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>>As to why Musk can do it. Treasury is a department, not even an independent agency. The president runs it, along with the president’s appointee the secretary of treasury. DOGE is an office within the Executive Office of the President.

That doesn't give Musk or DOGE authority over it, any more then the dept. of the Interior can control what gets paid..

I assume Musk is just sending an email to Scott Bessent who orders some Treasury employee to actually stop the payment.

I'd probably have to agree, something along those lines...

However, I can't say "Govt by good ole boy network" seems proper - and its really hard to figure out what power/limits/check and balances for all this is... Musk basically took over the IT arm of the executive branch ("U.S. Digital Service") - not sure how that allows him and other people without clearances access to secure data, or to make spending decisions for other groups..

There’s no “check and balances” issue here. This is entirely within the executive branch. Congress forked over a bunch of money to the executive to give out as grants. People with delegated authority from the elected president and his senate confirmed department head are stopping payment on some grants. That delegated authority is the only authority any executive branch employee has.

Now, it’s fair to say that Trump and Musk are exploiting the fact that Congress abdicated its “power of the purse” to a great extent by giving the executive a bunch of slush funds instead of making specific appropriations. But that’s Congress’s problem.

Also, Musk has a top secret security clearance. But I assume SSNs aren’t even classified and there’s tons of line employees with access to the databases.

It appears Musk's employees don't have clearance - which is apparently why they were denied access by the USAID _security_ officials. Its sorta their jobs. Given a lot of us work in Tech, I doubt most of our security officers would accept "tons of line employess" have access as an excuse :-P Not to mention plugging in hard drives (how are federal system even allowing usb devices to be accessed?? My stupid work laptop locks that down ??)

Also, there may not be 'check and balances' but there is certainly procedure - which seems to be why lawsuits were filed. Specifically it appears around: "whether DOGE is a presidential advisory commission obeying federal transparency rules about certain practices, such as disclosure and hiring" and "alleged violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires that "the advisory committee have a fair balance in viewpoints represented, that they do not meet in secret, and that their records and work product be made available for public inspection."

Anyway - guess we'll see how it plays out - but I wish there were some more clear cut explanations about

The advisory commission lawsuit likely will fail. It’s based on the structure of DOGE disclosed prior to the inauguration, where it was to be an advisory committee outside the government.

Apparently some smart lawyer looked at things again, and instead decided to create DOGE within the shell of USDS, in the executive office of the president.

I’m not sure where this whole “usb stick” story came about but I couldn’t find any news stories that said he was just plugging in usb sticks. I imagine this was a narrative developed to make DOGE’s access seem less official.

I believe it was actually 'connecting hard drives'... but letting random's (apparently without clearances at the time, though I think they've been granted now...) open up your machines and physically install NVME/Spinners would be even worse then USB, IMHO

The issue isn't just Musk's clearances, it's the clearances of the employees he's giving access to. With stuff like Salt Typhoon out there, and reports of Musk's college age hackers hooking arbitrary hard disks up to government computers, can you imagine the potential for potential Russian or Chinese infiltration given how careless Musk has shown his management to have been in the past?

Remember how Israel destroyed Iranian centrifuges with a worm on a USB stick that they just waited for someone to be dumb enough to plug into a government connected intranet?

C'mon man, the people defending Musk's brazen behavior here really need to think long and hard about what they're justifying because the like the guy's cars or rockets, or MAGA politics. This is CRAZY.

If you can find one, I’d like to see a news story showing that the people accessing the data don’t have the proper security clearances to. It seems most people are getting swept up in media narratives rather than the reported facts.

What do you consider a proper security clearance? One emergency approved by the President on a whim, or one that is the result of careful vetting over a 6 month process which seems to be the standard for renewals or new clearances? One of them is 19 years old, the other 5 are 24 and younger. You want 6 kids in charge of a 6 trillion dollar system, and one of them with hedge fund connections? Yeah, nothing that could go wrong there.

And what was so urgent about axing USAID that required this weird process of bypassing all of the normal ways people audit a six trillion dollar payment system? Seriously, what was the hurry?

You don’t think they’re being sloppy and reckless? We literally have critical websites going off line, we have airports like San Carlos losing all their ATCs, we have republicans in Congress confused whe their own constituents lose access to services because of misworded EOs, this is not normal.

We couldn’t have had a report prepared over six months, have Musk go to Congress and testify and show all the waste, and a plan to prioritize the cuts, have an orderly wind down, etc?

The US government isn’t X where you fly in in the middle of the night and are so incompetent you start randomly unplugging servers and have to be frantically rescued by heroic sysadmins.

This is the people’s property, not his. We have three branches of government, due process, checks and balances, we don’t have a dictatorship and frankly everyday this is looking more and more like a soft coup.

Property security clearance is one that is legally given, regardless of circumstance. The idea of having laws doesn't involve picking and choosing what's considered proper. There's also no "emergency approved" security clearances happening here. In addition to that, Katie Wells has already posted that "No classified material was accessed without proper security clearances."

The strategy for this administration is to do as much as possible as quickly as possible because they know they'll be challenged and they only have 4 years. The Medicaid site was up the very same day (01/28/25) with no payments missed. And the previous contracting company for San Antonio has been given an extension. Nothing they're doing has been shown to be illegal and what you're describing are pretty minor blips considering the changes they're making.

> This is the people’s property, not his. We have three branches of government, due process, checks and balances, we don’t have a dictatorship and frankly everyday this is looking more and more like a soft coup.

Yes, it’s the people’s property, being granted to private third parties by the executive branch under block grants from Congress. And the people elected Trump as the President in part based on his promise to scrutinize how unelected civil servants were managing all this. This is the elected leader of the executive branch delegating authority to his agent to regulate performing discretionary functions of the executive branch. That’s responsive government, not dictatorship.

We just had an election where both parties ran on an anti-immigration platform, and the more extreme guy won. If that didn’t result in canceling discretionary grants to refugee resettlement programs that would have meant democracy doesn’t work.

Demanding that someone write a report and have some committee is absurd. You can never change an organization that way. What you’re really demanding is that unelected civil servants be allowed to prioritize what they want instead of what the voters want.

I encourage you to listen to this NYT podcast about immigration: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi.... It details how for decades immigration policy has departed from what Congress actually enacted and what voters wanted. A lot of that was due to state department just doing whatever it wanted—e.g. turning the H1B from a temporary worker program into a vehicle for permanent immigration. That’s a profound failure of democracy.

> And the people elected Trump as the President in part based on his promise to scrutinize how unelected civil servants were managing all this.

By having a bunch of unelected non civil servants run rampant? Having a guy who registered as a foreign agent of Turkey (Flynn) tweeting out details in a manner that could put people under threat? What line is there that they would cross that would concern you? If they ordered Muslims to swear loyalty oaths or leave that would be fine with you? Keep in mind in this discussion there is precisely one party that’s been threatened with death by Muslims and it’s not you.

> By having a bunch of unelected non civil servants run rampant?

This is where you’re going off the rails. Civil servant is a constitutionally meaningless label. There’s the President, Principal and Inferior Officers, then employees and volunteers with ministerial authority. Civil servant isn’t a special category. It’s not a constitutionally recognized authority that somehow must be protected from the President and his agents.

And to be clear I don’t dislike civil servants. I worked with great civil servants at FCC. But their job is to do what the elected President and confirmed appointees say. There’s great civil servants, and there’s crappy ones. A genius from SpaceX is probably substantially smarter and more diligent than the average.

> What line is there that they would cross that would concern you?

The only “line” that’s been crossed is an imaginary one between different categories of unelected employees whose authority derives entirely from the elected president and senate confirmed political appointees.

> If they ordered Muslims to swear loyalty oaths or leave that would be fine with you?

Elon is the good guy. He tweeted about NED, which I didn’t know about. Their web page crows about helping to overthrow democracy the government in Bangladesh. When I told my dad about it—who has been a USAID contractor his whole career—he was like “yeah, NED is a CIA front.” He also pointed out that USAID under Samantha Powers has become enormously political and has been turned into a vehicle for destabilizing foreign governments. I hate that’s true—our thanksgivings are literally a USAID reunion. But it’s not surprising that the state department has been using the goodwill of an agency that builds hospitals in Bangladesh to export their crazy ideas around the world.

Muslims should be supporting what Trump and Elon are doing. This is the first break in the bipartisan consensus in favor of American Empire. I grew up listening to complaints about the state department meddling in other countries’ internal affairs. And this is the first chance I’ve seen in my lifetime to fix that.

I do agree about NED (what did they do in BD?) My parents voted for Trump. To say the least this is causing friction. I have a little trouble believing people like Mike Flynn have their safety and best interests in mind.

> A genius from SpaceX is probably substantially smarter and more diligent than the average.

This hardly strikes me as a democratic sentiment or one that has anything to do with Constitutional governance. I went to school with a lot of geniuses, people certainly smarter than your SpaceX employees. I don’t know that then or now I would give them untrammeled run of the government.

> Muslims should be supporting what Trump and Elon are doing. This is the first break in the bipartisan consensus in favor of American Empire.

I seem to remember an anecdote from partition of Bengal about a goat getting its head stuck in a pot and the village headman’s preferred solution being to decapitate the goat.

> My parents voted for Trump. To say the least this is causing friction.

So did my mom! Elon pushed her over the finish line.

> I have a little trouble believing people like Mike Flynn have their safety and best interests in mind.

I agree. But I think well-intentioned but ignorant moralists are even more dangerous. I’m shocked at how quickly the anti-imperialist left has flipped when State/the CIA put up some rainbow flags.

> This hardly strikes me as a democratic sentiment or one that has anything to do with Constitutional governance.

It’s orthogonal to constitutional governance. If someone isn’t politically accountable (either elected or a political appointee) then I’d rather they be competent than simply long-tenured.

> I seem to remember an anecdote from partition of Bengal about a goat getting its head stuck in a pot and the village headman’s preferred solution being to decapitate the goat.

We will find out.

Actually, I think the story might’ve had to do with the communal award (of separate electorates to untouchables)

> Also, Musk has a top secret security clearance. But I assume SSNs aren’t even classified and there’s tons of line employees with access to the databases.

Useful info. I had forgotten he had that. Considering his 420 romps, it's surprising he retains it because more lowly worms lose theirs on less cause.

But, your assumptions about line employees belies what I think is pretty well established ICT practice in government. If you can read it, your reading is logged. if you can alter it, you're in a small set and it's constrained by training/induction and also very strongly inculcated into "properly"

Just randomly dumping the entire dataset to some disk you have brought in, and telling your wizzkid to look at it bigly, would not fall into usual practices.

Elon Musk does not have security clearance. He was explicitly advised not to even seek it while operating SpaceX because of his well-known drug use and his connections to foreign powers.

He’s got a top secret clearance: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/16/elon-musk...

I stand corrected! So he is lacking a higher level of clearance, duly noted.

Usually drug use, financial debt to foreigners, or any criminal violations can get you rejected for clearance, especially top secret, so the only way he has this clearance is because the executive branch overrode it.

He’s had a top secret security clearance since 2018.

This sound be the top comment, and the discussion should be around why this is the case (how Congress appropriates money like this), what alternatives there could be, and what are the pros/cons of each different option. Sadly HN is no longer a place where this can happen.

This is a completely false equivalence. Trump used emergency powers to divert military construction funding to build the wall. He also diverted funds from other sources, like asset forfeiture. Biden did not stop payments on money that congress had authorized for building the wall.

If Congress has explicitly appropriated funds for refugee resettlement, then Elon Musk can't decide to just not spend that money because he doesn't like refugee resettlement. See Train v. City of New York.

Congress appropriated funds for a border wall. From the GOA: https://www.gao.gov/products/b-333110-0 (“Congress has appropriated funds to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) specifically for constructing fencing or barrier system at the southern border of the United States, commonly referred to as the border wall. On January 20, 2021, the President issued a Proclamation directing a pause in the construction of the border wall and a pause in obligation of funds for the wall.”).

And Congress didn’t specifically appropriate funds for these payments. They’re coming out of block grants. Congress has the power to appropriate funds for specific purposes that the president can’t block. But often it doesn’t do that.

Dude, read the link that you sent.

> We conclude that delays in the obligation and expenditure of DHS's appropriations are programmatic delays, not impoundments. DHS and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) have shown that the use of funds is delayed in order to perform environmental reviews and consult with various stakeholders, as required by law, and determine project funding needs in light of changes that warrant using funds differently than initially planned. As explained below, because the delay here is precipitated by legal requirements,

That's not the same thing as the richest guy in the world going after a refugee charity because a convicted felon and QAnon conspiracy theorist (Flynn) happened to tweet a screenshot of himself searching the government contract database for the word "Lutheran" because for some crazy reason he hates Lutherans or something

Yes, Congress did appropriate some money for the wall, but most of it was entirely at the discretion of the executive. There was a huge court case about it that was rendered moot when Trump lost the election.

None of that makes a legal difference. The legal distinction is whether Congress has specifically appropriated money for something or not. Congress didn’t specifically appropriate money for this refugee charity. So the President doesn’t have to spend that money.

So there is actually a conversation about what is legal or not then? It's not stupid to ask "is this legal" it's in nuances, and your position is: it's entirely legal. Ok. thats a view. I imagine others hold a different view, and it will be put to courts. I don't want to get sidelined into how courts behave in this economy, Jurisprudence is complicated.

What is your source for this? Congress appropriated money for a purpose and specified a mechanism for that money to be spent, namely through grants to non-profits. What about the administrative procedures act? Elon cutting off payments because Mike Flynn doesn't like Lutherans for some weird reason is the definition of arbitrary and capricious. What about the impoundment control act? What about the take care clause of the constitution? What about the terms of the grant?

Here's what Brett Kavanaugh wrote:

> Like the Commission here, a President sometimes has policy reasons (as distinct from constitutional reasons, cf. infra note 3) for wanting to spend less than the full amount appropriated by Congress for a particular project or program. But in those circumstances, even the President does not have unilateral authority to refuse to spend the funds. Instead, the President must propose the rescission of funds, and Congress then may decide whether to approve a rescission bill. See 2 U.S.C. § 683; see also Train v. City of New York, 420 U.S. 35, 95 S. Ct. 839, 43 L. Ed. 2d 1 (1975); Memorandum from William H. Rehnquist, Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel, to Edward L. Morgan, Deputy Counsel to the President (Dec. 1, 1969), reprinted in Executive Impoundment of Appropriated Fun ds: Hearings Before the Subcomm. on Separation of Powers of the S. Comm. on the Judiciary, 92d Cong. 279, 282 (1971) (“With respect to the suggestion that the President has a constitutional power to decline to spend appropriated funds, we must conclude that existence of such a broad power is supported by neither reason nor precedent.”)

The key word is “program.” If Congress appropriates $1 billion for refugee resettlement, the President can’t refuse to spend the money on that program. That doesn’t constrain the discretion to make or not make any particular grant.

Does it violate the APA? Possibly. But you can sue under the APA for basically anything. It doesn’t stop administrations—it’s like a company getting sued for breach of contract. You just put the smart lawyers on it and power through. How do you think Biden’s student loan forgiveness happened?

> For the same reason it was legal for Biden to stop payment on contacts for Trump’s border wall

I had a look at the linked article. You are misrepresenting it. Cancelling contracts is not stopping payment. Likewise the OP headline is completely misrepresenting the situation regarding the Treasury as well. I'll address that in a top-level comment.

These are discretionary grants, not payment for services rendered. So even less binding than a contract.