income by $330,000/year, and a financial planner comes in and says that your top priority is not to buy that hot dog at the Costco food court this weekend. Not even that you should stop buying hot dogs weekly, that you should not buy one. They make you a list of things you should stop spending money on, and "One Costco hot dog combo planned to be purchased sometime in the coming year" is top of the list. Oh, and they also have it listed as saving you $1,500 because they didn't actually check the cost of a hot dog before they gave you the list.
No we can’t because they control the narrative. There should be more transparency in an objective manner without using the qualifiers like “wasteful” so that readers can decide for themselves. Or at the very least express both the arguments for and against, similar to how voter guides often come with a listing of arguments from both sides of the coin.
I think what you mean to say is that you like what doge has claimed to have found so far. Unfortunately it doesn’t hold up to even the slightest scrutiny.
It's like we go out to a twelve course dinner and get home and there is one 10 calories carrot on the table and we are tweeting to no end about our genius and our total transparently and robust diet of throwing away that carrot. "Carrots don't taste good anyways" they screen and people cheer.
Meanwhile we are actually losing vision and dying of obesity.
There is plenty to do to get more healthy for real; but that's not where we are heading with these initiatives so far:
There is no rhyme or reason. That's the problem with it. Not that it's out in the open. Not that it's musk.
There is no rhyme or reason, other than stripping off the parts.
I'll bet you. Once the stripping is complete, Musk and Trump have the brilliant idea of replacing the old, "bloated" government functions that were cut with private for profit contractors (that are obviously "more efficiently" run because they're for profit).
A team of kids without the capacity for discernment and bad morals to get through government agencies data is unprecedented. This is not sour grapes, this is a radical shift to how things have been done. These kids talk about bling bling, pull pump and dumps in the crypto world and are now at Elon Musks command. This is pushing any conversation away completely because you cannot have a normal conversation with trolls. What’s next, uncontrolled violence?
For example, when the NLRB was crippled by trump firing a member and losing quoroum, they forgot an important part of union history.
Prior to a proper process of grievances, the old answer was to basically wage war, guns and all, against the bosses and their families. The companies also hired Pinkerton's and every so often had the national guard also fight for the companies.
Union history is a bloody and murderous affair.
The NLRB was the compromise to "go to the bosses house and shoot it up to leave a message". With the NLRB effective destruction, the next logical devolution for worker rights is violence, and a lot of it.
As for me, I'm looking at what it would take to get out of the USA. Already interviewing with a few places in EU. The USA is basically an invaded country at this point. And I really dont want to be around when the violence picks up.
How I'm reading and interpreting this, is that you dont want workers collectively communicating and joining forces at a negotiating table.
By denouncing this right of peaceably assembling and negotiating at a table of law, means that you're wanting the old solution of mass widespread violence against workers and management. Because this is exactly what happened before. But dont believe me - go read how unions were formed.
Most civilized countries have good worker protections. The USA is speedrunning the elimination of worker protections. And it doesn't take too much history knowledge to figure out how that works out.
I think the zoomer term is "fuck around and find out". We're in the 'fuck around' stage. I dont want to be here during the 'find out' stage.
Unions produce nothing and don't innovate. Yes, they can benefit some people, but they provide no net societal benefit. In fact, they are a net negative because they misallocate resources (such as by keeping factories open producing cars that nobody wants).
They could benefit some people? They benefit the workers who would otherwise be worked literally to death. I wish they were not necessary but they came to existence exactly for this exact reason. If you could come up with an equitable and non exploitative system that works for everyone, suddenly you no longer have a need for unions.
>They could benefit some people? They benefit the workers who would otherwise be worked literally to death.
The problem is that they benefit workers not through productivity increases, but via collective bargaining, i.e. at the expense of society. Consider that when unions go on strike, they reduce economic productivity and disrupt the economy. Likewise, when unions fight to prevent factories from closing to protect the jobs of workers, this causes an inefficient allocation of resources - so now companies must bid up the prices of raw materials to produce things that nobody wants just to keep some people employed. Unions oppose automation for similar reasons, which is why we have the most inefficient ports in the world (worse than Africa!).
So in sum, unions do literally nothing to make society better off. What benefits unionized workers receive come at cost of society (including other unionized workers!)
>If you could come up with an equitable and non exploitative system that works for everyone, suddenly you no longer have a need for unions.
Capitalism is working great, actually. It would work better without unions.
This is braindead capitalist propaganda. Stop filling your head with garbage. At the very least, keep it to yourself so other people don't have to smell it. Gross.
Nothing I'm saying is particularly hard to understand or controversial - and that's with most economists being left-wing! If a field dominated by the left can't even find strong support for unions, then perhaps its actually you who lacks "any sort of understanding of how the world works".
Black flag attack next, like Hitler did, the right wing is obsessed with those. Or will crack down hard on a protest and when they try to fight back he'll declare a state of emergency.
Doubt anything short of a military coup that dismantles maga can stop this. Hopefully neither party survives and the US will have an actual democracy.
Stop being naive. This is an unelected billionaire successfully couping the government and replacing competent people with incompetent lackeys. Musk is fucking you over and you're cheering him on because you've suckled at the teat of propaganda for far too long. Get your head out of your ass and actually think
Denial on what is actually happening is rampant at the moment. When in weeks, months, and years the consequences of these actions maybe, maybe, it will be acknowledged, though the pattern has been so far scapegoating the 'other'.
I concur, but White House staff that are not confirmed by Congress have limits placed on their power when dealing with some agencies (as legislated by Congress) and there are of course many other laws and regulations pertaining to information security (FISMA), security clearances, data privacy, employee protections, and so on that I would expect such a White House functionary to respect.
See I know something of what actually wanting to fix the government's waste fraud and abuse would look like. It would be beefing up the IRS (where every dollar more than pays for itself), it would be banning people in congress from buying individual stocks; it would be a lot of things that deeply nerdy policy wonks have been saying for years.
That's not what I'm seeing happen. I'm not seeing cost benefit analysis, I'm not seeing the use of existing experts.
What I am seeing... well perhaps we'd have different perspectives. To pick an example, look Musk saying that people who are over 200 years old are marked as alive.
If you assume the worst of Elon Musk, you might think he's an idiot who doesn't understand how COBOL represents dates in the SSA system, nor how large government databases deal with missing data.
I've worked, not for the SSA, but with public health data. Real people and historical records and old databases are messy as fuck.
The SSA neither throw out data, nor do they add data they haven't received, except when there is funding appropriated for it.
So these old people are simply actually people they never got death info on.
Could they just add a date? Well you have to consider the data integrity issues around date of death. If you pick a nonsensical date, can you assume that the SSA, department of commerce, and other orgs, not to mention the internal SSA progroms that rely on processing SSA data can handle it? Nope, an engineer can't assume that, there's an implicit API.
But the fact is, this has been looked at. Per this 2023 audit the SSA estimated it would cost 5.5 to 9.7 million to mark people as deceased in the database when they don't have death date information. They didn't do that, probably because no money was appropriated for it.
Does that mean there's massive SSA fraud of dead people? Nope. back in 2015 they decided to automatically stop giving benefits to anyone over 115. The oldest living American is, in fact, Naomi Whitehead, who is 114.
In other word, Musk is acting like saving the government 5.5 million minimum is a "HUGE problem".
Now, I don't think Elon Musk is an idiot who doesn't understand COBOL or how messy data can be from real people. I also don't think he thinks that 200 year old benefits fraud is really an issue.
Which begs the question, why bring this up at all?
My interpretation is perhaps less charitable than yours, but I'd be interested in hearing what you think.
What’s especially frustrating, if you care about governance being more serious than pro wrestling, is that we have a couple organizations in government that’d happily provide all kinds of ways to reduce the deficit: the GAO and the CBO.
But they tend to say reality-based things like “no, your tax cuts won’t pay for themselves, in fact they’ll cost $1.2T over ten years” or “no, this war won’t pay for itself, lol, what the fuck even” or “no, you can’t make meaningful progress on cutting the deficit by attacking benefits fraud, because there’s not very much of that.”
All things Republicans would rather pretend aren’t true, and certainly don’t want to act on. So what do you do when you need to show progress but are constrained by operating based on fiction? You tout tiny wins and hope the numbers seem big to people who don’t know much; you make things up; and you cause harm or even incur long-term costs or cause waste and call that savings by doing bad accounting.
> See I know something of what actually wanting to fix the government's waste fraud and abuse would look like. It would be beefing up the IRS (where every dollar more than pays for itself), it would be banning people in congress from buying individual stocks; it would be a lot of things that deeply nerdy policy wonks have been saying for years.
This is exactly what the dems need. Currently we have two options.
#1 status quo complacency which does things like congressional insider trading, identity politics, is completely ancient, and useless and ineffectual in identifying or implementing any actual changes that would improve people's lives.
#2 is a wing of the party ready to take a wrecking ball to things (bravo), but thinks taxes are the solution to everything.
We need more wrecking ball type options than just #2. We need a diversity of wrecking ball options that are energetic, smart, able to identify the places where the system (both private industry & governmental) isn't functioning properly and have the guts to actually push change through.
That's not exactly true, to pick some examples Bernie quitting the race in 2020 used his connections with biden and got a lot of things into a unity party platform, and I've seen it argued that AOC and the green new deal pushed the overton window for the infrastructure recovery act, and while it definitely wasn't everything they hoped for, it did include elements, including a massive investment in clean energy.
Pelosi is the top grifter. Instead of spending her last years with her kids she stays “employed” in order to keep her and her families crimes under wraps. She will die in office, there will be great fan fair of how amazing she was, followed by countless breaking stories of her and her families corruption of over half a century.
