Doge Privacy Act Requests

https://jamieraskin.com/doge-privacy-act-requests/

by toomuchtodo • 1 year ago

127 64 1 year ago

tw04• 1 year ago

I hope at this point people agree this has gone well beyond partisanship. Having a private citizen unilaterally gutting government agencies is an affront to the checks and balances of a functioning democracy.

roenxi6• 1 year ago

Which check or balance do you think is being ignored here? The point of the executive branch is to be the one where unelected and loosely vetted administrators work.

Congress is mostly voted officials, the judiciary is the group that are carefully vetted for cultural fit and the executive is where the messy parts happen with oversight from the other two government branches. It is where people like Musk are supposed to be working - the president thinks he a good person to be wielding power.

WarOnPrivacy• 1 year ago

Which check or balance do you think is being ignored here?

Which check + balance is being adhered to?

Which actions aren't in violation of the constitution, are operating fully with stipulated oversight and clearly operate within established best practices?

This should be trivial to provide from the Most Transparent Administration Ever.

danorama6• 1 year ago

So if it's government as usual they won't mind adhering to the Privacy Act of 1974 like every other agency, right?

artificialLimbs• 1 year ago

It was clearly told to the American people that this would happen before the election, repeatedly. This is what the American people voted for.

bickfordb• 1 year ago

Nope

someothherguyy2• 1 year ago

Yeah, they voted for all this too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes. It doesn't make it right.

Last term it was, "He is your president you have to support him". Now it is, "The American people voted for this"

All the same meaningless phrases that do nothing to discuss issues, just an appeal to the masses.

Political sentiment has never been static. We'll see what people think when inflation sky rockets, they max out their credit, etc, and they have fewer social programs to reach out to for help.

You can follow along here:

https://www.realclearpolling.com/latest-polls

nativeit• 1 year ago

Let's assume your first assertion is true, and I don't necessarily concede that, but for the sake of argument.

People frequently point out that Trump is doing more or less exactly what he said he would do, either explicitly or by way of Project 2025[1]—a detailed several hundred page diatribe and action plan for a second Trump term that he disingenuously claims to know nothing about, despite having employed nearly every one of its authors to work on his campaign and/or administration. That includes Project 2025’s principal coordinator Russell Vought[2], who Trump named to head the Office of Management & Budget, and who was policy director of the Republican National Committee platform committee from May 2024. So it is fair to say that we were warned.

But it is worth noting that an April 2024 NBC News poll[3] showed Trump leading voters who say they do not follow political news by 26-points. Meanwhile voters who said they read a newspaper every day supported Joe Biden 70% to Trump’s 21%. They very shrewdly targeted fire hoses of wedge issues, disinformation, and fear-mongering to millions of voters who reportedly do not follow politics, and who likely just felt like shit was better for them before 2020. It worked. But I am not so sure that these voters were equipped to know about, or fully understand the implications of, something like Project 2025. There is certainly room to speculate how many of Trump’s 2024 voters were voting for this kind of radical reshaping of American governance, rather than simply desiring a return to the pre-2020 status quo, before COVID-19 and its socioeconomic consequences violently rattled society’s cage.

It is true that Trump won his reelection with 49.8% of the vote, but that isn’t the same thing as 49.8% of voters. With only 63.7% of eligible voters casting ballots last November, Trump’s share of the vote narrows to just under a third of the electorate, significantly less than half. As I mentioned before, a large bloc of those voters do not engage with traditional news media. Along with the NBC poll I cited above, a survey conducted in November 2024 by Northeastern University[4] found that just 24% of Republican voters relied on news media, while the rest said they got their news from family and friends, as well as social media.

This means that while less than 1/3rd of eligible voters cast their ballots for Trump, only ~8.3% of the electorate entered the voting booth reliably informed, and still chose to support him.

---

1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2025/02/06/heres-h...

2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2025/02/06/project...

3. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/poll-biden-tr...

4. https://www.chip50.org/reports/2024-us-elections-sources-of-...

mateus1• 1 year ago

Topics mentioning DOGE and Musk are being quickly flagged here in HN, so I don’t think there is much hope for discourse here.

rcpt• 1 year ago

I don't think flagging automatically kills posts, no?

_fs2• 1 year ago

Its completely obvious that a bot army is gaming the system. Posts are flagged within minutes of posting

blackeyeblitzar2• 1 year ago

The reason they are flagged is precisely because there isn’t much hope for discourse, not the other way around. Also, I think per the guidelines, these types of discussions are also not welcome:

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

The guidelines also say the following, so I’ll just stop here:

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

Spivak• 1 year ago

I guess the argument for is that this is isomorphic to an outside contractor being granted access, providing a list of cuts, and the prez signing off on it. I don't like it but it seems like a difference in semantics and paperwork so I'm not sure if going after it is meaningful.

stvltvs• 1 year ago

That's not a description of the status quo ante.

Prior Presidents more or less respected the need for independent agencies within the Executive, and the courts upheld the right of Congress to direct how money is spent meaning the President couldn't arbitrarily shutter an agency created by law written by Congress.

jfengel3• 1 year ago

They don't. Very little has actually changed. For the people who voted for this, "unilaterally gutting government agencies" was what they voted for. For people who didn't vote, they don't seem to be saying, "Gosh, I didn't realize this would happen."

Trasmatta• 1 year ago

I'm losing my mind. This thread is already full of people sanewashing DOGE and Musk. I don't even know how to debate with them, because we seem to live on entirely different conceptual planets.

roenxi6• 1 year ago

I don't even know how to debate with them, because we seem to live on entirely different conceptual planets.

Typically the process is to exercise empathy, look into their world, see what it is like and then check for any logical problems or general weaknesses. If you want to debate with someone persuasively you have to meet them where they are.

watwut3• 1 year ago

They don't care about logic and reason. We all know it. There are no stable moral or ethical values - transparency mayter then it don't depending on tactical needs.

On emotional level, they like it when someone else is harmed. And that is it.

tpm5• 1 year ago

Disordered discourse is a term Eliot Higgins is using to describe this and I like it. There is essentially no way out and they will take whole HN down with them I'm afraid.

https://web-cdn.bsky.app/profile/eliothiggins.bsky.social/po...

sershe5• 1 year ago

Whole HN down? I don't even see all these off topic political flame wars you guys are having except when I feel particularly lazy and browse extra pages. Other than that my only interaction with them is to flag them. And I'm really grateful for other people flagging so I see less. The actual on topic hn content is not affected.

danorama6• 1 year ago

Flagged. We don't talk about privacy issues on Hacker News. Especially not when they involve the government.

Integrape• 1 year ago

One of the top posts right now is about a whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying. Go flag it.

danorama6• 1 year ago

sorry, forgot the /s.

tocs3• 1 year ago

So, is anyone here sending off a request for the info DOGE has on them?

Doge Privacy Act Requests

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