Is anyone not concerned by this? Paying the bills due is not a political issue, making payroll is not a political issue.
Elected or unelected, politicians with an agenda should not be in charge here.
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.
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...
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"