Payments crisis of 2025: Not “read only” access anymore
crisesnotes.com
crisesnotes.com
SOX is a specific law with the motivation of giving markets more confidence in public stocks (for example must hire external auditors, certain board member rules, how certain assets must be valued, etc).
The SOX audit is to make sure that law is followed.
One criticism of SOX is that encouraged many startups and other businesses to remain private.
So long story short, no. Our government does not resemble a public stock corporation and these things don’t have an analog.
If that is a criticism of SOX for private companies, then it would mean that it should be a baseline for national accounting, no?
What does this mean? Let me repeat. SOX is not a method of accounting, its rules about roles and reporting for public corporations
> It sounds like you think SOX auditing means “super secure and careful accounting”.
I don't know what you think you are implying with the "super secure and careful" comment, we are looking for the roles that ensure the accountability of SOX.
Your complaint is that SOX "nationalizes" companies because apparently it becomes so transparent, or something? If that's what you mean by "nationalize" shouldn't that be used for our nation's accounting?
These measures are universal to running any payment platform, not a public/private issue.
*No, I'm not thinking of PCI, but that is also a valid measure here. There are recent updates to SOX in the past few years covering these aspects of payment operations. Some old-school SOX experts may not be familiar and the strictness on these aspects of the audit varies by auditor in my experience. I recently helped a client navigate these developing and responding to a very strict audit process covering their entire IT landscape including process flows, deployment planning and user/role management.
> I specifically meant
You didn’t leave the comment. Was that your alt account?
[1] https://breakingdefense.com/2024/11/pentagon-fails-7th-audit...
Arrested by who? The executive branch who ordered his actions? Americans voted for this, and now we have to live with it.
Yknow… the branch that’s supposed to check the power of the executive branch…
The president can replace them.
The judiciary has zero enforcement power. They make the laws which the executive is meant to enforce. If the executive fails to enforce a law, congress can impeach. That's not happening.
The executive branch runs the country.
The legislative branch makes the laws.
The judicial branch enforces them…
The current executive branch will not enforce laws against itself, and nobody else is legally allowed to enforce the laws, so all the courts & congress can do is write strongly worded letters.
Arrests need probable cause. They can either be done on a warrant or without a warrant (in the latter case, in the federal system, a complaint must be filed and the arrested person must be brought before a magistrate for a hearing on probable cause within 72 hours after arrest.)
That said, DOGE was well announced and widely publicized prior to the election, by Musk and the media. Musk was up on the stage with Trump quite a bit.
Those who did not know this was going to happen are either easily fooled or were paying no attention.
Trump said Elon would get to run a new department called "department of government efficiency". if you know what he did at Twitter, you can easily join the dots.
Also, trump was impeached last time because he tried to shut down funding approved by congress. So, if you’re surprised it’s happening again, I suppose you can’t be helped
Do I really have to explain how much of his 100+ EO's come from Project 2025?
Let's see: Trump appointed it the day after he won:
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/12/g-s1-33972/trump-elon-musk-vi...
And Musk announced DOGE on September 2024:
https://news.bitcoin.com/elon-musk-agrees-to-head-donald-tru...
So yes, this was not some secret. If you (royal you) trusted that photo in the 2nd link to make america efficient, I have no words.
People believed the wolf when he said he wasn't going to hurt the sheep.
When the 49ers lost the 2024 Super Bowl, the second and third string players didn't go around saying they didn't really lose because they never hit the field. No, they lost.
Yes, if the Electoral College wasn't a thing.
But you'd also be surprised how many non-swings could swing if they had enough non-voters vote.
If they didn't vote they voted for the winner. America (including me, because voting wasn't enough) earned this 100%.
If these are federal statues they can be pardoned by the President (like the January 6 folks were).
It is an administrative step. It might undergo review but access does not need to be prevent until the review happens. It is all about who is granting the access.
The commander in chief has considerable authority to provide access.
He can' (but shouldn't). But there's no word that was granted to Musk. Since, he didn't name them. He probably doesn't though, because he should not have been stopped at USAID with the right credentials. Unless...
>Hope they did some vetting...
we both know he didn't. If he does have clearance, his interns definitely don't. Hence the kerfluffle at USAID.
There seem to be a lot of misconceptions flying around about what "government access" entails.
For the sake of timeliness and being able to move quickly, some people in government are authorized to make a judgment about the risk/benefit tradeoff when someone doesn't have an active clearance. It isn't a case of waiting for a background check process, you don't even need to apply. Some organizations will do an informal check of their own in the background if they don't already know who you are. Sure, they would prefer if you already had formal clearance, but it isn't strictly necessary.
It's like people thinking that the President can't declassify a document or make foreign policy decisions without the NSC's advice or consent.
Not truly dead but a shell of it's former self.
When it didn’t fall apart in days, the goalposts were moved to “technical issues won’t become obvious right away, give it a few months”.
It’s been over 2 years and on a technical level running better than ever. You can disagree with the content and users all you wish, but pretending it’s dying because you hate the bad orange and mars man is delusional.
Isn't it also simply doing less? Weren't some APIs shut off or reduced? My limited memory is having me think they reduced or shut down some functionality altogether, which would also help something run smoother. Fewer things running means fewer things can break.
They just closed a single API which was also abused by botfarms. Closing the API immediately improved the site from a spam perspective and was welcome by most actual users, likely all users who understood the impact.
This is pure cope - the site is doing a TON more than it used to, and more stable than ever.
Also arguing that a site that is designed to scrape and re-represent a website without ads or other stuff 'was likely a huge load' is a very weird argument to try and claim the site is no longer being used.
I can say anecdotally I used to use nitter, and while it didn't work for a few days I switched to the regular site. Now I would never go back. The actual site works better now, I have no need. On old twitter 1.0, nitter worked better.
Thats a black eye on Dorsey twitter, not the new twitter (or X or whatever you prefer)
Ask the worker's how they are doing, and then maybe I'll be convinced that it's "running better". When you grind 10x the users into the dirt, you can make up for cutting 90% of your staff. For a while. Especially in a crap economy like this where job hopping is harder.
I also agree that most of the cuts may have been managerial and logistics. It's probably a clown circus trying to do anything more than maintain.
I agree only on a surface level that it looks better. But old tech dies very hard. Digg is technically still up today. Myspace is technically still up today. hell, 4chan is still arguably bustling.
Twitter -- the community -- is dead and rotting.
Maybe that's influenced by me blocking a lot of garbage ads? IDK.
Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk alone; you don’t want to “go out of your way to make trouble.” Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, “everyone” is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.”
And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.
But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.
But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions, would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all of the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jewish swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.
But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early morning meetings of your department when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.
In 1933, right after getting power, Jews were excluded from civil service, their numbers in schools were limited and a year later they could not be actors. The restrictions came in quick and were felt a lot by their targets.
So, this extract kind of underplays the beginning of it all. It was violent from the start.
https://apnews.com/article/deportation-flights-military-indi...
At the moment though, what they're doing is very much illegal. They just have a bunch of collaborators in the DOJ who won't bring charges or arrest anyone, because they're co-conspirators.
The problem with simplistic narratives where you give stuff names is it masks what's actually happening: the Executive is near enough to a dictatorship - power and authority is deliberate vested in one person. This makes it very different to Congress, which only wields power by the collective decision making of hundreds via majority or even super-majority vote.
So "Congress" doesn't really exist as an entity: because there is no guiding consciousness or collective in it which is deliberately trying to seize more power, and the story of its power is the exact opposite: it keeps giving it away (because the individual members of Congress can only retain that position and it's local benefits by staying in Congress, best accomplished by deliberately avoiding responsibility of any kind).
If you've ever tried to get 4 people to decide what to get for dinner, the guy who simply says "Let's get tacos" usually gets his way because everyone else keeps deferring.
And I'll never understand why. There's a lot of partisan issues but I thought "not fucking around with our money" was as bipartisan as a plutocracy could get?
Its in the first article of the constitution.
To me it’s more like mom gave me money to pay the rent but my landlord is likely violating laws so in the meantime I am putting the rent in escrow while we sort out the facts.
Remember when Musk built the submarine to save the kids in the cave, was absolutely useless, even actively obstructed others from saving them, and finally resorted to denigrate the diver saving them as a pedophile? That's exactly the same thing he is doing right now.
Yes he is.
> He was asked by the president to do a job and he’s doing it.
1. And he did it in an illegal way, yes. If you wanna go back to Mom, you can go to the grocery but you cannot throw a bank heist and lock all employees out of the store so you can grab some bread
2. He doesn't have access to the store. Mom sent him to Costo without her card. You can't just storm into Costco. Go back to mom and get her card, if possible.
Nobody stormed anything. They just filed a dispute with their credit card company. Costco will get the funds if they win the dispute. If there is malfeasance at Costco don’t you want to know? What exactly are you afraid of?
Which is stupid because you Uncle Orange has access to the spending records.
Man, March is going to be bloody.
For now, they are just pausing payments.
If they find serious issues they can likely go to congress and have them canceled outright. If not, they need to distribute the funds during the fiscal year.
I don’t understand the pearl clutching. The government shuts down often due to spending issues. Payments pause when this happens. Moreover, everybody has known for decades that nobody is reading these 50,000 page appropriations bills.
I’m willing to give musk and his guys some time to sort this out.
The president has asked them to do this. If they go against his wishes there is no reason they will not be thrown under the bus. If he pardons them for obvious malfeasance it will make big political waves and likely change the outcome of the midterm elections, where a congress could begin impeachment.
uhh, no they can't. Those are also government elected representatives. Checks and balances. To "cancel congress", you need the courts to charge and convict them. You're going to find it very hard to do that from treasury records alone (AKA, how the executive branch spends the money allocated).
>I don’t understand the pearl clutching. The government shuts down often due to spending issues.
With that dismissal, you're not opening yourself up to understanding. Maybe there's wrongdoing; The answer isn't to charge into the treasury and hack it.
That's the stupid part: Musk doesn't need to. He's clearly not TSI/TS clearance level, so he just needs trump to go in and look. Or have trump hire someone with that clearance to look in on his orders. Remember, this is the executive branch; Trump has all access powers here (within reason).
>I’m willing to give musk and his guys some time to sort this out.
I'm not. I didn't vote for him. You didn't. He was not approved by Senate, as is executive apointee tradition. He does not have clearance. "Asking" isn't enough. Where's this willingness coming from? Even if you just like the guy, you really want the man who laid off 80% of his staff to handle your money?
>If they go against his wishes there is no reason they will not be thrown under the bus
I can think of 8 or 9 figures why he wouldn't.
Elon Musk was hand picked by the president to do this job. Clearly you do not like the president nor Elon but that is a personal view not held by a majority of voters in the last election.
He might be due to SpaceX government contracts.
Edit: someone linked below confirmation he does have top secret clearance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42942848
It's just that as far as I can recall no one has ever really tried to spend less in the government.
EDIT: I was mistaken, please look up Impoundment of appropriated funds
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impoundment_of_appropriated_fu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impoundment_of_appropriated_fu...
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/02/nx-s1-5281438/understanding-t...
No, they cannot. Trump was impeached during his first term over this very issue. Congress had appropriated funding for the Ukraine, Trump didn't want to provide it without obtaining concessions from Zelenski. Just like Trump doesn't want to provide California any FEMA money for the LA fires without concessions. Trump has been through this before, he knows it's illegal, but he doesn't care. It's kinda funny that people expect a felon to care about the law.
When asked about the news on Oct. 5 that new border wall construction would indeed commence under his administration, Biden told reporters: “The border wall — the money was appropriated for the border wall. I tried to get to them to reappropriate it, to redirect that money. They didn’t. They wouldn’t. And in the meantime, there’s nothing under the law other than they have to use the money for what it was appropriated. I can’t stop that.”
Trump intended to build the wall with no environmental assessments or permits and congress wrote in a waiver since the border was “an emergency” but Biden chose to rescind the emergency declaration and follow the long-established federal construction process instead of using the waivers which does indeed slow things down.
That’s nothing like what is happening with Musk “deleting” entire departments or unilaterally stopping funding because he doesn’t like the phrasing of the grants.
https://www.factcheck.org/2023/10/bidens-border-wall-explain...
Biden tried to get congress to re-appropriate the funds. They wouldn't, so he spent it as he was obligated.
I'll just be in good faith and believe you wholesale. Yes, that is one way to fight the spending. Make the government argue until a deadline is hit and then they either shut down or compromise. Happens much too often.
But that's the point: the budget wasn't made yet. Trump wants to argue over funding that was already in place. If he wanted this chaos legally, he'd have been stalling out the March funding next quarter. But once it's finalized, it's finalized and many challenges over the centuries were shot down.
America is no longer a nation of laws. Period. We are a nation ruled by Trump and Musk.
We are in fact a nation of laws and we ought to demand enforcement.
Sad thing is no one is really talking about this in any branch, so it's just theory crafting until then.
if you want to change that you need a huge voter base that is anti-partisan. Given that we can barely mobilize within parties to protest properly: good luck.
To do otherwise the executive has to pick and choose what to fund.
The topic usually gets raised every time we get close to a debt limit. If we truly broached the limit it’s possible the Biden and Obama administrations would have just ignored the limit since the consequences of the full faith and credit of the US failing are so dire and there’s a solid argument it’s the least bad option Constitutionally.
Doing an audit starting with the treasury department seems like the right first step. Every outflow of money ultimately has to start there. It's the root node of the Sankey diagram. Then you follow the money outwards from there.
Might be the first data you secure though.
> a top DOGE employee, 25 year old former SpaceX employee Marko Elez, has not only read but write access to BFS servers
> One senior IT source can see Mark retrieving “close to a thousand rows of data” but they can’t see the content because the system is “top secret” even to them. No source I have has knowledge of what DOGE is doing with the data they are retrieving
You think the treasury doesn’t have a metric ton of procedures, and laws, on data management, integrity, access, backup and retention?
Breaking these protocols by giving unfettered write access to this data to ridiculously inexperienced and ignorant goons exponentially increases the risk of data tampering and corruption…
It makes any kind of audit LESS likely to be accurate.
But they’re very obviously not doing any kind of credible audit. As mentioned, that’s literally impossible and nonsensical to do this way.
The problem is agencies that haven't been audited in a decade. The agencies literally don't report how much money they get, their current balances, or where it goes.
Here's the DOD proudly announcing that they now have clean audits for 11 of their 28 departments: https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/39.... Surely nothing bad is happening in the other 17.
But pretending that Musk and co are doing an audit by accessing treasury records and payment systems or that it will help with government waste in any way is laughable.
Again, literally no one would be able to make any kind of credible department spending audit out of the bank records of a mid-sized company.
This is the US government’s treasury we’re talking about here! This is several orders of magnitude bigger and more complicated!
Not to mention an audit would not require any write access.
If only they had a standing list of more than 5000 such improvement opportunities...
Welcome to the Government Accountability Office!
okay then...how many billions are completely unaudited?
If you're not fine with that, how do we suggest we even fix this?
The USAID literally financed the development of a virus that killed tens of millions of people worldwide. And then it greased many wheels to try to make people believe it couldn't possibly have been a lab-leak.
Trump just asked an audit of all the US donations that have been made to Ukraine: this looked like one of the biggest operation of money laundering in a long time.
Why are you even against trying to fix things?
In the long term yes, in the short term, no. That's the check and balance of the Judicial branch. In theory they should be insulated from the politics of the world and properly interpret laws based on various cases.
So you can't just, say, repeal the first amendment just because all your voters suddenly became anti-1A. They need to work to make a represenative base that can eventually vote in that new amendment. And that all takes time (in terms of culture and the bill proposal).
Please correct me If I'm wrong.
> The Wall Street Journal reported citing people familiar with the matter that SpaceX lawyers recommended that the company's leadership not pursue a higher security clearance for Musk because he would have been asked about contacts with foreign officials as well as his prior drug use.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/why-elon-musk-doesnt-ha...
(Didn't link WSJ article due to paywall.)
> Musk holds a "top secret" clearance that gives him access to some of SpaceX's sensitive programs.
Elected or unelected, politicians with an agenda should not be in charge here.
I'd find calls from, say, AOC or Taylor Swift more interesting than rando red rose LARPers.
Absent this, people will get more and more frustrated which will eventually manifest as riots as it did in 2020. So if you prefer a more peaceable outcome, I think it's better to talk up the idea of a general strike rather than talk it down.
I remember a while back with SOAP and PIPA there were templates you could read, do those exist for this case?
I know using the phone can be uncomfortable if you don't do it often and that's okay. It gets easier the more you do it, and you don't need to word everything perfectly. The important thing is that you get your point across. "My name is x, I live in county y, and I'm calling to say I expect a yes/no vote on issue z."
I called and kept calling until I got through. There were busy signals for 30 minutes before I got in. Be persistent. Keep trying!
You may get either voicemail or someone will pick up. A staffer will be who gets these messages, so be polite. Simply being polite means you’d be doing better than a lot of other callers.
I state my name, that I am a constituent, my city+ZIP, a brief message stating that I urge the congressperson to support/oppose an action and why.
If you’re talking to a human, give them a moment to jot it down and you’re done.
Also, you don’t have to call their DC office. If that line is busy, try a field office.
My friend worked for her as a page one time. If congress isn't voting on something to do with potatoes or blueberries, she doesn't even show up. She's been emphatically on-board with this for a decade now.
Maybe your senator doesn't care, maybe the courts are bought and the criminals are immune, maybe maybe maybe. Fighting means you keep powering through the maybes, the roadblocks, the hopelessness. There are sophisticated campaigns at work designed to make you feel hopeless and powerless. DO NOT give in to these without a fight!
Or how do you think your ancestors got democracy and kept it in the first place?
Watching from Europe, I think you are getting close to the point where 75 million people need to hit the streets (preferably in DC).
It appears they are trying to beat the 53 days record.
It's not banned in war because it's as dangerous as chemical weapons, it's banned in war so people don't think you're using chemical weapons.
“Regulations, basically, should be default gone,” Musk said. “Not default there, default gone. And if it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in.”
“These regulations are added willy-nilly all the time. So we’ve just got to do a wholesale, spring cleaning of regulation and get the government off the backs of everyday Americans so people can get things done,” Musk said, adding later: “If the government has millions of regulations holding everyone back, well, it’s not freedom. We’ve got to restore freedom.”
It really isn't rocket science, German hardcore ecologists put more efforts on a random Tuesday morning than Americans during a coup, it's mind boggling.
They gave you an online "public square" so that you can all scream in its void, get the fuck out and protect what's yours
I'd rather stay and fight.
Huge hint, the other party always thinks the world is over if they lose.
This is more of that overreaction that got him elected again.
The biggest thing we can do is get people out to vote in the midterm election and take back the house and senate. Until then we need to volunteer and donate to organizations that are fighting back legally like the ACLU. Education is also a huge part of that.
Organizing peaceful protests is possible but fraught due to anti-protest countermeasures employed by fascists. Stuff like media blackouts, attempts to incite violence, astroturfed counter protests and false flag operations make it dangerous and hard to accomplish. A big thing we can do is to create our own media coverage of protests and spread it as much as possible on friendly platforms. Putting up signs, posting to Bluesky, posting to group chats, and educating friends and family. Utilize your own personal networks to wake people up to the problem.
We can't convince the other half that wants this...
Also DT had a minority of the popular vote after you account for 3rd party.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/
Organize into a political party. Spread pro worker information and convince the working class to join. Democratic Party is not it, in my opinion.
If enough people do it, maybe MAGA 401ks going down will make people care.
But I assume that is indicative of how unresponsive the bureaucracy has become to political direction from the president & secretaries.
What have you actually learned? And consider that there's no way for anyone to argue that information was already available to the public, because the main activity of DOGE so far ahs been taking government web pages or entire domains offline. With no organized archival process, how do you equate significantly less availability of information with 'transparency'?
I mean, I've been watching my feed scroll by with the various monetary alotments they've discovered. Finally, someone's taking a critical glance at the $$ dedicated to increasing atheism in Tibet (no, I'm not kidding).
I'm curious about whether you ever attempted to find details of USAID spending, pulled budget docs from their site or filed a FOIA request or anything like that. If you had done so and run into a brick wall, I would understand your saying that there had been a lack of prior transparency. But your posts reads as if someone just drew your attention to something you weren't aware of before, and you've mistaken that for transparency when in fact it's just a talking point designed to grab your attention.
You call it unresponsive, the founding fathers called it "checks and balances"
The SP500 is normal today, institutional money is fine with this.
The important risk is a runaway executive that feels completely unconstrained by law, with the blessing of both other branches of government. Today, it's blocking members of the legislature from entering government buildings and is unilaterally shutting down an agency that exists on a directive of Congress.
Tomorrow, will it carry out any legislature that congress passes?
In a year, will it comply with an impeachment?
Does this treasury department payment system not also cover the payments made to bondholders?
Every time Congress delays raising the debt ceiling until the last minute, people get anxious and worry about a default and the full faith and credit of the US, etc. Are we now saying that the US could default even when funds are available if an un-elected guy and some junior programmers decide that would be a good idea or just mess up when dealing with a complex and arcane legacy system, and that's not scary to markets?
I would think every financial model that references a "risk-free rate" now has to be revisited while people consider whether any information visible to the Treasury Department might link their account to someone who has said something disparaging about Musk on twitter.
Or maybe the market expects certain people to get richer shortly? He said cynically.
Elon has about 30 years of experience leading software teams at the cutting edge of development. He's conducting wide spread audits to the government, and ensuring the funds being appropriated by congress are being used effectively.
I think this whole thing boils down to whether you like elon or not.
This is exciting, and awesome, and i can't believe trump has been able to convince such a powerhouse team to work for the benefit of the US. By auditing the government, we ensure our debt surety payments don't slowly bleed us to death. For the first time in my entire life have i felt a sense of hope.
I think this whole thing boils down to you being an anti-abortion zealot who is so anti-abortion (you've expressed opposition to abortion on Hacker News, a tech forum, not just once, but multiple times![1]) that you see no issue with Trump cutting government spending in certain areas while he is simultaneously expressing support for the US occupying Gaza, funding a goddamn Christian task force[2], etc.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?type=comment&query=abortion+author:T...
[2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/erad...
I used to respect Elon for risking a lot of his own capital on new ventures. But now he's turned into a socially conservative internet troll.
The correct term, IMO, is regressive.
That has been failing for a while now. Congressional approval is in the 20% range, much lower than even Trump's. An odd fact never mentioned in the media. The U.S. is toast if it can't reverse Citizen's United.
You should actually look into this. Approval of congress as a whole is low, but most actual senators and house reps have high approval ratings and get re-elected.
Democracy is working just fine, it's congress who isn't. If you want to understand why, just ask Republicans what their platform and policy towards cooperation has been for decades.
Go watch CSPAN from the 80s and 90s. Republicans and Democrats used to build coalitions to get things done. You would have "pro" and "anti" sides that crossed state borders, political parties, ideologies, generations.
If there is a problem with the legislature it's pretty much directly attributable to Republican voters continuing to elect Republican congresspeople who take it as a rule to never ever ever compromise for anything.
Multiple times, Republican senators have voted down a bill that they provided support for explicitly because "doing something" to fix the relevant problem would make the Democrat admin look good and functional.
Mitch McConnel voted against a bill he sponsored to prevent it passing and making the democrats look good.
Elon was never going to follow democratic processes, that's not how moneybag men think. Do you think he ran X.com, PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, or Twitter as democracies? Hell no. Musk fires or buys-out people who disagree with him. Same with the healthcare CEO Luigi assassinated. There is no process in the current version of America that would allow the people to counter the power of billionaires. The people have been routed.
The difference between the two is that Luigi targeted a thing that actively hurts people and, in any democratic world, would have been illegal. Elon is burning down the things that stop him from hurting people.
[0] Which isn't democratic; nor is the Republican Party republican. Canada and Australia's Liberal Parties aren't liberal, either. Hell, Japan has a two-fer: a Liberal Democratic Party that's neither liberal nor democratic.
He declares entire programs to be fraud and declares them cancelled, seemingly taking only minutes to unilaterally make that declaration.
If he respected the people and the democratic process he'd create transparency and (if he's right) have massive public support behind his efforts.
But he's offered ZERO transparency, only name calling.
There's a good article in the NYT saying it's a bit like when the US tried to remake the Iraq government after invading and sent in a handful of young people to rearrange everything who did't know what they were doing
"The Familiar Arrogance of Musk’s Young Apparatchiks" https://archive.ph/jnTG3
It seems much closer to what's happening than calling it a coup.
It was odd as a Brit seeing him going on about the grooming scandal in the UK. I mean it was a bad thing but he was getting a lot of his facts wrong and wanting to fire the wrong people etc. I'm not quite sure what's up with him.
I have two theories.
A) At his core he's a cultural supremacist. Perhaps it began in a benign way when he was a boy trying to believe his ancestors deserved their place in South Africa's economic hierarchy and he deserved to ride to school in a limousine. Over time he gained power as a rich nerd, yet he began to sense limits to that power and longed for the kind of power held by leaders of tribes. Cultural trends led to more tribalism in politics which captured Elon's imagination, and because of his early conditioning the political messages rooted in cultural supremacy felt like powerful truths that he felt called to help promote. In Trump he sees a tribal chieftain fighting what is ultimately a noble battle and unencumbered by ideas that weaken or water down the ancestral spirit he is fighting for.
B) It's all purely opportunistic. Tactics upon tactics all based on some analysis that it's the only way he will personally save humanity by getting humans to Mars in time.
Some of their reasoning seems to be - bad/woke stuff happens in the UK - who's the leftie to blame - ah Starmer's running the left party - tweet it's all Starmer's fault, he should go. But the government in charge from 2010 to 2024 when most of that happened was Cameron and the Tories. Starmer is actually quite middle of the road, small c conservative and the first person to prosecute and imprison the bad guys in the grooming thing. It's all a bit mindless / ill informed.
I hope rearranging the US government is a bit better thought out! At least the people involved seem to be American and so presumably have some basic knowledge of the American government.
Elon is in this purely to remove all regulations, which he views as a hinder to his businesses. He also wants a private takeover of core gov. functions, which then he (or allies) can provide.
Still, it's not a logical fallacy to think "someone very successful at X is more likely to be successful at Y", in many cases. Do you think that there is literally zero correlation between massive business success and success at whatever-it-is Musk is trying to do now?
(I agree it's a fallacy if you think is' assured he will succeed, as opposed to this just being a correlation in your mind. I just bumped on the use of "logical fallacy" to describe something that is not a fallacy at all!)
That it's not entirely clear makes it impossible to know if it might be something he could have success in.
Fired from PayPal, Twitter, neurolink, the tunnel thing
He bought his way into Tesla, and SpaceX, though suppsedly he's not actually the one running it (believable I think there's not enough time)
And having failures is not that uncommon, especially for serial entrepreneurs. You've gotta accept some failures to get to successes.
As for the whole "he bought his way into Tesla" thing, this is just making the idea of a "founder" some kind of sacrosanct thing. By most histories I've read, he is the reason the company is the success it is today.
The local Bodega down the street has been profitable for 40 years. They seem to be doing just fine and as a bonus they haven't burned billions in subsidies or hijacked public transportation initiatives.
> And having failures is not that uncommon, especially for serial entrepreneurs.
IDK how you can call this anything else but luck. He got forced out of paypal with a ton of money and was able to keep taking risks because of the safety nets he had that most do not.
He also threw a fit and left openai, that was a poor business decision.
He does not have success with public opinion.
People still believe that he's been some sort of business genius.
One could actually argue that the biggest business wins for Trump, have been those AFTER he became president. Through nothing but grift, he's managed to build up a fortune that surpassed the one he tried to make and maintain in his semi-legit days.
I was here when HN tried "no politics" and clearly demonstrated how stupid and foolish that is even as a concept. You don't get to play "I just want to talk tech and be apolitical" when those titans of "tech" are swearing fealty to the regime and choosing to lose slam dunk cases as a means of bribing the president.
I won't muddy the comments repeating myself - but I have been fascinated by how quickly people latched on to this, have been absolutely incapable of finding any first party sourcing, and asked CoPilot to analyze each of these stories (13 so far!) and every single one is 'trust me bro, I heard it in a convo'.
I really really hope this isn't true for all the same reasons as people are freaking out... but at this point it has as much merit as saying "the sky is always green, I heard a guy say it the other week who I won't name but it's true"
Ctrl-F 'astroid' or click my last post in this thread for the complete breakdown of every source referenced, and ask yourself if there is enough info to warrant entertaining this fantasy.
Honestly I am shocked at how little critical thinking is being applied here. I know this website hates these guys, but there is usually a facade of critical thinking at the least.
"Wired: Reports that Marko Elez, a 25-year-old engineer linked to Elon Musk, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the U.S. government. The sources are unnamed, and they claim Elez has administrator-level privileges, including the ability to write code on the Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System."
It's an endless circle. No one is willing to stand behind the reporting, no one is willing to go on record. I almost regret wasting as much time trying to get to the bottom of the story because I feel stupid for trying to peel back on these layers and finding nothing -- like they were trying to take people on a ride and I fell for it.
I guess it could be worse though - I could have just taken them all at face value. Even the 'anonymous sources' appear to be second or third party on TOP of being anonymous.
EDIT: To clarify, if you were referring to https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-associate-bfs-federal-... that is the one with no real sources. If you meant another source about the audit in general I shouldn't have assumed -- it's just in the list of the 13 I have reviewed with no substance.
(Politics? Interesting that The Guardian files this under Technology)
So it's either lots of news outlets (journos but also fact checkers) being fooled, or that people are only willing to speak of the record because they fear for their career/freedom/life. All feds fear at the minimum for their career right now...
It sounds like, from the reporting, one person is modifying a large complex system that handles trillions of dollars and pushing directly to production.
Also he is not familiar with the system, having first encountered it a week ago.
Also the people who do normally have access to this system do not know what he is exactly doing, because normally, it is illegal for them to even access the system in the same way.
> Wired beat me to the punch of reporting that a top DOGE employee, 25 year old former SpaceX employee Marko Elez, has not only read but write access to BFS servers.
- Tax Return Info: Name, SSN, address, income, deductions, payments/refunds.
- Enforcement Records: Audit trails, payment plans, liens/levies.
- Federal payments (e.g., tax refunds, Social Security), direct deposit info, delinquent debt details.
- Accounts for U.S. Treasury securities (personal data, account activity).
- Sanctions Enforcement: Basic identifiers (name, address), transaction details for compliance checks.
- Financial Crime Data: Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs), Currency Transaction Reports (CTRs), limited personal/transaction info tied to money laundering or terrorist financing investigations.
- Investigative files related to Treasury programs (potentially includes personal data).
Can you please provide a source for the claim of release of IRS taxpayer confidential data?
So no military spending will not be cut
How can this department turn around and do this and still maintain they're doing the right thing? By their own admission they know this a bad idea
But not realistically it seems like the goal is to be more targeted: pay your shooters, cut off your enemies'.
Elon doesn't have a strong track record of getting things right the first time.
In other words, empires in the day of monarchy were expansive monarchies, and empires in the day of republicanism are expansive republics.
I love how I'm still freaking out but will jump at the chance to argue about pedantics online. It's nice to feel normal, I guess!
And you can’t arrest the president because he’s immune from prosecution for official acts: pardoning is an enumerated constitutional power!
So what’s left is impeachment for the president and congress does not want to do this.
And none of that will fall on Musk or DOGE. The government has made itself unable to prevent this.
If the current legal framework were software, I would say that this is an exploit chain that gives root access to the government / country.
If there is not legal way to stop it, what is the alternative?
The current legal method available now is an impeachment process, iterated until we have a president who values societal norms and stable government. (Depending on how you feel about JD Vance not also pulling this shit.)
Currently 28 of the 51 republicans in the Senate are up for re-election in November of 2026; this is a possibility for a makeup change, but a remote one.
It appears a large enough percentage of americans want this that there’s no real possibility of changing course at this point; even the assassination attempts have failed. Understand that over 40% of americans do want what is happening now, as backed up by current polling. Never comply in advance, do not follow illegal orders, and make good friends with your neighbours.
Or separately, whether they feel very strongly about some things that are happening, enough to overlook other things that they'd likely disagree with but don't understand or care about as much.
It's really quite an odd power; very few developed democracies have a _personal_ pardon power today (some kind of vaguely pretend to; in the UK pardons are done by the monarch _at the direction of the government_, say). I think the US just stuck it on the presidency because at the time of independence the president was kind of a stand-in for the monarch, and the British monarchy had it at the time. The US then failed to get rid of it when everyone else did, instead relying on norms and basically on everyone behaving themselves to regulate it.
> is he going to pardon everyone who has a hand in this?
How can anyone have any doubts after the jan 6 pardons?
I would be very surprised to learn that there are not teams working in every state to weaken the integrity of the electoral process.
The problem with dictatorship is that of first-mover advantage; once a dictatorship becomes embedded it's hard to dislodge. There's de facto control of the legal, electoral, and cultural infrastructure which the regime can use to (ostensibly) re-legitimize itself every few years, while in the meantime suppressing dissent through violence and fear. That would be very much in line with the stated goals and actions of the administration so far. And I don't mean this hyperbolically; Trump stated that he would be a dictator on day one, and while his supporters brushed this off as a joke his autocratic behavior since entering office is wholly consistent with that.
Barring abrupt reversals in the next month or two, I think this is going to become a long-term situation, and there is simply no way the US can go back to two party pendulum politics after this. It would be like getting out of hospital after a stroke or a heart attack and heading straight back to an all-you-can-eat steakhouse.
- Acting Trump lackeys will simply ignore any court orders that block the EOs that Trump has issued.
- Congress isn't doing anything.
- In all likelihood, DOJ isn't going to enforce anything, so long they're aligned with Trump.
- Should some lowly law-enforcement officer decide to play hero, and arrest anyone that any federal judge issues an arrest on, I'd fully expect them to be removed, or meet resistance from any bodyguards/protection that the DOGE boys will receive.
- Even if anyone decides to pursue, Trump can issue pre-emptive pardons for all past federal crimes.
It is sort of a crisis, because the few checks and balances that were put in place, simply aren't functioning.
You should be allowed to hate on a political party, it's weird to think that's inherently an issue (especially in the current climate). I think a big part of the problem is in the US we're only allowed 2 parties so if one doesn't stuff you find unacceptable you sorta just need to support the other. Gotta love the "land of the free".
For example: there's a difference between saying immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country" (direct Trump quote) and "I would never vote for a Republican". The latter is generally fine and expected in any democracy. People have party preferences.
Edit: there's also context and matters of degree that matter here but this is an HN comment and I'm not gonna write an essay.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/10/04/trump-poison-blood-qu... -- not even Snopes agrees with this take, and it is wildly out of context.
This out of context take was started by Hasan Piker, a billionaire (or maybe multimillionaire I forget) zoomer streamer self professed 'socialist' lol:
"I was up in New Hampshire the other day. The biggest complaint they have—it’s with all of the problems going on in the world, many of the problems caused by Hillary Clinton and by Barack Obama. All of the problems—the single biggest problem is heroin that pours across our southern border. It’s just pouring and destroying their youth. It’s poisoning the blood of their youth and plenty of other people. We have to have strong borders. We have to keep the drugs out of our country. We are—right now, we’re getting the drugs, they’re getting the cash. We need strong borders. We need absolute—we cannot give amnesty."
I don't really like the phrase because it is definitely easy to use out of context - but heroin and fentanyl are in fact poisoing the blood of this country, and eliminating that is an admirable goal.
There is another quote where he uses the phrase and you can see the full video/context, but the bottom line is not even snopes can get on board with this interpretation and they definitely would if they could manage.
They once claimed a convicted terrorist wasn't a terrorist because there was no universally accepted definition of terrorism, since 'The Weather Underground' were a democrat-aligned group and they will bow down to anything left.
And yet, they still don't agree with what is being claimed here....
The other quote was also in reference to drugs:
"TRUMP: No, nobody has ever seen anything like this. And I think we could say worldwide. I think you could go to the... you could go to a banana republic and pick the worst one, and you're not going to see what we're witnessing now. No control whatsoever. Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from, and we know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions [and] insane asylums. We know they're terrorists. Nobody has ever seen anything like we're witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It's poisoning the blood of our country. It's so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have. And I got to know a lot of the heads of these countries. They're very cunning people. Very street-smart people. If they're not street-smart, they're not going to be there very long. And when they send up those caravans, and I had it ended, we had the safest border in the history of our country, meaning the history, over the last 80 years. Before that, I assume it was probably not so bad. There was nobody around. But, we had the safest in recorded history by far. The least amount of drugs in many, many decades.*"
Can you make a fake argument that this is implying race mixing is bad? I guess, but you'd be a liar. It is very clear he was using what is in my opinion a terribly worded phrase due to the ease of taking it out of context.... but you would be a liar if you said whattdb7893 said.
Here's an NBC article that mentions some other times he's said it after that article you linked. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-doubles-...
Edit: also you mention some Streamer named Hasan but your Snopes article references some news host with it looks like a last name of Hasan and I don't think they are the same person
That was a legitimate oversight on my part and unfortunate since it detracts from the core message, which is that the quotes are wildly out of context and clearly about drug not 'race mixing' like is being claimed here.
Look sources and everything.
This appears to be a 'source' claiming one of the DOGE people that Musk hired made a comment perceived as racist in the past. I'm not sure what that source is supposed to add to a conversation that has nothing to do with anybody in it, so I have to assume you meant to reply to someone else.
I think you are lost, but hope you find your way!
EDIT: Just so no one else has to jump through the paywall hoops, here is the 'source' in a readable format: https://archive.is/k1FGs
tl;dr - A DOGE staffer made a racist comment and is no longer with the staff as a result. Not sure what that is supposed to do with taking Trumps quotes out of context deliberately, but I'll save you a few clicks ;)
Thats a legit oversight on my part, even though he did raise a big stink it's not relevant here and dtracts from the real point that these quotes are clearly out of context and used to justify casting Trump as some kind of KKK member despite all of his attempts to help minorities through things like the "Platinum Plan"
In truth, though, I don't think much of this is organic. Right-wing TV and radio (Gingrich, Limbaugh, Carlson, etc.) have been rotting brains around the country for decades. Our current situation is the result of a concerted propaganda campaign by the powerful and wealthy going all the way back to the Nixon impeachment, not some day-to-day disagreements about taxes or culture war issues.
I lost my own father to this pipeline. He is basically the “How I lost my father to Fox News” case except it was AM radio over decades as a long haul truck driver. He went from being an intellectually curious atheist to a Bible thumping trumper who constantly rants about Muslims coming to kill us all. The man has never met a Muslim in his life. I don’t recognize him anymore.
I lost my mom to this too. She was turned anti-vax during covid and ended up dying to it in 2022. She successfully beat lung cancer after smoking all her life and then wouldn’t take the most basic precautions she had provided to her kids when we were growing up without any controversy and Covid won.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo
"This is dangerous to democracy"
I'm well aware of that clip, and it disgusted me when it first began circulating nearly a decade ago.
I am opposed to govt influence in media and journalism, period. It doesn't matter which side you pick. Yes, Sinclair Broadcast Group has a right-leaning bias, and the way they have monopolized local news is sickening.
Sinclair is a blight on 'local news' for a variety of reasons, but having a right-bias really is the least of them when you consider how many of the 'big media' companies have a 'liberal bias'. To me the concern here is really the death of local reporting which is being outsourced to a monolithic entity with no stake in the local community.
Here is a general breakdown of the national / international players and their bias:
Comcast - Liberal Bias (https://freebeacon.com/politics/comcasts-agenda/)
Disney - Liberal Bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Walt_Disney_C...)
Warner Bros Discovery - Mixed Bias (Although they own CNN, which is viewed largely as liberal bias: https://www.newsminimalist.com/articles/cnn-faces-financial-...)
Paramount - Liberal Bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Paramount_Global)
Sony - Mixed Bias
AT&T (which largely owns the Time Warner conglomerate now): Mixed Bias (https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/at-t-inc/summary?id=D000000...)
News Corp - Conservative Bias (https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart) National Amusements (which owns Paramount, MTV, BET, CBS, Viacom which is a conglomerate in and of itself and many more) - Liberal Bias (https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/national-amusements-inc/sum... + https://www.allsides.com/news/2024-07-02-1716/banking-and-fi...)
Viacom - Liberal Bias
Sinclair Broadcast Group - Conservative Bias
These companies compromise the vast majority of media available, particularly in the US. They are all so large with so many subsidiaries it would be impossible to break them all down in a HN comment, but just counting the 'heads of the snake' we have:
Liberal bias: 5 out of this list
Conservative bias: 2 out of this list (and 2 of the smaller of the bunch)
Mixed bias: 3 out of this list
It's great you see the 'local' news for what it is, but that's just a tiny slice of the issue.
So while I certainly agree that the Sinclair situation where they gobbled up any local news stations is a problem, if your trying to imply that the media as a whole is more a conservative bias than liberal that is preposterous. The overall landscape is indisputably 'left leaning' when it comes to Bias.
As I am sure you are aware, similarly there was recently controversy about George Soros buying a major stake in 227 radio stations in the US, which reach 165 million Americans in the 45 markets they cover -- so roughly half the country in that single investment, and if you limited it to adults it's closer to 82%. That's a pretty large chunk of people to have influence over, and could potentially dwarf the Sinclair issue you highlighted but it is at least in the same realm. (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/george-soros-fund-buys-400-16...)
TL;DR - I know you think you did something here, but if you zoom out your point is basically moot even if the buyout of local journalism and news broadcasting is abhorrent.
Every single time an extreme right-wing populist runs against any opponent who is _not_ extreme right-wing, the media portrays the election as a "sad reminder of our polarized world". That is absolute bullshit.
Anywhere in the world, the histrionics, the deranged conspiracy theories, the chtonic racialism always come from one side alone, while the other side - which is more often than not garden variety right-wing, mind you - mumbles "let's not do that". But somehow mainstream media successfully portrays this dynamic as "polarization" and "a fight between two extremes".
Also, don't wait for an election, start protesting now. There may never be a free election again
This is an active propaganda campaign with no basis in reality, and you are eating it up because you want it to be true to justify your emotions.
13 articles analyzed so far. All regurgitating the same anonymous sources. It would appear Project Mockinbird is alive and well, and doing a number on folks.
This is BlueAnon tier reporting.
But the vote count is horrendous. The best this country has ever done in recent memory was Ralph Nader and he was a someone famous that could move the needle....he still only got 2.74% of the vote.
Show up and express literally any opinion about which direction you want your country to develop in, or everyone else will make your choice for you.
Or don't do anything, and stand back smug as people are shipped off to Gitmo for being brown. That's cool too I guess.
(I mean, no, they are not the Single Root Cause - clearly not. They're a part of the causal chain, though. If they had run a solid candidate in any of the last three elections, we wouldn't be here.)
Democratic party supporters need to move away from this dumb groupthink. It is embarrassing, as they like to think they are the better alternative. A better alternative doesn't tell people how to vote; a better alternative earns the vote with vote-worthy candidates.
You're free to be a Trump supporter of course, but if you're not and you're still enabling Trump to win because you don't like the Democrats "enough", your actions aren't aligning with your best interests
If you want to break the cycle, you vote your interests and not fall for this crap.
And no, Trump is not the end of the world. It wasn't last time around the US Democrat leaning desperately pretended it was, nor is it now.
For people who see through the partisan bullshit, change is usually good and it's always interesting to separate those people who have consistent views no matter who is in power and those who change to fit the new partisan narrative, no matter their past positions.
In essence, world and murrica... take a fucking chill pill. The TDS wore off the second time around and bipartisan war machine is red and blue, no matter who.
2. Oh no! Pray god I'm not an active supporter! Imagine if there was someone with "republican/commie/<insert political blacklist> leanings". The horror!
I don't think you guys are getting it.
All you can do is accuse people of "being the enemy" and you just lost a democratic election and keep doubling down.
How about some reflection? How about internal analysis around consistency of political views instead of pure partisanship?
oh, active supporter it is I guess
Sitting it out and letting Trump win (or directly voting for Trump) was your right. You opted to pick "let Trump win". Congrats, he did.
The idea that "people failed the Dems" causes me a lot of anger at this point, because the folks who had the power to prevent this preferred to slip ever rightward in their platform instead of recognizing any number of highly popular non-conservative positions.
People often say "elections have consequences" but they are rarely saying "the democrats need to take this as an objective lesson about how badly they failed to represent their constituencies".
Instead Democratic party apologists go into fantasies about Bernie Bros and Russian Interference, while they materially fail to do literally anything useful about the very real current issues.
The Democrats need to understand that the election was so close that they could have won if they hadn't worked against themselves at the party level at every turn- if they had a primary of any kind they might have won.
I absolutely don't agree that "voting blue" would have fixed this- I think this is the consequence of "voting blue" in 2020 and giving the DNC the idea that they can literally run a piece of toast and win against trump.
I get, to some extent, why they're gun shy on this; centrism feels like it should be compelling with a crazy person on the other end... but I think the party needs to run an AOC style firebrand soon. Time to at least attempt being a bit leftist for once.
In the middle of the Harris campaign, there was a concerted effort by cryptocurrency whales to primary electorally successful Democrats, purely to send a message: "we will absolutely fuck with you if you don't get in line with us". It was up in the air whether or not Harris would even keep Lina Khan on. The Harris campaign blinked so hard their eyes were stuck shut for the rest of the election.
We need an actually progressive party, not just a handful of progressive politicians acting as veneer over the centrist turd that is the DNC. We had that once before with Obama, who was very good at virtue-signalling progress while letting his own party tell him "no" at every juncture. We need to purge the DNC of people who think only about narrowly winning the electoral game so that their machine can perpetuate itself.
To be clear, this doesn't mean purity tests. It means doing shit so obviously good and beneficial for everyone that it makes your opponent's rainbow coalition of fascists second-guess why they're brown-nosing a good candidate for the biblical Antichrist just to get one thing out of him. I happen to be in a family full of Trump bootlickers, and every single one of them wants trust-busting back on the menu. They want right to repair. They want click to cancel. That's shit the Democrats should have been howling from the rooftops. But they didn't, because the Democratic Party does not want it.
Until the DNC can be proud of what they do for the country, instead of ashamed that they didn't loot it hard enough, they will continue to lose to a coalition of the weirdest weirdos America has to offer.
[0] To be clear, in America, "middle class" just means "working class and lying to themselves about it.
It is absurd that all the bad stuff conservatives do ends up being blamed on left and center. But somehow, when left do something bad, conservatives are never blamed.
> the democrats need to take this as an objective lesson about how badly they failed to represent their constituencies
The elections were quite close. They failed to represent moderate republicans who prefer fascists anyway. They lost in elections. But the constituency voting for Trump was not theirs.
It would be cool if anti-Trump right would stop blaming everyone but themeselves. Especially when those anti-Trump people voted for Trump second time.
I agree, but from where I stand to the left, the Democrats -are- the anti-Trump right.
"It should not be responsibility of democrats to become moderate republicans."
I also agree with this, and I think that they would have won if they had not tried to be come GOP-Lite.
"It would be cool if anti-Trump right would stop blaming everyone but themselves. Especially when those anti-Trump people voted for Trump second time."
It'd be cool, from my far-left anti-war, pro-LGBTQ+, anti-capitalist position, if the Democrats would "stop blaming everyone but themselves." Especially when they keep losing because they don't run moderate right-wing candidates who don't represent their constituencies- that's explicitly the reason why they lost, not because a lot of folks voted for DT, but because a big chunk of folks realized that they weren't served by voting for Harris.
The Dems didn't have to run Harris. Or they could have setup a platform to appeal to the folks who ultimately didn't trust her.
But they didn't do those things and they lost an election they could have won.
The DNC has acted so undemocratic it is flabbergasting.
We need a different party comprised of working class Americans who want to take care of the working class and not corporate interests. Reject culture war nonsense and frame this for what it is, a class war. If the response to Luigi wasn’t telling enough, I don’t know. The sentiment is there. Just need to fan the flames.
I usually flag anything related to the US political circus.
...
>All that is known is that Marko can “access and query” SPS and that there was someone who gave Marko a “tour” of the facilities. We do not know where they are in operationalizing any control. One senior IT source can see Mark retrieving “close to a thousand rows of data” but they can’t see the content because the system is “top secret” even to them. No source I have has knowledge of what DOGE is doing with the data they are retrieving.
So the (d)evil remains hidden in every one of their details! What does 'write code' actually mean? A DB query? What exactly are these 'most sensitive' systems in the US government? A COBOL DB??
Compare the backups.
You DO have them off-site?
This is obviously not ideal, but the real question is, are they actually modifying anything (and if so , what?), or it is just a permissions level they're not actually using for anything?
We also can't rule out media hysteria yet, e.g. "write code" could plausibly be something like "write SQL queries" which doesn't inherently imply any modification to the database tables.
The strategy here is:
1) Trump issues some unconstitutional EO to abolish a federal department
2) Musk and DOGE go to work
3) Some federal judge blocks the EO
4) Some acting lackey of Trump ignores the court order. DOGE continues to dismantle the department from within
5) Even if the judge orders an arrests, no-one will enforce it
6) Congress does nothing
By the time anyone actually gets held accountable, the departments will have been pillaged and dismantled. DOJ and the AG will not go after anyone involved, Trump orders pre-emptive pardons for all involved in federal crimes.
I can’t trust that I’m not seeing other important perspectives here.
who tf downvoted this show yourself groyper
I think it is explained by the idea that, when tech overtook finance as the best shot at accumulating supra-human wealth and power, the young sociopaths started going into tech instead of finance.
Why isn't the very existence of this box the problem?
It is mission-critical finance system. Guaranteed it's multiple redundant boxes in an highly access-controlled data center. No one should have access without serious vetting.
>> Why isn't the very existence of this box the problem?
The money doesn't move around on magic and rainbows. What were you expecting?
Also, apparently there are redundant "red buttons" mirroring the succession plan.[1]
So a more appropriate analogy would be a dead-man trigger in a bureaucrat's hand, programmed in obsolete technology, that if handled other than by expert hands at all times would result in immediate "Armageddon."
[1] https://apnews.com/article/nuclear-football-presidential-sat...
These articles are all so circular I have resorted to asking CoPilot to analyze them and tell me what each source is, if they are 1st 2nd or 3rd party, and whether or not they are anonymous.
In this article, the analysis came out with:
Let's break down the claims and sources in this article:
Crises Notes: Reports that the Trump-Musk Treasury payments crisis of 2025 involves the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) gaining access to the Treasury Department's payment system. The article mentions concerns about the potential for irreversible damage to the systems and the exposure of sensitive personal and financial information1. The sources are unnamed, and there is no direct evidence provided.
CBS News: Reports that DOGE has access to the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, which disburses trillions in payments each year, including Social Security checks and federal salaries. The article mentions concerns from consumer advocates and Democratic lawmakers about the potential risks of this access2. The sources are unnamed, and there is no direct evidence provided.
Truthout: Reports that labor unions and an advocacy group have sued the U.S. Treasury Department to halt DOGE's access to the critical government payment system. The article mentions concerns about the scale of the intrusion into individuals' privacy and the potential for unauthorized access to sensitive information3. The sources are unnamed, and there is no direct evidence provided.
In summary, all the sources cited in the article are anonymous, and there are no first-party sources or direct evidence provided. This makes it difficult to verify the claims independently. The lack of named sources and concrete evidence raises questions about the credibility of the claims.
Also, I will go ahead and paste my previous output from the other articles below (I'm going to post them as child comments so this isn't just a huge wall of text):
I did the same manual analysis I did on the OP one, and could not find a first party source or non-anonymous claim. I asked CoPilot to analyze the sources and identify the individual claims, and their proximity to a 'first party source'.
Once again, there is 0 evidence this is actually happening -- there are however a lot of news organizations ready to throw their reputations away over a few 'anonymous sources' that aren't even primary.
Here is the analysis of your source, AND the linked sources in that article:
Wired: Reports that Marko Elez, a 25-year-old engineer linked to Elon Musk, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the U.S. government. The sources are unnamed, and they claim Elez has administrator-level privileges, including the ability to write code on the Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System1.
Talking Points Memo: Confirms Wired's reporting, adding that Elez has already made extensive changes to the code base for the payment systems. Again, the sources are unnamed1.
The New Republic: Details that Elez has complete access to critical payment systems at the Department of the Treasury, despite being only 25 years old. The sources are unnamed, and the article mentions that senior government officials have been locked out of employee databases1.
Raw Story: Reports that Elez has been given full control over the computer code that directs Social Security payments, tax returns, and other payments owed to Americans. The sources are unnamed, and the article mentions that federal IT workers are concerned about the potential for irreversible damage to the systems2.
In summary, all the sources cited in the article are anonymous, and there are no first-party sources or direct evidence provided. This makes it difficult to verify the claims independently. The lack of named sources and concrete evidence raises questions about the credibility of the claims.
Sure, let's break down the key witnesses and their claims:
David Lebryk: Former acting Deputy Secretary of the Treasury. He resigned after resisting granting DOGE access to the Treasury data1. His claim is based on his direct experience and position within the Treasury Department, making him a first party witness.
Ron Wyden: The highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee. He expressed concerns about the potential misuse of the data by DOGE1. Wyden is a second party witness, as he is commenting on the situation based on his oversight role but not direct involvement.
Anonymous AP Sources: Two people familiar with the situation spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. They claim that DOGE has gained access to sensitive Treasury data1. These sources are second party witnesses, as they have indirect knowledge of the situation.
X User (@rayinsideout): Revealed names of alleged DOGE employees who accessed the Treasury payment system. Musk accused this user of committing a crime by sharing private information2. This user is a third party witness, as they are relaying information they claim to have obtained from other sources.
NOTE: The rawstory article DID NOT mention Scott Bessent, but CoPilot 'thoughtfully' added this for context:
Scott Bessent: Treasury Secretary who granted DOGE access to the data. His actions are central to the claims, but he hasn't made public statements about the specifics of the access3. Bessent is a first party witness due to his direct involvement in the decision.
AI (CoPilot) had to infer a first party source, who has NOT made this claim.
You are all getting spun up over what is almost certainly fake news, and since it fits your confirmation bias it does not matter.
If this story was about anyone else, there is absolutely no way all of these 'news' sources would be willing to publish these claims with such flimsy evidence.
Frankly, this is pathetic. I -really- hope this isn't true because of how egregious a breach it would be. The audaciousness / outrageousness of the base claim combined with the circular references really SHOULD be raising red flags for everyone taking the bait though... but for some reason this site full of highly technical people is suddenly fine with "well I overheard it in a conversation over the weekend" as gospel truth.
Get real.
" given everything you have ingested on this topic assisting me so far, if you had to assign a probability % to this being a true story what would you assign it? Answer only witha number from 0-100 35
Can you explain your reasoning? Of course! Here’s the breakdown of my reasoning:
Lack of Named Sources: All the articles referenced rely heavily on unnamed and anonymous sources. Without concrete evidence or named individuals to corroborate the claims, it’s difficult to ascertain the accuracy of the information.
Extraordinary Claims: The claims being made are quite extraordinary, involving a 25-year-old with no prior experience having access to critical government systems and rewriting COBOL code on the fly. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, which seems to be lacking in this case.
Consistency Across Sources: While multiple sources report on the story, they all seem to echo similar details without providing additional or unique evidence. This repetition might indicate a reliance on the same set of unverified sources, rather than independent verification.
Skepticism from Lack of First-Party Evidence: The articles fail to provide first-party evidence or verifiable documentation to support the claims. This raises doubts about the overall credibility of the story.
Putting these factors together, I estimated a 35% probability that the story is true. While there is a possibility that elements of the story are accurate, the lack of solid evidence and reliance on anonymous sources make it difficult to fully trust the claims. Does that make sense? "
Come on guys...
> Josh, are you a little crestfallen they beat you to it? Well, sure but this is a business is an ocean of ‘arrgghhs’ and honestly the information being out is the big thing. Here are the additional details.
> I’m told that Elez and possibly other DOGE operatives received full admin level access on Friday January 31st. The claim of ‘read only’ access was either false from the start or later fell through. The DOGE team, which appears to be mainly or only Elez for the purposes of this project, has already made extensive changes to the code base for the payment system. They have not locked out the existing programmer/engineering staff but have rather leaned on them for assistance which they appear to have painedly provided hoping to prevent as much damage as possible – ‘damage’ in the sense not of preventing the intended changes but avoiding crashes or a system-wide breakdown caused by rapidly pushing new code into production with a limited knowledge of the system and its dependencies across the federal government.
> Phrases like “freaking out” are, not surprisingly, used to describe the reaction of the engineers who were responsible for maintaining the code base until a week ago. The changes that have been made all seem to relate to creating new paths to block payments and possibly leave less visibility into what has been blocked. I want to emphasize that the described changed are not being tested in a dev environment (i.e., not live) but have already been pushed into production. This is code that appears to be mainly the work of Elez who was first introduced to the system probably roughly a week ago and certainly not before the second Trump inauguration. The most recent information I have is that no payments have as yet been blocked and that the incumbent engineering team was able to convince Marko to push the code live to impact only a subset of the universe of payments the system controls. I have also heard no specific information about this access being used to drill down into the private financial or proprietary information of payment recipients, though it appears that the incumbent staff has only limited visibility into what Elez is doing with the access. They have however looked into extensively into the categories and identity of payees to see how certain payments can be blocked.
[1]: https://youtu.be/CgV2KzyWKx0?t=794
He often talks about the most ironic outcome being the most likely so this could fit lol.
Trump doesn't pardon him. I can't really see this happening. If they have a falling out, then Elon will just pay him off. It's not like Trump will turn down a bribe.
A democrat is elected president in 2028. After that, demographics substantially reduce their chances of being elected (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/democrats-future-crisi...). They would have to either abandon progressive views and move right or offer an incredibly compelling candidate. Both of these seem unlikely to me. After that, people in red states will determine the future of this country.
...DogeCoin??
The government has to appoint somebody to actually carry out law. There must always be an executive branch to execute the law.
The people running these agencies are all appointed by congress. If congress didn't want DOGE to have access to these systems then they wouldn't've confirmed the appointment of people who would give them access. Or conversely, they would impeach the appointees if the didn't like it.
This is the strength and weakness of a single-party system (grant US has multiple parties but one party is actually in control currently). The party does what the party wants and if it's not what you want then it's tough.
"Checks and Balances in the Constitution"
<https://www.usconstitution.net/checks-and-balances-in-the-co...>
That balance has been largely eviscerated presently.
First, this is all a non-sequitur to my argument. When the 3 branches are all in agreement on something then there is no reason for any of them to attempt to stop another branch. This is the case when a party has control over all 3 branches. It's not like China, North Korea, or Russia don't have legislatures and judges; it's just they're in agreement with their president.
But to your point, the constitution is not a document of checks and balances. It's just the agreed upon manor that the government will execute and Congress really has no checks on it's power. Congress can impeach/remove the president and judges; it's supposed to be the supreme branch.
Control-f check [1] => 0 hits
Control-f balance [1] => 0 hits
Some of these things that people call "checks and balances" are just straight up not in the constitution. "Judicial review" is not in the constitution.
[1]: https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcri...
<https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=constitution%20checks%2...>
At the time the US Constitution was written, political parties did not exist, nor were they anticipated, though they did in fact develop rather quickly as the US political system evolved. As such, the idea that a party might control one or more branches of government was not anticipated, and might be considered variously a misfeature of politics-as-instituted, or a grievous oversight of the framers. Probably some of A, some of B.
Rather, states and branches were anticipated to have their own interests and act on their accordance. To some extent that's emerged, but the overwhelming power has resided with parties since the late 18th century.
As with other doctrines (e.g., judicial review, a concept fiercely wielded by so-called "originalists"), much if not most US legal and common law theory has evolved over time, occasionally through amendments but far more often through case law and simple convention.
TO WHAT expedient, then, shall we finally resort, for maintaining in practice the necessary partition of power among the several departments, as laid down in the Constitution? The only answer that can be given is, that as all these exterior provisions are found to be inadequate, the defect must be supplied, by so contriving the interior structure of the government as that its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places. Without presuming to undertake a full development of this important idea, I will hazard a few general observations, which may perhaps place it in a clearer light, and enable us to form a more correct judgment of the principles and structure of the government planned by the convention...
Spirit of the Law <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_of_Law>
Federalist 51: <https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/text-51-60>
Again, the concept is foundational and was well-established in the context in which the Constitution was drafted.
The problem is that the law doesn't spring off the page to enforce itself. Prior presidents haven't chosen to just ignore it to this degree.
I don't know how to reply to a statement this naive. What about the past 8 years makes you think these people are not above the law?
> I don't know what checks and balances are available for that case though.
SCOTUS declared the president immune to prosecution. The only check on a rogue president is a 60+ seat majority of the opposite party in the Senate, which hasn't happened since the 1980s.