The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-government-young-engineers/

by medler • 1 year ago

1683 2539 1 year ago

medler6• 1 year ago

I don’t know how this will shake out, but I do worry that these 19-24 year olds, some of whom are known to HN for other achievements, are putting themselves in real legal jeopardy.

Edit: by the way, this post isn’t off-topic. It is about the activities of the US Digital Service (now known as Doge), and the exploits of young hackers who came up through top tech companies. It has implications for information systems security, especially as it relates to Silicon Valley culture.

minimaxir3• 1 year ago

From a journalistic standpoint, it's entirely fair to report on these 19-24 year olds, and it is not doxxing to do so. They are quite literally now involved in the US government, and are consenting adults making the rational decision to involve themselves in real legal jeopardy.

bko• 1 year ago

I guess that's good. It's interesting that we're just now learning the names of the people that hope to disrupt these agencies, but we don't know exactly who, or even how many, of these agencies existed.

In other words, there are these critically important agencies that I didn't even know existed, but they're basically the glue that holds together our democracy. Who runs these agencies is not important, what is important is that they continue to run as they have in the past and anyone looking to disrupt that should be thoroughly investigated.

JumpCrisscross4• 1 year ago

it's entirely fair to report on these 19-24 year olds

Of course it is. As it will be to go after them through the criminal justice system in years ahead. I believe OP’s point is they don’t realise the jeopardy they’re getting themselves into.

liontwist15• 1 year ago

So are public teachers. But I don’t think you would respond the same way.

maxerickson6• 1 year ago

Yeah, probably. Why does their jeopardy concern you more than the apparent lack of legitimate authority to do what they are doing?

medler6• 1 year ago

It doesn’t really. Obviously the alleged security breach is egregious and if they’re committing crimes they should be prosecuted. But given that they’re relatively young, part of me wonders if these guys are being exploited by Musk and Thiel and will be scapegoated if the political winds start blowing another way. But that makes no difference to their criminal liability.

electriclove6• 1 year ago

I thought Marco Rubio is acting director and has given them authority. Is this untrue? Why do you say apparent lack of legitimate authority?

Tadpole91812• 1 year ago

Why are you concerned? They're adults and know this is blatantly illegal and are serving their lord anyway. They don't even have the pleasure of deniability since the government officials literally stepped in, physically blocked them, and told them they weren't allowed.

Personally, I hope they get what's coming to them.

jjtheblunt3• 1 year ago

blatantly illegal

genuine question, not sarcastic: what specifically is blatantly illegal, violating what law?

johnnyanmac8• 1 year ago

I do worry that these 19-24 year olds, some of whom are known to HN for other achievements, are putting themselves in real legal jeopardy.

They 100% are. This is a full blackhat attack on a nation. Did they take no ethics class? (software or otherwise)?

aswanson• 1 year ago

The one kid just graduated high school. So, unlikely.

viccis• 1 year ago

My experience with ethics classes is that they usually just teach you good ways to justify whatever you want.

wyager5• 1 year ago

If you get your ethics from some class you took in college, you definitely shouldn't be given authority over anything important

beAbU4• 1 year ago

They are 19-24. They never completed college.

justin667• 1 year ago

I do worry that these 19-24 year olds, some of whom are known to HN for other achievements, are putting themselves in real legal jeopardy.

I worry that the law will not hold them accountable.

archagon2• 1 year ago

If not the law, then perhaps social consequences will.

guelo• 1 year ago

Nah theyll have pardons if they ever get into trouble. That was part of the reason trump pardoned the j6ers, to let all his minions know that they have free rein to commit crimes.

euroderf3• 1 year ago

That's why they need OPM: So they can run off a giant listing of DOGE-droids and tear it from the dot-matrix printer and stamp every page with a big rubber stamp saying "Pardoned! D.J. Trump"

afavour9• 1 year ago

I’d go as far as to say that’s the intention here. They’re fall guys and they’re too naive/arrogant to realise it.

People say “oh, Trump will pardon them” but I wouldn’t be so sure, why does he care? Once this is done they’re not of any real use to him so it’s entirely possible he won’t waste the political capital pardoning them. Would be in character for a guy famous for not paying folks who have done work for him.

latexr4• 1 year ago

I do worry that these 19-24 year olds (…) are putting themselves in real legal jeopardy.

On one side you have a handful of arrogant young adults doing the bidding of a couple of wannabe despotic man-babies. On the other you have an entire nation made up of millions of people and with major influence over the rest of the world.

I’m having a hard time understanding why your concern lies with the former.

drysine6• 1 year ago

man-babies

If only other babies could launch and land rockets. Call Musk what you want, but he is not a baby.

ty68533• 1 year ago

Lon Horiuchi could not be convicted for literally sniping an unarmed women with a child in her arms, standing in a doorway of her house threatening no one. Supremacy clause for executive federal employees.

They will be fine.

ansmithz422• 1 year ago

They are not executive employees, they are Musk employees, not the same thing.

dumah2• 1 year ago

Lon Horiuchi couldn't be convicted because the state's prosecutor dropped it.

venusenvy47• 1 year ago

I don't see why anyone should worry about the people actually committing crimes and being in legal jeopardy. That's the purpose of the legal system. People need to learn that ignorance of the law is not a defense.

kelnos27• 1 year ago

I really don't worry at all for these people. They're adults, even if young, and they've made their choice. Any consequences they suffer will be well deserved.

I'm sure Trump will preemptively pardon them at the end of his term anyway. My worry is that these people will never be held accountable for what they're doing.

Save your worry for things that actually matter.

nxm4• 1 year ago

Same like Biden and his crew of folks he preemtively pardoned

alfalfasprout7• 1 year ago

Why worry? They signed onto be one of Musk's sycophants are at this point are clearly aware of their actions. You can have accomplishments and still be on the wrong side of history.

ninalanyon• 1 year ago

When I was in that age range (five decades ago) everyone I knew of the same age was politically aware and many were politically active. Has that changed so much that they can claim to be naively unaware of what they are doing?

6stringmerc• 1 year ago

My experience working for Tyler Technologies in the Courts and Justice division opened my eyes to the absolutely arrogant and basically consequence-free mismanagement of public data in the hands of private enterprise. The fiasco with JudyRecords.com is absolutely important to keep in mind. If anything, I find stressing "efficiency" in government is simply a cover for "gutting functionality" because anytime something doesn't fit in "the model" of services then it simply gets dismissed.

Is this a technology equivalent to burning the libraries of old? Once the data is gone, come on, do you think any reasonable efforts will be made to restore it? Frankly speaking, is the course DOGE taking a mandate by the people to be enacted by representatives in the government or is it vice-versa, that "we are changing your society whether you like it or not" is the fundamental principle.

Then again, I just got out of jail after a year on a made-up Terroristic Threat charge politically motivated, so my perspective is likely skewed regarding motives and actions of those who have unchecked power at their disposal.

nico• 1 year ago

This is like crypto, or rewriting the whole code from scratch. Re-learning all the lessons

ericjmorey• 1 year ago

They're not going to learn anything. They're subverting the system for personal gain at the expense of everyone else.

TrackerFF5• 1 year ago

If they're engaged in doing illegal stuff, at the federal level, I fully expect Trump to just pardon everyone involved.

Maybe they're too deep in the Yarvin / Thield / Musk (Kool-Aid) sauce, but they should know better. This stuff will follow them for life.

Terr_9• 1 year ago

to just pardon

More likely Trump continue to fire prosecutors that try to do their jobs upholding the literal law. No prosecution, no pardon needed.

The check on that is for Congress to impeach and remove a corrupt President from office, but that will be difficult with how many Republicans are complicit.

nullocator• 1 year ago

Based on what we've seen this past week it seems the next administration would have an obligation to fire them all, in much the way Trump is firing anyone who looked into or investigated him. And extrapolating to the next few months I'd say the next administration will likely have an obligation to attempt to send anyone associated with DOGE to prison for the rest of their lives. At least this appears to be the type of government Donald Trump and his voters believe America should have.

Shekelphile• 1 year ago

They're directly attacking government infrastructure, including our intelligence apparatuses.

Even if they escape legal consequences they could become targeted for extrajudicial killings by intelligence agencies of the US and allies.

Vecr• 1 year ago

I assume these are US citizens. The US constitution isn't set up to protect intelligence agencies if they attempt that kind of thing on US soil.

electriclove6• 1 year ago

What attack?? They are working for our government.

xdennis• 1 year ago

If they're engaged in doing illegal stuff, at the federal level, I fully expect Trump to just pardon everyone involved.

Not trying to both-sides this, but the fact that Biden did that makes it more likely that Trump will do it too. It's a terrible precedent.

ric2b• 1 year ago

As if Trump cares about precedent. It makes no difference.

ck22• 1 year ago

Musk could not get US Security Clearance

He cannot enter certain facilities or meetings at SpaceX because of that.

Yet now he is bypassing that requirement.

None of these people are elected or confirmed by the Senate and they are doing extremely sensitive things to the government

That's not how any of this is supposed to work by law.

rbanffy3• 1 year ago

National secrets shouldn’t have been kept in a bathroom in Mar-a-Lago and, yet, here we are.

readthenotes16• 1 year ago

Nor in a garage, nor in unsecured university offices

logifail• 1 year ago

Q: Why are there (still) classified documents at USAID?

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/04/15/when-is-for...:

"U.S.A.I.D. was created in 1961 to help the United States win the “hearts and minds” of citizens in poor countries through civic action, economic aid and humanitarian assistance. As a cold war policy tool, the agency was, at times, used as a front for C.I.A. operations and operatives. Among the most infamous examples was the Office of Public Safety, a U.S.A.I.D. police training program in the Southern Cone that also trained torturers."

albroland• 1 year ago

musk holds TS clearance but not SCI

TrackerFF5• 1 year ago

Musk holding any level security clearance is farcical. It's the type of DEI that they're fighting so hard.

troelsSteegin• 1 year ago

https://doge.gov does not say anything about what the DOGE plan is, and https://www.usds.gov/ is not apparently up to date wrt DOGE. Is there something other than the Executive Order [0] that lays out concretely what DOGE intends to do? This group of engineers is doubtless skilled, but I don't seem them as the decision makers and planners here.

[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/esta...

ahazred8ta• 1 year ago

We went through something similar in the 1960s with the Whiz Kids, young college graduates from the RAND corporation with no experience in government or the military. 'But you have to obey us because we're so much smarter than you.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiz_Kids_(Department_of_Defen...

LastTrain7• 1 year ago

That wasn't even remotely similar to what is happening now.

KerrAvon2• 1 year ago

The Whiz Kids, for all their flaws, were duly and lawfully appointed. It wasn't this.

ck22• 1 year ago

Are they skilled? Or just arrogant and drunk on power?

Some of them most certainly could not pass US security clearance.

https://bsky.app/profile/jsweetli.bsky.social/post/3lh7nii7y...

zzzeek5• 1 year ago

the plan is more specifically this right wing crypto idea called "the network state" - using technological means to bring down the Democratic state and replace it with a crypto-based oligarchy that serves big tech interests only:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyl171lyewo

throw0101c4• 1 year ago

See perhaps "The bro-ligarchs have a vision for the new Trump term":

All of these men see themselves as the heroes or protagonists in their own sci-fi saga. And a key part of being a “technological superman” — or ubermensch, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would say — is that you’re above the law. Common-sense morality doesn’t apply to you because you’re a superior being on a superior mission. Thiel, it should be noted, is a big Nietzsche fan, though his is an extremely selective reading of the philosopher’s work.
The ubermensch ideology helps explain the broligarchs’ disturbing gender politics. “The ‘bro’ part of broligarch is not incidental to this — it’s built on this idea that not only are these guys superior, they are superior because they’re guys,” Harrington said.

[…]

The so-called network state is “a fancy name for tech authoritarianism,” journalist Gil Duran, who has spent the past year reporting on these building projects, told me. “The idea is to build power over the long term by controlling money, politics, technology, and land.”

* https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/395646/trump-inauguration...

Also maybe "Why big tech turned right":

* https://www.vox.com/politics/397525/trump-big-tech-musk-bezo...

General right-wing plan:

* https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c977njnvq2do

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025

mkoryak• 1 year ago

Nice, the $ logo is a 22.5kb 375x372 avif file resized to 48x48. That is efficient!

zelphirkalt3• 1 year ago

Only top engineers at work there. Pahhaha!

kelnos27• 1 year ago

Of course not. Getting all of this done requires overwhelming amounts of surprise. Trump signing a flood of executive orders is a part of this: it takes time to figure out what's going on with each one, and how to combat it. And in that time, the damage can already be done.

Musk and his coup team aren't really accountable to anyone but Trump, and have no direct legal authority. The way that they get things done is by threatening and steamrolling people, and gaining control of important functions (like the ability to put people on leave or fire them). All of this requires some amount of secrecy and chaos in order to pull off. If they were posting detailed plans on their website, it would make those plans harder to execute.

Nasrudith• 1 year ago

Didn't they already do exactly that with Project 2025?

mrkeen6• 1 year ago

[https://doge.gov/]

  Sorry, you have been blocked
  You are unable to access doge.gov

Feels like the Twitter transition again.

Hey remember when there was concern that he might not have time to effectively run Tesla and SpaceX. And then Twitter. And 12 kids. Or popping ketamine and playing Diablo 4 all night.

I guess he's got time to run the country too.

Phelinofist• 1 year ago

I'm also blocked. Is it some geo block perhaps? I'm from Germany

burgerrito• 1 year ago

I'm from Indonesia and my access has been blocked too.

jxramos2• 1 year ago

I think they're posting their daily updates on their X channel https://x.com/DOGE

DemocracyFTW2• 1 year ago

https://archive.ph/QYBhK

twochillin• 1 year ago

why was this flagged?

rbanffy3• 1 year ago

Having the word “Elon” seems to bring out the worst in us. I still believe we can have civil discussions about topics that might be considered taboo.

AnimalMuppet5• 1 year ago

[flagged]

chairmansteve4• 1 year ago

And yet..... almost all your recent are related to Musk...

LastTrain7• 1 year ago

Given who is involved this is as relevant as it gets here.

johnnyanmac8• 1 year ago

Yeah, we know, tech is bleeding over into politics, but... how many Musk stories do we need in one day?

You should Ask Musk to cool down then. We didn't vote him in. We didn't ask him to break the law and compromise american security. We didn't grant him access to the US treasury. "We" voted this in. Those who didn't want this are 3 months too late.

And I see this excuse on every platform. I see a story I don't want to engage with... I just move on. Maybe you browse new, but I've never seen politics be "the dominant topic on HN".

computerthings9• 1 year ago

Some of us are sick of politics all over HN all the time.

That was never the situation.

how many Musk stories do we need in one day? However many the number is, we're past it.

So the number is zero. Having one story for each major separate event is one story too many. This is still what it is. The longer the rationalizations for it get, the more sad it gets.

breadwinner4• 1 year ago

So this feels like a hostile takeover of the machinery of governments by the richest man in the world.

... and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Checks and balances have been neutralized.

TrackerFF5• 1 year ago

Checks and balances were never tried in the first place. There must have been some assumption of decorum and decency, so strong that whatever loopholes are, have been left wide open.

Without a competent or impartial FBI and AG, there's literally zero chance these people will be investigated.

With a house and senate that fears the president, there will be no impeachment.

And even if they successfully manage to impeach the president, I'm 100% sure Trump will challenge it.

Yeah, buckle up and enjoy the ride. Gonna be 4 very, very long years.

breadwinner4• 1 year ago

4 years? Trump has been talking about a third term.

“It would be my greatest honor to serve not once but twice,” Mr. Trump told an audience on Saturday. “Maybe three times.” https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/26/us/politics/trump-boundar...

nailer10• 1 year ago

Checks and balances have been neutralized.

That seems somewhat inverted - the elected government is creating checks and balances on unelected bureaucrats.

92834092326• 1 year ago

Elon Musk was elected? News to me.

justin667• 1 year ago

"Checks and balances" is a phrase that applies to the ability of the three coequal branches of government to hold one another in check.

triceratops• 1 year ago

By sending in their own unelected bureaucrats

vixen99• 1 year ago

You're in the wrong place for a comment like that. Don't even bother.

jonnycomputer• 1 year ago

Can't believe this is flagged.

relaxing3• 1 year ago

Honest question: how do things get unflagged? Do users at some level gain vouch privileges?

johnnyanmac8• 1 year ago

They 99.99999% of the time don't. I think only dang has that ability and he won't really step in unless there are some truly rouge actors.

justin667• 1 year ago

If you use the vouch feature much, eventually they take it away from you. Same with upvoting and downvoting, but it all happens silently so most people don't notice.

minimaxir3• 1 year ago

If a post is flagged-but-you-can-still-comment, then it can't be vouched.

If a post is flagkilled w/ comments disabled, then you can typically vouch.

dredmorbius8• 1 year ago

It's possible to vouch for stories and comments.

You can also email moderators at hn@ycombintor.com to request unflagging. I do that occasionally, with mixed results. (I've come to know which are long shots, and typically concede the point, but at least make the attempt.)

bathtub365• 1 year ago

It looks like there are people flagging literally every story related to DOGE.

johnnyanmac8• 1 year ago

I'm not. Pretty sure at this point that anything about Musk that doesn't involve Tesla or SpaceX is just being impulsed flagged.

ddalex• 1 year ago

Time to flag SpaceX and Tesla too...

camillomiller• 1 year ago

All stories about Musk’s coup are. Disgusting. Where is dang?

segasaturn5• 1 year ago

Of course it's flagged, this site is an altar to worship at the feet of the American oligarchy. It's as rotten as the rest of Silicon Valley.

As JWZ put it:

"A venture capital company's fan club, finance-obsessed manchildren making the world worse"

Slightly NSFW source: https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2024/hn.png

dang14• 1 year ago

I turned the flags off on this story 24 minutes before you posted this.

Care to revise your view?

dredmorbius8• 1 year ago

Flags are applied by users in virtually all cases, not mods.

Contentious topics, regardless of how merited a discussion might be, tend to draw flags inordinately. But again, you generally can't blame mods for this.

(HN does systemically penalise, or outright ban, numerous sites. I strongly doubt Wired is in either category, though if you want to know for certain, you can email mods. For a number of fairly evident reasons the full list isn't publicly disclosed, though pg provided some lists and extracts early in HN's histoyry, notably <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=499044> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4984095>. There were 38,719 banned sites as of the end of 2012, a number which has doubtless increased.)

nailer10• 1 year ago

Why? The article is provably false - these are demonstrably not inexperienced engineers.

andyg_blog• 1 year ago

Please elaborate? I define experience in terms of mostly "time" spent on something. And I consider any engineer with less than 5 yrs of experience as "inexperienced" regardless of whether they are talented or not. I've met many talented, but inexperienced engineers who still needed redirecting.

indoordin0saur7• 1 year ago

Pure political posts are usually flagged. Go to Reddit.

anigbrowl3• 1 year ago

You just got here last year. This place has always been political.

Whatarethese2• 1 year ago

They are adults. They work for the federal government. They deserve no privacy protections.

electriclove6• 1 year ago

I keep seeing a contradiction that I’m having a hard time explaining. On one hand, there are numerous comments saying that what these individuals are doing is illegal. On the other hand, there are comments saying they work for the federal government and so doxxing them is fair game.

If they work for the government, how is what they are doing illegal?

kelnos27• 1 year ago

They don't actually work for the federal government. That's a big part of the problem. Trump has just given them access.

lostdog9• 1 year ago

Being an employee of the federal government doesn't give you access to everything. There are laws, passed by Congress, about who is allowed to do what.

twen_ty• 1 year ago

Why is this flagged?

fzliu• 1 year ago

I don't understand why the editors allowed the engineers' names to be made public. What did they hope to gain by doing this other than making them magnets for harassment and possibly threats?

minimaxir3• 1 year ago

The identities of the engineers are now unambigiously in the public interest as they now have an impact on the government. These aren't scrappy hackers trolling on internet forums.

rozap2• 1 year ago

They're public servants. Most public servants have their name, position, level, salary, etc listed in public datasets. There is no "doxxing" of public servants. This isn't a usenet.

ceejayoz12• 1 year ago

Now do @libsoftiktok.

Or Musk himself: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1858916546338590740 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1858914228624924963

fullshark5• 1 year ago

The American people deserve to know what is happening in their government.

tgv4• 1 year ago

Isn't it free speech? Yes, that is a comment in style against the guidelines of this forum, but you've got to admire the irony.

latency-guy22• 1 year ago

In normal circumstances, e.g. as contractors I would agree. However, they are not, as far as I can tell they are operating as federal employees. No federal employee name is private.

I do see this (article) as mostly retaliation though. Maybe deserved or not. Hard to tell at this point. But these people are public employees nevertheless, they never had the option for anonymity.

xnx3• 1 year ago

Are such drastic action appropriate given the current state of the US? The US probably hasn't been this economically dominant since after WWII.

Feels like Chesterton fences are getting torn up left and right by people too young and incurious to possibly understand why those fences might be there.

mystified5016• 1 year ago

Some people in the us government are very afraid of China.

Whether that fear is justified is a totally different topic

psunavy032• 1 year ago

Why yes, let's let a totalitarian state become a superpower and start dictating the international order. I'm sure Xi Jinping will prove to be just as cuddly as Winnie the Pooh; nothing to worry about here.

KerrAvon2• 1 year ago

No, they are not. This is a bizarre and highly illegal coup by Musk simply because he can, and who's going to enforce the law? Trump's corrupt DOJ?

electriclove6• 1 year ago

Can you explain what is illegal? Aren’t the people that Wired doxxed actually being paid by the government?

jeffgreco3• 1 year ago

Not sure why this is being downvoted as Musk & co's actions are clearly bizarre and illegal.

toast0• 1 year ago

I don't get how this could be a coup, Trump was duly elected, and he's delegated this power to Musk. It could certainly be bizarre and highly illegal, but to me, the essential piece of a coup is unseating the rightful leadership, and there's no element of that at present.

Judging from his last term, at some point Trump is likely to get tired of Musk, kick him out of the administration, declare he always thought Musk was a bad guy, and pretend like he never listened to him. If Musk tries to stay in after that, it could be a coup.

bende5114• 1 year ago

In a just world, these kids will end up in jail for a long time, and Musk for the rest of his life. In a less just world, well, I don't want to get banned

afavour9• 1 year ago

Never appropriate. The actions are entirely unconstitutional. If the US decided to disband USAID it would have to be an act of congress, unelected friends of the president don’t come close to being able to make that call.

aaomidi3• 1 year ago

Doesn’t matter if laws don’t matter and aren’t enforced.

jaggederest7• 1 year ago

In a sensu stricto it's illegal, but practically and regrettably they are able to make that call, because though there are rules against it, unless the sergeant at arms of the senate goes out and handcuffs them, nobody is going to stop them. When the executive branch and the judiciary both decide to ignore the legislative branch, what is the legislative branch going to do?

brtkdotse• 1 year ago

The actions are entirely unconstitutional.

For all the fetishization of the constitution popular media has led me to believe Americans engage in, when push comes to shove it doesn’t seem to be worth the paper it’s written on.

ahmeneeroe-v219• 1 year ago

Strict constitutionalists would call many of these programs unconstitutional.

This is a problem for the left and for neo-cons; they flouted the constitution for so long, that now that someone else (Trump) is doing it to them, the left/neocons don't really have a base that responds well to cries of "Unconstitutional!".

billfor3• 1 year ago

Totally appropriate. Everytime congress would ask USAID for information on their spending or audit what they were doing, they would just ignore the requests and say they were apolitical. They're not apolitical. The state department is by definition political, and responsible for the US interests. Totally reasonable to roll it under the state department where they will have to answer questions and not refuse audits. It's not going away it's just going to be accountable to the public that pays its budget (the US taxpayer).

jmyeet2• 1 year ago

Something is "constitutional" if nine unelected political operatives in black robes with lifetime appointments say it is.

This same court invented prisidential immunity out of thin air. They invented "history and tradition" doctrine out of thin air (and then selectively applied it). They invented "major questsions" doctrine to allow them to act as all three branches whenever they want to.

There is absolutely no opposition to any of this. There are only the perpetrators and the controlled opposition who are 100% complicit with what's going on.

Nobody is coming to save you and certainly not the courts.

stainablesteel9• 1 year ago

what's unconstitutional is how USAID would stiff-arm senators who want to investigate their activities

UniverseHacker• 1 year ago

Your comment assumes that the constitution and democracy still stand- which does not appear to me to be the case. Hopefully I’m wrong.

megous3• 1 year ago

Too late, Musk already has direct access to Treasury systems:

https://www.crisesnotes.com/elon-musk-wants-to-get-operation...

And can incite people against anything he chooses on X, like:

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1885964969335808217

and he can certainly act quicker than any checks and ballances. We'll see how the system works to get rid of the chaos monkey on the inside.

colechristensen• 1 year ago

The actions are entirely unconstitutional.

At this point, who cares? The democrats in power have proven themselves wholly incapable of doing anything for many years now.

jimmydddd• 1 year ago

US National Debt Adds $1 Trillion Every 100 Days.

skywhopper6• 1 year ago

What is your point?

tyre4• 1 year ago

Yes and it is fine. That’s a scary number with zero context, but given the borrowing rate and the investments we’re making in future GDP, this is good borrowing!

it isn’t good when a group of people tries to destroy the entity that’s making those investments. These shitheads are basically corporate raiders coming in to tear things apart for personal gain.

Ironically, it is the “fiscally responsible”, “WhY nOt RuN gOvErNmEnT lIkE a BuSiNeSs” gang who want to destroy any fiscally responsible investment.

If they want to reduce spending meaningfully, they need to cut defense, social security, and Medicare. They won’t, because it’s political suicide.

jacobjjacob8• 1 year ago

If a balanced budget led to a flat or negative GDP, reduced the USA’s power and influence globally, and/or lowered standards of living, then would it still be desirable? What exactly is the argument against a deficit besides that it might be giving some groups leverage over the USA, which is dubious?

caspper69• 1 year ago

Who holds the vast majority of the debt of the government of the United States?

Hint: it's not China, the UK or any other foreign government.

It's us silly. We owe ourselves. :)

mindcandy5• 1 year ago

76 of those days are social security, medicare/medicaid, vet benefits, income security for the poorest citizens and interest payments.

15 of those days are national defense.

9 of those days are what Elon hopes to cut in half.

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

The deficit is a huge problem. I don't know how to fix it. But, what DOGE has done so far is exactly the opposite of what makes sense.

mempko• 1 year ago

To put it another way, the private sector gets an income of $1 trillion every 100 days. Now suppose you stop that income. What happens to the private sector?

timeon• 1 year ago

So US is trying Germany's austerity?

nomel7• 1 year ago

Are such drastic action appropriate given the current state of the US?

With the debt ceiling ever increasing, approaching a trillion dollars in interest per year, nearing $6k/year per working individual, I would say the correct time to put any effort, whatsoever, into reducing spending, was 20 years ago.

I think the fundamental problem is we lack adversarial systems within the government: it doesn't like to hurt itself. Trying to cut jobs/waste/find fraud is political/career suicide for anyone in government. Accountability requires a true adversary/"outsider". Should that be DOGE, or its current implementation? Probably not. Should the adversarial concept of DOGE exist? I would enjoy seeing arguments against the concept. It seems like it's severely needed.

skywhopper6• 1 year ago

You are way underreacting to what’s going on here. This is not about saving money, or trying to cut waste or fraud. Elon Musk has been posting wild conspiracies on X to justify what he’s doing. But the actual changes are reactionary and political. Accountability is long gone if someone like Elon is in direct charge of what bills get paid. Fraud and waste will skyrocket in these conditions.

wahnfrieden3• 1 year ago

Trying to cut jobs/waste/find fraud is political/career suicide for anyone in government

US Government Accountability Office already existed to do this, without it being career suicide for those involved (at least until Trump began attempting to end it despite being nonpartisan)

bdangubic5• 1 year ago

start with the “defense” budget first, cut that by 95% and go from there… oh wait, that money is going to… :)

watwut9• 1 year ago

There is about zero chance Trump and Musk will make debt smaller.

derektank3• 1 year ago

US debt as a percentage of GDP (i.e. our ability to pay off our debt) has basically remained static since COVID. I agree that the US requires a serious debate about our fiscal priorities and the appropriate levels of spending and taxation, particularly with automatic social security cuts looming. But it is nowhere near an emergency and fiscal decisions are the responsibility of Congress, not the executive.

ChicagoDave7• 1 year ago

Our national debt is directly related to the 45 years of regressive tax policy.

rurp• 1 year ago

Any remotely serious attempt to balance the budget will have to involve serious cuts to some or all of Defense, Medicare, and Social Security; along with tax increases, either new taxes or closing loopholes. Trump and Elon are completely uninterested in doing any of those things, and are in fact going to make them worse.

Indiscriminately firing federal workers whose salaries will collectively make up maybe one tenth of one percent of the budget is not at all about reducing debt, that's just the thin justification they are using the destroy any independence and competence within the government that might get in the way of their looting and corruption.

Anyone who thinks that Trump and Musk are serious about reducing the federal debt at this point aren't likely to be swayed by anything I say. But for anyone who genuinely believes that I hope you will look at what the national debt and deficit are right now, and then to check on them in a few years when both are dramatically worse. You will find that two of the most prominent bullshitters in the world are in fact bullshitting on this topic as well.

kristjansson4• 1 year ago

You’re describing the independent Inspectors General. That were summarily fired. Could they have had more power and independence? Sure. But there were real independent offices doing what you describe.

The problem is EM and DOGE are equating “fraud and waste” to “I think it’s wasteful”, which is a judgement the adversarial auditor should not be allowed to make.

KennyBlanken3• 1 year ago

And guess whose fault that deficit is? Answer: Bush and Trump.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/tax-cuts-are-primar...

https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/the-2017-trump-tax...

https://www.propublica.org/article/national-debt-trump

https://www.budget.senate.gov/chairman/newsroom/press/extend...

He campaigned (first time) to reduce the national debt and instead exploded it by giving massive tax cuts to corporations and the wealthiest of the wealthy.

https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/trump-plan-boosts-bud...

Something something promises something kept?

yodsanklai• 1 year ago

I would say the correct time to put any effort, whatsoever, into reducing spending, was 20 years ago.

Alternatively, it's possible to increase revenue.

stfp• 1 year ago

Haven't republicans been campaigning on reducing govt spending for like 50 years?

Aren't other countries adversarial enough?

I think these are made up concerns. By and large the US is dominant in the real world, and always will be given its size, location and cultural foundations. And that translates to being able to print and spent a large amount of money, which could be used to solve real world problems, such as:

- climate change and the need to transition energy, transportation over time with some urgency

- chronic housing shortage

- education costs

Instead they're focusing on fake problems and solutions that will make the real problems worse.

UltraSane32• 1 year ago

Strange how the national debt increases much faster when the president is a Republican. Republicans love to run the debt up when they are in power and then use it as a weapon when they are not.

JohnHaugeland• 1 year ago

The things being done make the deficit worse, not better

mycall• 1 year ago

The US government owes about 2.5 years of median salary to every American, but when an average work lifecycle is 40 years, it isn't too bad.

jimkleiber14• 1 year ago

We have it: three branches of government. But the political branch loyalty has been superseded by political party loyalty and it breaks the system.

What I think should happen is that the vast majority of legislators (Senators/Representatives) should be furious that the Executive branch is disregarding laws that they wrote themselves. And the justices should be furious that the Executive branch is disbeying their interpretation of the law.

iNic2• 1 year ago

I am happy to cut government spending and increase government efficiency (obviously). I have so far not seen any evidence that DOGE is working is this direction. As I like to point out the marginal dollar spent on the IRS brings in ~$10 of revenue. If DOGE or Trump really cared about the deficit they would expand the IRS. They would take ease the burden of NEPA, but in the meantime increase the number of bureaucrats to make the process faster. They would reform the Paperwork Reduction Act. They would make it easier for government officials to handpick hires.

On the policy side they would push for port automation. They would get rid of the Jones act. They could standardize and simplify the tax code (& get rid of loopholes like stepped up basis)

Instead they are breaking random government websites, blocking & politicizing USAID (< 1% of budget), mass firing with seemingly no plan for running various orgs, trying to increase mass incarceration (?) and reinforcing captured markets (like TurboTax).

derangedHorse5• 1 year ago

By what metric do you think the U.S. is as “economically dominant” as it was in the period after WWII?

immibis2• 1 year ago

Most of the world's currency is backed by the currency they print? The USA has to spend a few cents to gain a hundred dollar bill, but any other country has to exchange a hundred dollars of actual goods and services (to the USA!). Losing this privilege would be devastating.

watwut9• 1 year ago

It does not matter. If republican party voters cared about appropriateness, they would not picked up Trump and Musk. They picked them because they wanted to see maximal harm and they see lack of ethics/morals as strength.

jazz9k3• 1 year ago

No. They want to stop the bleeding from the last 4 years. I blame the person that made the mess. Not the one cleaning it up and showing it to us.

riskable2• 1 year ago

You said it! How long before a lot of small countries start leaving treaties like the Berne Convention? Why would they bother protecting other big countries copyrights when they're no longer getting support through programs like USAID and there's no longer any guarantee that the US will protect them in any way.

The first country to pull out has the chance to make like $100 billion by creating the next TikTok competitor that never takes down content for violating anyone's copyright. It'll be like Edison moving to Hollywood all over again! Let the gold rush begin!

rapht• 1 year ago

You see the carrot vanishing... OK. But what about the stick? The whole point of Trump's policy is 'we forgot the stick, let's use it again'. I see this true for international policy but you could probably extend that to that infamous DOGE: Fed agencies must be 'productive' (whatever that means), or else.

nine_k4• 1 year ago

I don't think these fences are being torn down by inexperienced engineers by their own initiative. They have a mandate (or so they think), a direction, and maybe specific orders from much more experienced folks, AFAICT.

huijzer• 1 year ago

The US probably hasn't been this economically dominant since after WWII.

Where do you base that on? China’s GDP is huge. It overtook the whole EU’s GDP.

tehjoker2• 1 year ago

What are you talking about? The whole reason this is happening is because US economic dominance is being eclipsed and dedollarization is occurring at a rapid pace. This is a freak out and reorganization of foreign policy and the economy to cope with that situation.

TOMDM• 1 year ago

Is there any data you can share that backs that up?

ikiris• 1 year ago

If by cope you mean ensure it happens by running our economic power into a trade war iceberg.

bende5114• 1 year ago

what are you talking about? this statement of yours does not match reality in any way

screye2• 1 year ago

Sure, a cold war has started and China is the enemy. But why make enemies out of your closest allies?

The US tried tariffs during Japan's rise as an automobile powerhouse. Look where that's left the American auto industry.

Sanctions have their place as a carrot and stick mechanism. But Trump offers no carrots. Only stick.

PeterStuer2• 1 year ago

The US is tethering on the brink of hyperinflation due to not just the last 4 but the last 40 years. Interest on the debt is insurmountable.

You can argue whether the chosen approach is right, but no matter what, a drastically different course is needed as 'business as usual' is a sure way to disaster.

I for one hope the US get their act together at home rather than dragging the world into WWIII.

czzr2• 1 year ago

Your model for the economy is just utterly wrong. The US is in zero danger of hyperinflation, and probably has the smallest debt issues of any country (certainly of any major country).

Now, the problem is - what to do about how badly informed you and millions of Americans are. That you cheer for the destruction of valuable and painfully built state capacity for completely spurious reasons. It’s almost funny, except for all the innocent people who get hurt along the way.

cco2• 1 year ago

Please please please take a minute to look at this administration's tax plan and their previous one.

They did already and are planning to again add trillions to our deficit. Go look at it, it's laid out very clearly.

There is no good faith here, these actions are a plundering of the state.

jjallen• 1 year ago

Is economic dominance the right metric to be looking at?

Yes, the US is the biggest economy. This doesn’t mean its ability to pay liabilities is infinite. Every amount of income has a particular amount of debt and interest that it is able to pay.

Take the largest company. It would not be able to service infinite debt. Apple could not service $5 trillion in debt, just like the US could not service 300 trillion.

I get why some people are concerned about the US’s liabilities and its global police status.

Also stopping giving many other countries billions of dollars a year after might be drastic. But I see why some people may not like this. Individuals can give to charities instead if this is really such a problem for them.

Now cutting research and other things is really dumb. Glad they reversed that quickly. Also needlessly licking fights with our neighbors is also really dumb.

Now only if we can reduce our military spending as well.

starspangled6• 1 year ago

Are such drastic action appropriate given the current state of the US? The US probably hasn't been this economically dominant since after WWII.

Why is USAID needed most in times when the US is very "economically dominant"?

vkou8• 1 year ago

Because it takes decades of investment and work to build up international trust and soft power, but as it turns out, it takes all of two weeks for a fool to destroy it.

Look at how that turned out for Bismark's Germany after he was gone. His successors were high on their own supply, and in pursuit of short-term wins, destroyed the careful network of relationships and alliances that he curated.

Beijing is, no doubt, finding this entire folly amusing.

doctorpangloss2• 1 year ago

fences are getting torn up left and right by people too young and incurious to possibly understand why those fences might be there.

So you're saying they hired a bunch of undistinguished Berkeley drop-outs just because they're libertarians? A sort of affirmative action for libertarians?

It's always projection with these guys.

ahmeneeroe-v219• 1 year ago

Is this really a drastic action? As others in this thread have pointed out, these programs are a single-digit percentage of the Federal budget. We could delete these completely and still have a budget that is 90% the same as last year.

intended8• 1 year ago

Wow. That’s a refreshing take on the reducing the corruption angle.

If these programs are so small, why aren’t they going after the real grift? It’s too hard? Why the small, more relevant to citizens programs get cut first?

Because its easy to avoid the military spending and the black box that represents.

screye2• 1 year ago

USD as reserve currency is a hen that lays golden eggs.

The US maintains monopoly on this free money cheat through goodwill driven manufactured consent, diplomacy, financial bullying and military might. Each subsequent tool being more heavy handed & less preferred than the last. Heavy handed tools while effective, break more than they fix. This prudence sustains Pax Americana.

In 2025 America, good will is at an all-time-low. Mechanisms for classical diplomacy are being actively dismantled by Elon-Trump. Financial bullying is now the cudgel of choice. Pax Americana is under threat.

Post-WW2 peace is among mankind's most remarkable civilizational achievements. It isn't self-evident and it definitely isn't the historic norm. How long until nations start questioning the deal ? How many decades of work is being dismantled within days ?

May be hyperbole, but the locks on Chesterton-Pandora's box are being opened. It might work out, but Elon's aggressiveness seems so unnecessary at a time when the American economy is doing exceedingly well.

diob2• 1 year ago

I'm honestly terrified that they'll turn my savings to some sort of nothing by fucking over our currency.

I don't know how anyone isn't.

insane_dreamer7• 1 year ago

Closing USAID is idiotic from a foreign policy perspective. Gives China a huge opportunity to fill the void in countries and grow its global influence. It’s already done so in Africa due to US being so preoccupied with the “war on terror”. Not to mention that aiding developing countries - reduces chances of instability/conflicts/etc which otherwise end up costing much more. Plus it’s about access to raw materials (why do you think China cares about Africa?). Idiotic no matter how you look at it.

nxm4• 1 year ago

A lot of what USAID was spending money on would shock people. Meanwhile, no money left to rebuild parts of the US

refurb3• 1 year ago

You realize USAID has been a conduit for CIA activities pretty much since its establishment? I mean the hint is the fact its head sits on the National Security Council. Why does a friendly aid organization need a seat at that table?

USAID played a huge role in the Vietnam War by supporting things like “civil defense forces” arming villages against Viet Cong, land reform and “open arms” program to get defectors from the North.

https://www.archives.gov/research/foreign-policy/assistance/...

It had little to do with no strings attached foreign aid. It’s mostly been an arm of US covert activities in other countries (providing cover) and a massive, massive slush fund for the CIA (hence the billions going to “undisclosed recipients”).

bitsage2• 1 year ago

That’s an interesting thought because I saw Trump, and many other elections, as a conservative reaction. A main complaint I see is people thinking the country is going backwards, rather than into uncharted territory.

naravara• 1 year ago

The young and incurious have been targeted, recruited, and brainwashed into this by tech moguls for just this reason. A steady diet of calcified resentments against vague, post-modernist buzzword nonsense like “woke” and “DEI” has created a whole political movement around getting unreasonably angry over feeling slighted about symbolic representation in pop culture to the point where they’re going to bring the whole country down it’s insane.

But of course, that’s exactly what would be oligarchs want.

gauravphoenix3• 1 year ago

The US probably hasn't been this economically dominant since after WWII.

now look at the deficits.

ceejayoz12• 1 year ago

Which are roughly like me having a mortgage that’s the same as my annual salary. Which is quite commonplace.

It’d be a problem if we had to pay it all off tomorrow, but we don’t.

ggddv• 1 year ago

Chesterton fence == I don’t have an argument but I do have a fence and you don’t, so I guess somebody should have learnt their lesson!

elzbardico2• 1 year ago

> The US probably hasn't been this economically dominant since after WWII.

In which parallel reality do you live? Some metrics:

- U.S. share of global GDP (nominal). 40% in 1960 to around 24% nowadays.

- Share of global exports from the peak of 17% in 1963, to around 8.5% today (China is 14%).

- Global R&D expending from the 1960 peak of 69% to 30% today with China closing the gap currently at 23%.

- Reserve currency status of the Dollar dropped from 71% to 59%.

- Share of outward Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) 47% in 1960 vs 22% in 2022.

Even the strongest selling point of the american economy of being the largest consumer economy is strongly dependent on high levels of consumer debt as well as the ability to sustain gigantic trade deficits based on the global appetite for the dollar and US bonds.

And then we have some other points of concern: In 1950, manufacturing represented 28% of GDP, while FIRE was 10%. Today, manufacturing is 10%, and FIRE is 20%. FIRE’s dominance reflects financialization — prioritizing short-term profit through financial engineering over productive, long-term investment. It encourages Rent-Seeking vs Productive Activity, for example, in Finance, much of the sector’s growth comes from fees, interest, and speculative trading (e.g., derivatives, high-frequency trading) rather than financing innovation or infrastructure. In Real Estate Rising prices often reflect speculation rather than new construction or improved living standards. This leads to inequality amplification, FIRE disproportionately benefits high-income earners (e.g., Wall Street, landlords). The top 1% owns 53% of stocks and 40% of real estate wealth (Fed data), which exacerbates wealth gaps without broadly improving household economic security. Real Estate alone now accounts for ~60% of corporate profits, something that create obvious systemic risks.

The US is still the richest and most powerful country in the world, but it is far from being as economically dominant as it was in the past, exactly the contrary of what you said.

I understand that after the gains we all had in the stock market in recent times, we might be tempted to consider this as a measure of the health of American Economy and considering market capitalizations, its global dominance. But that is a mistake. Stock Prices reflect investor sentiment, not fundamentals, they are driven by factors like speculation, liquidity and future expectations, not direct economic performance. Also, a handful of mega-cap companies dominate indexes, which introduces a lag that could mask broader economic issues. For example, the "Magnificent Seven" drove around 75% of the S&P 2023 gains, while small-cap stocks lagged. Also, tech and finance dominate markets, but they are not labor intensive, and thus they can't contribute as much to employment. Also, as the top 10% of the households own almost 90% of stocks, rising markets enrich the wealthy but don't reflect wage growth or living standards.

Also, a lot of the stock market exhuberance has been driven by things like stock buybacks, inflating share prices at the expense of investment and wages.

azakai• 1 year ago

True that the US's share of global GDP is lower than it has been. But there are many other ways to measure its power (and dominance), so it is easy to argue about this between reasonable people.

Rather than make any specific point, I'd recommend acoup's detailed post about the US's overwhelming dominance across a huge swath of areas:

https://acoup.blog/2022/07/08/collections-is-the-united-stat...

I think he makes a good case there, even if you are right and by some measurements the US did better in the past.

oblio5• 1 year ago

Regarding the metrics, 1945 to roughly 1971 or more realistically, 2010, were anomalies.

The US watched the rest of the world burn itself down during WW1 (partially) and during WW2 (almost completely).

There were basically 0 industrialized countries doing better in 1945 than they were in 1928.

The US reached those insane peaks because of a total aberration. It was never going to last.

China and India, for example, have been between 1/3 and 1/2 of the world economy for multiple millennia.

After the Age of Discovery Europe as a whole took over at least 1/3 itself.

The US would do well to adjust to this new reality, but I guess the temptation to make America great again is too strong.

jmyeet2• 1 year ago

I'm not sure why people are focusing on the engineers here. The fish rots from the head.

Elon is the definition of Dunning-Kruger. He seems smart (maybe) when he's talking about something you know nothing about but as soon as he talks about something you do know about, the illusion quickly shatters. Many here learned this after the Twitter takeover when he started talking about software and technical infrastructure.

The only thing going on here is some performative cuts to mollify the base and make some headlines. The real goal here is looting the public purse for the (further) benefit of the ultra-wealthy.

Welcome to the kleptocracy.

nxobject15• 1 year ago

It’s the definition of failing up: you sin bullshit for long enough, and make big enough changes, that you get your next job before you’re accountable for the consequences.

coldtea3• 1 year ago

If it's at some economic dominance peak is at the point at the top of an upward curve, when the acceleration has ended and the object reaches 0 velocity before coming back. It's a downward trajectory: public debt, failing infrastructure, failing manufacturing capabilities, failing leadership, failing rule of law, increased irrelevance on the world stage, and let's not get started with the culture.

If the dollar falls further from being the global reserve currency (something which both administrations did their best to ensure it will happen) that will be an even worse blow.

That there are people in bubbles believing it's all fine, or they never been better, is also a contributing factor to all this.

karuselli• 1 year ago

Agreed - it’s arguably as much a risk-on behavior as the excessive spending they’re warning about. They are using a similar cut-first mentality to what has been done in the private sector, but in the govt there are more considerations than the direct economic impacts of the actions. In an ideal world the better route is likely to spend more time on analysis before making cuts and to try and reduce variance, but it’s fair to say that might impede the initiative entirely plus they are trying to act quickly before the opposition wakes up.

nxobject15• 1 year ago

Or, for that matter, before the judiciary can act as a balance. Establishing “facts on the ground”.

almostdeadguy2• 1 year ago

Young, inexperienced people have a hard time saying “no”. It’s even harder when working 120 hour weeks where you have less than 7 hours a day outside work (not even enough to get a full nights rest): https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-doge-work-silicon-...

Sleep deprivation, stress and overwork, controlling the lives of participants, targeting at risk populations, etc. are cult programming techniques.

UltraSane32• 1 year ago

This is actually curtis yarvin's RAGE (retire all government employees) concept. Curtis Yarvin, an extreme right-wing tech person out of Silicon Valley and the person who JD Vance is a disciple of. Their belief is that the U.S. government itself “must be deleted” and that what the country needs is not a president but a dictator, which is what a CEO of any successful corporation actually is. Yarvin said that the American people “must get over their ‘dictator phobia’” while Vance says we have to do things that make even conservatives “uncomfortable.”

hsuduebc23• 1 year ago

It's just big tech weakening the power of state. The economics incentive is just a cover up for masses and politicians.

templeOSdotcom• 1 year ago

The U.S. national debt has been increasing at a rate of approximately $1 trillion every 100 days, which equates to about 10 days to add $100 billion. When do we hit the panic button?

lostdog9• 1 year ago

Trump's first term is responsible for a large portion of the debt. He should take accountability and step down.

elif3• 1 year ago

I think assuming that their intentions are a well functioning economy have been disproven by the rapid pace of kicking pillars out from under it.

Occams razor would instead suggest that either a recession or some other form of social instability is not an externality but an objective.

It makes me scared for what the ultimate aim is, but I think at this point it's beyond giving him the benefit of the doubt.

jasondigitized• 1 year ago

I was literally going to quote Chesterson's fence. How are people this smart and also this dumb?

paganel• 1 year ago

The US probably hasn't been this economically dominant since after WWII.

That may be true if you look at the US in isolation, they're much richer now compared to 1950, but they've never had a strong a contender as China is right now. The Soviets were matching them militarily back in the Cold War years but they were never close to surpass them economically, like China is now in the process of doing.

sanktanglia• 1 year ago

The US weathered the recession better than nearly any developed nation so the idea that we aren't economically dominant is hilarious

Gothmog69• 1 year ago

The guy who deciphered an ancient scroll destroyed by a volcano is too incurious to possibly understand things unlike the amazing geniuses who fund DEi operas in Peru

tyrrvk• 1 year ago

[flagged]

ctrlp8• 1 year ago

[flagged]

dang14• 1 year ago

Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

euroderf3• 1 year ago

Speaking of which, do these DOGE-drones go thru drug testing ? Does Elon ?

dang14• 1 year ago

Please don't cross into personal attacks on Hacker News.

xivzgrev• 1 year ago

of course Musk recruits young ambitious kiddos - they work hard, for not much money, and don't question authority (because they're blinded by their ambition)

it's only when you get older that you see how rife this is for abuse. as a simple example, if DOGE knows influential Treasury recipients, then they could find ways to extort them. help us and you'll get your money on time. oppose us, and...

heck, I'm a treasury recipient (albeit a very small one), so if I take to X and start criticizing Trump or Musk, is my money at risk? Maybe not today but maybe within his term. Scary times.

ctrlp8• 1 year ago

It's also only when you get older that you see how rife the existing system is for "abuse" (if you want to call it that). Maybe the young upstarts have other motives for dismantling the existing system than simply blind ambition, especially if the existing system is set up with entrenched patronage networks that are basically inaccessible to the "young ambition kiddos".

Your example is pretty unpersuasive. It is already that case that "influential Treasury recipients" are called upon to "help" those in power. How else can you explain the various volte face moves by seemingly apolitical economic actors. I think the kiddos might finally be getting wise to how the game is played and how it is rigged.

__loam3• 1 year ago

These "kiddos" are committing crimes.

juujian• 1 year ago

Who knows. If you happen to mention any words that are on the CDC's new forbidden words list, maybe you will fall victim to the next Ctrl+f search these guys run.

llsf• 1 year ago

Everyone likes to throw the "1st amendment" in the conversation, when it suites them... but I agree given the recent retaliatory tendencies, it is difficult to criticize the current administration, and effectively leaving it in its own echo chamber.

I am wondering if that partially explains how Musk radicalized himself lately. While I like the idea of absolute free speech, it kinda falls when the powerful are retaliatory... and kinda loose with the rule of law.

While I get the idea of "the bureaucracy" having its own life sometimes getting in a way of change, and the President willing to get more done, faster. But the fact that the bureaucrats do not carring on sometimes is because they follow a due process.

Now with those young men taking the control of the $6T/yr, this is a tremendous power. Even unintentionally, a mistake could have dire consequences.

rqtwteye2• 1 year ago

Dictators always liked to exploit the idealism of young people. The Nazis had the Hitler youth, China had the Red Guards, most prison guards for the Khmer Rogue were teenagers. They happily did the dirty work and could be discarded easily once not useful anymore.

I would all be for scrutinizing what government does but you can't just go around and cut everything you don't understand within 15 minutes. And I bet they will keep the moon and Mars programs going.

thrance• 1 year ago

For sure, Musk and his friends will keep their billions of dollars government contracts. No inefficiency there, surprisingly.

dbbk2• 1 year ago

They're already being abused. They're being made to sleep at work.

readthenotes16• 1 year ago

Re that scroll

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-21-year-old-u...

It seems to me like it really appropriate background...

vitajex3• 1 year ago

Experienced enough to win this though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39261861

Xelynega• 1 year ago

Since when did winning competitions require experience optimizing costs across various industries?

I don't think anybody is doubting they're smart, just that they have no experience doing this kind of work and are now being trusted by the highest level of government to do it.

ShrimpHawk• 1 year ago

who have little to no government experience

Decoding ancient scrolls has no relevance to government procedures.

vitajex3• 1 year ago

What he did to win the scroll competition had to do with data analysis, not ancient history, so of course it could be relevant. But none of us, including the author of the article, knows what they're specifically doing, so it's not possible to say how relevant it is. It's a pity the reporter didn't do some reporting about that, instead of writing a hit piece calling them lackeys.

brigandish2• 1 year ago

That seems entirely relevant - getting to the bottom of a cryptic and poorly documented puzzle without any help from the contemporaries (in the case of the scrolls, because the are dead, in the case of government employees, because it’s not in their interests).

I write that only half in jest. Maybe less than half.

mbesto5• 1 year ago

That's impressive! Now how does that experience translate into financial accounting systems?

A SAP FICO consultant in Moldova is better qualified than these young men.

roboror• 1 year ago

That would be relevant if our governmental budgets were printed on ancient scrolls. What was the point of posting this?

MeetingsBrowser3• 1 year ago

I came in first place in my college CTF. Where do I sign up to decide which parts of the government should be shut down?

MeetingsBrowser3• 1 year ago

Found it. For anyone else interested https://neuralink.com/careers/apply/

ahmeneeroe-v219• 1 year ago

I think Musk asked for applications on twitter.

ActionHank• 1 year ago

I mean that’s cool, but not what he will be remembered for.

Imagine being one of those 6 with your name on the list of people that destroyed US democracy.

readthenotes16• 1 year ago

Some context for USAID

https://youtu.be/qe47hTyUh5g?feature=shared

strangeloops85• 1 year ago

Have Elon Musk and all these engineers sworn oaths as required to be a federal employee? https://federalnewsnetwork.com/commentary/2019/10/the-oath-o... If Elon is "just advising", under what statute or directive does he have specific authority?

If they are accessing TS/SCI information and places like SCIFs have they filled out their SF-86? Are any of them dual nationals and do they have any ties or vulnerabilities to hostile foreign states?

Basic questions given the enormous access they are being given, far beyond frankly any handful of people have generally had in US government history.

Also, they have apparently plugged in their own private server at OPM. Has this already been compromised by Chinese/ Russian agents? Has the NSA had a look?

jeffgreco3• 1 year ago

There are class action lawsuits being organized on behalf of federal workers against this egregious data breach and let's hope to god they succeed.

ansmithz422• 1 year ago

Simple answer: No.

throw0101c4• 1 year ago

If they are accessing TS/SCI information and places like SCIFs have they filled out their SF-86?

Did the Mar-a-Lago workers who moved boxes fill out those forms?

* https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/05/25/...

* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/06/surveillance...

yesco• 1 year ago

Would contractors need to do any of this? Is DOGE using federal funds?

I'm not exactly clear on the situation but if they are just doing this for free and don't have access to confidential information, I could see that potentially being the key loophole here.

ian_d• 1 year ago

Elon is also now claiming to have "deleted" 18F (https://18f.gsa.gov/): https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1886498750052327520

paulgb2• 1 year ago

This is nuts, 18F was one of the few groups in the federal government that is/was good at making software! (login.gov is a good example of craft you don't generally see in commercial enterprise software, let alone government software)

According to that tweet they were apparently “far left” because they also worked on Direct File, which sought to cut out the middleman (TurboTax et al.) and let Americans file taxes directly. Regardless of where you stand on the political spectrum, unless you're in bed with Intuit, this seems pretty hard to argue against!

jf2• 1 year ago

freitasm2• 1 year ago

this seems pretty hard to argue against!

Removing consumer protection would be something hard to argue against too, but yet, here we are: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/banking-law/bessent-pauses-cfp...

"Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has shut down a wide variety of operations inside the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in his new role as acting director."

Nothing of this makes sense in that all these actions don't seem to make life easier or better for citizens in particular or the world in general.

justin667• 1 year ago

This is nuts, 18F was one of the few groups in the federal government that is/was good at making software!

Hopefully it's obvious at this point: Musk and friends not there to do anything but enrich themselves, and destroy.

chinathrow2• 1 year ago

At this point, Elon is doing only damage while he thinks he cleans up. Someone will have to cleanup after the cleanup aka damage doen though, and it won't be pretty.

ianburrell2• 1 year ago

My brother works for 18F.

18F might also be "far-left" cause it was created by Obama folks. I also wonder if it is also bad in his mind cause conflicts with taken over Digital Service.

0xcde4c3db• 1 year ago

Being in bed with tax preparation companies is probably the main thing, but I also vaguely recall a statement by someone years ago (perhaps Grover Norquist or Dick Armey) that filing tax returns should be kept annoying simply for the sake of keeping people angry about taxes in general.

__MatrixMan__3• 1 year ago

Replacing the government with unaccountable middlemen is sort of their goal, isn't it? Think of the efficiency we could gain once we do away with all of that accountability nonsense...

watwut9• 1 year ago

If you goal is to make government small, ineffective at consumer protection and such, this is absolutely the first group to target.

hondo77• 1 year ago

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency has deleted a group that was devoted solely to making the government more efficient. Makes perfect sense, in Trumpistan logic.

Cornbilly3• 1 year ago

Given his tech record, he probably dragged a file named 18F to the Recycle Bin.

This is the same guy that nearly tanked PayPal because he was obsessed with rewriting their entire system for Windows.

hinkley3• 1 year ago

I had a coworker who turned beet red when I put Musk and PayPal in the same sentence. You know that feeling when your parents didn’t yell and you wished they would? I was too afraid to ask for the full story.

His PR makes him sound like a founder but he was not.

jacobjjacob8• 1 year ago

Looking at the quoted post, what do they have against Direct File? It is really hard to keep track of their positions which I believe is intentional.

neuronexmachina2• 1 year ago

Many in the GOP are generally opposed to federally-funded free tax return filing: https://pennsylvaniaindependent.com/politics/irs-direct-file...

In December, however, Kelly and 28 House Republican colleagues wrote to President-elect Donald Trump to ask him to end the program: “We write to urge you to take immediate action, including but not limited to a day-one executive order, to end the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) unauthorized and wasteful Direct File pilot program. The program’s creation and ongoing expansion pose a threat to taxpayers’ freedom from government overreach, and its rollout and structural flaws have already come at a steep price.”

kelnos27• 1 year ago

Direct File competes with Intuit and other tax prep companies. Of course they're against it; DF threatens corporate profits.

BryantD• 1 year ago

It's referred to as Elizabeth Warren's Direct File project.

UltraSane32• 1 year ago

They oppose anything that reduces private companies revenue. Direct file reduces Intuits TurboTax revenue.

hackyhacky7• 1 year ago

It is really hard to keep track of their positions which I believe is intentional.

The reasons are unimportant. The important thing is that you trust Uncle Don and Uncle Elon, our grand leaders, who always have your best interests at heart.

buu700• 1 year ago

Blackcatmaxy• 1 year ago

ThePowerOfFuet• 1 year ago

Corrected link: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1886498750052327520

pityJuke• 1 year ago

He got rid of 18F, a group within the Govt to improve usage of tech (and hopefully therefore efficiency), because of a tweet.

A tweet about IRS Direct File, a group that replicates the basic automatic taxation program of other advanced economies?

Over a fear that the Government would take over deciding what taxes people pay, despite a fact that such a program doesn’t necessarily block you from manually filing your own taxes (don’t know if the American implementation has that, but the UK one certainly allows you to override PAYE).

Yes HN commenters, this is the genius behind Government reform.

EDIT: Jesus Christ someone is going to convince him FedNow is a conspiracy and kill another basic system other countries have easily managed.

tsunamifury2• 1 year ago

He clearly wants to replace the US government technology platforms with X/XPay/etc

kelseyfrog2• 1 year ago

Yes - This is an underrated point.

The circle of Elon, Thiel, Andersson, etc conceptually orbit Balaji. Balaji, The Network State author, explicitly advocates for a techno-libertarian exit because they perceive the US and especially "team blue" as getting in the way and slowing down their vision.

bamboozled2• 1 year ago

He said wants X to be an “everything” app like WeChat a few years back. Nice an authoritarian.

araes• 1 year ago

Thanks for the link on 18F in the feds. Didn't realize how much they had put up on Github and other areas [1]. analytics.usa.gov [2] is also pretty cool. Apparently its Jekyll, Sass, React and d3 from their Github.

343,025 first time users in the last 30 minutes, with GSA Advantage, USPS Tracking Results, NIST, CEAC Visa Status Check, and Federal Student Aid being some of the biggest sources. Had no idea this was available.

[1] https://github.com/18F

[2] https://analytics.usa.gov/

h197BQcV2• 1 year ago

They have interesting pedigrees: Meta, Palantir, Neuralink, xAI, SpaceX, Databricks, Energize AI.

It seems clear where this is going. Data mining and algorithmic (claimed!) efficiency improvements while working on an essential and critical production system.

Since these people claim that "AI" does not need to respect privacy and copyright, perhaps they'll also train a model on this.

Where are the Democrats on all this? There is hardly any opposition. Are they not interrupting their enemy while he is making mistakes? That would be the only explanation.

bilbo0s3• 1 year ago

Democrats can oppose, but they don’t have any votes. All 3 branches of government are controlled by Republicans.

So, yeah. I guess we got the government we voted for? And since it’s a democracy, I suppose that means we have exactly the government we deserve?

Maybe it gets better later in the administration? That’s my hope anyway.

arrosenberg7• 1 year ago

I guess we got the government we voted for? And since it’s a democracy, I suppose that means we have exactly the government we deserve?

Well, we voted based on the only two options that were shoved down our throats by various groups of the wealthiest people on the planet. I don't personally think we deserve this, why would we? That said, if we don't do something, it won't get better.

rtkwe4• 1 year ago

The filibuster in the Senate is powerful but it basically only blocks new laws from going in you can't really touch all the things Trump is doing via EO through Congressional obstruction the main avenue for blocking that is through the courts which ultimately have limited enforcement power.

PhunkyPhil• 1 year ago

I guess Elon believes that long wait times for government services is because of an O(n^3) function somewhere...

Where are the Democrats on all this? There is hardly any opposition

I think because this is so unprecedented the structures to oversee simply don't exist. The article mentions that congress has no mechanisms for oversight, and Elon is moving too quickly in this area for any checks to take place.

lukev2• 1 year ago

The courts are just now beginning to order injuctions and restraining orders, for the stuff that happened last week. The process seems to lag by 2-3 business days. So hopefully we'll be seeing a lot more this week.

How the administration responds to those is going to define how this constitutional crisis unfolds. And it is a constitutional crisis: congress unambiguously has the power of the purse, not the executive.

If Trump gets away with this, it isn't clear that Congress has any power at all.

SamBam2• 1 year ago

It's utterly wrong to give Elon any benefit of the doubt in terms of his motives right now.

He's helping destroy the Federal government because doing so aligns with his interests as a billionaire.

jacobjjacob8• 1 year ago

Maybe the strategy is to let it play out until there is enough of a case that the other branches can’t look away? Let Elon show himself out by inevitably crossing Trump and going the way of so many other advisors?

xmprt• 1 year ago

Democrats have bigger fish to fry and DOGE isn't a real department so it doesn't have a whole lot of authority to do things on its own. It can only advise the government so in the end, until an executive order is signed or some other action is taken, there's nothing to be done.

92834092326• 1 year ago

You have no real handle on the scale of damage being done and DOGE is a real department as it was merged into the US Digital Service through executive order.

affinepplan4• 1 year ago

I'm not sure what could possibly be a bigger fish right now. This is, quite literally, the dismantling of our entire government and its public services unfolding before our eyes.

mrkeen6• 1 year ago

Democrats don't have a frypan.

bee_rider3• 1 year ago

Like Democratic elected officials? They lost. They have no power. They don’t control any branch of government.

They have as much ability to pass laws as you or I personally do. They have as much ability to hand down a Supreme Court or direct law enforcement as you or I personally do. None. Where are we? Complaining on social media I guess.

I’m quite frustrated why my elected officials as well but it is kind of hard to blame them when we don’t give them any actual power to wield.

maximilianburke2• 1 year ago

Sure, but there's other things they can do. They can all stop trying to achieve bipartisan support on things, as the republicans do when they're in the minority. Senators can withdraw their unanimous consent. They can vote against everything. They can drag a bunch of reporters over to Treasury and start loudly asking questions

It sounds like some are finding a clue, like the ones who stomped down to USAID with reporters in tow today. They need to do more of this.

Just because they can't pass legislation doesn't mean they are out of ideas.

What you can do is write to or call them. Ask them to vote no on every senate confirmation. Ask them to not provide unanimous consent. Ask them to make a scene. Demand answers!

bufferoverflow3• 1 year ago

And why did they lose?

daedrdev• 1 year ago

The democrats have effectively no power. They control neither the house, senate, or presidency, the courts have become more conservative, etc. They can only talk. The filibuster will prevent new laws, but that isn't much when the federal government acts according to the presidency, and the filibuster does not prevent government appointments

cma• 1 year ago

I doubt they will maintain the filibuster

dml2135• 1 year ago

And the filibuster is nothing more than a polite restriction that the majority of the senate places on themselves — they are free to remove it if they wish.

bobbylarrybobby• 1 year ago

The democrats were there on Election Day. They were shown the door.

freitasm2• 1 year ago

Where are the Democrats on all this? There is hardly any opposition. Are they not interrupting their enemy while he is making mistakes? That would be the only explanation.

You mean the same Democrats who were not given a majority on neither legislative houses, nor the Presidency?

Some people voted against their best interests. Consequences.

gadders7• 1 year ago

They should try coming up with some popular policies and winning elections.

chihuahua2• 1 year ago

No, they must talk about nothing but identity politics for the next 4 years, surely that is the best way to gain majorities in the Senate and House.

sunshowers3• 1 year ago

Policies don't really determine elections in this age -- the only thing that determines them is people's brains being cooked.

FactolSarin• 1 year ago

Where are the Democrats on all this? There is hardly any opposition. Are they not interrupting their enemy while he is making mistakes? That would be the only explanation.

This is the kind of thing that someone who's on TikTok a lot says. The line being fed to people by the Chinese government to make the Democrats look bad as well. But the truth is the Democrats have no power. None. They can't do anything to stop this. Elizabeth Warren and AOC have just as much power as I do to stop Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

hashishen• 1 year ago

I would look to c-span for some accurate real time reactions from dems

https://www.c-span.org/program/news-conference/congressional...

bb88• 1 year ago

Where are the Democrats in all of this?

I think there's a fear they'll end up on the Kash Patel FBI enemies list:

https://newrepublic.com/article/188946/kash-patel-fbi-enemie...

energy1234• 1 year ago

* Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) “Elon Musk, you may have illegally seized power over the financial payments systems of the Treasury, but you don't control the money of the American people. The US Congress does that under Article 1 of the Constitution ... we don't have a fourth branch of government called 'Elon Musk”
* Rep. Chris Murphy (D-CT) “This is a constitutional crisis that we are in today. Let’s call it what it is.” -And- "Let's not pull any punches about why this is happening. Elon Musk makes billions off of his business with China. And China is cheering at this action today. There is no question that the billionaire class trying to take over our govt right now is doing it based on self-interest."
* Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) "It is a matter for Congress to deal with, not an unelected billionaire oligarchy named Elon Musk. And Elon, if you want to run USAID, get nominated by Trump and go to the Senate and good luck in getting confirmed."
* Rep. Van Hollen (D-MD) “We asked to enter the Aid building, really on behalf of the American people, but to talk to Aid employees, because … there’s been a gag order imposed on Aid employees. So we wanted to learn first-hand what’s happening. We were denied entry based on the order that they received from Elon Musk and Doge, which just goes to show that this was an illegal power grab by someone who contributed $267bn to the Trump effort in these elections.”

Estimated crowd of 100 protesters (reported). Other attendees and speeches made by Congressmen Beyer, Raskin, Connolly, Omar, Olzewski, Senator Van Hollen (seems like more maybe there not much coverage to confirm)

rsoto25• 1 year ago

The democrats are busy trying to squeeze more AIPAC money for when they get massively primaried for backing a genocide. No, i'm not joking the house minority leader gave a speech on israel's success in gaza this week

wesselbindt• 1 year ago

Where are the Democrats on all this?

It's a big club...

fennecbutt• 1 year ago

Where it's going is largely irrelevant I suppose. The only reason the "doge" thing is going on is because Elon needed a way to insert himself into the government, and everybody else involved is too technically inept to realise (or care).

But the effects don't really matter because this is what the American public voted for. As an outsider who's read Daemon and Freedom when are you yanks gonna start the darknet already?

littlestymaar• 1 year ago

Given how useful USAID has been for the CIA, if the “deep state” was a real thing, Elon would have at best a few more days to live.

spaceman_2020• 1 year ago

As someone from the developing world where USAID regularly funded organizations that were often divisive and insidiously subversive, can’t say that I’ll be unhappy to see this thing dismantled.

lukev2• 1 year ago

But that has to be an act of congress. Congress creates and funds government departments. The president can't just dismantle them by fiat.

That he's (apparently) tasking people to do so who don't even have the requisite experience or clearances is just adding insult to injury.

cjbgkagh• 1 year ago

It seems more like a CIA civil war to me, CIA cut outs on both sides.

karmakurtisaani• 1 year ago

The recent events should finally put to rest all the JFK conspiracies. Messing up with the government at this scale should indeed put you into some 3-letter agency hitlist.

sangnoir• 1 year ago

if the “deep state” was a real thing

If it wasn't, he made it real. Elon is the deep state. An unelected individual who has set up a no-oversight machinery with hands on the levers of state power, and using them to his own ends, independent of public benefit. Every accusation is a confession.

m463• 1 year ago

Posts here talk about the legality of this, that what they are doing is not allowed, or that they're doing something naively without understanding.

But what is the goal? Maybe what goal to they think they're pursuing? This is hacker news, so I'm asking for an answer without political rhetoric.

blfr• 1 year ago

They're cutting their opponents' access to federal funds.

golemiprague• 1 year ago

Why those funds were allocated to their ops and not equally to everybody? If those government organisations were serving only one side of the political spectrum than something is inherently wrong with it.

ahmeneeroe-v219• 1 year ago

Also correct. These programs are seen as funding professional democrats who then vote for more funding

tyre4• 1 year ago

The goal is to dismantle as much of the government as possible. Where possible, they can replace the existing people with their own people, then steer government contracts to themselves.

riskable2• 1 year ago

The way they're going there might not be a government much longer. I really do believe they're that stupid.

The entire stock market is premised on the stability of the US government. Without it all their wealth would disappear overnight. All the luxuries they love would cease being produced. They wouldn't be able to fly their private jets anywhere.

In the past the rich could stockpile easily-tradable goods like gold in order to maintain a luxurious life even if their government collapsed. When it comes to billionaires that's not possible. The logistics of keeping and moving that much physical currency/gold/etc don't work out in their favor.

If they keep this up they're going to lose almost all of their wealth as the world destabilizes. They're also setting themselves and their families up to be assassination targets for the rest of their lives (far, far beyond what they are already). There's people everywhere that will be severely impacted by their actions. There will be nowhere for them to go because the US really is the pillar of the world's economies.

adastra2210• 1 year ago

I know some of the people involved, and named in this article. So do many other people on HN. I pitched my startup to one of these zoomers just a few months ago. I can tell you that whatever this is, it isn't that kind of cronyism corruption. We can do better than such accusations, and that's what the person you are replying to is asking for.

mbs159• 1 year ago

If I was a billionaire who wanted to become even more rich by any means possible, I would do exactly that

novia3• 1 year ago

The goal is to find government waste and to trim the fat. The goal is to make the US government lean, efficient, and effective at improving the lives of Americans while not prioritizing improving the lives of citizens of other nations. The view is that the government of those other nations should be responsible for taking care of their own citizens. The goal is to uncover fraudulent payouts, stop more from going out in the future, and to bring the fraudsters to justice. Overall, the goal is to do a thorough accounting of where exactly US tax dollars are going to, and to use that information to decide if they should keep going to those recipients in the future, to put it to a vote using congress to decide.

[Political bias report: I'm a liberal who has read Rand and who does not agree with The Republican Party's views in the vast majority of cases. I have been listening to Musk and Ramaswamy talking about DOGE on X. I also follow conservative meme sites to keep up to date with the way they are thinking about things.]

avs733• 1 year ago

The goal is to find government waste and to trim the fat. The goal is to make the US government lean, efficient, and effective at improving the lives of Americans while not prioritizing improving the lives of citizens of other nations.

Lets be clear, that is not the goal - that is what they say the goal is and reality shows it is not. The goal is grift and theft adn destruction. Properly naming things is going to continue to matter more and more. Because no matter your bias or perspective, repeating propaganda is an act of propaganda.

watwut9• 1 year ago

I don't believe Musk or Trum cares about "improving the lives of Americans". They would try to protect Americans if that was their goal. Their first targets are consumer protection, environmental protection and such.

they don't care about fraud either. Both are fraudsters themselves, both will enrich themselves and their families. They both surround themselves with fraudsters.

What I give to Musk is that the staggering nepotism you see with Trump is not there as much.

kelnos27• 1 year ago

If that actually was the goal, and if this function were being executed by a legally formed executive branch agency, with non-partisan career employees that have been properly vetted, hired, and granted security clearances, I might be behind this effort.

But that's not what's happening.

It's clear to me their goal is to dismantle as many "leftist" agencies as possible, like environmental protection, labor rights protection, securities laws enforcement, humanitarian aid, etc., and replace them with people who will enrich their friends and families and allow corporations to run roughshod over the rights of regular people.

It is bizarre to me that anyone could lack the critical thinking skills such that they'd accept DOGE's stated goals at face value.

lm284692• 1 year ago

Some people are about to learn about soft power, how important it is, how fast it's lost, how quickly alternatives fill the gaps

Trasmatta5• 1 year ago

None of that is the goal. That's the propaganda.

sanderjd21• 1 year ago

Those may be the stated goals but I don't see any reason to believe those are the goals. Trust is earned.

disqard6• 1 year ago

If that is the goal, then what happened to "profile before you optimize"?

As an analogy, what's happening feels like this:

* Somebody (let's call them "X") has embarked upon a mission to de-bloat the ancient-but-working family desktop PC. * X's first actions appear to be to desolder various things from the motherboard, while the computer is on. * Anyone who sees what X is doing, is somewhere on a spectrum between "scratching their head" <----> "wow, they're trying their best to destroy the PC".

To those defending this particular way of "fixing" things, would you yourself replace a large, working legacy software system in this manner?

insane_dreamer7• 1 year ago

Those are the stated goals. I’m not sure they are the actual goals.

maxerickson6• 1 year ago

You may want to consider whether you are overly credulous.

rat873• 1 year ago

The goal is to enable cronyism and corruption as well as undermine resistance to legally and morally dubious acts.

adastra2210• 1 year ago

I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.

matthewmacleod4• 1 year ago

If that were the goal, I think we'd see some evidence of it.

You do not "do a thorough accounting" by deciding in advance what programs and operations to terminate based on specific ideological viewpoints. I don't doubt for a second that this is "the way they are thinking about things" – but it's hopelessly, irredeemably naive to think that's what's being done.

croes2• 1 year ago

effective at improving the lives of Americans while not prioritizing improving the lives of citizens of other nations.

A bold claim. Can I get a list of these nations?

Because last time I checked, if in doubt the US backed who is better for them not for the people of that nation.

And what’s waste is highly political.

In the long run the US will lose lots of its influence in other countries.

tpm• 1 year ago

It's a plutocratic coup, a takeover of the country by a small group of unelected men. The goal is to own and exercise power without opposition and without any rules.

racktash3• 1 year ago

Since it worked so well for Russia in the 90s onwards, why not America?

jacobjjacob8• 1 year ago

I would guess that part of it is to tear down what’s there so they can rebuild in their own vision. I think this is a desire that any engineer can understand- and also understand that it often has to be suppressed because it’s a common blunder.

How many engineers have walked into a legacy project and their first instinct is to rebuild? Of course this is sometimes warranted, but almost always costs way more than anyone expects and doesn’t necessarily lead to a better outcome.

Edit: I’ll also add that this mentality is more common in younger / junior folks, which fits the context here.

disqard6• 1 year ago

I think the word you're looking for is "immaturity".

It is not exclusively found in young people, as one can plainly see with the plutocrats in charge today.

FWIW, even when it is justified in a software context, we understand that there will be a (usually large) business cost.

When implementing this in a political context, there's no way to skim over the fact that there will be a huge human cost. But here we are anyway.

CPLX3• 1 year ago

When reality doesn't agree with logic, question your assumptions.

Why does an alcoholic crash their car and ruin all their personal relationships?

Why does someone with impulse control problems make a self destructive statement?

Why does a tech billionaire who is clearly intoxicated by his own power and a cocktail of legal and illegal drugs behaving erratically?

stevenwoo• 1 year ago

Isn't this just the Dark Enlightenment that Curtis Yarvin has espoused and Thiel, Musk, and JD Vance have also endorsed? TL;DR - Dictatorships are superior to democracy, and quick executive actions that replace legislative responsibilities with the tacit endorsement of judicial and legislative branches are functionally the same. The foundations for this were laid when Trump got so many Federalist judges approved last term and the Supreme Court endorsed the anything goes if President does it theory.

https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/11/patchwork-2...

khold_stare2• 1 year ago

This will sound like a conspiracy theory, but this is the playbook of Curtis Yarvin, specifically the "RAGE" step - Retire All Government Employees. Some references:

Watch the whole video (posted months ago predicting all these actions), but here is the relevant section: https://youtu.be/5RpPTRcz1no?t=1201

NYT interview: https://www.nytimes.com/video/podcasts/100000009910862/curti...

Gil Duran did a lot of the reporting on this. https://www.thenerdreich.com/the-network-state-coup-is-happe...

zzzeek5• 1 year ago

it's not a conspiracy theory, it's an actual conspiracy. it's all out in the open for reading / download.

bende5114• 1 year ago

They are looking for The Cathedral.

ahmeneeroe-v219• 1 year ago

The goal is to overturn the system. The electorate is mad that nothing changes regardless of Dem or GOP in charge. They want something to change. They've wanted it for so long that at this point they're okay seeing it burn down.

philjohn2• 1 year ago

Until it directly impacts them ... and then it's "I didn't think the leopards would eat MY face!".

UltraSane32• 1 year ago

Until there social security checks stop coming. Then they will riot.

sanderjd21• 1 year ago

I don't think it's possible to answer this apolitically because their goals are political in nature.

mike_hearn8• 1 year ago

The right is at present a coalition of conservatives, nationalist patriot types and globalist libertarians. DOGE seems to be a mix of two goals:

1. They think that the civil service has become not just openly hostile but outright dangerous to any form of Republican government, and therefore that taking direct control of the civil service infrastructure at high speed is essential to avoid being kneecapped by rogue federal employees again. They think that this happened during Trump's first term, and that if they don't get this problem under control then America has effectively become a Democrat dictatorship that does whatever the left wants regardless of who wins elections. They have a good reasons to believe this is a real problem they need to solve and fast, see Sherk for some egregious examples [1] but there are many more you could cite.

2. A genuine belief that the government is very inefficient and in particular that a lot of the waste is basically just funding the Democrats via various 'laundered' routes like allied NGOs that pretend to be politically neutral charities but aren't. Doing something about that is a good way to get libertarians like Musk and his allies on board. Everyone is in favour of government efficiency in principle so letting the libertarian types go cut waste is an easy way to build that coalition even if the other parts don't care about fiscal efficiency much itself.

These two are interlocked. Poor performance and efficiency improvements are one of the legal justifications for laying off civil servants, so it's much easier to get the civil service under control if #resistance results in being one of the ones "optimized out" of a job. That's doubly true if the sort of NGOs that would hire them if they were fired are being defunded simultaneously.

[1] https://americafirstpolicy.com/assets/uploads/files/Tales_fr...

shigawire3• 1 year ago

They kneecapped themselves by being a party of opposition with no constructive ideas for decades.

ranger207• 1 year ago

There's two parts to it. First, there's the reasonable position that the government is inefficient or has too much bureaucracy or regulation. If that's the case, how do you improve that? Chesterton's Fence says that all those regulations are in place for a reason, but it's reasonably to believe that some of those reasons may not be relevant anymore, or could be better written to allow for more efficiency. However, sitting down to figure out why existing regulations exist and how to get rid of them without allowing whatever bad outcome they were created in response to is difficult. If you have the general feel that a regulation is bad, why not just get rid of it? Or an office you don't like, or a committee that likes to say you're doing things wrong? If you've got the vibe that "this thing is bad", why do you need to prove it before getting rid of it? So it's taking things that are legitimate problems and trying to fix them based on vibes rather than data. Which, if some of the problems you're annoyed with are "it takes too long to build a building because the EPA wants data to see if there's environmental impacts", is it really a surprise you'd want to take that out without data?

Second is the dismantling of the deep state. The deep state exists, but it's not a conscious effort in general. Instead, it's the typical aspects of institutional inertia, multiplied by the fact that the kinds of people wanting to work in government favor inertia more than in most private businesses. Of course the low level government bureaucrat at your local post office or whatever is going to want to slow-roll things and keep things from changing as much as possible; that's just the kind of person that typically looks for a government job and gets hired. Of course they're going to resist rapid changes from people that want things to be fixed yesterday. If your conception of the government is as an agent to execute orders, rather than as an agent to steadily administer regulations, then you're going to resent the people who don't respond instantly to the executive's desires

FWIW I voted for Kamela because I think that the process of governance is just as important as the governance itself, and did not want Trump to remove the existing processes in this way. I can definitely see why people would want to change processes, and given the historical ineffectual attempts at changed processes I can see why people would vote for someone who promised to tear it all down, but I don't think tearing it all down is the best option. Although, I didn't vote for Harris as much as I voted for the most effective way to prevent Trump, but given the American first-past-the-post voting system that was the best I could do. https://ncase.me/ballot/

tonymet9• 1 year ago

Between Elon's stated goals, the systems under scope and my personal experience from state & local finance, they are performing a strategic efficacy audit of treasury spending. The US Treasury normally doesn't audit transactions -- they execute requests for transfers from other agencies and defer governance to congressional oversight.

The GAO doesn't even audit in the intuitive sense. They audit that spending is being recorded properly, and for many agencies even that low bar isn't met. In other words GAO is okay with you dumping money into a hole as long as you count how much.

DOGE is doing a practical audit of the spending. i.e. taking high-level spending principals from trump and identifying specific budget items to eliminate.

tonymet9• 1 year ago

It's worth noting the difference between Budget & expenses since families normally blur the two. Budgets are the plans developed by the President and approved by Congress, and expenses are what actually get spent during the year-- and they vary widely.

DOGE's unique approach is to use the Treasury as the "chokepoint" for telemetry so they can cluster and classify all of the transactions .

Imagine a massive microservices platform with 10k services and you want to know which ones are viable ( cost/benefit). Rather than survey all 10k, you would surveil a router or LB chokepoint to measure the input & output of all 10k services. That seems to be their approach with the treasury.

Trasmatta5• 1 year ago

This is propaganda.

guax3• 1 year ago

Asking the treasury to do ideological/legal analysis of transactions is the same as giving your bank the responsibility of approving your credit card expenditure based on their idea of what you need/should buy.

The fact that they're going for the payment system and not for contract/orders analysis is exactly the red flag people are and should be concerned about.

T-A• 1 year ago

Ever seen "Johnny English Strikes Again"? I'm sure Musk did, and is now implementing Jason Volta's plan as just retribution for the not-so-subtle reference hidden in the villain's electric name.

valbaca2• 1 year ago

They're literally accelerationists: They're shooting the gov in the face, so they can enact more emergency powers, and then it's one step to pure, raw fascism.

I'm asking for an answer without political rhetoric

You need to start caring about politics real fast if you care at all.

DustinBrett• 1 year ago

You got your rhetoric as (not) requested.

steve_adams_864• 1 year ago

There is arguably no non-political angle to this. I’m not sure how you’d describe what appears to be happening without it seeming biased.

From here in Canada it looks a lot like the fascist takeovers I’ve read about since middle school. The playbook is bizarrely tight to Hitler, Mussolini, hints of Stalin, etc. I didn’t expect this in my lifetime. Or rather, I imaged I’d see it coming sooner.

TheAlchemist• 1 year ago

They are playing post-URSS playbook, at 10x the speed.

It's fascinating that people still wonder what kind of goals they may be pursuing.

The President launched a meme coin 48 hours before being sworn in !!! Even crypto scammers were outraged at the audacity of the scam.

cco2• 1 year ago

But what is the goal? Maybe what goal to they think they're pursuing? This is hacker news, so I'm asking for an answer without political rhetoric.

I'm a bit confused because the stated goals, either the "digestible" ones or the ones they've stated outside of mainstream media, are all political in nature.

How could you get an answer about the motivation and goals of this behavior that isn't "political"?

Clubber3• 1 year ago

Cut spending.

roland353• 1 year ago

Look up Curtis Yarvin. This is all his libertarian tech bro fantasy come to life

donutpepperoni• 1 year ago

Made it easy for anybody who makes it this far:

1. Part one on Curtis Yarvin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYrPNvVhKLU

2. Part two: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpEg4LS3CT0

No affiliation with the show just thought the episodes were enlightening.

Culonavirus• 1 year ago

This is hacker news, so I'm asking for an answer without political rhetoric

LMAO. That's like going to Reddit and asking for relationship advice.

jrflowers• 1 year ago

I love this post. “Explain what is going on with the government without mentioning politics. If the reality is that current events and the people involved in them are driven by ideology, invent a version of reality wherein they are not” is like walking into a Sephora, opening up the folding chair that you’re carrying, and loudly demanding the catfish dinner and a beer.

theonething21• 1 year ago

This is hacker news, so I'm asking for an answer without political rhetoric.

Sadly, based on the comments here and elsewhere, HN is not immune to political rhetoric.

pharrington• 1 year ago

Elon Musk's goal is to gain as much power and control as possible. Line go up.

alluro23• 1 year ago

Since the goals are not clear for now, let's give Trump and Elon the benefit of the doubt, that what they're doing is from the good of their hearts, for the benefit of all the American people.

It's not like they're openly corrupt, narcissistic egomaniacs with history of screwing up people for their personal gain or something. Up till now, especially Trump, they've made huge strides in bettering the country and wellbeing of the people, let's let them cook.

flaque• 1 year ago

This seems broadly good. If you told me a democratic admin had recruited these people, I would think "wow! what a positive signal for the current admin!"

MeetingsBrowser3• 1 year ago

How could you not trust a 19 year old who goes by bigballs?

I for one trust Mr.BigBalls to make smart and effective cuts to get our government back on track!

throwaway173738• 1 year ago

You should probably pay more attention to what people do rather than their credentials as it’s a more powerful signal.

danso• 1 year ago

The Obama admin created the US Digital Service — i.e. the unit that “DOGE” has now reappropriated — which attracted and hired folks like Google’s Matt Cutts [0]. The USDS did not, as far as we know, try to sneak in fresh-out-of-college-grads by bypassing the normal hiring process.

[0] https://medium.com/the-u-s-digital-service/the-next-chapter-...

lif• 1 year ago

[flagged]

charlescearl• 1 year ago

Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s In the Shadow of the Shadow State, which discusses the concept of the anti-state state.

https://sfonline.barnard.edu/ruth-wilson-gilmore-in-the-shad...

billiam• 1 year ago

[flagged]

disqard6• 1 year ago

Obviously

tenpies• 1 year ago

The Founding Fathers had 18, 20, 21 and 25 year olds in much more important positions.

And just like DOGE, they were working in a team with older people too, but that sort of rational framing just doesn't get clicks.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founding_Fathers_of_the_United...

ahmeneeroe-v219• 1 year ago

Thank you! I was looking to see if anyone made this point.

You are exactly right. "Inexperience" just means someone younger than you.

(Note I am middle-aged)

Svoka• 1 year ago

It is very strange idea to equate life experiences gained before 18 of people born in 21st century in 18th century.

Also, as outsider, I would never understand US fascination with "Founding Fathers". Some folks born about 300 years ago and somehow having answers to all the questions for all the times. Back than this country was a backwater colony which barely started industrialization. Overwhelming majority of population lived out of sustenance farming and majority of trade goods were products of slave labour. I mean, it is what it is, but where this yearning for glorious past which never existed comes from? Like, life in USA became more or less good only several generations ago, after the country became giant economical winner of WW2. And it did it by investing heavily into helping allies, not building isolationist policies.

gtirloni• 1 year ago

I'm no expert in US history but just looking at the signers list, 3/4 of them were >30yo.

Cthulhu_4• 1 year ago

The Founding Fathers were responsible for a population of... just under 3 million though, as opposed to the US' current ~350 million.

jeltz4• 1 year ago

Most of the founding fathers were old. Benjamin Franklin was in his 80s. The young ones were the exception.

rsoto25• 1 year ago

hahaha you think any part of this is rational? Ignorance must be bliss.

bende5114• 1 year ago

No way a 19 year old could be tricked by a pretty woman into giving her secrets and access codes. Real level-headed and clear-eyed age

nickpinkston• 1 year ago

Though is true of a lot of fully grown men - especially in DC.

Cthulhu_4• 1 year ago

Yeah I mean Zucc was only 20 when he started Facebook and popularised the adage "work fast and break things", which was a great strategy for Facebook and its burnt out staff (or those that couldn't hack it) so of course it'll work for the biggest economy in the world too, it's basically the same as a startup, right?

asadm• 1 year ago

nations were lead into greatness by 17yo. It's a dumb idea that this can't be done here.

emagdnim2100• 1 year ago

disappointing to see so many “hacker” news comments complaining about lack of credentials or system-specific expertise.

yes, existing government systems are insanely complex - that’s part of the problem! the essential complexity is not higher than that of a brain-computer interface, or an interplanetary rocket.

we don’t even know what these kids’ mandate is (also disappointing). but if your general premise is “smart outsiders who are good at engineering are always the wrong people to rework complex, inefficient systems,” i’d like to think you’re on the wrong site.

whoknowsidont• 1 year ago

The problem with these types of comments is your filtering reality through some sort of weird hero-complex you're clinging to. It's not realistic and it's harmful.

The people involved in this are not qualified or capable in _any_ manner to be doing what they're doing. They are sycophants.

Worse, it's putting an entire nation in jeopardy.

This isn't "smart, young spirits defy all odds and save the day!" it's really "hitler youth comes in and starts thrashing about until daddy gets his way."

alfalfasprout7• 1 year ago

Yep. You can move fast and break things in a SAAS startup or some dumb LLM as a service startup.

But the stakes are much higher in what they're touching. And the way they're being brought in is selecting for loyal sycophants, nothing else. If they disagree musk will axe them in seconds.

l0t0b0r0s2• 1 year ago

You're making swathing character attacks and claiming that you are qualified to know who is qualified. If anyone has a hero complex its you with your emotional argument and alarmism.

Very compelling argument, definitely not partisan rhetoric.

vzqx• 1 year ago

I'm open to outsiders improving inefficiencies. The concern is that these are kids, barely out of college. They don't have the domain-specific knowledge required to rework these complex systems, no matter how smart they are. Plus, given Musk's track record, they were likely chosen more for their loyalty to Musk than for their technical acumen.

tgv4• 1 year ago

the essential complexity is not higher than that of a brain-computer interface, or an interplanetary rocket.

Sorry, but that's such an absurd comment. These kids don't even know anything about rocket building, let alone they're able to build a rocket from first principles. Second, the US government is much more complex than a rocket; it cannot be understood by a single person. Third, you can waste rockets, but a whole nation depends on one goverment. You can't just experiment with it. Fourth, there are lives at stake. It's not just a payload, or one or two astronauts who know what they signed up for, that are at their mercy.

lm284692• 1 year ago

yes, existing government systems are insanely complex - that’s part of the problem! the essential complexity is not higher than that of a brain-computer interface, or an interplanetary rocket.

Yeah, and why don't we build concentration camps again? They're super efficient in term of work per unit of food. Colonies are also super nice, lots of free stuff!

Some people should open history books, life isn't about refactoring everything, making things as simple as possible, &c. It would be comical if it wasn't the very first thing you learn as an engineer

If you think a rocket is more complex than hundreds of years of infinitely complex people making decisions and compromises through democracy you're completely out of touch with reality, and if you genuinely think we can just burn it all down because some nerd unilaterally thinks he found a better way to do it you're just plain dumb.

kelnos27• 1 year ago

"Smart" isn't enough when dealing with systems like these. I want smart and experienced.

jeffbee2• 1 year ago

There is zero evidence that any of these guys are even average.

drawkward9• 1 year ago

Disappointing seeing so many "smart" people on this site thinking that a government shoild be run like a business.

bagels10• 1 year ago

Qualified or not, it's crimes, unconstitutional, and fascist.

HumblyTossed5• 1 year ago

We are watching a coup in real time.

There's no two ways about it.

Sigh...

racktash3• 1 year ago

I would love just one year of this decade to be uneventful / boring...

I used to think people were over-doing it in their criticism of Trump – I thought he was dreadful, but ultimately a contained / containable force. I was even a little optimistic that he might be a disruptive force (inadvertent) that would make other politicians return their focus to everyday, working class concerns.

I was naive and stupid. And many people are kidding themselves even now about what's going on. There's nothing normal or business as usual about what's happening in America right now. I'm not qualified to predict where this all ends, but I don't think any of it's good and I don't think this ends after Donald Trump's second term.

To the people thinking DOGE is about cutting "wasteful spending", I can only shake my head. What will it take for people to see clearly what's right before them?

MathMonkeyMan• 1 year ago

Each of us feels that we belong to some tribe. If your tribe supports what you see going on, you won't be alarmed by it. Reality is less important than the discourse's impact on your tribe.

Besides, maybe everything is fine and the Muskovites are right.

nxm4• 1 year ago

Tell me exactly how I will miss USAID and the billions wasted to foreign governments? Be specific please.

HumblyTossed5• 1 year ago

I was naive and stupid.

No, you weren't. People on every angle of this are tired of the government not working. It's easy to have that glimmer of hope that maybe he really will make a good change. The problem is, he's a salesman - a grifter. His art is to latch onto that glimmer of hope and sell you on it while never delivering on it.

bobsmooth• 1 year ago

Are you going to do anything about it?

HumblyTossed5• 1 year ago

Yes

user324893182• 1 year ago

how is someone’s age relevant? Is a 55 y.o. Software engineer who spent 20 years in a bureaucratic wheel any better than a bright 20yo mind? They both suck in a different way! Writing an entire article with ageism as a center piece is truly pinnacle of American journalism

PeeMcGee2• 1 year ago

When they're as young as literally 19 years old, then it must be the case that they lack the appropriate experience.

user324893182• 1 year ago

I’m not disagreeing with you but let’s ask the question “experience for what”? Is it making a couple of dashboards, extract data from legacy systems into something more queryable, or generating a couple of expense reports? Or will they be making actual significant decisions affecting millions? How likely would that be?

92834092326• 1 year ago

Experience is an important teacher and a 19 year old doesn't have it.

kelnos27• 1 year ago

I find it hard to believe that any 19-22 year old would have the appropriate level of experience to handle this responsibility.

Sure, a 55 year old also may not have the appropriate responsibility, but at least it's reasonable to expect that they could.

BurningFrog2• 1 year ago

Pretty sure these whiz kids engineers are writing software to analyze things like where all the money goes.

Decisions will ultimately be made and implemented by the appropriate authorities, of course.

soared• 1 year ago

None of them have seemingly ever held more than 1 full time job. Age is discussed, but experience is clearly lacking. Your argument skips over that entirely.

tgv4• 1 year ago

19 year olds are much more malleable. They can be fanatic, and follow orders easily. They aren't educated. They have a limited grasp of morality, and can't oversee the consequences of their actions. They have no other obligation in life than to this holy task.

That's why it's relevant.

kdmtctl2• 1 year ago

This is exactly the reason why they were selected.

fastball8• 1 year ago

Somewhat ironic to claim a "limited grasp of morality" and a lack of education when the instutions doing said education have been preaching moral relativism for a while now.

grumple• 1 year ago

Experience - which comes with age - is absolutely critical in all intellectual pursuits, including programming, government, and just about everything else. Experts and lifetime learners learn more each day. A 20 year old simply has not had the time to be exposed to the same breadth or depth of ideas, or to critique them seriously. Younger people are also far more vulnerable to hormonal impulses, manipulation, and more likely to have been exposed to a much more limited world view.

I can’t imagine anyone but insufferably arrogant - and really fucking wrong - young people making an argument to the contrary. Not that there aren’t benefits to youth - being unburdened by complexity, ignorant enough to be especially bold - but these aren’t actually that useful. And we have good evidence to support that; older founders do better, for example: https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/younger-old...

thom• 1 year ago

I agree. Fascism is fascism whether it’s a teenage Octavian, Agrippa or a groyper. Underestimate them at your peril.

Buttons840• 1 year ago

The age of one person isn't that relevant, you're right about that. The average age of an entire "agency"[0] is relevant though.

[0]: DOGE may not technically be an "agency", but whatever the case, they have and are acting with power equal to that of an agency.

zelphirkalt3• 1 year ago

I think it is more about how Musk needs to surround himself with young easily impressed and gullible minds, because anyone else would probably see through him all day. These young guys are probably afraid to speak out against him, or are sucking it aaaaall up as ordered by Musk. He will have chosen who gets to tag along.

rich_sasha• 1 year ago

With age comes life experience and an appreciation that it's hard to make things better, and breaking them is rarely good.

Similarly, it is easier to convince an impressionable 19yo to do reckless and possibly illegal things.

It doesn't strike me as totally irrelevant.

mrkeen6• 1 year ago

20yos with max 2 weeks of experience in the job - given the inauguration date.

Sparkle-san• 1 year ago

Because there's a baseline age to have the necessary skills, experience, and cognitive development to be able to accomplish the task.

alfalfasprout7• 1 year ago

Their experience is relevant. If they're being brought into build data analysis systems to make sense of data of various organizations there's zero chance they've worked on a project of that scale let alone do they understand all the gotchas you need to deal with working on a project of that scale.

You're offering a completely false dichotomy here.

pizzafeelsright3• 1 year ago

Yet it is encouraged that everyone votes (distributed system affecting the lives of many) and are given weapons of war to kill people (military, cops).

We have a minimum age on the Presidency. They work at the discretion of their employers.

TrackerFF5• 1 year ago

Let's face this head-on.

Not all 20-year olds are mature. No mater how bright they might be when it comes to topics in STEM. Their minds haven't matured enough, especially the male mind.

They do immature shit because there's prestige dangling in-front of them, or because they've been convinces by Musk et. al. that this is the cause to fight for.

There's a reason organized crime preys on young people. They're malleable, do what they're told, blindly ambitious, and want to please their superiors at all costs.

jxramos2• 1 year ago

good quip over here https://x.com/pmarca/status/1887003073530286569

eutropia• 1 year ago

There are people in this thread claiming that Wired "doxxed" these engineers working for Musk dismantling things they don't understand; however didn't Musk publicly mock individual federal employees on his twitter account, drawing the eyes of millions onto random government functionaries for no other reason than to capriciously taunt them about being fired?

I hope people condemning the former also condemn the latter.

sanderjd21• 1 year ago

People who work at the highest levels of our government are public figures. It is the job of reporters to report on who they are and what they're up to.

cgannett• 1 year ago

Well if they are working on those systems I think they count then right?

mrkeen6• 1 year ago

Sources:

When Musk does it:

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1858916546338590740

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1858914228624924963

When others do it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/comments/1igw3cs/elon_m...

srid• 1 year ago

The X post in that last link is in response to a suspended account. Screenshot for those wondering is here:

https://x.com/jessesingal/status/1886479301081522599

(The names it includes are already in the Wired article)

alfalfasprout7• 1 year ago

How exactly is this doxxing? When you're backchanneling cabinet-level access to a sizable chunk of the country's personal data (and a nontrivial amount of classified information to boot) you're now essentially operating as a public figure.

This is reporting in the public interest. Nothing they revealed isn't available already as verifiable public information.

johnnyanmac8• 1 year ago

It's still doxxing because these are not elected officials.

But then again... these are people outright breaking the law and I sure do want to know who's potentially tampering with my data. If the courts won't do it, someone has to put names and faces to this.

eru4• 1 year ago

This is reporting in the public interest.

This might be true, however...

Nothing they revealed isn't available already as verifiable public information.

... collating publicly available information and publishing it in one place would still meet my definition of doxxing.

(In this case, the doxxing _might_ be entirely justified and be in the public interest. I don't know.)

NedF• 1 year ago

Reddit - "Pink mist them all" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrYxMsWmrjk (Screen caps on Twitter etc. if someone wants to find and link them)

Mocking != doxing.

Musk was horrid to do that, but it's a different thing.

Cody-993• 1 year ago

Did you seriously just link Asmongold?

epr• 1 year ago

Two wrongs make a right. OK

nailer10• 1 year ago

There’s a difference between mocking the general function of government employees and specifically calling for violence against individual engineers.

SpicyLemonZest8• 1 year ago

These are not "individual engineers". They're government officials with seemingly vast powers which aren't yet fully understood by the public. As the article details, they seem to have the authority to demand access to most if not all of the government's computer systems; we don't yet know which of them have this authority, or what limits there are, or what review processes are in place.

That doesn't mean it's OK to call for violence against them! But Wired isn't doing that. It does mean that news outlets need to report on who they are and what they're doing, even if they fear (even if they know) that third parties might issue death threats.

lovich2• 1 year ago

I hope people condemning the former also condemn the latter.

Why? Its ok when our betters engage in such behavior and who could be better than the rich?

When some poors like "journalists" try to do this, they're just upending the system for their own gain. It would really be tolerating corruption if you just tolerated them ripping up our current system of governance just because they preferred a different set of rules. Elections have consequences and its just gauche to ignore the results like this.

ChuckMcM• 1 year ago

I mean "mr free speech absolutist" has already tweeted that anyone complaining about the government would have their account suspended. Kind of on brand for a nazi.

darthrupert• 1 year ago

Suspending an account on a single service has absolutely nothing to do with fascism.

shipscode4• 1 year ago

There’s no reason to look for logical consistency. Some people like the government employees, some people like the kids taking them down.

It’s a fundamental matter of opinion driving the discourse - not the misappropriation of some objectively correct morality.

matwood5• 1 year ago

The hypocrisy of Musk once again in full effect. Anyone who still thinks Musk is out to help anyone but himself, I have a bridge to sell you. It's sitting right next to 'free speech'.

When it comes to these people specifically, they need to be publicly called out. What's happening is unprecedented and possibly illegal. I know most of the press has been bought off or strong-armed to look the other way by the new administration, but at least someone is still doing reporting.

concordDance5• 1 year ago

Anyone have any guesses as to why "Both are quite bad. I expect better from Wired." would be flagged?

Sometimes HN really confuses me.

nojonestownpls2• 1 year ago

Imagine if this was a male journalist snooping through newly appointed young, female engineers' histories, e-stalking them the same way and writing an article of his findings. You can justify it as "it's technically still reporting", but it's very creepy that they thought of this and then continued to think this was a good idea throughout the process.

fifilura• 1 year ago

Most Scandinavian countries are required to make any communication in public departments (including all coworkers emails) public on request by journalists or anyone interested.

This is to make any doubts regarding e.g USAID public instead of making such drastic measures necessary.

But also make work of an entity such as Doge transparent. They are after all funded by my money (as a taxpayer).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_public_access_to_...

vkou8• 1 year ago

instead of making such drastic measures necessary.

These drastic measures are neither necessary[1] nor legal (Well, they are a necessary step in carrying out a self-coup...) But there's nobody left to prosecute or enforce the law.

First they came for the judges and made sure that the courts were stacked... And then they could do what they want, because they have the police, the army, and the courts.

[1] It's actually wild how people here are actively arguing for shredding the constitution because the country is carrying a debt. America truly is done.

reaperducer2• 1 year ago

Most Scandinavian countries are required to make any communication in public departments (including all coworkers emails) public on request by journalists or anyone interested.

In the U.S., too. In fact, it was the United States that pioneered this in the modern age.

But it's all happening so quickly that nobody can keep up with it. And the people who are supposed to take care of these things have been fired.

Also bad, when requests are made by legitimate parties, they are being ignored or dismissed by the new regime.

Let what's happening in the U.S. serve as a warning to you that no matter what laws you pass, electing lawless people brings lawlessness. And the law you passed cannot help you against people who don't respect the law.

writebetterc2• 1 year ago

In fact, it was the United States that pioneered this in the modern age.

This was instituted in Sweden in the year 1766. Source: https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offentlighetsprincipen

That's 10 years before the USA declared independence.

rahimnathwani• 1 year ago

  In the U.S., too. In fact, it was the United States that pioneered this in the modern age.

In practice, at least one San Francisco (city/county-level) department and at least one California (state-level) department deliberately makes it difficult to get responsive records, even though the law requires them to not only provide those records, but help the public identify which records might answer the questions they have.

Clubber3• 1 year ago

In the U.S., too. In fact, it was the United States that pioneered this in the modern age.

The hack in the US is to just label everything "SECRET," and it's excluded from FOIA.

goldfish3• 1 year ago

Is this supposed to contrast with the US? You just explained the US Freedom of Information Act of 1967.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Information_Act_(...

That DOGE is not transparent is because the Musk/Trump administration has moved beyond the rule of law.

picafrost• 1 year ago

The attributes of young men have always made them convenient to put on the frontlines.

adamredwoods• 1 year ago

I'm concerned about my US bonds, as the way to access them is through a government website. Are these people going to block my access and steal my money?

> “We really have very little eyes on what's going on. Congress has no ability to really intervene and monitor what's happening because these aren't really accountable public officials. So this feels like a hostile takeover of the machinery of governments by the richest man in the world.”

justin667• 1 year ago

They are going to make it easier to get your money by making it available via X!

chasely• 1 year ago

I'm trying to download my 1099 forms from TreasuryDirect and it's coming back as unavailable. Probably unrelated to everything going on now, but the fact I thought that it could be related for a second is crazy.

>> TreasuryDirect is unavailable. >> We apologize for the inconvenience and ask that you try again later.

sanderjd21• 1 year ago

Investors' faith in US bond and equity markets is, unironically, the most powerful immediate-term check on the current administration. The longer-term check is the midterm elections in 2026. If they really screw things up, as they appear to be doing, that's their deadline for fixing them.

bloopernova4• 1 year ago

The republicans purged a lot of people from voter rolls. They're going to do the same in 2026.

If you want to vote, anticipate dozens of hours over several months making sure you weren't removed from the register.

Why are they so against people voting? The number of actual fraudulent vote cases prosecuted was very, very small, but the measures taken against voter fraud have been disproportionate.

mostertoaster14• 1 year ago

It’s all in the eye of the beholder.

It appears to me that Trump is doing phenomenal, and my I didn’t like the other side vote for him, is turning into I kind of like him and would more actively support him. He seems like a strong president, especially compared to his predecessor, and the promise to “make America great again”, seems like it might becoming more of a reality.

If he can negotiate an end to the Ukraine war, in a relatively soonish timeframe, I will be very happy. But it’s kind of a game of chicken, a high risk high reward type gamble, that could be very dangerous and lead to worse things, so I’ll just have to wait and see.

Ultimately I read comments here and I think the “other side” is blind, which they likely think of me.

DanielHB3• 1 year ago

Imagine if the US misses bond payments and defaults because of bureaucracy problems (not lack of money). It would completely explode the interest rates of any loans they have and completely tank the US government for years.

adamsb6• 1 year ago

I don't think Treasury Direct could get much worse without just being completely broken.

At least they don't force you to login with a virtual keyboard any longer.

hedora2• 1 year ago

They'll steal it via inflation. Trump's already announced a few programs that involve him siphoning federal dollars into the pockets of his cronies (including the tariff revenue).

Blocking your access to any sort of "sell my bond back" button while they do it seems prudent.

fastball8• 1 year ago

The last two admins already "stole" it via inflation. Do you have any idea how many dollars were printed in the last 5 years?

Cutting federal spending is obviously not the thing that will lead to more inflation (though tariffs certainly might, but that is not really the subject of the current discussion).

jaimex23• 1 year ago

Yeah man, theyre using them to buy weed as we speak. Sorry.

affinepplan4• 1 year ago

“Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control.

I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe. The entire government, just like that. How did they get in, how did it happen?

That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on…”

- The Handmaid's Tale

zzzeek5• 1 year ago

Fortunately we have an enemy this time, Elon Musk. He's it. He's also really bad at hiding what he's doing.

pietrrrek• 1 year ago

I don't think that Elon Musk can be singled out as the source of these changes, he's didn't just magically appear lur of nowhere and start doing what he's doing.

morkalork• 1 year ago

I don't think he cares? Seems like he's happy to fill the role publicly. It appears to be on purpose like a wrestler turning heel or a gamer drawing aggro on a mob. Society of the spectacle indeed.

netbioserror• 1 year ago

Vacuous cliches this painfully stupid need to stay in high school theatre clubs where they belong.

freddi333• 1 year ago

This is like a Christian quoting scripture to an atheist, there are real world parallels of current events to draw from which carry substantially more weight.

ActorNightly2• 1 year ago

How did they get in, how did it happen?

Over half of US was apathetic and didn't vote.

You can blame the MAGA for everything that is happening, but they literally said this is what they were gonna do. Over half of the US, implicitly said, "Given all of that, and Kamala, it really doesn't matter who is the president".

Which is worse than MAGA IMO

xboxnolifes• 1 year ago

Voter turnout hasn't significantly changed in 100 years, how is that the cause to point to?

PartiallyTyped• 1 year ago

let us not forget all the attempts at disenfranchisement, destruction of ballots by MAGA, voter intimidation, and all that.

eps• 1 year ago

Over half of US was apathetic and didn't vote.

Not true. Voter turnout was between 59% and 64%.

hn_throwaway_995• 1 year ago

This is the part I'm curious about. Trump may be many things, but lacking transparency around his motives and actions is not one of them. As you say, he is doing basically exactly what he said he would.

So what I'm curious about is whether anyone who voted for Trump, and especially not the hard core MAGA folks but more the "The Dems suck, prices are too high" folks that shifted toward Trump in 2024 vs previous elections, are surprised/angered/scared by his actions. If so, what was their thought process?

I'm especially curious how they feel about Musk's role in all this. I just can't wrap my head around people that were "drain the swamp" nativists are cool with an unelected foreign-born billionaire having free reign, essentially unaccountably, to do whatever he wants to any federal department. If somebody told me in 2010 that this would happen in 2025 I would tell tell them that they are nuts. If the Dems had done anything 1/10th as egregious, Republicans would be apoplectic, and rightfully so.

energy1234• 1 year ago

"Gradually and then suddenly" is how it always happens, whether that's the collapse of democracy or the collapse of dictatorship. You can't take it for granted just because it hasn't happened yet. And that 'suddenly' almost did happen on January 6th 2021 if not for the moral courage of Mike Pence. That same moral courage will be absent this time around given the lesson they learned on that day. Appoint loyalists.

markus_zhang2• 1 year ago

Well from a foreigner's perspective, US is finally getting its own version of Cultural Revolution.

wyager5• 1 year ago

This is perhaps more analogous to an immune reaction to a(n attempted) Cultural Revolution.

markus_zhang2• 1 year ago

Or a counter-cultural revolution.

jeltz4• 1 year ago

Not really. To an outsider this looks very much like the cultural revolution.

dinkumthinkum6• 1 year ago

I think the Democrats are the ones that are into struggle sessions and re-education ...

kragen4• 1 year ago

We'll see.

They were tearing down statues and demanding public self-criticism a few years ago, but that was actually the other side.

Shutting down the universities and firing any professor who isn't politically correct is a couple of years in the future; Trump probably has to replace the accreditation system for the universities first. There isn't currently a mechanism for "sending down" suspected subversive thinkers except for deportation.

The Red Guards haven't been formed yet, though commuting the sentences of the ringleaders of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys is a start. (You may not be aware of this, but the Red Guards were over 10 million people.)

The news media are still independent, for all that matters.

So are almost all of the police, although Trump has said he wants to bring them under his command.

So I don't think we're likely to see that kind of widespread mass killing in the next two or three years. The organizational infrastructure for doing it the traditional way, using hand tools, can't be built overnight. Vance's ally Anduril might be able to automate the process with AI-powered surveillance drones, but they won't have enough production capacity for at least three years.

antifa• 1 year ago

The news media are still independent, for all that matters.

The media has bent the knee to Trump, a meteorologist was fired for critiquing Trump on her private Instagram, and an LATimes article's editors removed the article author's criticisms of Trump. You have to goto YouTube to find people openly critizing Trump.

aqsalose• 1 year ago

I think Third Republic France is a more apt comparison. Political fights about religion and content of education, check. Diverging media landscape aligned with party political identity and ideology, check. Major changes to civil service personnel after consequential elections (1879-1884), check.

ggm3• 1 year ago

I don't see the parallels. When are the academics going to be sent to the countryside and where are the self criticism sessions being held?

iamleppert• 1 year ago

The next four years are going to be a test of the US Constitution. But when they are up -- and they will be, and people are more angry at Trump than the last time around the pendulum swings wildly back again, as it always does, what is going to happen to Musk and the rest of them?

vermilingua• 1 year ago

I expect we’ll see more Italian plumbers coming out of the woodwork before 4 years is up.

drawkward9• 1 year ago

I too am a fan of mario brothers!

tines6• 1 year ago

It's not a test of The Constitution, it's a test of our constitution, and we're being exposed as we speak.

duderific• 1 year ago

I think it is going to be much harder to get Trump to leave after these four years than the last time. I imagine there will be an amendment on the table soon to do away with the two-term limit, if there isn't already. Or, he may just say "come and get me" and if the military is on his side, he can just continue to rule as he sees fit.

sirbutters2• 1 year ago

Key word here is "cannot be elected more than twice". So as long as there is no official election, he is not technically violating the constitution by remaining in power. I'm playing devil's advocate here.

louthy• 1 year ago

That assumes this will end.

kappuchino• 1 year ago

From the outside (that is europen view) it looks like they're planning that this change in four years - or even two - will not happen. We'll see.

A good read would be Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires.

AnimalMuppet5• 1 year ago

I worry more about what will happen to the US then. The backlash is going to be very tempted to fight fire with fire, to fight unconstitutionality with unconstitutionality.

Can we get back to a functioning rule of law and a limited government at the end of this? I'm... hesitant.

kelnos27• 1 year ago

The problem is that the optimistic approach requires that there's enough left of the government in order to use legal means to stop the catastrophe. I really really hope there will be, but right now I'm worried that's a losing proposition.

yibg3• 1 year ago

This assumes there will be a next time. Sometimes once momentum is allowed to build it's very hard to stop or even slow things down.

siliconc0w• 1 year ago

If DOGE wants to be effective it really should be going after the big ticket items like medicare or defense, some estimates have medicare at 40% fraud and waste and the DoD can't even pass an audit so no one really knows what %. And that is just getting what we've paid for, not even evaluating if what we've paid for is effective.

Of course to do that would require actual coalition building, hard choices that upset voters, and congressional approval. Instead they'll going to disrupt some of the highest ROI small-money grants like food or medicine to impoverished countries because they don't have any representation.

It won't meaningfully reduce the deficit and means we we're signing up for warlords and global instability in the near future.

solatic• 1 year ago

Catching Medicare fraud likely requires a level of automatic data anomaly analysis that's simply beyond all the participants involved, both in terms of getting access to the actual databases and in getting the qualified manpower to build such a system.

If the DoD's auditors can't track down all the expenses, then why would DOGE be any more successful?

Running after bullshit is the low-hanging fruit.

jacobjjacob8• 1 year ago

I think that the practical solution is to hire more auditors/investigators, and they would end up paying for themselves, but I don’t think Elon would accept a solution that requires more humans and up front cost.

rasz• 1 year ago

should be going after the big ticket items like medicare or defense

ok, but just after he fixed twitter bots like he promised, or ships working Autopilot.

chrisgd• 1 year ago

Medicare fraud perpetuated by individuals is u likely to be that high. Overbilling by hospital corporations and medical device companies could be possible. But corporations aren’t the target of DOGE.

nxobject15• 1 year ago

Not just by individuals - by Medicare Advantage managed care organizations, too… like the biggest insurers in this country.

Taikonerd2• 1 year ago

The 40% estimate is for fraud and waste combined. "Waste" being things like unnecessary MRIs.

johnbellone• 1 year ago

It’s cute you think they’re trying to be “effective”.

paxys• 1 year ago

It isn’t about budget but about ideology. Firing prosecutors who investigated Trump, firing FBI agents involved in Jan 6th arrests, firing employees for having pronouns in email signatures, going after agencies that spend <.1% of the federal budget just because they have “diversity” or “aid” in the name, using emergency executive power over vague threats like “drugs”. This is a government takeover and purge of anyone who can be considered disloyal to the administration. This may be a surprise to people who have only ever lived under functional first-world governments and the rule of law, but the rest of the world recognizes it as a story that has played out many times before.

xvector8• 1 year ago

Will you eat your words and admit you are wrong if Musk frees up a significant fraction of the budget?

karthikk• 1 year ago

Non-American here, from the outside it seems like the Jan 6 thing was way overblown. It feels like similar things happen in other govt buildings in the USA all the time but the perpetrators were not targeted the same way. Not condoning either, but there seems to be selective govt retribution.

jimkleiber14• 1 year ago

Exactly. An ideology of "the world is out to get me, I shall seek vengeance on them," which honestly, is maybe the farthest thing from what Christians should believe, if they read any of the New Testament. And I think maybe even has been taboo since Hammurabi.

test65542• 1 year ago

Even if they somehow managed to clear $250 bn in wasteful federal expenses, people would still be upset and start demanding how it should be spent.

crooked-v3• 1 year ago

They don't want to be effective. They want to punish and humiliate anyone they don't like, and lie about it because claiming "efficiency" is an easy way to get overly credulous American moderates to look the other way.

bamboozled2• 1 year ago

Musk also thinks it's funny we all have to say "DOGE" because he is a petty moron with the sense of humor of a spoiled 13 year old gamer from the year 2000.

BenFranklin1002• 1 year ago

You don’t really need to get moderates to look the other way when you have crazed MAGA going at this gung-ho.

speakfreely• 1 year ago

As someone who witnessed the absurd corruption of the weird fiefdoms carved out by the horrifically inefficient career staff at the Department of State and USAID, I have to say that all this really couldn't happen to a better set of people.

kyrra• 1 year ago

Trump and almost all of Congress doesn't want to touch the entitlements. Bush Jr tried to reform social security and got trounced for it. Since then no one seriously tries to change it because the other side will beat you over the head with it, even if they are half truths.

Voters like to vote themselves "free" things, even if it might destroy the economy.

whimsicalism4• 1 year ago

i will vote for whichever party reforms entitlements and raises taxes, especially less distortionary taxes like on inheritance, property, and consumption.

aishdbxjdns• 1 year ago

This has been a known pattern for millennia. Democracy as it is today in the US suffers from the same ills Plato discussed. It is not a good nor sustainable system. It is not the system the founding fathers put in place.

That none of our rulers question it nor propose alternatives is very telling about who runs our society and what their end goals are. The only reason society appears to be improving (and it is on the whole) is due to our incredible technological advancement. That being said, we should be living in a utopia by now if our rulers weren’t parasites.

crabmusket3• 1 year ago

Great recent article which explores how to actually cut $2T of federal expenses (though if course a tally doing so very quickly would cause a recession):

https://prospect.org/economy/2025-01-27-we-found-the-2-trill...

Most of what's been discussed so far is culture war dog whistling which won't save any money- or just cutting entitlements and hang the consequences.

Terr_9• 1 year ago

Plus the whole issue of "the executive branch can't unilaterally change or suspend laws."

Well, not without fascist criminality anyway.

crabmusket3• 1 year ago

Holy typos, batman.

*Though of course actually doing so very quickly would cause a recession

ctrlp8• 1 year ago

Have to take out the enemy machine gun nests first before you take the citadel. Goodbye USAID/CIA.

rsoto25• 1 year ago

LOL the trump admin just ressuplied Israel to the tune of a billion to keep murdering children defense budget is not getting cut

liontwist15• 1 year ago

It’s week 2. I think they will have time to go after those big orgs.

But also you’re missing an important theme of the administration. Foreign aid doesn’t go to Americans. Social security and Medicare do. Trump didn’t run a tea party platform.

beej712• 1 year ago

They did save that billion dollars... Enough to power the federal government for a little over an hour.

jimkleiber14• 1 year ago

You mean go after military contractors like SpaceX and Palantir? That would require they actually want to reduce the deficit, not just kill departments that they find evil because of some projected vengeance.

turtlesdown114• 1 year ago

some estimates have medicare at 40% fraud and waste

same tired old lies, medicare is more efficient than private insurance

whalesalad• 1 year ago

"move fast and break things"

just imagine how insecure and fucked up their solutions will be? waiting for the S3 bucket that has global read permissions on a literal "select * from usa_citizens" dump of data.

SubiculumCode3• 1 year ago

Are they the cause of the rumored fire in a NIH server room?

quantisan• 1 year ago

- Youth-Led Implementation - Bypassing Traditional Authority Structures - Loyalty-Based Appointments - Institutional Disruption - Limited Oversight - Information Control

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution

mythrwy4• 1 year ago

Good. These guys, in addition to obviously being very smart, are young and don't have a lot of baggage in government or industry.

I think they are perfect for tracing down what has been going on and finding where inefficiencies and/or corruption has been occurring. Anyone who has issue with rooting out corruption and inefficiency isn't in the right.

Of course what is done with what they find will not be in their hands.

tombert10• 1 year ago

I think part of the concern is that Elon Musk is still the CEO of or has strong financial interest in a lot of companies, some of which get government contracts (e.g. SpaceX).

Finding out corruption and inefficiency is fine, but I think a lot of people are skeptical that that's the actual goal of this "advisory board". How likely is it that Elon is going to find anything inefficient about SpaceX? Tesla? What's to stop him from using this data to haggle better deals from the government paying for his projects?

It's entirely possible that SpaceX is efficient enough, but it's still a conflict of interest. I don't think a guy who owns and runs a company that competes on government contracts should be in charge of determining which parts of the government is efficient.

mythrwy4• 1 year ago

Ok, but what does that have to do with the nature of the young guys charged with the analysis?

I read through your past comments. It's obvious to me what you believe. And I don't agree with your worldview but not sure that matters. If you don't like Musk and don't like Trump, fine, I get it. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like either of them in person either, and, they both have vested interests on that we can agree. You know who else has vested interests? The people benefiting from waste, fraud and abuse. The people who have been directing public funds into propaganda and a black hole. I'd like to see western civilization persist. If you feel differently that's a value judgement and it's fine. But hearing kveltching and ridiculous statements from liberal midwits on every single policy article is getting really really old and it's shitting up this site. This is what is going to happen. And it's long overdue.

a_puppy• 1 year ago

I think it would be great for the federal government to be more efficient and less corrupt. For example, let's talk about USAID. It would be great if DOGE could make USAID more efficient, to accomplish the most possible good with the money allocated by Congress.

So far, that's not what DOGE appears to be doing. Rather than "rooting out corruption and inefficiency", DOGE appears to be cutting government spending that Musk disagrees with.

And that's unconstitutional! The executive branch doesn't have the constitutional authority to unilaterally cut a program established by Congress. If Congress allocated $X billion for foreign aid to country Y, the executive branch must disburse that aid.

Furthermore, speaking of corruption: Both Trump and Musk have major conflicts of interest. Prior to Trump, presidents were expected to divest business interests and put their assets in a blind trust; but Trump refused to do so. And SpaceX is a major federal contractor; if the head of a major federal contractor is _also_ the biggest supporter of the incoming president, the conflict of interest is obvious.

As you said, anyone who has an issue with rooting out corruption isn't in the right. So surely you're alarmed by these conflicts of interest, right? Don't you agree that Musk should either fully divest from SpaceX, or step away from politics?

TrackerFF5• 1 year ago

How would they know?

I've worked on billion dollar defense projects, and have supervised plenty of smart junior consultants from top consulting firms (McKinsey, etc.) - guiding them through processes, while they're digging through data.

Believe it or not, but you don't know what you don't know, and domain expertise is absolutely crucial. Slashing things you think are inefficiencies can lead to some serious footguns.

And I fully expect Musk to value speed over precision.

varsketiz• 1 year ago

Curious european here. Do you think we will see some serious mass protests in big USA cities if this continues? By this I mean "reckless" action by Musk and Trump.

Night_Thastus• 1 year ago

The vast majority of Americans either voted for this, or don't care.

Will there be some protests? Sure. Nothing will come of it, though. The only thing that will enact any real change is if big corporations start losing any profits due to all this upheaval, in which case they may put pressure to get things settled down.

accrual• 1 year ago

A lot of voters didn't turn out, so it's not accurate to say most Americans voted for this. There's also the issue of Trump saying Musk helped him win two key states during his inauguration speech, which some consider just short of an admission to rigging the election.

Only something like 3% of the population needs to actively strike and protest to start affecting corporations.

wyager5• 1 year ago

This is exactly the type of thing that Trump said he wanted to do. Who is protesting that who wouldn't be unconditionally protesting Trump anyway? Plus, with the federal NGO money spigot cut off, a lot of the NGOs that organize protests are probably having operational problems.

energy1234• 1 year ago

Only if there's inflation. If there's no inflation then people won't do anything. Most people don't know what's going on because they get their information from social media echo chambers. Truly a dystopia in the making.

int_19h2• 1 year ago

Maybe. The first test will be on February, 5, when there are scheduled protests in all state capitols. There's also https://generalstrikeus.com.

barbazoo2• 1 year ago

I'm a pessimist sometimes so I can't imagine any real uprising coming out of this. At the end of the day, people in the US have to pay the bills, people live beyond their means whether they know it or not, no one can afford to sacrifice any of their time to a real revolution save for a small minority.

krainboltgreene• 1 year ago

Oh sweet, we're at the honeypot general strike stage of a Trump presidency. Glad we're just hoping trade union consciousness springs forth from the lowest union rate in american history.

fullshark5• 1 year ago

No one cares about protests even if they happen. Remember all the women's march / pussy hat protests? What a great instagram opportunity that was. They are chances for people to cosplay as "members of the resistance" as they live their day to day lives as urban PMC drones.

drawkward9• 1 year ago

I marched in NYC against the war in Iraq; they didnt care then either.

anigbrowl3• 1 year ago

Yes. Lots of people in this thread have collective amnesia about 2020.

msikora• 1 year ago

"between 19 and 24" - that would mean not even college educated?

JFC, I was a complete dumbass in my 20s.

kccoder7• 1 year ago

As is very nearly every person, including these children.

Arubis• 1 year ago

That's a hell of a stain to have on your résumé.

tonymet9• 1 year ago

Young people should be happy to see more representation in the federal govt. Among roles of authority it's probably 65+ . They're spending your & your grandkid's prosperity every minute.

People under 55 should be happy about this situation.

iAm256262• 1 year ago

History doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes. Komsomol/Soviet, Red guards/China. Ideology fan the flame of youth into fanatic. Who/what is providing the necessary guardrail? God speed America. Future belong to the young. Make good/long term decision.

yongjik• 1 year ago

The similarity with Red Guards is too uncanny to ignore.

I guess we should be thankful that the new Red Guards aren't beating federal employees to death. Yet.

kragen4• 1 year ago

The Trump-supporting Red Guards might be the Michigan Militia? Or the marchers at the disastrous "Unite the Right" rally? Those are tiny fringe groups orders of magnitude too weak to carry out a Cultural Revolution. Maybe the 1500 people who got pardoned for the January 6 riot?

You may not be aware of this, but the Red Guards were over 10 million people.

hintymad• 1 year ago

"Bringing in young talent with new skills is literally 'what can be unburdened by what has been' if that's a thing anyone on the left still wants" -- Lulu Cheng Meservey

macagain2• 1 year ago

https://archive.ph/QYBhK

why is this redirecting to lifetips.it ? did archive.today get hacked?

macagain2• 1 year ago

This one is working:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250202235355/https://www.wired...

areyourllySorry• 1 year ago

what's your dns?

mynameyeff• 1 year ago

I mean, these "kids" are rockstars. Why are they being juvenilized by the Wired writer?

masterclef• 1 year ago

Jealousy.

l0t0b0r0s2• 1 year ago

The institution of journalism is all partisans.

zombiwoof3• 1 year ago

Peter Theil is running America

gradus_ad• 1 year ago

I applaud these guys and the work they're doing. Any bureaucracy, public or private, with access to a guaranteed income stream will grow like a tumor. The entire federal govt needs to be audited and gutted. The time for committees, reports and similar half measures is over.

nxm4• 1 year ago

Not sure why this is being down voted. I don't want my tax money being wasted to no end

rozap2• 1 year ago

Even taking your statement at face value, as a non-troll, this makes no sense.

Have you ever optimized a slow program? How do you do that? A popular approach is with a flamegraph. It shows the hot parts of the execution; what is burning CPU cycles. If we profiled federal government, we'd find 4 big areas of spending [1]. Social security, medicare, the military, and debt interest. In our flamegraph, these are big fat sections. If you're profiling a program, would you look at this and say, "oh i'm going to spend my time optimizing this function call which takes up .01% of the execution time?" no, you wouldn't (unless you're an intern).

But that's hard, which is why elon isn't doing it. Nobody wants to cut social security because then a bunch of old people would starve to death. Same with medicare. Defaulting on our national debt would be a bad look. And god forbid we give the military less money. So where does that leave us? Even if you truly believe elon cares about making the government more efficient, the approach doesn't make any sense. In the absolute most charitable reading of it, he's just incompetent and he's doing this for show to get some widely supported easy wins (let's get rid of the penny and save $86M/y!) so people will like him. But the more realistic viewing is that he's gutting programs in order to further his own agendas, which is literally the definition of corruption.

There's a saying "don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" but you don't become the richest man in the world by being incompetent. You become the richest man in the world through malice.

1. https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

drak0n1c• 1 year ago

There is still a sensible positive interpretation. It's possible that the distortionary economic and geopolitical effects of this spending both domestically and abroad has just as severe or worse negative externalities as items with larger budgets. Those externalities could range from inflation, displacing local industries and organic fundraising mechanisms, enabling rent-seeking corruption, overproduction of idle elites, instilling self-crit degrowth ideation, and political polarization/backlash abroad (My Japanese relatives now have a very dim view of Rahm Emanuel and Biden due to their USAID type activities and strings-attached diplomacy of paternalistic progressive cultural imperialism).

A reverse Keynesian effect you could call it - where there are second-order deadweight loss effects from "NGO" grift make-work complex, rather than a synergy.

jazz9k3• 1 year ago

How is this different than any other private company?

trhway• 1 year ago

Well, Cultural Revolutions are almost always done by young and inexperienced.

Btw, i wonder how many of those raiding the government offices are really DOGE people and not say Russian or Chinese agents pretending to be DOGE - if one to believe the news the security let them into the building once they threatened to call Marshals Service (social engineering DOGE style. That clearly shows couple things - 1. DOGE themselves didn't bother to get proper paperwork, clearances, etc., a "promising" start so to speak and 2. that at least the building security part of the government there got totally rotten as it failed to perform their basic duties. And the agencies' (Treasury(!), USAID,...) employees just giving their laptops and access to internal systems to the first schmuck supposedly from some DOGE - and that all after years of trainings of "don't leave your screen unlocked", "don't give sensitive info to the strangers pretending to be your higher-up or a colleague" . Really shows the effectiveness of all those trainings :)

niceice6• 1 year ago

Average age of engineers and scientists in the Manhattan Project was 25.

Our current gerontocracy is ahistorical.

Perhaps one reason startups work so well is they are one of the few places that still let young people exert agency.

The average age of NASA’s mission control team during the Apollo era was 27— they put humans on the moon. Young people bring a force of curiosity and creativity that can disrupt the status quo. If we’re serious about cutting waste in gov spending, let’s not turn away new minds.

The guys featured in this gross and irresponsible hit piece by Wired, by all accounts, are brilliant engineers. Top 1%.

- one decoded the Herculaneum Papyrii at the age of 20, winning the Vesuvius Challenge

- another built a startup funded by OpenAI

- one interned at SpaceX and got a Thiel Fellowship

- another was a top engineer at a major AI firm

This is who they are bullying and putting a target on. The best of us nerds. https://x.com/anothercohen/status/1886480470185001025

galleywest200• 1 year ago

All of those people you listed as examples were legally and duly appointed/hired for their roles and not given carte-blanche over agencies without oversight.

makizar• 1 year ago

source ?

valbaca2• 1 year ago

Source? and what's the median?

Also, that was during WW2 which would likely skew those #s (though I would actually expect to much older, as in not most-fit-military age)

tjhill• 1 year ago

Richard Rhodes' introduction to Serber's "The Los Alamos Primer" suggests 24:

Despite this leavening of older men (Oppenheimer was thirty-eight), the group's average age was only twenty-four.

generj• 1 year ago

The field being relatively new also heavily influenced the scientists being so young.

The age of modern quantum mechanics started in 1925. Heisenberg received the Nobel Prize for his 1927 work on the uncertainty principle in 1932 at the age of 31. 10 years later the Manhattan Project started.

There just weren’t that many older scientists with training in the field. Young PhDs were only a few years removed from the first discoveries that enabled nuclear physics to leap forward.

rtpg3• 1 year ago

If you look at the Manhattan project org chart and take people randomly at the top, they're all at least in their 40s. "There are young people on the project" is a thing but at the end of the day things like the Manhattan Project are downstream of the will of an entire behemoth (at least in theory attempting to represent the will of the people), balancing various interests and ethical or moral questions that are usually downstream of some experience.

They also have gone through the military chain of command...

I didn't see Musk's confirmation hearing. OMB's head needs to be Senat confirmed, Musk is giving OMB orders and took over their e-mail addresses. Where's the hearing? Where's the confirmation?

whimsicalism4• 1 year ago

i feel that a lot of people are commenting without knowing a lot about the government. putting aside whether Trump is exceeding his statutory authority (he very well might be with this USAID stuff, he certainly has with his past XOs), you can have an executive branch position with access and managerial control without being confirmed. who confirms the White House Chief of Staff?

fuzzfactor• 1 year ago

things like the Manhattan Project are downstream of the will of an entire behemoth

Plus that project in particular was more about destroying things exponentially faster, than it actually was about building things somewhat faster.

The faster building process was achieved in a relatively linear way at best, and the only thing built was a tool for destruction, no comparable efforts were made toward building things of lasting value which would need to more than compensate or the tech effort is a net loss.

Or, after destruction is induced, a recovery can not be made since the time required for building has the time it took for destruction in the denominator.

zasz• 1 year ago

That's false, the average age was 29.4: https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/L...

Here are the ages of the senior scientists: Oppenheimer: 38 Teller: 34 Lawrence: 41 Rabi: 44 Szilard: 44 Ulam: 33 Bethe: 36 Fuchs: 31 von Neumann: 39

So the younger people would have had plenty of supervision.

sberens• 1 year ago

These are not the only 6 engineers working for DOGE, just the youngest. They have supervision as well.

mitthrowaway22• 1 year ago

That's incredibly young for senior scientists! 31 years old? Nobody over 45, let alone 50?

prvc4• 1 year ago

Why did you choose to restrict your data to "senior" scientists? What is that supposed to prove?

butlike3• 1 year ago

'senior' is only a 6 character prefix that can be attached to any name/position as an accolade. It means nothing out-of-context.

Oppenheimer was smart, no doubt, but did he have the life experience to warrant 'senior'-level decision making? I feel like the history books show it's emphatically indecisive.

alfalfasprout7• 1 year ago

First, there's hardly any evidence that these are anywhere near "brilliant engineers" let alone 1%. Their claims to "fame" were being interns or working on tightly scoped greenfield projects. Some might be interesting, sure. But it's hardly relevant to operating in a complex organization.

But more importantly, the real issue is regardless of how old they are an unelected individual is doling out hyper-privileged access to sensitive data to folks without any kind of oversight. It's a total mess.

It's hyperbolic to the n-th degree to call these "the best of nerds" as well.

crooked-v3• 1 year ago

Their claims to "fame" were being interns or working on tightly scoped greenfield projects.

And there's that one guy whose entire work history is as a summer camp counselor.

mvkel• 1 year ago

Sure, and there's a sprinter who can outrun Usain Bolt who just happened to become an accountant instead

jamala1• 1 year ago

Probably still better than the non-technical people usually governing things.

TacticalCoder• 1 year ago

One of the dude literally solved a hundreds years problem and won a prize. He coded an AI to decipher an ancient manuscript AIUI. I certainly wouldn't look down on the achievement of that young programmer.

zekrioca4• 1 year ago

100%

goldenManatee5• 1 year ago

I mean, Garry Tan has already been on Twitter with his stupid take that there are “brilliant” so it surely must be true. /s

The Treasury has been taken over and barricaded, but please enlighten us Garry with fables of their 10x brilliance.

eterevsky• 1 year ago

Government employees are never elected. They are hired by the elected officials. In this case the general public in the US was aware of DOGE before the election and chose to vote for it.

exe343• 1 year ago

I don't understand the "unelected" aspect - he funded Trump and Trump got elected. Trump said Elon would get to run a wrecking ball through the ship of state and the magas cheered. He derives his authority from Trump. A lot of people work at the white house and only one of them was elected.

booleandilemma• 1 year ago

I think it's really cool they have the Herculaneum Papyrii guy working for them!

It's a shame Wired is behaving this way.

brazzy• 1 year ago

[flagged]

binary_slinger4• 1 year ago

The guys featured in this gross and irresponsible hit piece by Wired, by all accounts, are brilliant engineers. Top 1%.

Wheres the evidence of their brilliance? A few projects in GitHub isn’t impressive.

Seriously if they’re brilliant this is the perfect PR opportunity to highlight the highly talented people making a difference. But instead we have secrecy.

I suspect the real reason for these choices is they needed people who are young and naive, will not ask too many questions, easy to manipulate, and coerced to work long for little pay.

an_guy3• 1 year ago

Wheres the evidence of them not being brilliant? Just because they have fewer github projects, they are not talented?

Also please point to the last federal employee in IT sector who were highlighted for their "Talent and Brilliance".

mike_hearn8• 1 year ago

The post you're replying to has a link to a video in which one of the guys talks about how he decoded the Vesuvius scrolls. It's literally a PR video highlighting a highly talented young person.

goldenManatee5• 1 year ago

One of them transcribed an ancient Greek text from Vesuvius. So idiots buy into the idea this qualifies them to become unelected arbiters of THEIR OWN opinion of justice and decide who the Treasury pays or does not.

drawkward9• 1 year ago

So you are saying this is a team developing a tool to nuke the government?

boringg• 1 year ago

You cant compare manhattan project, NASA to a bunch of good software techs ripping apart the government. The first two projects required high levels of intelligence and new concepts.

These guys are the modern equivalent of name any destructive revolutionary group looking for stuff they don't agree with.

I don't however refute that you can be a brilliant mind and active contributor at any age. Just that these guys aren't anywhere close to the same page as our greatest minds.

sgarland3• 1 year ago

Not to mention, NASA famously has incredibly strict coding standards and guidelines [0]. I somehow doubt there’s anything along those lines at DOGE.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_10:_Rules_for_Dev...

fermentation• 1 year ago

They may be brilliant engineers, but they’re adults who’ve decided to become enemies of the state.

rufus_foreman• 1 year ago

Wait, what?

melbourne_mat2• 1 year ago

The great thing about young people is that they haven't had much time to develop a moral compass. I'd say that makes them perfect for the roles they've been given

epolanski• 1 year ago

Interestingly, I see it the other way.

Young people tend to be more ideological and ready to fight for what they care. The older you get, the more problems you have (bills, health, children, etc) the less you care imho.

UltraSane32• 1 year ago

The age is irrelevant. What IS relevant is the fact that the engineers and scientists in the Manhattan Project were all qualified and legally hired and authorized to do what they did. This is NOT true for DOGE which has no legal right to the federal payment system and no legal authority to stop any payments congress has approved.

catmanjan2• 1 year ago

Hilarious irony here, given that these qualified and legally hired people built the most morally reprehensible weapon in history

Dalewyn3• 1 year ago

This is NOT true for DOGE which has no legal right

DOGE and the Treasury Department are both part of the Executive Branch and derive powers from its head, aka the President.

This is essentially President Trump telling President Trump to hand President Trump the keys to the payment system so that President Trump can check WTF President Trump is spending money on.

not_a_bot_4sho• 1 year ago

Perhaps one reason startups work so well

As a veteran of startups, this puzzles me. I assume it's a perception that successful startups are the majority of startups. (They are not.)

nxobject15• 1 year ago

Good grief, don’t identify me and the rest of HN with then. I don’t want to be “us” with people in government who make a virtue out of being unaccountable solely because they’re successful engineers.

courseofaction• 1 year ago

They are violating many, many laws. They should be named.

natch3• 1 year ago

Yes, name the laws.

kamaal4• 1 year ago

>Perhaps one reason startups work so well is they are one of the few places that still let young people exert agency.

As some one who just turned 40. This does make sense. Perhaps the biggest deal about aging especially in the downswing is the countdown to death keeps getting closer as you go. You do tend to care less about things around you.

Im beyond the point I would take offence on anything, but Im also beyond the point I would do something to impress somebody. There is no trying twice from here. Things either work with something/somebody or you move on to something/somebody that does/do.

I definitely was more tenacious as a young man, with projects and relationships. I'd move heavens to make something work. Now they have work or something new is sought. As an aging person I care more about less noise, bullshit and more stability. Guys like me are needed for continuity of life. Whereas younger men are needed to bring about big leap frog changes.

The world needs the young and old for both progress and sanity.

RIMR2• 1 year ago

I don't care how smart they are. They are committing crimes in service to fascism. Speak for yourself in your use of the word "us".

cozzyd• 1 year ago

All the bigger shame they're illegally seizing government systems.

doctorpangloss2• 1 year ago

They are all beneficiaries of affirmative action, for libertarians, in case you are wondering why these guys and not more competent or mercenary people, which are both abundant.

stefap23• 1 year ago

It is legal to make a federal government employee’s name, role, and salary publicly accessible because taxpayer-funded positions fall under the scope of public interest and open-records laws, which promote transparency and accountability in the use of government funds. You can find this information on official databases like the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) website, which routinely publishes data about federal employees’ salaries and positions, as well as on other government websites that provide access to public records.

ZeroGravitas• 1 year ago

There were at least a couple of guys on the Manhattan project giving information to Russia as well.

seanhunter• 1 year ago

   > Perhaps one reason startups work so well…

If you take any individual startup its probability of success is very low. Most startups fail. There is a very extreme survivorship bias at work when people say startups work well or that particular tactics are why startups are great etc (pointing at a successful startup).

Startups as a whole produce a lot of innovation because there is this extreme Darwinian process where the vast majority fail and a few succeed but you have a huge amount of risk-taking in parallel in a very compressed time frame.

Government generally doesn’t have the luxury of failure because the consequences for people’s lives are too extreme. So by definition government is going to be slower-moving and more risk-averse. They are essentially paying to reduce the standard deviation of possible outcomes because they can’t afford the risk of the extreme negative tail.

kamaal4• 1 year ago

>Government generally doesn’t have the luxury of failure because the consequences for people’s lives are too extreme.

Im guessing they will eventually discover why bureaucracy even exists. That is to move slow enough to ensure big mistakes become impossible and provide stability for newer things to happen at their own pace.

Im guessing any chaos inside bureaucracy for as little as a decade could cause a lost century to a country. The cost of stabilising, course correcting, recovering and then going on upwards could take decades.

niceice6• 1 year ago

Perhaps you don't realize how badly run the government is and how much of a problem that is in real terms.

Education, physical and mental health, cost of living, healthcare, wealth inequality. They've all gotten worse the past few decades, would you agree?

The NYT just reported that the federal government lost $236 billion to apparent fraud ("improper payments") in 2023 alone.

The US GAO says "2018-2022 Data Show Federal Government Loses an Estimated $233 Billion to $521 Billion Annually to Fraud"

USAID literally set up fake AIDS prevention workshops to topple foreign governments https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/08/0...

This is a small sample of the extreme waste, fraud and abuse, while we have very serious issues here on the ground that are systematically ignored. For DECADES. Unaddressed.

Fixing this is what the majority of voters voted for and are rightfully thrilled to see these brilliant young tech nerds untangle the beurocratic leviathon. There will be, and have been, mistakes, things deleted that shouldn't have been. Anything important and that the people actually want, will be added back in. DOGE was upfront about this process.

drbojingle• 1 year ago

Not just that but you CAN train people. It's possible for juniors to learn >.>

jorvi3• 1 year ago

This is who they are bullying and putting a target on. The best of us nerds.

Wilfully choosing to work for DOGE/ current Musk certainly isn't "the best of us".

austin-cheney• 1 year ago

Government is not a startup just as pizza is not a vegetable, just as prison is not a vacation from a bad job. It’s more accurate and less toxic to compare molecular oxygen to carbon monoxide. False comparisons do more harm than good.

Inexperienced people imposing disruptions due to lack of experience is why young people may succeed at startups but fail at establishing companies. Likewise, government is not a startup and you really don’t want government to fail.

anonzzzies3• 1 year ago

Probably won't be interpreted as such but this is an honest question; I don't care about their age really but if they are so smart, why are they taking part of an illegal operation? Befehl ist befehl? That's not very smart is it? Or are they picked because they are young and gullible and easily manipulated yet brilliant in some other areas?

concordDance5• 1 year ago

As a non-American: What's illegal here?

My understanding is this is DOGE getting some analysis software in place so they can find out where the money goes and start their cuts, which I understand there is an executive order for. And my understanding is that the executive does have the power to do that sort of audit.

Where has my understanding gone wrong?

turtlesdown114• 1 year ago

Or are they picked because they are young and gullible and easily manipulated

bingo, take developing minds with high risk tolerance to do the illegal work someone older and wiser would refuse.

NoGravitas2• 1 year ago

Smart? Maybe. Wise? Definitely not.

cedws• 1 year ago

Intelligence isn’t an indicator of ability to navigate huge bureaucracies.

adrian_b• 1 year ago

Those involved in the Manhattan Project who were young were doing scientific/technical work.

When dealing with organizing and managing a great number of people or resources, I have never seen a young inexperienced human performing adequately, even remotely.

Old age and presumed experience is not at all a guarantee that someone would be good in such roles, but from what I have seen, young age and the associated lack of relevant experience pretty much guarantees failure in such cases.

pizzafeelsright3• 1 year ago

Their project literally killed innocent people.

simianparrot• 1 year ago

It’s good to read a comment of sanity amidst all this instinctual bellyaching whenever T or E do anything. But in particular when a formerly well respected publication writes a hit piece like this…

I used to scoff when people said “TDS” was a real thing, but having observed the same with Elon over the years and then listening to hours long talks between him and others, I realised “EDS” is clearly also a thing. And lo and behold: Listening to full long-form talks with Trump revealed a person wholly different to what media portrays.

And as a disclaimer, no I don’t agree with everything they do or say. But they’re not the monsters the monsters in the media machinery spin them up to be either.

The real monsters are those that purposefully trim and clip and stitch together falsehoods out of context, and then believe their own lies until they’re willing to throw other citizens under a figurative bus just because they work with or for “those people”.

kelnos27• 1 year ago

They may be smart, and may have won awards, but Musk's techno-thugs are not "the best of us". At best, they're misguided and have fallen for Musk's charisma. At worst, they're actively supporting and abetting the subversion of our democratic government.

chikere2322• 1 year ago

At best, they're misguided and have fallen for Musk's charisma. At worst, they're actively supporting and abetting the subversion of our democratic government.

They can easily be both. They're definitely the latter

goldenManatee5• 1 year ago

Let us also consider just how badly this continues to paint tech and tech workers to the general public. To distrust technology such as all the AI hate we see online.

niceice6• 1 year ago

They are fixing our non-democratic government that has been wasting trillions of our tax dollars, while we have increased homelessness, physical and mental health crisis, and other problems that have been ignored for decades.

The NYT just reported that the federal government lost $236 billion to apparent fraud ("improper payments") in 2023 alone.

The US GAO says "2018-2022 Data Show Federal Government Loses an Estimated $233 Billion to $521 Billion Annually to Fraud"

What Musk is doing is what the majority voted for. To finally put an end the unbelievable waste, fraud and abuse. This is exactly what he said he would do and most Americans are relieved and see hope for the first time in a long time.

teew• 1 year ago

It's great that there are young, brilliant people in research and engineering and working for business ventures. It's also very cool you remember some who started out young in the past. Hasn't got much to do with the posted article though, as that is talking about the integrity of public policy versus actors personally beholden to unelected officials and their friends reaching into US-governance.

crocowhile• 1 year ago

It does not matter. None of that has to do with the requirements of the job which, BTW, should have zero executive power and only make recommendations to Congress, the institution that has power of the purse.

Do you understand that this is just a constitutional crisis? I reckon musk ended up appointing kids because they also did not understand the political and ethical implications of all this.

chikere2322• 1 year ago

If they're helping overthrow democracy and the rule of law, they are not the best of us nerds.

Naming and shaming them is good. No one forced them to take this job. With the skills you list they could have done any number of good or neutral things instead.

amarcheschi2• 1 year ago

Putting a target on? They're dismantling the gears that make America run smoothly, and you say putting a target on? This is the point where people should start taking into consideration violent actions

msie2• 1 year ago

I would be weary of nerds taking care of this nation after all I've seen in the tech industry. AirBNB, Uber, Juicero, WeWork, Theranos, Tesla, crypto...

pesus• 1 year ago

Agreed. I used to scoff at the hate "techbros" received, but at this point the industry has done more than enough damage to deserve that derision. This is by far the biggest escalation, though.

pavlov3• 1 year ago

Wernher von Braun was a brilliant young engineer, one of the best minds of his generation. At age 25 he joined a patriotic party that was full of curiosity and creativity, disrupting the stale status quo of his home country.

For the next eight years he did groundbreaking work in developing rockets. In 1945 he and his youthful engineering team were actively recruited to continue their work for another country with great ambitions in space. A tremendous success for his personal career, even though the party he served fell a bit short of their goals.

He was clearly "the best of us nerds". Never mind that his genius was built on slave labor and oppression. He disrupted some governments, made good money and got to work on awesome rockets! That’s what counts in life.

tschwimmer• 1 year ago

This has shades of Robin Williams’ bar rant in Good Will Hunting.

almostdeadguy2• 1 year ago

Haha I think the irony here will fly over some heads, this is great though.

otras• 1 year ago

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

That's not my department, " says Wernher von Braun.

Tom Lehrer - Wernher von Braun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro

goldenManatee5• 1 year ago

No you’re supporting treasonous actions and you must be taught and discouraged from such actions that violate the will of the people in favor of expeditiousness. Your views are a danger to a stably growing society.

saagarjha3• 1 year ago

I figure more 25 year old nerds who dismantle the US government ought to be bullied. Signed, a 25 year old nerd.

(While I'm at it, there's nothing special about age here. Plenty of 25 year olds are actually doing productive things for humanity. But many 40 year olds are doing it too. The difference is that they are competent and empathetic, not random guys who Elon happens to like.)

andyjohnson02• 1 year ago

The guys featured in this gross and irresponsible hit piece by Wired, by all accounts, are brilliant engineers. Top 1%.

Their youth and technical ability isn't the problem. What are problems are their inexperience and recklessness and evident lack of awareness. Government and the administrative state are serious undertakings. Move Fast and Break Things is extraordinarily dangerous in this context.

nxobject15• 1 year ago

“Move Fast and Break Things” really does only apply to the scenario where you have to clean up your own messes.

JKolios• 1 year ago

Perhaps one reason startups work so well is they are one of the few places that still let young people exert agency.

So, who's the VC that will fund the 4-9 failed governments we'll have to go through until we get a unicorn?

uni_rule3• 1 year ago

Maybe we'll get a solid Somaliland in the ensuing chaos after this current unmanaged Chapter 11 leads to a messy Chapter 7.

samirillian• 1 year ago

The “problem” with youth isn’t intelligence, it’s that early twenties you are at your most confidently ideological and you’re most willing to break things. I bet the average age of a terrorist is pretty low too.

The danger of the vision is the power of the vision, fix what’s broken in the bureaucracy, it’s not being fascist it’s just easier to ask forgiveness than permission!

We’ll see!

WJW• 1 year ago

one reason startups work so well

Since when do startups "work well"? Some startups work well, but famously >90% of them fail. Imagine if 9 out of every 10 fires was just left alone because the fire brigade was replaced by a startup, or if 9 out 10 bridges fell down within a few years. Startups are just one of many models of running things, but they are not appropriate for everything.

uni_rule3• 1 year ago

Treating the government like a startup is gambling, the difference is startups are intentionally disposable while a Nation State... it's a fucking Nation State.

djaychela• 1 year ago

Young people bring a force of curiosity and creativity that can disrupt the status quo.

Counterpoint - they don't have the wisdom and experience in the domain they are working in that older, wiser heads do. I've seen a LOT of stuff from both 'tech bros' and programmers who are new to a domain where it's clear they are 100% confident they are right, despite consensus to the contrary. And when their plans are implemented, all the things they didn't think about come into play - such as Tesla service which is terrible.

These people may all be brilliant engineers. But not all problems are engineering problems, and while these people may be able to engineer a system to reduce costs drastically, they may not understand where to cut costs and where efficiency can actually be achieved.

Don't forget that most of the new tech economy that people harp on about (Uber, Amazon, Tesla spring to mind) is built on the erosion of workers' rights and lowest-common-denominator treatment wherever possible.

DrScientist• 1 year ago

You need a mix of naive enthusiasm and grizzled experience.

It feels a bit like that famous Joel on Software post - when faced with an existing code base - it looks over complex and you can't understand it - so you decide to re-write - only to discover during the process why it's so complex in the first place.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Sure it's important to challenge the status quo - but it's really important to approach it with humility and to seek to understand why things are the way they are, not just to assume you know it all.

bjourne• 1 year ago

The Cultural Revolution was led by China's smartest students too.

guax3• 1 year ago

Even If I take everything you said here to the T, being brilliant in making tech startups does not AT ALL mean they'll be brilliant understanding government processes and structures.

This over arrogance of us techies thinking because we're good with computers we're the best at everything is what people are annoyed and, justifiably critical of.

You're going to be responsible to assess and dismantle a government agency with thousands of employees and billions in budget being in your twenties with ZERO gov experience is indeed a huge red flag and not merely putting a target because they're young.

We've all met incredibly accomplished people who are not to be trusted with sharp objects. Expertise in one area does not translate to another easily.

Juliate• 1 year ago

Well, even if they are, brilliance isn't everything in a human... And it shows.

turtlesdown114• 1 year ago

When the very first sentence of your premise is false, why read the rest?

52-6F-622• 1 year ago

LOL.

I’m some sort of off-brand late comer Scots Canadian so my opinion is essentially alien and invalid to people like you but I’ve got to ask:

Why does the incestuous name dropping qualify anyone especially?

Peter Thiel is expressly trying to (and vocally so) speed run everything into the apocolypse and is very worried about the anti christ (apparently). He’s also running a massive surveillance dragnet and wants power and money above all. Again, his words.

How in the global fuck does working for or being awarded by a person with those ambitions qualify anyone for anything?

You may as well have said they attend church every sunday as their qualification.

If you said, well he has spent 10 years developing high availability systems and invented novel algorithms or implementations for managing high volume data flows or something then maybe there would be something to talk about.

But I’ve seen baby faced juniors elevated to senior and management roles and bungle them SO badly that it alienated all the actual engineering talent again and again because they were little more than virtual blood boys.

It sounds more like this latter scenario is the most likely.

Its just all goddamned hype men and their blood boys up and down this grotesque beast of what was once an industry.

With those words you don’t work in an industry, you serve a new segment of technolords and their only goal is to eat everything.

mattgreenrocks• 1 year ago

All those credentials and yet they lack the wisdom to see what is really happening.

Maybe that had something to do with why they were chosen?

moby3• 1 year ago

There's some real irony here.

What I'm hearing from my friends - many of whom have helped build and scale some of the most successful tech companies on the planet - is that no engineer is an exceptional one without a modicum of ethics and wisdom.

These seem to be in short supply at DOGE.

Pat_Murph3• 1 year ago

Don't startups fail at a very high rate though?

butlike3• 1 year ago

You work on a team named after a meme.

Such rhyme. Much knowledge. Wow.

tqi4• 1 year ago

Smart is not the same thing as qualified. None of these qualifications you've listed have anything to do with running a government agency.

People around here love to talk about the Dunning–Kruger effect, but seem to be of the mistaken belief that it is about smart vs dumb people rather than people with domain expertise vs people without.

craftsman4• 1 year ago

Let's see their Pull Requests. Then you won't need to make assertions about their ability. We can have public accountability in the light of day.

nujabe• 1 year ago

Average age of engineers and scientists in the Manhattan Project was 25.

The youngest scientist or engineer was Richard Feynman who was 27 years old at the time.

Average age of scientists/engineers on the Manhattan Project was closer to 37.

25 sounds so absurd I don’t know how you didn’t double check your sources. The rest of your post makes some claims about NASA but stopped reading as it has to be BS as well.

arionhardison4• 1 year ago

This is where we are, we need to stop complaining and deal with things as the actually exist. I am doing this in my own way, my fear is Elon and Co. hitting Medicare/Medicaid so I am making my own: https://medicare.dev. I think this is going to become more and more common as fed become less and less stable/reliable.

DanHulton2• 1 year ago

This is a prime example of a social problem that does not have a technical solution.

Re-think your approach.

arionhardison4• 1 year ago

I don't understand what you mean? Healthcare process efficiency is a "social" problem?

dbbk2• 1 year ago

How come your website doesn't even explain what it is?

arionhardison4• 1 year ago

Apologies, I am at the "embarrassed" by how early I am phase. I will update ASAP, but here is an example: https://www.youtube.com/@CodifyHQ

It's pretty much what the name indicates. A new medicare.

tines6• 1 year ago

To the people talking about how "Zelenskyy said that he only got $75 billion of the $175 billion in foreign aid we sent them, where'd that $100 billion go??? That's right, it went into the pockets of the Deep State!" and then deleting their comments:

According to https://www.cfr.org/article/how-much-us-aid-going-ukraine, "It’s important to note that of the $175 billion total, only $106 billion directly aids the government of Ukraine. Most of the remainder is funding various U.S. activities associated with the war in Ukraine, and a small portion supports other affected countries in the region." Of that $106, about $70 billion is weapons, $33 is budget support. So it makes sense that lawmakers would claim that "We sent Ukraine $175 billion!" and Zelenskyy would directly see less than $175.

The the line from Zelenskyy is an attempt to clarify to the world that $X billion in a bill somewhere doesn't equate to $X billion on the ground in Ukraine directly; he's not saying there was some kind of corruption involved and that the money mysteriously disappeared.

matwood5• 1 year ago

To relate more to the HN crowd. It's like opening a new project and the initial reaction is everything is terrible. Then as someone understands the project better they see it's not terrible, but the problem is much more complex than they initially understood. Basically classic engineer hubris.

daxfohl• 1 year ago

I wonder how much of this is "I don't want to sell this Tesla I couldn't afford, so instead I'll change my whole political ideology"

pessimizer• 1 year ago

There doesn't seem to be anything interesting in this article, it's simply a Red Channels style blacklist against young people who are auditing a government program. The only reason this was published is because Wired is an intelligence outlet (and has always been.) Otherwise, the publishing of random government auditors' uninteresting resumes would obviously be considered harassment (if not doxxing, like Musk barked.)

Really, all this article says is that if you are an auditor for the commission appointed by the president, we will make sure that this comes up in an aggressively negative way when somebody who you want to work for googles you. It's pure intimidation, masquerading as journalism. It's somehow worse than Bill Ackman hiring trucks with the names of college students protesting a genocide being blasted as antisemites. At least Bill Ackman isn't pretending to be a journalist.

edit: every single article by this "disinformation expert" has been an anti-Trump or anti-Musk article. She has no other beat.

talldayo• 1 year ago

if you are an auditor for the commission appointed by the president, we will make sure that this comes up in an aggressively negative way when somebody who you want to work for googles you.

You just archeologically unearthed the dictionary definition of accountability. If the people doing the auditing are a goon squad from corporate, what reasonable person should accept their results?

boplicity2• 1 year ago

Remember, if you can vote, vote the next time you can. Convince your friends and neighbors to vote, too. Apathy has real consequences.

barbazoo2• 1 year ago

It sounds like you're assuming that if more people had voted, they would have voted for not-Trump. Is there data backing that up? Is there any indication that the result would have been different?

fullshark5• 1 year ago

No if anything the data suggests they'd go for trump or it'd be a coin flip

https://news.gallup.com/poll/24655/party-images.aspx

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/dona...

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/kama...

spencerflem10• 1 year ago

I wish there was a way to get better options though. A vote for Kamala would have just barely kicked the can down the road

drawkward9• 1 year ago

Well, we probably wouldnt be in a trade war right now.

lostdog9• 1 year ago

Politicians look at how people vote to decide how to run and how to govern.

When you vote for Kamala over Trump, you show them your preferences, and they'll run and govern in a more methodical way. The next batch of candidates gets even better.

But Trump winning means the next batch will be even worse.

dkdbejwi3832• 1 year ago

If Americans won’t vote for centre-right candidates like Harris or Clinton, there’s little hope they will go for any real change.

ncr100• 1 year ago

And here's the most important comment!

Vote in a democracy. Do things to preserve voting in a democracy.

Vote with your wallet for representative news stories that matter to you and not just indulgent shock material.

Vote with your mind and know what is truly important for you, your happiness, and your loved ones.

yibg3• 1 year ago

Would it matter much? It seems like the election is fueled on false narratives and outright lies amplified by social media and technology that many of us here helped to build. Apathy is a real thing but at least close to half the population fully intended to and did vote for their choice of leadership. What can we (generalized we in the tech community) now combat this?

dontparticipate2• 1 year ago

We need to use our skills to build platforms that have both high retention and diffuse ownership that uplifts its users. We need to build a media ecosystem that isn't just a toy. My generation treated social media like it was just an amusement, and didn't notice it slowly turn the flow of information back into AM talk radio until it was too late. There have to be genuine alternatives to Tiktok and X and Instagram that are just as obsessive about UX as the proprietary apps are, but can't be owned.

boplicity2• 1 year ago

the election

Which election are you talking about? Because I'm not referring to the election that happens every four years in the States. Every election in-between can, and often does, have major consequences. Or, it could, if enough people made sure of it.

That might actually be related to your question -- what matters is not just one election. If that's the case, then we've already lost.

yubblegum• 1 year ago

"Apathy"? How about disgust? The choices were Kamala and the Donald. I read that as a 'f.u. either way' from the political class. So yeah, not apathy.

mychael• 1 year ago

Many of us here voted for exactly this and we are very happy to see all of these changes.

speedgoose3• 1 year ago

[flagged]

lunarboy6• 1 year ago

It's crazy to me that this is the state of hackernews wow

bongodongobob3• 1 year ago

Neither side wants to give us affordable healthcare or education. Everything good comes from those two things imo. Voting doesn't matter anymore. Only money. The oligarchs have won (for some time now) and the government is their puppet.

mkoubaa4• 1 year ago

I don't know anyone that voted democrat in this election.

If you're looking someone to blame, blame the idiots who engineered the blue ticket, not the voters who couldn't stomach it

rokkamokka• 1 year ago

Blame is generally unproductive. What is productive is realizing wrongs and doing what you can to right them. That said, I was raised that it is the responsibility of a citizen to always vote. If more people had voted, I believe the US would be in a better place.

failuser2• 1 year ago

There will be no new elections. At best we’ll have a Russia-style farce.

witnesser2• 1 year ago

The old experienced are staying home or surviving with aids of non-engineering skills. LOL.

jayshah5696• 1 year ago

Do people know age of founding fathers or USA?

jeffbee2• 1 year ago

If your point is that Elon Musk is overthrowing the government and these are his pals, then this statement makes sense. If you were trying to make any other point then this makes zero sense.

jeltz4• 1 year ago

Between 26 and 81.

stainablesteel9• 1 year ago

I found Bukele's comments to be eye opening, https://x.com/nayibbukele/status/1886059275174506850

Most governments don’t want USAID funds flowing into their countries because they understand where much of that money actually ends up.
While marketed as support for development, democracy, and human rights, the majority of these funds are funneled into opposition groups, NGOs with political agendas, and destabilizing movements.
At best, maybe 10% of the money reaches real projects that help people in need (there are such cases), but the rest is used to fuel dissent, finance protests, and undermine administrations that refuse to align with the globalist agenda.
Cutting this so-called aid isn’t just beneficial for the United States; it’s also a big win for the rest of the world.

Their funding has been hard for Congress to vet, and it seems like they do some shady things. Kudos to Elon and his team for cutting us more than $1b/day so far!

zb3• 1 year ago

This was basically Open Society Foundations but using taxpayer funds.. of course leftist groups will complain, this is expected.

medler6• 1 year ago

It’s not Elon Musk’s place to make spending allocation decisions for the US government. The Constitution assigns that power to Congress. It is not hyperbolic to say that if Elon/Doge can arbitrarily cut spending, then Congress has effectively been abolished, and the US Constitutional order is over.

Now, if Elon wanted to review spending allocations and recommend cuts to Congress, that would be fine. I would be in favor of that, provided he accessed the data in a legal and privacy-respecting way.

stainablesteel9• 1 year ago

if it's not Elon's place even though Trump literally ran on Elon doing this, and they not only won the electoral college but also the popular vote too, then it's not USAID's place to do so either

the money they give away tends to fund extremism and terrorism, and never goes to where it's needed

- Haiti: Post-2010 earthquake, $1.14 billion was spent on a port and power plant project promoted by President Bill Clinton. The project never built anything. - Cuba: A 2006 audit showed $74 million in “democracy promotion” funds vanished without oversight. - Afghanistan: Millions squandered on health scams; hospitals never built. - Nigeria: Chemonics, a major USAID contractor, was linked to a subcontractor's overbilling scandal. Hundreds of millions lost. - COVID 19 Funding: USAID sent over $40MILLION in taxpayer money to a scientist located in Wuhan to do gain of function mutations. This directly led to the creation and release of COVID-19 - $2.5 MILLION to DEI in Serbia - $70,000 onan Irish DEI musical - $47,000 on transgender operas in Colombia - $32,000 on a trans comic book in Peru - Iraq: $20M for an Iraqi version of Sesame Street to promote LGBTQ Agenda - Egypt & Tunisia: $56M for “tourism” - Jordan: $40M for “schools” - Vietnam: $11M to fight “trash burning” - Central America: $27M for deportee gift bags. - Trump Lawfare: $27M to fund left wing prosecutions of populist political opponents around the globe, including Donald Trump. Patently illegal.

anon7000• 1 year ago

No, not kudos!

Before destroying an entire organization, it’s important to know their true impact and how much it’ll hurt to have them gone. So far, I’ve seen zero evidence that deep thought or analysis went into these decisions. In other words, it’s objectively a careless decision. If it’s not careless, then Elon should be sharing evidence, lengthy discussions on his decisions, etc. Plus, there should be a public comment period because Elon sure as SHIT doesn’t have enough context to understand the full impact.

I, for one, do not like the fact that the richest man in the world, who still owns multiple companies in conflict with our government, gets to unilaterally make these decisions with no input from the public. Not only is it undemocratic, it’s objectively corrupt! You know, that thing where we expect our federal decision makers to not have severe conflicts of interests?

So no, don’t fucking give kudos for shit like this. And a single tweet from one president isn’t enough to justify decisions of this magnitude.

If those allegations are true, sure, reform or shutter the department. But do it democratically. Move fast and break shit is not the correct problem solving model to apply to geopolitics or even federal policy, and it’s absurd that this isn’t self evident.

kansface• 1 year ago

USAID is reputedly the tool of the CIA.

OsrsNeedsf2P• 1 year ago

Before destroying an entire organization, it’s important to know their true impact and how much it’ll hurt to have them gone

I have to prove my impact every 6 months as an engineer. I expect an entire organization can do the same - the fact there is not a clear impact people can point to speaks volumes.

stainablesteel9• 1 year ago

It was done democratically. Trump ran for president on abolishing this deep seated managerial class that controls the federal government, he specified Elon to be at the helm of it and here we are.

You have no business pretending this is undemocratic. These offices being shut down are the same people who sabotaged Trump during his first term, they have every right to do this. And if anyone understands large organizations, it's Elon: the man who's proven he's the greatest engineer in the world and that you don't need a PhD to be that.

solidasparagus• 1 year ago

This is just blatantly false. The 10% number is ridiculous which anyone involved with foreign aid knows. But you can easily tell that the countries want the money from the cases where the US threatens to take away aid over some disagreement and then the foreign countries capitulates. You know these are sovereign nations that can say no to the aid if they don't want it right? You don't just show up without a visa and hand out money without the approval of the foreign government.

megous3• 1 year ago

This is a very simplistic take.

adamrezich• 1 year ago

Man, these are some seriously impressive motherfuckers—my resume looks absolutely shameful compared to any one of them, and I'm over a decade older than they are.

gunian• 1 year ago

ngl when they said trump 2024 musk 2028 in 2022 i thought it was far fetched but now i'm kinda curious to see what happens

angry_octet• 1 year ago

These are not engineers, they are not software engineers, they are brown shirts.

fullshark5• 1 year ago

Watch some leftist billionaire now cut them blank checks to get them away from DOGE. The Cyberpunk future is here.

__MatrixMan__3• 1 year ago

Congress has no ability to really intervene and monitor what's happening because these aren't really accountable public officials.

Congress gets to make laws. They can intervene by making a law that allows them to intervene, which is the job we elected them to do. Apparently they prefer getting bossed around instead.

fastball8• 1 year ago

The majority of the currently elected Congress supports this – it is part of the mandate for which they were elected.

lunarboy6• 1 year ago

Unfortunately, laws have to be signed in by the president

__MatrixMan__3• 1 year ago

Not with a two-thirds majority--which I realize sounds to the modern ear as politically impossible, but we're going to have to change that if we want to survive as a nation. The whole "living document" aspect of the constitution is a rather important one.

I don't even have much to say about which sorts of decisions that two thirds should make--that's their job--I'd just like it if they grew a spine and started making some.

linuxhansl• 1 year ago

Is anyone surprised? It's not like it was a secret, and a majority of voters still voted this government in. Maybe most thought it'll be better for inflation and chose to ignore or belittle the crazy. It seems we're getting the crazy now - and not, yet anyway, a single action of inflation.

hansvm2• 1 year ago

In Trump's first term he had one of the lowest rates of fulfilling campaign promises of any president. I was caught off-guard by him actually appearing to go through with this.

XajniN7• 1 year ago

He tried, but he wasn’t well prepared.

UltraSane32• 1 year ago

Elon Musk and all of these DOGE employees should be arrested and charged with multiple violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. They have no need or right to access the federal payments system and no authority whatsoever to stop payments congress has approved.

EGreg2• 1 year ago

And here I thought they'd actually consider my resume. They didn't even bother looking. When DOGE first called for people to apply, they did it on X and said we can send a message to their account on X.

So I actually got excited about tackling waste, and wrote this cover letter:

https://magarshak.com/resume-cover-letter.php

Little did I know this admin was going to be shutting down datasets from data.gov and other crap. I really tried to bring something positive into it, but it's just more of the same. They sidelined Vivek too.

a12k3• 1 year ago

Little did I know

You should have, had you done any research. This was long after Elon’s slide into anti-democratic, far right ideology. And as we now know merely weeks before he did multi Nazi salutes on stage.

This feels like people who are surprised that Trump is ticking boxes on Project 2025 despite it being out for multiple years.

There’s a pizza shop in NW DC with a basement you should investigate.

EGreg2• 1 year ago

Well, it's refreshing that you're doing an "I told you so" about Musk, rather than getting on my case about my suggestion to use Blockchain to "increase public transparency and accountability", which is what I thought was more likely to happen on HN.

I think there are actually good use cases for blockchain and smart contracts, and DOGE was finally going to be one of them.

etchalon• 1 year ago

It is deeply telling that DOGE is relying on inexperienced anyone.

chmorgan_• 1 year ago

Amazed at the pushback against an effort to cut waste out of government. There is a ton of it. It's your tax dollars being wasted... let's instead discuss whether things they've identified are keep, toss, or reform and if the wrong call has been made.

a12k3• 1 year ago

Setting aside the issue of the public’s PII and PHI in the hands of the most odious individuals, your post is a mischaracterization of what’s going on. They’re not identifying things and creating a report for evaluation; they’re identifying things and using illegal thuggery to shut things they don’t like down. This is illegal and unamerican.

dontparticipate2• 1 year ago

If only there was a group of people that were given the legal rights to make that decision... We could call them like... A Congress and we could like write those processes down. Maybe call that document a Constitution.

Take8435• 1 year ago

I want to down-vote you, but I seemingly cannot.

This is incredibly dangerous. A select few, having such control over so many millions? Are you nuts?! This is a serious question, as a new member of this community, is this a normal type of comment I can expect on HN?

drooby• 1 year ago

You've encountered a rare political thread that the moderators have allowed to stay up.

The physics are different here

lunarboy6• 1 year ago

I'm almost certain this thread is being targeted by bots. Comments in support are always cookie cutter talking points like "cutting waste and fraud", "what's wrong with executive branch auditing itself", etc

emddudley• 1 year ago

You've been fooled.

kccoder7• 1 year ago

Of course there is. Who says that's what they are trying to do? What specific credentials do these children have that makes them uniquely qualified to handle this task? Why is Elon the appropriate vessel for this activity? The man has more conflicts of interest than nearly anyone else for this task, and has the temperament, self-control, and maturity lesser than those he's hired.

I'm amazed that ANYONE is okay with this nonsense.

crabmusket3• 1 year ago

They have made the wrong calls at every step. I posted a link to an article in a sibling comment; have a read of that.

bagels10• 1 year ago

Yes, there's waste. I'd rather have the waste than a coup.

megous3• 1 year ago

What naive person does anything voluntary for the richest man on Earth?

sam3454• 1 year ago

HN Comments have really deteriorated. Dang is AWOL i guess.

pinkmuffinere4• 1 year ago

They really really have deteriorated. I’m not sure that dang’s efforts alone would be enough to hold back the tide though. I worry this is a culture shift :/

nojonestownpls2• 1 year ago

Not necessarily a culture shift - assuming you mean IRL culture, not HN culture - but rather a sign of HN's much increased popularity in recent years, outside the thoughtful nerd circle.

sam3454• 1 year ago

What evidence do people have that anything damaging is happening? Because these people are assumed to be conservative and not progressive? How is this any different than an internal audit whose work would be kept confidential? Or even a third party vendor who presumably would be covered by confidentiality agreements? The allegations in these comments are completely without evidence and are outright politically biased. All the wired article can say is there are a handful of young presumably conservative engineers doing their job. That about sums up the scandal.

kccoder7• 1 year ago

Nothing about this is normal, goes by standard practices or procedures, and is being led by a capricious man-child who wasn't elected to office, nor confirmed by the senate, with extraordinarily dubious intentions and conflicts of interest, who has brought in a bunch of near-children to clandestinely infiltrate huge swaths of our government, none of which have the appropriate security clearances, training, ... to engage in any of these activities.

Have they explained what they are doing? No. If you ask them, would they tell you? Is there any kind of oversight available? No. As a matter of fact, prior to these actions, Trump dismissed the inspectors general responsible for this oversight, in violation of the law which was passed to prevent him from doing just that, again.

Who in their right mind would assume that everything "above board"?

Capricorn24814• 1 year ago

We have his last "audit" of Twitter, where he repeatedly and publicly embarrassed himself with half hearted explanations for his clearly personal firings as he carved the platform into a racist hellhole.

Some of us know people that work for him, confirming he is that boss that will fire anyone giving him bad news on the spot because he wants to push his dumbass unreachable deadlines. And mostly because he thinks it's cool and has reveled in his ability to fire people like any small human would.

We have the evidence of the family, that everything Musk says about his presence in raising his own kids is a lie. He was not around, and seems to only push the narrative because he knows being an absentee father would be unpalatable to the conservatives he's courting.

They're hiring interns to fire people because they're molding their ride or die sycophants. It's completely natural to assume when they're telling us they're being thoughtful, they aren't. That when they say it's for you, it's for them. It always has been. That you choose to stick your head in the sand is your problem.

bagels10• 1 year ago

The rule of law is dead. Is that not damaging enough?

awestroke• 1 year ago

Yeah let's let them continue their coup until we can assess all the consequences and determine whether dismantling the whole country was a good or bad thing

ulbu3• 1 year ago

laws are not about evidence and punishment. they are just as much, if not less, about preventing the apparition of evidence. oftentimes, evidence means you’re too late.

ulbu3• 1 year ago

i meant “not more.”

i very much lack sleep today.

greenie_beans2• 1 year ago

some different takes:

https://www.crisesnotes.com/elon-musk-wants-to-get-operation...

no matter political affiliation, this should be alarming the level of access these people have been given without security clearances etc.

this is a national security issue.

lunarboy6• 1 year ago

This has to be a bad faith argument. DOGE was not signed into law by congress as an official executive department, Musk was not officially appointed with a congress hearing and approval.

kragen4• 1 year ago

Interesting note:

On Sunday, CNN reported that DOGE personnel attempted to improperly access classified information and security systems at the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and that top USAID security officials who thwarted the attempt were subsequently put on leave. The AP reported that DOGE personnel had indeed accessed classified material.

It's attracted a lot of attention that killing USAID has been such a high priority for these guys despite only being 1% of the budget and having a seemingly innocent humanitarian mission. But what's USAID doing that involves classified data? Distributing humanitarian aid shouldn't require any information whose disclosure would seriously disclose national security, should it? Presumably this means USAID has been used as cover for covert operations around the globe.

Paranoid conspiracy theory? Maybe, but it's also a well-known fact; see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agency_for_Int...:

William Blum has said that in the 1960s and early 1970s USAID has maintained "a close working relationship with the CIA, and Agency officers often operated abroad under USAID cover. (...) From 2010 to 2012, the agency operated ZunZuneo,[199] a social media site similar to Twitter in an attempt to instigate uprisings against the Cuban government. Its involvement was concealed in order to ensure mission success. The plan was to draw in users with non-controversial content until a critical mass is reached, after which more political messaging would be introduced. At its peak, more than 40,000 unsuspecting Cubans interacted on the platform.[199]

(There's a lot more there. Check it out if you haven't heard of this.)

So, if it's been a key part of the US's overseas covert operations for decades, why did it go into the wood chipper in a weekend? Did Elon Musk just fail to realize its importance to the US's worldwide influence?

With no evidence beyond the above, I think USAID was targeted because it's been a nucleus of the Intelligence Community's resistance to Trump consolidating his power.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 1 year ago

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/02/03/elon-musk...

"They have apparently installed sofa beds in the office of the OPM."

"Government employeees in various agencies report that staffers from DOGE are turning up at this offices, plugging in servers and running "code reviews"."

"What the DOGE people seem most keen on is access to personnel records and as much information as possible about what employees actually do. According to one civil servant interviewed by DOGE personnel, the questions include, "Which of your colleagues are most expendable?""

Sounds like a scene from Office Space.

tomrod• 1 year ago

Thanks Dang for letting this political conversation persist!

fsckboy• 1 year ago

the dogs bark. but the caravan continues on. -- proverb

shipscode4• 1 year ago

The moral arguments against what the left or right do are exactly the same.

Suddenly the left is all concerned about doxxing or unelected bureaucrats in government.

Truthfully politics in America is not about any moral compass - it’s about individual preference to see certain political ideas win or lose.

Instead of pretending politics is based on a set of moral issues, just accept that it’s a set of opinions. Some simply like certain causes, people, or businesses more than others do.

ayakang31415• 1 year ago

I see things done by DOGE are getting noticed. I vaguely remember that DOGE will be decommissioned around 2026 independence day I believe? I have no confidence in judging what the outcome might be at this point, so I will wait till the last day of DOGE.

jondwillis• 1 year ago

Accelerationism, everyone. I'm not excited to see this play out.

jimmydoe4• 1 year ago

One thing CCP did masterfully is sending very young grads, who are newly admitted to the party, to go to different local communities and evaluate the outcome government project like poverty reduction there (because obviously Xi don’t trust local officials and party members). These young people have a lot of energy to make some impact, also too young to lie or corrupt. The result turned out to be actually effective.

There are quite some admiration for CCP from the american new right like moldbug and musk, It seems either they took a page from CCP, or happen to think alike.

turbojet1321• 1 year ago

too young to lie or corrupt

In my experience, youth has little to do with honesty or corruptibility.

jimmydoe4• 1 year ago

I mean their social experience is usually not enough to conduct sophisticated rent seeking or reach some comprise with local officials.

Young grads from big urban usually don’t do well with local mid aged bureaucrats. That type of human nature tension is what’s being leveraged here.

tivert2• 1 year ago

In my experience, youth has little to do with honesty or corruptibility.

It has a lot to do with naivete and not having the confidence to stand up when needed.

There's a lot of easily indoctrinated, exploitable idealistic youth out there. A lot of organizations run on them.

jorvi3• 1 year ago

Young people often are hopelessly ideological, in the same way a dogmatic religious person would be. Both are less corruptible than your average person.

leftcenterright• 1 year ago

isn't it more like "too young to speak up" ? How many Snowdens do we have after all.

zfg6• 1 year ago

too young to lie or corrupt

Too young to have the experience to know what's a good idea and what's a bad idea. Too young to question what they're doing. Too young to push back when things are going wrong. Too young to have life experience and so are far easier to shape and indoctrinate.

Musk pledged his commitment to China's core socialist values: https://www.mediaite.com/news/elon-musk-signs-letter-pledgin...

Musk advocated for the submission of Taiwan to China: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/08/elon-musk...

Musk thinks China rocks: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/31/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-china-ro...

jimmydoe4• 1 year ago

What Xi/Musk need in these cases is loyalty, not critical thinking. Apparently they both know how to leverage the youth for it.

dtquad• 1 year ago

Many high-ranking Chinese officials, including Xi Jinping (Chemical Engineering) and his predecessors like Hu Jintao (Hydraulic Engineering) and Jiang Zemin (Electrical Engineering), are trained engineers.

They also like economics and finance people. Premier Li Keqiang has a PhD in Economics from Peking University. Zhu Rongji, a former premier, had a strong economics and mathematics background.

I am not a fan of American techno-libertarianism nor the Chinese CCP but Europe needs more engineers and economists (from math heavy programs) in politics.

jimmydoe4• 1 year ago

Not to challenge your conclusion but you might want to examine your examples carefully. AFAIK Xi Jinping is widely believed to be close to illiterate…

h1fra• 1 year ago

Maybe the difference here, is that those young people seems to already be corrupted and doing illegal stuff

saturn86015• 1 year ago

My understanding is that local Chinese municipalities are going bankrupt due to the high amounts of debt that they have?

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/31/economy/china-local-governmen...

They are going through a real estate crash and their demographic situation bodes a very bleak long term future.

ImHereToVote• 1 year ago

CPC

philipwhiuk5• 1 year ago

The CCP also send young agents overseas to infiltrate organisations that don't have adequate security controls.

Like DOGE.

cod1r• 1 year ago

I fully support young folks being put in those high pressure situations. Lets them learn and showcase what young people can do.

I think there are huge benefits when you put together a team of people that usually don't have distractions like kids, intimate relationships, health problems etc that can hinder productivity.

Even more beneficial to a team when you combine the wisdom and experience of older folks with the passion and energy of the youth.

tnt128• 1 year ago

or young folks are passionate, idealistic, lack real-world experience, and idolize heroes, which makes them perfect foot soldiers for carrying out tasks without questions.

WillyWonkaJr• 1 year ago

This is exactly what happened when Obama was elected, btw. Cult of personality is a dangerous thing from either end of the political spectrum.

bagels10• 1 year ago

Let them create some startups, not coup the government.

nullbyte808• 1 year ago

Im sure as you read this article, they're already dumping TBs of classified documents and storing it on Musk's servers.

jimkleiber14• 1 year ago

Can we please call it DGE so as not to pump the crypto coin?

jimkleiber14• 1 year ago

Well I hope in the (very near) future we decide we want the executive branch to have less power, so as to protect ourselves from a unitary executive who goes rogue. Yes it may be less efficient, but more resilient.

This drive for uber efficiency can 1) make government more fragile (see toilet paper supply issues during the pandemic) and 2) be a slippery slope to dehumanization (see paper clip maximizing problem).

XorNot2• 1 year ago

Toilet paper supply issues were not an example of an efficiency problem, they were misinformation creating a demand shock.

Your average supermarket has limited shelf space and stocks to the level that it will reliably clear shelves before new supply turns up, or things spoil.

If a whole much of people just buy one extra pack that week, this can easily empty the shelves... Which then gets posted to social media to imply a supply problem, which then prompts people to increase their buying rate.

There's no solution to this other then education: there was no supply issue, and never was. Any "solution" would be concluding that a supermarket should devote an absurd amount of shelf space to toilet paper, just in case misinformation goes viral again.

jimkleiber14• 1 year ago

From my understanding, toilet paper is produced for commercial and residential purposes. As people stopped going to the office (and restaurants and malls, etc), people stopped using commercial toilet paper and started using more residential toilet paper.

What I read at the time also said that it's very hard for a plant to shift from making commercial to residential toilet paper, that the margins are paper thin (pun intended) and so it would take a lot of time and money to retool.

giancarlostoro• 1 year ago

I remember seeing a video of a person in a warehouse making fun of the panic, the warehouse was full of more toilet paper than you knew what to do with. TP companies were probably happy, and the smart move is not to send way more supply than a store can contain, because if demand dies, now you have too much just sitting there. It's much cheaper for them to keep it at their warehouses.

bagels10• 1 year ago

After seeing Bush in office, the sensible thing to do would have been to reduce presidential power. Nobody bothered. Then again after Trump. Biden didn't do a damn thing to reduce presidential power, knowing what happened and what could happen. Way too late. The judiciary and congress are now both subservient to the president.

kelnos27• 1 year ago

Biden didn't have the power to reduce his own power. Congress would have, but they're not interested in doing that.

lukas099• 1 year ago

There are certainly sympathetic federal judges, including on the supreme court, but as a whole the judiciary is not (yet) owned

ModernMech16• 1 year ago

Well, for his part Biden's DOJ did argue in court against the idea of blanket presidential immunity. SCOTUS disagreed, said POTUS needed more power.

For Congress' part, they did pass laws that make a lot of what Trump is doing now with impoundment of congressional funds, and firing inspectors general explicitly illegal. He's doing it anyway.

But the reason Trump is able to do what he's doing now comes down to the structure of the DOJ being an executive branch he controls. Combined with his immunity from SCOTUS. This means he can argue anything he does isn't a crime, no one will investigate or prosecute him, and he can pardon anyone acting in his direction / direct his DOJ to not prosecute them.

Nothing Biden or Democrats could do about this, because at the end of the day, Republicans decided they deserve this power, and they grabbed it for themselves. It was always there for the taking, they just needed to convince themselves with words and court decisions and speeches that they had the right.

wnc3141• 1 year ago

It's hard to unwind that clock. The next admin will may leverage that consolidated power to undo trump harms, but also see the benefits of keeping that power. I pray congress mandates the political independence of certain federal agencies (FBI, doj etc)

kelnos27• 1 year ago

The problem is that we painted ourselves into a this corner long ago. Even if Congress wasn't generally paralyzed by bad-faith partisan fighting, the House and Senate are not equipped to do even a small fraction of what the executive branch does today.

If we removed much of the executive branch's power, it wouldn't be "less efficient". The government just wouldn't do anything.

Some people (current GOP) seems to think this would be a good thing.

jimkleiber14• 1 year ago

Agreed. If government provides fewer services, companies can provide more services at a profit. Why have public (non-profit) education when you can have private (highly profitable) education? Who needs public (non-profit) health insurance when you can have private (highly profitable) health insurance?

The list can go on and on.

biohcacker843• 1 year ago

Most conservatives and Libertarians from all times think that.

A minority of those on the right, don't.

tonymet9• 1 year ago

Have you considered reducing the overall scope of the federal government rather than just the executive branch?

jimkleiber14• 1 year ago

And have the scope picked up by state and local governments (or even a global one)? Or just let corporations make the rules?

I see the government doing at least two things: setting rules and providing services. Do you want fewer rules or fewer services? Or something else?

onetimeusename2• 1 year ago

What about protecting ourselves from a biased bureaucracy who use their power for their own political ends? There is a history of this happening now like the IRS scandal and I am surprised how quiet people are about the mass migration event into the country from 2020-2024. It's to the point where people actually say it's just a conspiracy theory and disinformation despite it being a primary concern of most voters according to polls. It's hard to argue that DHS and other bureaucracies were completely innocent. At best they were negligent and incompetent but I think most people know they took steps to make illegal immigration and asylum claims easier to do and help fund immigration routes. This wasn't a platform Biden ran on. He did not win a democratic mandate to open up asylum claims to basically anyone who arrived and grant temporary protected status somewhat arbitrarily. I am surprised no one is concerned about un-elected people being able to do all this and escaping any responsibility.

afpx• 1 year ago

I thought that was their strategy, though? Dismantle the executive branch to the point where the president has little power.

biohcacker843• 1 year ago

I guess it took Trump to make Liberals want a smaller executive government.

trod12342• 1 year ago

How would we protect ourselves when the rule of law is non-functional?

This definition is quite literally the only check to balance power available to the average person, at least when it worked. There is no longer equality under the law which is dependent on the other components which have also degraded.

Congress is non-responsive to their constituencies.

We are stuck in a positive feedback loop, eventually when the abuses are great society will fall back to the natural state prior to the social contract. These will not be peaceful times.

mldqj• 1 year ago

They are operating outside of their circle of competence, because they are not working on an engineering problem.

pinoy4202• 1 year ago

If you have ever spoken to a 16-20yo you will understand just how good these people are.

windowshopping• 1 year ago

What? Unclear whether you're trying to say they are very good or not very good.

pinoy4202• 1 year ago

Very good. Able to absorb information so much quicker than people their senior. Also incredibly eager to learn and please.

malthaus• 1 year ago

so musk re-invented mckinsey?

qwertox• 1 year ago

How high are the chances of these young engineers getting highly lucrative offers from China and Russia just to tell them what they saw? They are set for life, and Elon Musk does not recognize that he enabled this.

hoseja• 1 year ago

Advance Publications needs to be stopped.

jaimex23• 1 year ago

Oh this sounds like it'll be a balanced, well researched article based on merits.

I'll then leave a comment here about a guy that knew a guy that heard from another guy that Elon almost ruined a company his aunt worked at.

msie2• 1 year ago

Move fast and break thousands of Chesterton's fences.

tjpnz• 1 year ago

Would be fucking terrified knowing that my personal employment records were in reach of these children. Who's the responsible adult in the room stopping them from "losing" a backup they've made or maintaining the non-compliant equipment they'll have brought in.

zfg6• 1 year ago

Save America: don't buy Tesla.

andyjohnson02• 1 year ago

In pondering the mindset of these people, I was reminded of a very different submission on hn yesterday [1]. Quote:

"Avoid, at all costs, arriving at a scenario where the ground-up rewrite starts to look attractive"

Seems to me that in their narrow, reckless arrogance they're doing something similar to the mechanisms of government. This is all broken and people who built it were idiots. Lets just scrap it and built it again with a modern stack.

Chesterton's fence, metacognitive ability, overconfidence effect, those who do not learn from history, etc.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42920285

dvh• 1 year ago

I think rewrites are popular in part because during rewrite it is possible to drop features, either voluntarily or because of deadlines, while it would probably never fly to drop feature from working, existing implementation.

Also your theory doesn't hold up for cases when you rewrite your own code. I've rewritten my old code hundreds of time because I was "idiot" in a sense that it was unmaintainable with new changed requirements.

Rewrites are sometimes necessary.

silvestrov• 1 year ago

Rewrites of other peoples code/laws also allows you to think "I'm much smarter than they are".

Governance has a lot more "unknown unknowns" than you expect.

indigo945• 1 year ago

A rewrite enables dropping features including, but not limited to: checks and balances, due process, a government for and by the people, and certain inalienable rights.

And just to make it clear: I am not being facetious, I am very concerned that all of these are under serious attack.

Checks and balances are already broken because of DOGE, because the Department of Justice simply ignored a court order to stop the funding freeze, and because the firing of FBI career employees was probably illegal [1].

Due process is coming under serious threat due to the building of camps in Guantanamo and El Salvador, where detainees will likely have insufficient access to legal counsel.

A government for and by the people will be replaced by fascist "network states", sovereign territorial entities under authoritarian control by a "CEO", i.e. dictator [2]. The goal is to enable ultra-wealthy individuals to freely "exit" democracies, to live and govern without any rules.

Inalienable rights are explicitly under attack by the ultra-libertarians in Musk's circles. Nick Land, one of the main thinkers behind this neo-fascist brand of thought (branding it as "Dark Enlightenment"), quotes Patri Friedman, who runs Pronomos Capital, the corporation that builds these network states for Peter Thiel and others:

Patri Friedman remarks: “we think that free exit is so important that we’ve called it the only Universal Human Right.” [3]

Id est, building a privately-owned, corporate-controlled, dictatorial "network state", which is exactly what "free exit" means, justifies abolishing all human rights.

The worst thing is that this all sounds like an insane conspiracy theory, but this is operating completely in the open. The statements of Peter Thiel, Patri Friedman and others are freely available, and they make very clear (Peter Thiel):

Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. [4]

[1] https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/watch/-totally-il...

[2] https://www.vcinfodocs.com/venture-capital-extremism

[3] https://keithanyan.github.io/TheDarkEnlightenment.epub/TheDa...

[4] https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...

rayiner15• 1 year ago

But sometimes these people aren’t wrong! Microsoft Teams really does suck. And while not all of the federal government is Microsoft Teams, the State department definitely is.

jalapenos7• 1 year ago

A more likely scenario is they're now fully aware how little time they have versus how long things take and how much heal dragging they're going to face every day of it.

So they've decided this time to rampage straight out of the gates and sustain it as long as they can.

This is a key weakness of central planners - the centralization and the slow rate of development of the bureaucracy. It takes far more effort to develop an invasive and parasitic bureaucracy than it does to blow it to pieces.

So this is a natural strategic asymmetry that makes perfect sense to exploit. Enjoy!

rayiner15• 1 year ago

Shock and awe.

BolexNOLA5• 1 year ago

Maybe sound a little less excited about it lol

rayiner15• 1 year ago

“Inexperienced.” Reflexive deference to credentialism and tenure coming from Wired is wild.

BigParm• 1 year ago

Elon is stealing any and all data to train AI. His padawans are AI guys. At least he's going in personally with a crew like a proper heist.

bestest• 1 year ago

It is AI related, but I don't think it's only "train". I believe Musk is a real visionary (villain?), and he's going to replace the whole government apparatus with AI. POTUS included.

greenie_beans2• 1 year ago

in the RFPs, they are gonna replace DEI clauses with AI clauses. which reveals what they think about labor and people

xezzed• 1 year ago

This article appears to be a fictional piece that imagines a scenario where Elon Musk has gained control over certain federal government agencies through a project called the "Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)." (c) Claude :)

alp1n3_eth• 1 year ago

There's probably going to be a flood of lawsuits, complaints, etc. following this. Cleaning up inefficient gov processes and waste would be good, but this is the completely wrong way to go about it. A single team, made up of extremely young people, some of which haven't even finished college yet, is not qualified in the slightest to do so. This is on top of them having no gov experience, and experience with how things work on the individual teams they're trying to clean out.

Not to mention they've probably already accessed Secret and up levels of classified data without a clearance, which would get any normal gov employee fired and potentially thrown in jail depending on the offense.

I also want to highlight that OPM is the backbone of workers rights for the government. Most skilled positions working directly for the gov are already underpaid. OPM was one of the few pros they had to offer; robust worker rights that are required across the fed.

failuser2• 1 year ago

Lawsuits take time, the authoritarian takeover of the government is completed in days.

_bin_• 1 year ago

bureaucracies essentially never reform or reduce themselves through their own processes and by their own hand. they have not the incentive, perspective, nor means to do so.

stormfather5• 1 year ago

Say what you want, but if we don't drastically cut spending, our way of life will collapse. It would be nice if Congress itself would reign in spending and downsize the government, but everyone knows that has a 0% chance of happening.

This is better hyperinflation or a violent revolution, at least, which is what it avoids for us. Anyone who doesn't see that hasn't done the thought experiment of extrapolating out our spending for a few more decades. It can't continue, period. Period. Our only choice is how to change it and our democracy (congresspuppets controlled by lobbies) fundamentally cannot fix this. Does anyone have a better idea that will actually work?

ModernMech16• 1 year ago

I would agree with you if the people slashing spending indiscriminately on things that poor people rely on, also didn't have a history of and weren't currently planning to yet again give the rich and corporations massive tax cuts that have and will balloon the federal deficit.

My idea? Raise taxes. I know, it's radical and literally no one has ever thought of it, but we tried lowering taxes and the deficit goes up. So maybe if we raise taxes the deficit will go down.

stormfather5• 1 year ago

Do you see a popular mandate for raising taxes materializing? Do you see Congress enacting that? I don't. Like you said, you're not the first to think of it, but it never happens.

As imperfect as DOGE is, its the only measure I can see actually happening that has a shot at cutting the deficit. I would love to think of another one.

fallingfrog4• 1 year ago

I think that we should cut the amount of money going towards superyachts and 10,000 dollar bottles of wine, rather than education, infrastructure and healthcare. Which do you imagine will lead to a healthier economy in the long run?

Because when you cut taxes on the super wealthy, you are effectively taking money away from education and infrastructure and allocating it towards superyachts.

stormfather5• 1 year ago

Ok so let's raise taxes on the wealthy. I think that's great and am in total agreement.

How long do you think we should wait for Congress to significantly raise taxes on the rich? How confident are you that will ever happen? Have you seen a graph of the national debt? How long do you think we have to wait? Why oppose cutting spending now? That's not in conflict with raising taxes for the wealthy, both should be done.

Jiro• 1 year ago

Naming these people this way is a blatant invitation for harassment by signal-boosting their identities, even if technically their names are already known. This is one step away from doxing and we should not support it.

babycheetahbite2• 1 year ago

Gosh, many of the folks at HN seem to be deeply invested in things remaining status quo with the administrative state.

th0ma5• 1 year ago

Nothing to me shouts the absolute failure of AI technology than needing this team and also in some kind of emergency way.

tqi4• 1 year ago

I hate that in this country, everything is political and everything has only 2 sides. Is there waste and inefficiency in government spending? Yes, I think so. Should we do our best to cut and trim this? Absolutely. Is DOGE's ham-fisted, half-assed version of this "doing our best"? Of course not.

But apparently in this country, you have to be either pro government waste or pro DOGE. No middle ground or common sense allowed.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF3• 1 year ago

I hate that in this country, everything is political and everything has only 2 sides.
But apparently in this country, you have to be either pro government waste or pro DOGE. No middle ground or common sense allowed.

Take a close look at who is creating two sides. Perhaps there is more nuance to the points being made by the people who do not seem to be pro DOGE.

blast• 1 year ago

It's the other side! They're the ones creating two sides!

tqi4• 1 year ago

they are certainly leading the dance, but it takes two to tango

ThatMedicIsASpy• 1 year ago

I am sitting here in EU and asking myself why does DOGE need access to data. All you need is access to the data structure to build software around it.

philipwhiuk5• 1 year ago

They're not building software, they're finding reasons to fire people.

discodonkey• 1 year ago

I don't think there are many people who are "pro-government waste". That would be a strange position to hold.

I do think that Elon Musk and DOGE are attempting to create a "with us or against us" binary narrative that leaves no room for even-handed nuance (not unlike Trump), in an effort to push an agenda that maybe doesn't have much to do with government efficiency (for example, MTG's clampdown on allegedly-liberal media [0]).

[0] https://www.axios.com/2025/02/03/marjorie-taylor-greene-hear...

webninja2• 1 year ago

The democrats couldn’t cut wasteful spending so the republicans have to instead. Ever seen the debt clock?

ModernMech16• 1 year ago

Can you look at the chart "Federal Debt Trends Over Time, FY 1948 – 2024" and tell me what you see?

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio...

The last budget surplus we had was under Bill Clinton - Democrat. But instead we had to go to war in the middle east, give massive tax breaks to corporations, and rain helicopter money during COVID. Those happened under Republican administrations. You can't pretend anymore that Republicans are the fiscally sound ones. And they're going to do it again. Despite all this talk about cutting spending and reducing the deficit, that debt clock is going to keep going up for four years straight, just as the time before, and the time before that.

tqi4• 1 year ago

Sure, in the same way that a hacksaw and diet/exercise are both effective weight loss tools...

RGamma• 1 year ago

No center party. Arguably the eligible, but non-voting share (~36%!), could have made it happen, but alas such choice does not exist.

croes2• 1 year ago

Of course their is a middle ground.

The problem is what is classified as waste. It won’t be the projects of the GOP‘s donors.

craftsman4• 1 year ago

Let's open their repos and see their PRs. Then nobody will need to make assertions about their brilliance or irresponsibility.

D.O.G.E.: Make your repos public. Let's see what you are doing. And if you don't have repos, write a script to mirror the codebase and your diffs.

dani__german6• 1 year ago

Luke Farritor Deciphered an ancient scroll using AI, he seems to be pretty smart.

craftsman4• 1 year ago

Cool.

So anyway, let's see what he (allegedly) is doing with the codebase. Given that these systems are part of the public trust, we should all want to see the code and the DOGE team's PRs as they make improvements.

reaperman• 1 year ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1ijbtqf/this_i...

adonovan• 1 year ago

What would that prove? Great coders are not necessarily competent leaders of the civil service.

craftsman4• 1 year ago

We can all watch the DOGE team in action and not speculate as to their brilliance or irresponsibility.

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1• 1 year ago

It's going to be a field day for China and Russia state hackers.

justonenote5• 1 year ago

I have never seen a thread on this site so full of vitriol, hatred, threats of blacklisting for life, threats of violence and general hysteria. And that kind of rhetoric is entirely coming from one side. (or at least the not dead comments of that nature are coming from one side)

Regardless of where you stand, I think a lot of people who have been commenting on here about blacklisting or worse about the named individuals need to check themselves, these are young men who have lives and families.

justonenote5• 1 year ago

The reason trump won is that is he authentic. He is following through on his promises. He doesn't have 20 speech writers corralling his every word to be completely neutral and say nothing at all.

It's insane to me that the so called left are going to bat to defend the status quo, when the status quo is multi-national corporations lobbying gov for their own goals of super globalist trade. Isn't "buy local" a left position? Obviously trump is a flawed character, even the most ardent supporters will admit that. But he is not a cookie cutter straight of the factory line politician.

The same goes for Elon, he is an idiot a lot of time, but he is not a lobbyist just sitting in the shadows, he is public about being an idiot for better and worse.

These are all left wing ideas, f the corruption, that's what doge is supposed to be doing, it supposed to be cutting out inefficient spending, which lets be honest, will go to friends of friends, but the left are losing their shit because they got their funding for dressing up as the opposite sex cut off.

oblio5• 1 year ago

The reason trump won is that is he authentic. He is following through on his promises. He doesn't have 20 speech writers corralling his every word to be completely neutral and say nothing at all.

I find it absolutely incredible that people believe this.

Trump LIES about everything, all the time. He just lies in all directions. He lies that the sun is blue, he lies that the sun is red, he sometimes that the sun is pink.

Then a decent chunk of the population chooses the lies they like and ignores the rest.

ryg465wert• 1 year ago

It's time to read The Great Leveler. Maybe...

patrulek• 1 year ago

Two sentences? This is the whole article or am i blind?

abvdasker• 1 year ago

If I was a foreign adversary of the US I would be salivating at the idea of several unvetted 19-25 year olds with unlimited access to classified government computer systems. The security implications are apocalyptic.

tosbalok3• 1 year ago

unlimited access to classified government computer systems.

What makes you think they have access to classified government computer systems, let alone unlimited access?

It's my understanding that classified data is on a completely separate network called SIPRNET[1] and that basic accounting data (e.g. USAID grant data) (a) isn't classified and (b) access to USAID data doesn't imply access to SIPRNET

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIPRNet

alluro23• 1 year ago

I find the whole discussion around power of government branches and what different events mean and how will this or that branch react a bit surreal.

The guy has been impeached twice, exposing it as laughable, which it is. He has then been convicted as a felon, which hasn't slowed him down a bit in becoming a president again. He has then installed people of ridiculous backgrounds as some of the highest ranking officials in the country. He has then let Elon run amock within the government, accessing confidential data and doing things with absolutely no scrutiny or oversight. He has then already started nibbling at FBI, CIA and dozen other government agencies. It's been THREE. WEEKS.

I'm just not sure what mechanisms, checks and balances, and measures some people expect will be employed or will have any effect to control this. The government as was known up till now is no more. As long as people STILL try to frame Trump within traditional accountability mechanisms of the government, they will be floundering around the scandal or crime no. 3232, while he's committing no. 12768.

Once this slows down, there will be maybe 5% of tools and power left to revert things (and it would take decades), control the rich to any extent, and have any semblance of democracy, if they even bother to maintain it.

arandomusername2• 1 year ago

and have any semblance of democracy, if they even bother to maintain it.

Isn't this democracy? People voted for Trump and this is pretty much what he ran on.

nomendos• 1 year ago

Interesting inversion of priorities? In the age of huge increase of abuse of power by secrecy over-classification and already unearthed arguably up to criminal abuse of power and waste of our money (with all crimes that it caused here and in the world), invasion of the country and countless other hybrid attacks how does secret clearance of few efficient engineers look compared to all of the results already shown and more to come? Is it ideal, no but there was not other known way or all would be open to hear it and cutting the power of executive branch is bureaucratic dream where they could grow like cancer up to killing the host, which they were arguably close.

The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

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