DHS removes all members of cyber security advisory boards, halts investigations
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The Coast Guard having a plan for when large fishing vessels get into trouble, and indeed a plan to stop them getting into trouble, seems like a good thing to me even if it's grouped somewhat incongruously under Department of Homeland Security.
edit: your other comment on this makes me think we are at the "letting commercial fisherman, and the coastguards trying to rescue them, drown to own the libs" stage, and my faith in humanity drops another notch.
The US Department of Homeland Security "began operations on March 1, 2003, after being formed as a result of the Homeland Security Act of 2002, enacted in response to the September 11 attacks" (wiki).
So are you saying that for 78 years of its existence, the USCG had no "plan for when large fishing vessels get into trouble, and indeed a plan to stop them getting into trouble" until the DHS assembled a (assuming this is a thing) "National Commercial Fishing Safety Advisory Committee"? You dont think theres any redundancy? That just maybe bureaucracy cant help but to expand forever every time someone with a title has a question that cant be answered immediately by someone standing in the room, they have to create a committee so they can have someone on speed dial? If the coast guard doesnt have plans for this, one wonders what the coast guard does all day.
It could just as easily have been, for example, that back in 2002 someone realized USCG was involved in drug and weapons interdiction in the waters off Florida, swept them up into DHS under anti terror laws, and got the fishing boat thing as a freebie. It does not mean that USCG were not doing anything on the latter until DHS showed up.
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2024-09/24_0712_ncfs...
The activities listed are:
1. "...advise and provide recommendations in writing to the Secretary of Homeland Security...on matters relating to the safe operation of commercial fishing industry vessels"
2. "review regulations..."
3. "review marine casualties and investigations of vessels..."Or more likely, somewhere inbetween, thousands of teams, mediated by a few hundred of the most influential, struggling to get the attention of this or that decision maker. Most of them just throwing random things at a wall and seeing what sticks.
The truth is HN readers won’t know and can’t ever know, barring a tiny handful who can read the tea leaves successfully year after year.
Edit: Thanks to @lelandfe for pointing to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Street_(Washington,_D.C.)
I'll leave this comment up in case there are others this term is also new to.
As your document says, it is literally the commercial fishing industry, shipbuilders, shipowners, equipment manufacturers, insurers etc. getting together to swap notes on safety because shipwrecks and deaths are not good for business.
"members serve as representatives of their respective interests, associations, or organizations"
This is not woke communism.
One of the interesting bits about the job posting is that, not too surprisingly, there are no salaries:
> All members will serve at their own expense and receive no salary or other compensation from the Federal Government, with the exception that members may be reimbursed for travel and per diem in accordance with Federal Travel Regulations.
Which, to me, can read two ways: altruistic people trying to make the industry better
OR
You won't even be selected to this committee unless you're already wealthy enough to foot the bill yourself and shape policy in a way that advantages ones self.
I don't know which way to read it, but if it wasn't costing anything, cutting it "for cost savings" can't be completely true. Maybe there were other overhead costs, but even saying that those costs are $1M/yr is a rounding error for the national budget.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/10/13/2020-22...
And notably, most military spending is discretionary, so the remaining funds for basically all the neat dynamic things government can do is less than a trillion.
A million is of course still a rounding error at e.g. $900 billion, but it adds up really fast, especially when you consider that these are ongoing costs.
What a ludicrous statement. I mean, I know inflation has been bad but not THAT bad. One or two trillion dollars is an absolutely enormous amount of money.
When people think about government spending they tend to handwave away billions and, as per this thread, millions are seen as a rounding error.
But I think thats because most people are thinking about the entire budget - which is around was 6.7 trillion on total revenue of 4.9 trillion.
But when "only" 900 billion of that is left for all the neat things government could do it really nails home the impact of things like a trillion dollars per year spent in interest on the debt.
It really also makes clear why starting to slim things down is essentially becoming necessary. The current system is not sustainable.
Industry associations have no such reach unless individual members make it so, and unofficially at that.
Without the direct line, the association has to rely on lobbying/bribing politicians for access.
Nobody except you is talking about woke communism. Nobody except you is talking about "owning the libs". You're making paranoid, nonsensical arguments against people on your side by imagining they're some sort of alt-right strawman.
It's obviously the "you're backing me up with documentary proof that this is a boring sensible thing" interpretation. The original comment had similar intent.
The NTSB, through its Office of Marine Safety (OMS), investigates major marine accidents across all sectors, determines probable causes, and issues safety recommendations. It operates independently.
In contrast, NCFSAC is an advisory body focused solely on commercial fishing safety, providing recommendations but not conducting investigations.
DHS is arguably a much more appropriate home for the Coast Guard than its previous department, Transportation, given all of the facets of their actual mission (source: father and grandfather both in the Coast Guard for 30+ years).
I send more emails than anything, but if you tried to get me to spend time being trained on sending email they wouldn’t find your body.
Conversely I design new courses rarely, but when I do it matters immensely that it’s done well. Resources and support and structure to help me do that well when I need to is most welcome.
The CISA report that dealt with memory safety is still on the CISA site. What do these recent developments mean for CISA? Is it an independent organization that will continue to exist without DHS support or is it essentially dead and its site and reports will vanish as well?
The legal fight against CISA to stop their censorship was lost not on the basis of it being constitutional, but because the plaintiffs powerful enough to bring it to court couldn't show they had been directly harmed by it. A common stumbling block for many court cases for legitimate issues. CISA has publicly stated they will be changing their approach as a result of these controversies.
Do you have any clues for the "why" ?
A comment on the blusky thread went to "five eyes should stop sharing information" which I suspect won't happen, but I could see people thinking it should.
Investigations are annoying to people who were behind the President at his inauguration.
What risk? There isn’t a consumer liability, and they can control the cybersecurity risk-reward balance they’re exposed to. From their perspective, oversight is the liability.
A good rule of thumb, at least for the next couple of months, is that any rules and regulations that have been criticised by the billionaires, banks or oil & gas industry are likely to be shredded. (The “deep state” stuff is mostly whoever has the king’s ear sort of politics. It’s unclear that had any influence here.)
Or, maybe Im thinking more of advantageous requirements/regulations than oversight per se.
A notable example is SEC mandates on breach disclosures, which will most likely be dead now. Those were a major forcing function to make companies realize security is important. Otherwise, paying a ransom and doing the bare minimum to not get cut by Chubbs or AXA is the norm.
I agree with JumpCriscross on his read of this situation. It ain't great. At least I'm well off enough to weather the negative impacted by a lot of the chaos. Sucks for everyone else.
> The coordination definitely seems to be more of amzn (and similar) employees providing technical expertise to congress and regulators
It's bidirectional. CISA, FBI, and others often get intel or actively take down a botnet or offensive actor, and will percolate this information to security teams at larger organizations before percolating en masse.
For example, when this one APM/data collection tool that almost every DevOps team ik was using was pwned early last year, CISA notified CISOs days before they officially announced it in the news.
Someone who didn’t vote is more in concordance with the current government than someone who voted against it. Actions speak louder than words, and not voting is an action.
But, by definition, not voting is an action rather than absence of one. What you are doing by not voting is giving out a tacit agreement that the people who went and vote get to decide who will be elected.
Following that line of thought, by not voting, you actively chose the current government, no matter what the current government is.
Those that don't care to vote are doomed to be ruled by those who care.
You still have to pay taxes, and perhaps see a government you truly despise making all sorts of decisions that will get the system even more rigged against you.
Not voting out of spite is similar to stabbing your own head to show contempt for your brain when you have a migraine.
"You won't have to vote again" – Trump 2024
https://ogles.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-ogles-propo...
A negligible effect is, mathematically speaking, incalculably higher than no effect.
My Colorado general election ballot contained nothing I could see that would associate me as a registered voter to the ballot itself. Colorado ballots are hand marked, machine readable, and human readable as has been the best and obvious practice since 2000's "hanging chad" debacle. There are certainly "index marks" on the ballots so that the tallying machines can get squared up, but they don't appear different per ballot. I compared to my wife's ballot, just in case.
Why do you ask?
People that vote are not always hush hush about who they voted for, and has nothing to do with can you pick their particular ballot out of the pile. If I tell you I voted for A but B won and now I'm grumbling about the things B is doing, there's no need for discussions about ballots at all.
Just like you don't need to find someone's secret ballot when they're wearing a red MAGA hat.
We haven't done anything quite that irreversible yet.
Our children will pay the price for today's votes. But hey, at least we'll have cheap gas (maybe).
It shouldn't be surprising to anyone here with a functioning brain and is roughly aware of what is going on. Expect more of this.
I think what we're seeing in this moment is the overreach that precedes the backlash, like clockwork.
He's not up for re-election for one, and I'm pretty sure he doesn't give 2F whether Vance gets elected after him or not.
The time for the backlash would have been to refuse to accept the election results and storm the Capitol since that's apparently totally cool to do now.
"There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it"
I’ll say this as someone who’s moderately wealthy: this administration is a massive wealth transfer to those with either capital or connections to it. Taking apart these committees means less-regulated telecoms, infrastructure and financial services. If you’re in those spaces, this is great for you.
The size of each of those industries entirely dwarfs the military-industrial bogeyman, which is largely just being transferred from one set of owners (Boeing, Lockheed, et cetera) to another (Musk, Bezos, Lucky, et cetera)
One possible upside of the current situation is that the very obvious corporate ownership of the federal government is dropping the “emperor has clothes” pretense. We are ever closer to simply paying taxes to Buy-N-Large.
If people don’t like it, at least now they can have a practical conversation about it (Luigi notwithstanding). It’s sort of like when Snowden showed us how fucked we were/are.
In theory, it should be easier to understand the reasoning behind the existence of newer fences, but the idea is still to do that step first...
I mean, clearly some people just reject this entire idea as creating too much friction, and I can often see their point!, but I think we can at least avoid saying "it's a good concept, but it just doesn't apply in this case", and be honest about just rejecting the concept.
Chesterton’s fence can never be an argument against creating something new.
The whole point of it is that if you come across a fence then that was the result of a conscious human decision and subsequent effort, which strongly implies there was a reason it was created, and until you understand what that reason was, you’re taking a risk by destroying the fence.
But if there is “nothing” and you’re creating something new, Chesterton’s fence doesn’t apply because the lack of existence of anything was not the result of intentional human design and effort, therefore there’s no evidence that the lack of existence of something “had a reason for it”.
In other words, there is no "nothing". We will always be playing in a sandbox someone else played in before us.
Several (of the new government) have expressed belief that the government is headed towards a catastrophic debt overload. In their view, emergency relief is necessary.
Not arguing for or against this view, but that seems to be what people voted for.
I am a big fan of Chestertons fence but it doesn’t always apply.
If that fence is stopping the school bus from driving off the edge of a cliff, for example, I would absolutely not want to remove it - and you can bet I'll spare a modicum of thought to make sure that's not the case before I yank it out of the way.
A related point is, it’s pretty easy to find people unhappy with current systems. But if you ask them what to replace those systems with, you’ll often find that coalition dissolves.
It's like marking read all your emails. The important stuff will pop back up.
And for the owner, who probably thinks he's co-piloting the strongest government in the world right now and attributes part of that success to the platform he controls, it is functioning magnificently.
..and that is all that matters to him.
You're not, sure. The people who are in charge view the whole apparatus as a machine, and the people doing the work as cogs in that machine.
Maybe you're replying to someone else?
Unfortunate for some people who may be affected by this.
Personally I don't believe that or want to believe that and would rather chalk it up to neo-toddlerism, but there's a chance right?
So I'm wondering if this is as simple as cost/benefit? Did somebody do the sums and decide the delivery was sub par for spend?
The alternatives are mostly very sad: they're fools. Replacing a process can be beneficial. There's usually overlap.
That would be a very interesting analysis and something to learn from. It would also help prevent similar mistakes in the future. It's really unlikely someone would go to such effort and just keep the results to themselves.
One of the reasons a lot of people are worried about this administration is the vibes based policy decisions they seem intent on making. Everything is haphazard, arbitrary and contradictory. Some of it comes down to personal grievance and some of it comes down to favors for people in the business sphere who chose to kowtow to this administration.
Current South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem wants CISA to be “refocused” on critical infrastructure and to no longer address mis- or disinformation efforts online.
So less/no fact checking, including Trump claims.
Her explanation, moreover, doesn’t make sense. The infrastructure advisory committees are also being disbanded.
So the knee jerk reaction of current administration is burning it to ground. Which could actually change something.
An effective administration would be thoughtful about things and reorganize rather than simply cut. So they're either being thoughtful and decided something like state sponsored infiltration isn't good to investigate or are being thoughtless.
If we don’t test or investigate, there are no problems and no crimes eh?
It's probably not a specific decision based on what the individual boards have been doing.
The current techbro CEO squad is a small group of people who got extraordinarily lucky and made a bunch of money.
The techbro CEO squad takes their luck to be ability, and they think the fact that they have more money than other people means that they're smarter than everyone else. Some members of the techbro CEO squad think of themselves as prophets or messiahs.
In addition to this, the techbro CEO squad is addicted to money and its accumulation. This isn't a "I need more money to live a more comfortable retirement" thing, it is a "my sole purpose for being is the accumulation of wealth" thing. They are more akin to machines whose purpose it is to grab onto as much money as possible than they are actual human beings.
The techbro CEO squad's vast wealth has enabled them to surround themselves with an army of staff whose only job it is to make their dreams a reality and execute their orders. There is a vast, impenetrable field of personnel and money that insulates them from the reality of the world.
So, they think that they're better than anyone else to the point of being god-like, they are sociopaths who only care about money, they are surrounded by an army of yes men, and they have lost (or never had) any connection to the average human being and his or her existence.
They believe that any restriction on their ability to accumulate wealth is an assault on their freedom, an enemy to be defeated, an injustice to be made right by any means possible.
Limits on their ability to pollute, protections for employees operating in the heat or cold or around hazardous materials, regulations designed to prevent market manipulation or money laundering, it is all evil and must be destroyed.
They are willing to dismantle any system to get what they want.
Because they think that they are better than everyone else, the techbro CEO squad does not value consensus or institutional knowledge that has led to regulation slowly building up over centuries in response to events and emergencies: if they don't like it, it must go.
So, the slow infiltration of government by the Peter Theil, Andreessen and Horowitz, Musk, (but mainly their servants) and the rest started a couple of years ago and continues to this day.
tl;dr: Billionaires will rape your grandmother's corpse for lower taxes, harvest and sell her organs for a laugh, then label you a woke communist and kick you off twitter for criticizing them.
Really though, competence would create the new "efficient" thing, hire best of the best and get it running before tearing down important security, this is business-leader level incompetence being attempted at global super power scale, we are going to need a new word for businessjerks breaking things they should have never been able to touch
Do you think it was half? More? Less?
Basically nearly every person who goes into a new situation thinking only they can fix it.
And if your intent is to just destroy it, it’s a far more effective one than bringing in experts to slowly try to disassemble the giant jenga tower without it falling over.
Replacing government run and funded cyber security and threat assessment roles with privately owned contracters will be quite profitable for a few of the Brolliegarks.
Are some of these things normal SOP for a regime change? Sure. But to normalize everything under that blanket assumption is just foolish.
Unless you are an exceedingly (liquid) wealthy white male, you are entirely disposable to the incoming administration. You are less than nothing. If anything, you are an inconvenience buried deep in the calculations that needs to be factored out of the equation because your existence hinders the "progress" being sought.
All these pragmatic or, worse, so-called "libertarian" views demonstrate a supremely naïve, if not outright harmful (to yourself and countless others), understanding of what is going to be aggressively pursued these next few years.
* question all the rules
* when in doubt, slash the rule, and see what happens
* if it's really bad without it, bring back the rule
* if you don't have to bring back 10% of the rules that you slashed, you haven't slashed enough yet
USA is now entering the phase where everything is getting slashed - following the will of the majority of -Pennsylvania- the people.
At the level of a company, this can bring great efficiencies, and make reusable self-driving cancer-free nuclear-fusion based rockets. Or crypto scams.
Unfortunately, at the level of a Federal Government, it will bring lower taxes, but some of the 10% will end with coffins. And crypto scams.
We'll watch from the other side of the Atlantic how the great libertarianism experiment goes for the USA.
I expect both impressive improvements, and dramatic karmic irony.
This is questionable. There are many times when bureaucracy exists for bureaucracy sake. But many, many times they exist for a reason.
Get any sufficiently large company and try to understand its complexity. Simply slashing it is a recipe for disaster.
> Unfortunately, at the level of a Federal Government, it will bring lower taxes, but some of the 10% will end with coffins. And crypto scams.
This is highly questionable, especially the "lower taxes" part. Governments are not very keen on reducing revenue, more likely they will only direct the surplus by cutting off services to other things - in the case of US, I wouldn't be surprised if they just increase spending in military, for example. Those sleasy and juicy defence contracts need funding, you know.
https://www.crews.bank/charts/taxes-and-spending
Even if they cut 100% of government functions other than entitlements, healthcare, and defense, it would not solve the deficit.
Regardless, I think the primary costs created by regulation aren't directly to the government budget, but rather knock-on effects of compliance incurred by the entire nation's economy.
If that holds up (and who knows if it will) I wouldn’t expect any taxes to be cut until the budget is close to balanced.
Budgets can be balanced, of course. In some contexts it may be harder to do.
https://www.investopedia.com/us-debt-by-president-dollar-and...
Republicans do not bring up deficit when they are in power.
(quick google search, first result)
Which seems to show a different story. But looks like there is a lot of analysis on the numbers which can be done? (Eg I saw something in your article about ‘Biden will contribute 1.9T to the debt by 2031’.. even if he hadn’t gotten reelected, he wouldn’t be in office in 2031, so this includes the long-term effects of policies?)
Lots of rules tend to constrain an authoritarian ruler's ability to act at whim.
Most of the commenters here seem to be taking it on faith that these government organizations are necessary and serving a crucial function. But the entire thrust of this election is that the majority of the country doesn't share that level of faith in the federal government.
"When in doubt, slash and see what happens" seems like a highly effective, albeit a bit reckless, approach to finding out which agencies are truly needed and which are not.
I preemptively nominate "unexpected knock-on effects" as "periphrase of the year" for 2025 ;)
Or more specifically, the Amish...almost poetic.
Public service announcement: libertarians aren't the ones who want to shrink government enough to fit through your bedroom door. Those would be the Republicans, who are now in power. They are classified in the opposite camp (authoritarians).
With this, along with all of the other recent events we have had the privilege of witnessing, we should be able to tap into the resonant frequency from the “energetic whirring phenomenon” occurring at Arlington National Cemetery to provide all of the energy that the country needs for the next century at least.
It's like firing your ATC training team and then, the following week, claiming, see! we just saved a bunch of money and no airplanes crashed -- we didn't need them after all. Until one day ...
Then when some day a crisis situation occurs, there isn't an appropriate response because "oops, that dept no longer exists, or doesn't have the staff to respond". But who knows if Trump's lucky he might even be out of office by then and someone else has to deal with it. But in the mean time, VP Musk gets to claim "look at all the money we saved!"
Maybe some of the positions are redundant, but gutting across the board on day 1 definitely comes off as unwise and not thought through.
Firing an "ATC training team" and replacing them with advisory commissions is not a good thing. Advisory commissions are not, and should not be, functional units of government.
I know it's so easy to jump on the hate train, but you're confusing different aspects of government, and what has happened.
https://epic.org/dhs-disregards-internal-policies-and-avoids...
https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone
https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/breaking-dhs-will-begin-...
https://www.theverge.com/c/23311333/tsa-history-airport-secu...
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/us/tsa-screeners-win-i...
The list goes on. There's 24 years of history you can comb through. The DHS' security theater exists solely to compromise the constitutional rights of American citizens. To this day there's no evidence they're even that successful at their job. The fact the impeachment of Mayorkas failed was quite mind-boggling but characteristic of a government that doesn't truly believe anyone, even citizens, have certain inalienable rights.
The DHS was and still is bipartisan. It's America's Staatspolizei.
What did stop is some pretty important recent cyber attack reviews and that seems to touch China's interests.
Instead, it's creating a DHS that is less accountable and less sensitive to outside advice. In other words, a more dangerous DHS.
So really the opposite of what you're hoping for.
I live next to former president's and being efficetively made into a holocaust victim with no proper recourse by the people ment to protect the president's makes me feel like they never should have had the job in the first place.
Literally, for months.
At this point we might as well print out Project 2025 bingo cards. Perhaps that will be the only way we “win” something in all this mess.
Every comment on this post is frighteningly uninformed about current events.
If there are no consequences, it just reinforces their power.
By then, the country was destroyed along with most of it’s citizens, but boy howdy was it a ride eh?
Every time. I lived in Austin in the early 2000s and have no idea how many "BUSH=HITLER" bumper stickers I saw. It was stupid then, it's stupid now.
And don’t worry, I don’t think he’s literally Hitler. Hitler actually went to jail when he got convicted, after all.
Have you heard stories about women (and men) who believe ‘they love me, they’d never cheat on me’ while their spouse is not only clearly cheating on them, but bragging to friends that they are cheating on them?
That’s what is happening. And the more in-your-face it is, the more they’ll double down or even attack the people trying to tell them.
"Department of Mission Creep, Pork-Barrel, Tax and Spend, continues to tax and spend as it endeavors to expand pork-barrel mission."
There is no evidence this is an actual target for anyone in government.
My point is we have seen zero evidence of this influence in Trump’s executive actions thus far. DOGE is analogous to the Federalist Society or NRA. Influential. But not policy prescriptive.
Not a campaign promise if it didn’t come from the campaign!
This isn’t cost cutting. The DHS budget hasn’t been slashed. This is deregulation. (Which was a campaign promise.)
> The DHS budget hasn’t been slashed.
Rome wasn't built (or destroyed) in a day. Once there are no members or investigations then what are the money spent on?;)
'Musk told political strategist Mark Penn in an interview broadcast on X that the $2 trillion figure was a “best-case outcome” and that he thought there was only a “good shot” at cutting half that.'
'That figure was quickly dismissed as implausible by budget experts, who said the entire discretionary budget was only $1.7 trillion. Musk hadn’t waved people off the number until Wednesday, and it has been widely cited in reports about DOGE’s plans. '
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/elon-musk-say...
Not a single person has any license to be surprised at anything that’s happening.
At best we can say “this will be variously slowed down at points due to legal battles,” and hopefully even infighting with the broligarchs. But none of this is a shock.
I can speak for the firm I work for. Our clients are effectively invulnerable to Salt Typhoon. Yes, I know that sounds like a "big claim" but it's really not. We enable our customers to run endpoints that aren't based on Windows or macOS. So...