DOGE employees ordered to stop using Slack
404media.co
404media.co
For someone who claims to love freedom of speech, Elon is pretty quick to determine who can say what, and how much access to _his_ data people have.
No idea why the markets aren't in freefall at this point.
But this is the very thing. In every single financial crisis, the uber wealthy accumulate even more at the expense of everyone else that is loosing everything.
It all is quite unsettling. Then the fact it is Trump doing this is just something else all together too.
I am a bit worried how the country is going to deal with this level of change. We aren't even 3 weeks in.
Though you do have a point of even if it's illegal who will enforce it? The courts have started to some but are necessarily reactive and slow.
personally I think this was Gödel's Loophole
The exact shape or form of USAID is also up to the president. It was created through an executive order, and can of course also be transformed through one.
> Unless abolished pursuant to the reorganization plan submitted under section 6601 of this title, and except as provided in section 6562 of this title, there is within the Executive branch of Government the United States Agency for International Development as an entity described in section 104 of title 5.
- 22 U.S.C. §6563
All it takes is a simple google search.
This is why lawyers exist. Presumably doge and trump have access to good lawyers. I’m not asserting that they are right, just that a shallow legal analysis is error prone and looking at a single law likely does not yield useful prediction making capability.
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title22/cha...
This is not true. Obviously.
That would give the President carte blanche authority over the budget by merely declaring "illegal/fraudulent/wasteful."
Go re-read the Constitution before posting this bullshit.
Now I do not know if Congress has explicitly required X to provide certain thing. If they did then there might be some issue if X fails to provide it. It's probably easy to say someone is accountable for it if it's something objective (let's say building for Congress) but if it's subjective it could get tricky.
This is called impoundment and it's unequivocally illegal.
The Trump administration will repurpose those funds to things more aligned with GOP preferences.
(It's one of those "power of the purse" things. If Congress has created an organization and funded it, the executive is required to spend that money on it.)
Citizens voicing their opinions about the government is clear cut First Ammendment activity, of precisely the sort the first ammendment was intended to protect in the first place. People need to get a grip.
No, DOGE was formalized as a division of the US Digital Service. Employees of DOGE are federal government employees. Some of them, like Elon are "Special Government Employees" which is a short-term category and avoids certain disclosures.
Creating DOGE and enabling them to have access to certain IT systems is legal ... but what data, how much control they have, what they can demand of other departments is subject to all sorts of laws and controls which may or may not be being followed at the moment.
I'm not sure they are being shut down. USAID is being restructured for instance and folded into the State Department.
(Either way, the exact approach they've taken so far with the total freeze and shutdown, then later saying they'll totally start doing the job again somewhere else later on, seems sketchy.)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't those people foreign nationals as well?
On a separate note, assuming that "it's good to help people if you can" doesn't move you, the cynical reason for USAID's existence is marketing and soft power projection. For a tiny fraction of the US budget, we get to look good for how nice we're being to people, and get other countries to want us to come in and get our hands all over their infrastructure until it'd be painful for them to oppose us and lose that aid.
(Also, HIV specifically? That's something where lowering the levels of it in foreign countries will directly help the US, because it makes it less likely that US citizens will get exposed to it when people travel.)
My grandparents have passed away, so I’ll need to track down exactly who has that quilt now. I know it came over to the US with their parents (my great-grandparents) when they immigrated, and that it was pre-Nazi-party for sure.
It may very well be associated with the false mythology that was adopted by the Nazis. I don’t think so, but it’s been a long time since it was new. No one who was there when it was made is still alive, nor is anyone who knew them well. I’ve not seen anything about that side of my family that would lead me to believe that they were ever sympathetic to that cause, but it’s entirely possible that it was hidden, not shared with the next generation, or otherwise just lost to time.
… but now I’m curious, and will have to figure it out :)
That man is way too friendly. Just before the election he gave $300.000.000,00 to Trump. And he is so special, eh! He can read air-gaped, highly sensitive data that no one should see from government systems, just using his mind/indoctrinated minions. I hate it when people speculate this might have to do, amongst things, with dark money to be made in intelligence/elite level international crime.
Many people, especially libertarians, voted for Trump for this exact reason.
Yeah, you might think he shouldn't have access to these system but it's the President, who the majority of the people voted for, that has the authority to grant him access, or ask for access from the appoint leaders of these departments.
Everyday when he posts list of things the US government is spending money on the more people are backing Elon in this endeavor.
Go here https://x.com/DOGE and read some of the things we are paying for and you tell me that we should be spending money on it.
Yeah, you might think he up to something bad but you would have always thought that because you don't like him.
Are you sure he's not just an American who cares about the US and doesn't want it too head into a death spiral from massive amount of debt with no one brave enough to stop it because it might cause them to lose an election?
If you have honest policies, there is no need to ddos the democratic system, and it certainly does not require a bunch of insanely spoiled Accelerationist billionaires and the killing of science.
We already have departments for improving and reforming spending. Elon and MAGA are inundating you with bad faith justifications for what is ultimately a goal to fund their next round of tax breaks before they expire this year using the working and middle classes as livestock.
(via CNN) - It is not legal for the president to unilaterally “abolish, move, or consolidate USAID”. He needs to have congressional authorization to do so.
The President hasn't shut down the USAID yet. They just froze it with the intent to abolish it.
Musk is essentially a presidential advisor, and legally an advisor can advise the President to do pretty much anything. Even if the thing they are advising the President to do is illegal, the President is the one who bears the legal responsibility for the action, not the advisor.
In really extreme cases, like if Musk were advising Trump to commit genocide, or carry out a military coup, or transfer a billion dollars out of US Treasury into someone’s personal bank account, and Trump followed the advice, Musk might be held legally liable for having given it. But shutting down a government agency isn’t anything like that. The legality of shutting it down is debatable, but even if ultimately held to be illegal, it isn’t the genocide or military coup or blatant corruption kind of illegal.
which is illegal. USAID can only be "shut down" by an act of Congress
Might be illegal.
> Musk talked Trump and Rubio
Obviously isn't, no matter how many salutes he does or how many emeralds he owns.
By the way, I heard the Palestinian Problem is going to be solved for good?
This narrative infuriates me. Either you are right, and entire wings of our government are abetting a coup, or you are wrong, and our government has huge back doors that no one is watching.
Both realities reveal something urgently broken with the United States. In a way that should scare the entire western world to its core.
Edit: BTW this strategy has always been available, it’s just that career politicians aren’t incentivized to do this for “good” because they want long political careers.
So the government is designed in such a way that someone can do illegal things without those currently running the systems simply saying "no?"
They have the power to do the things, and then we have to wait for it to be litigated. Watching the cases against Trump drop like flies after he got elected, knowing the Supreme Court is packed full of members of one party. This doesn't seem like a reliable solution.
If Elon says one thing and someone else thinks the opposite, it comes down to a battle of wills... and Elon doesn't back down. Sure, it can go to the courts, but the courts only matter if they're listened to or enforced. Neither of which will happen here.
Furthermore America has been moving towards this for decades. There has been openly shared plans on how this was to be achieved, for multiple different stages. From stacking the courts, to gerry mandering, to creating Fox, to strategies to stack the SC, to more recently project 2025.
---
I am feeling dumb for having to mention this, after re-reading your message. Am i right in suspecting you are aware of these strategies and are driving to a specific point?
This is not in line with first-past-the-post voting system. If you want to have "people work together" you need coalitions.
Not long ago Hawaii told the Supreme Court 'spirit of aloha' and the broken paddle trumps _Bruen_. And nothing stops them, the Supreme court has a few armed marshalls and little else.
One thing to also consider is that sometimes, the execution of the court orders will rely on local governments and locally elected officials in local enforcement bodies (like the Sheriff’s Office or the local PD). In that case, enforcement will vary across the country.
It's not reliable. It worked because Presidents had always been decent about it. The alternative would be to tie the system even further into knots, just to avoid a problem that would require cartoonish villainy.
Until now.
That's not why: Reagan, Clinton, W, and Obama all had the opportunity for sweeping changes of this magnitude without regard to further political careers, but none of them wanted to make radical changes. Their view of the US government (even Reagan's!) was "basically doing a good job, but maybe needs a tweak". The current administration does not appear to share this view, though we'll see how that goes.
Trump is threatening to turn that knob to -1 or lower, for good or ill.
And more recently, congress essentially won't do anything, period. Either because the president is not of their party, or more recently, chaos within the Republican party itself.
Which is why you see presidents trying to do things with executive orders, but typically the courts (correctly) block overreach there. Trump is busy accumulating court rulings against his administration.
Or, you know, maybe it's also because politicians who are not total psychos don't want to fuck over an entire country for their own gains.
Now that some other psychos are taking over, the people that got used to the previous psychos are uneasy because change it not easy, especially rigorous change.
But maybe this will make people actually realize that the system was always flawed. The current administration just exposes that.
If the answer is “they don’t” then they aren’t government employees or contractors and shouldn’t be inside private areas of government buildings and systems.
If the answer is anything else then it’s either a misappropriation of funds or an illegal private pay scheme.
Our government operations expect people to conduct themselves as adults.
Clearly, if we survive Elon's coup, we need to encode these norms into law.
He does a good job of explaining the facts of the legalities etc.
It's been more than 20 years (or might be about that?) that we passed the law that said "if you prosecute Bush for warcrimes we will invade the Hague". Granted, we were never a treaty cosigner (sharing the lovely company of Russia, North Korea, and Iran), but it's very convenient we have a "laws for thee but not for me" attitude.
Look I'm just saying we've been headed in this direction for a while and I don't expect the institutions we're supposed to care about preserving doing much to stop it. Americans need to get a lot more mad if they want politicians to represent them well. I'd hazard a guess most americans have never contacted their representatives, vote in their non-swing state (effectively making their vote worthless), and pat themselves on the back for a civic duty well done. I think we've gotten ourselves into a position where politicians who have spent most of their careers failing to pass legislation now need to pull political ability from who the hell knows where to actually follow through on their promise to fight facism. Very grim times.
IF, by a rare circumstance, the media moguls decide to not sane-wash the incredible fire-hose of lies, corruption, fake news, and religious extremism, and the DEMs get into office in some next term, those DEMs will find the state destroyed beyond repair.
Health epidemics, broken foreign relation relations, dysfunctional government agencies (filled to the brim with stupid or evil clients from the shadow elites), downright abolished agencies, information sphere completely muddied in Musk-style, tech oligarchs sworn allegiance to MAGA (done), abolishment of fact checkers (in progress), removal of experts and intelligentsia (busy), impoverished voters (in progress).
You can enter the cockpit, but MAGA makes sure you are never going to fly again. If you want to get somewhere, you will need the fixers.
People here are discussing legalities with a situational awareness of 3 millimeter maximum. This feverish is understandable, we MUST interpret things like they are normal. If you want to keep it that way, don't read the next sentence.
As soon as the news broke of Trumps reelection, all cases where dropped quickly. That is all you need to now.
Many other republics have split the executive branch into multiple semi-independent centers of power. The head of state and the head of government can be separate roles. A directly elected president may be responsible for signing laws and appointing senior officials, while a prime minister subordinate to the parliament may be in charge of running the executive branch. And government departments may have dual leadership with a politically appointed minister setting the directions and a career director appointed by the president running the department. Because the director's term is independent from the political appointees, they can refuse to comply if the minister asks something illegal.
Republics have all kinds of failure modes. For example, Hungary was supposed to be a robust parliamentary republic. But due to non-proportional elections, slightly over 50% of votes were enough for a sufficient supermajority to rewrite the constitution.
oops. they already have access to data, and there's no unseeing what they've seen.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ty6853&next=42914628...
It is a (ridiculous) pretext for purging the system from people that the new power deems “uncooperative”.
And it's not some theoretical idea, in all Western democracies, every civil servant that has been in place for long enough has seen governments from multiple political sides. That's how it works.
Using illegal means to purge the institutions from undesired people is not something that happens in a democracy, this is unprecedented in the West since Gleichschaltung.
Have you forgotten Trump's first presidential term? The resistance [1], the gleeful celebration of the "deep state" fighting back against Trump [2], a US general calling his Chinese counterparts before the 2020 election [3]?
Bureaucrats cannot fight against a democratically elected executive, call themselves the resistance and then be surprised when they are treated as the resistance.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/02/opinion/trump-fauci-deep-...
[3] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-top-general-secretly-cal...
for example, you are defending firing workers for: “People are just going to have to accept the results,” he told The Washington Post. “I’m a Republican. I believe in fair and secure elections.”
...some dangerous deep state, indeed.
In a democracy, a civil servant must respect the law even if it goes against orders. When all you have civil servants who respect their boss's orders even when it goes against the law, you have left the domain of democracy.
Which was something people here screamed bloody murder about when they accused Biden of doing it, just by asking Twitter to moderate content, but I guess this is all fine now.
It's never wrong when it's something you agree with, and that's as far as Musk's belief in free speech goes. Allowing posts he agrees with, it's free speech. If it's something that sheds bad light on something he is, owns, or believes, it's bad and must be stopped. It's a classic as old as time
Going into CMMS and IRS records almost certainly puts them in jeopardy of state crimes. Tight collections of only young, fervent ideologues have one role in military and political systems: cannon fodder.
Supremacy just covers removal [1]. The body of law being adjudicated doesn't change. And the President can't pardon state offences.
I'm not convinced all these folks will get convicted. But they're almost certainly spending their thirties in court.
Maybe I'm confused, but why do we think Elon is committing offenses that a state could charge so that a pardon from Trump would not be possible?
However, if you put them on a scale blanket pardoning the mob who stormed the capitol, attacked and injured police officers, threatened congress members, planted bombs and were looking to hang the Vice president because he would not overturn the election results where do you think it will lean towards?
The one is bad optics the other is literally giving blank checks to convicted enemies of the State.
Depends on who/when any of these theoretical charges occur. If they were to happen now-ish, then Biden would be thrown under the bus. Which I'm assuming is the opposite response to what you're trying to apply rational reasoning to. I think for at least the remainder of the next four years, applying rational reasoning will be a fool's errand.
Prosecutors have the power to ask 2 years incarceration for jaywalking, without proof, 10 years for ignoring a stop sign and having not paying because the state has a wrong address for them and can let someone who empties a machine gun into a kindergarten walk free. But why go so far as to actually convict them of anything?
An IRS agent (and every state has them, not just the Federal government) could just accuse anyone of tax fraud 9 years ago, arrest, then deny bail (if the accusation is tax fraud it is the IRS agent that gets to approve or deny bail, not a judge), and then think about what they'll do next, for 3 years. They also have the power to block any particular bank account US-wide, or all bank accounts "that benefit an individual", so they can damage the person's family too.
No worries, after those 3 years, those now freshly declared innocent people will have to be paid 20 or so dollars per day to make it all alright (technically they don't, as they would not even be innocent, as the IRS does not need a conviction to declare you a criminal, but that's kicking someone hard in the nuts after incarcerating them for 3 years).
None of this requires even a single judicial decision, just an executive on your side. And Trump does NOT have the power to grant pardons over any non-federal matter (which is pretty ironic since part of the reason presidential pardons exist, is to prevent state or local governments from using state justice systems to influence the Federal government)
I have a feeling it's not the ethics of the actions that have changed, but the goals for doing so. In both cases it was about controlling a narrative.
https://x.com/Cernovich/status/1887267531267940517
They are providing receipts for all of the corruption they are uncovering.
>SERVICES FOR UNACCOMPANIED CHILDREN.
https://x.com/GenFlynn/status/1885872007062892568
LUTHERAN IMMIGRATION AND REFUGEE SERVICE INC: $367,612,906
LUTHERAN SOCIAL SERVICES OF THE SOUTH, INC: $134,190,472.95
LUTHERAN SERVICES FLORIDA, INC.: $82,937,819.95
The truth is that LSS got grants to pay for the resettlement of legal immigrants. LSS was NOT "facilitating mass migration." LSS has a long tradition of this work and from what I know of their work in Washington, DC (the city, not the cap), it was exemplary.
The US government ran ads in Haiti and other nations in French teaching people how to apply to come to America as asylum seekers.
The US government flew huge numbers of these people into the US and also paid organizations like LSS to “resettle” them.
This is mass migration and ALL of this was done using taxpayer money. Nobody voted for this, this is pure corruption.
It is so wonderful to see it all being dismantled and exposed.
Maybe ask yourself why you/they are against immigration of low-income workers but don't have a problem bringing in as many higher-income workers as they can(at lower salaries than they would have to pay non-immigrants).
I don't want to be working at McDonalds while companies like Tesla, Google, Amazon, etc. are importing labour for the higher-paying jobs in the country, but that seems to be the future a lot of people are excitedly running towards by supporting Musk.
These are taxpayer dollars:
LUTHERAN IMMIGRATION AND REFUGEE SERVICE INC: $367,612,906
LUTHERAN SOCIAL SERVICES OF THE SOUTH, INC: $134,190,472.95
LUTHERAN SERVICES FLORIDA, INC.: $82,937,819.95
Specifically, provide some evidence, please.
For example, asserting that two groups are exchanging money simply because they're both customers at the same bank.
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/03/the-twitter-files-playbo...
What about USAID being used to pay celebrities but only those that support one of the political parties?
Which is not very easy right now as Trump illegally fired many of them across 17 different offices.
The illegality and unconsitutionalism of the actions being taken to dismantle agencies and placement private citizens without background checks or proper auditing / security procedures inside of highly critical and often classified systems are the issue, not whether or not USAID should be audited or abolished. There are proper channels for that. they are being bypassed (even though fully available to the President with all three branches of government in Republican control).
>The cost per job saved for one year was $169,000 to $258,000, which was much higher than the average amount—$58,200—paid in wages and benefits to small-business employees in 2020. [1]
[1] https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/2...
I'll get rage-y about this one when someone explains what a Politico premium subscription provides and why it was a corrupt purchase. Maybe it's a valid information data service that provides key information to whatever agency purchased it, purchased using an appropriate bidding contract. Or maybe it wasn't.
But the point is show me why that was an inappropriate purchase while Starlink and Bloomberg feeds aren't.
Unfortunately doing that takes investigation and due-process, and it doesn't score the same propaganda points as just yelling "See?! My political opponent had the government as a customer!!"
Is that what a pro subscription is? Or does it provide useful data to a government agency that works on the ground in many different countries?
How about show me the government contract for the purchase that outlines what information they're purchasing? Who else bid on it, and why did Politico win? If they don't provide anything beyond clickbait articles, it should be pretty obvious that they were arbitrary chosen over whatever right-leaning competitor also bid on that sweet sweet government bucks. Every government purchase has mounds of paperwork, lets look into what the contract purchaser was actually trying to get from it before deciding this is a partisan bribe. Or does that take too much work and due-process, and we're just trying to score some quick smear-the-opposition rage points?
I'm all against government corruption, but show me this is corruption rather than a reasonable data purchase.
lol, so you don't know what Politico Pro does, but you know it was worthless, and it doesn't matter because the propaganda points have already been scored and the news cycle has turned over.
This is the world you want to be cheerleading for? Really?
I've flirted with government contracts before, and I've worked with large information-as-a-service providers before. So I understand the value of niche information providers. I'm not a policy guy, so I don't know what kind of information a policy-heavy government group needs, but it sounds like a completely plausible service to me.
Given the Occam's Razor between "government bureaucracy-levels of contracting and oversight required to do any purchase still resulted in a corrupt money-handoff" and "Elon's got a tendancy towards theatrics and smearing the political opposition, so he's using this to tickle people's amygdala and move on before people look too closely at it", I'm going with the latter.
Prove to me that the niche job functions of the people who purchased this didn't actually require any of this information using the mounds of contracting paperwork that surely exist, or just admit that proving it was never the point and it was all about outrage theatrics before people bothered to do the actual work of looking into this.
And yes it does look worthless. It provides things like a policy template and other boilerplate which an LLM model can now come up.
Pro also offers many articles from their "experts" that happen to be fresh out of college with liberal arts degrees. Quite the irony when the Politico proponents are up in arms about the age of the DOGE members.
What laws does it break?
I like to watch those "Auditors" on Youtube who film in public places. Every cop assures them that filming a police officer / police station / inside a public library is illegal. About 25% of the time they detain them, and about 10% of the time they arrest them.
When they ask what law they've broken, they never get a straight answer.
Whether musk is operating as such seems dubious but possible.
- For routine uses within a U.S. government agency
- For law enforcement purposes
https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/federal-unions-s...
https://www.hrdive.com/news/federal-workers-unions-challenge...
†: They actually couldn't, without stripping the filibuster from the Senate.
(But really, it's the traditional second tier footnote symbol after an asterisk, which I couldn't use here because it triggers italics.)
There's a thing called a vote for cloture, meaning a vote you take about whether to stop debate and vote on the issue. In the US Senate, a cloture vote requires 60 votes (out of 100) to pass. So there's a "procedural filibuster", whereby one side will announce that they're not going to vote for cloture, but the other side won't force them to actually keep talking so the chamber can move on and do other things.
This used to be quite uncommon, and things would regularly become law with a bare 50%+1 majority, but nowadays -- basically since ~2008 -- there's a de-facto "nothing that can't get 60% support in the Senate can become law" rule in effect. With a specific carve-out for a few things that're not allowed to be filibustered, mostly around passing a budget, that are just barely keeping the government functioning.
Personally, I intensely dislike this, and feel like the shift to default-filibuster-everything is a major cause of the growing dissatisfaction with the system that ultimately gave us Trump.
Voting for someone doesn't imply they aren't bound by existing rules.
Edit: There's also more to be said here about restrictions on American democracy (e.g. gerrymandering, first past the post, disenfranchisement, financial barriers to entry for candidates, lack of choice for political parties, etc) that make the US not some bastion for democratic governance. I'm not an expert but the current chaos is at least partially enabled by the flaws in American democracy (rigid 2 party control is a good example of a generally undemocratic force, many Americans would prefer more parties but aren't being represented, that is enabling executive overreach).
Does this mean it was wrong of Republicans to have tried to stop anything Obama or Biden was trying to do? Or question it's legality?
I keep hearing this "the people voted for it argument", but unless your prepared to condemn things like limiting the scope of the ACA and refusing to confirm justices, it's hard to take the argument seriously.
If the current administration is able to do all this, imagine what previous administrations have all done without our approval. Only now people are shaken up about it, because the current administration is rigorously changing things. But it doesn't mean that it was better before, it was always corrupt, now the corruption just becomes more obvious to us.
What you are saying is Trump won so he can effectively shut down agencies and create new ones by fiat. And if those new agencies break laws that is fine.
As a hypothetical, suppose DOGE amasses a large dataset of every resident in the US and it then identifies “illegals” and instructs the deputized military to deport this group of people to prison in El Salvador via secret messaging beyond FOIA reach. This is not OK. Especially if the deported were not given due process to defend themselves in court. What if a few of the deported were actual citizens and had their identities mixed up with someone else.
It was very interesting how they got around things.
Could you share you reasons. From what I gather, the EO[1] does a few things to avoid potential law suits:
- It revised the purpose of an existing agency, USDS. The general purpose is not changed: "Modernizing Federal Technology and Software to Maximize Efficiency and Productivity". This avoids the issue of creating a new agency without the approval from Congress.
- It cites cites the sectio 3161 of title 5 of United States Code, to create DOGE as a "Temporary Organization" for only 18 months. This avoids the law suits that the EO creates a new government entity with out the approval of Congress.
- It orders each government agency to hire DOGE teams, each of which includes a lead, a lawyer, an HR, and an engineer. Agency heads should ensure that DOGE agenda is implemented. This is within the authority of an EO.
- The EO voids previous EOs to avoid law suits on future conflicts.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/esta...
What's your reason to flag it and downvote it without counter arguments? Anything that does not agree with your rage is automatically morally bad bad bad?
That said, even if it's just trolling, trolling has no place in government. We all deserve better and we need to trust that what is said is the truth.
[1] https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_SPRMCO24VC0339_19...
That said, I wish these were required to be a lot more verbose. I can envision a program with that description I would totally approve of, and I can imagine programs with that description that I wouldn't think are useful. Being more transparent around the programs would help in cases where wild unsubstantiated claims are made.
Whether the funds were used for condom balloons or lifesaving hospital deliveries of babies, the complaint from the masses should be “give us more information for exactly what this money is obligated to accomplish.”
Especially when the federal government is eager send me demands for additional backup and information on money I earned 3 years ago, after it had previously signed off on documentation presented.
Which law(s) are they breaking? Please cite them specifically.
I'm genuinely asking because you are making a very assertive statement.
Reducing bureaucracy, rooting out corruption, and shrinking government waste also polls really well.
Democrats should be much more careful about positioning themselves on this long term.
If they are seen as the party of more bureaucracy and corruption (they already are) this will further tarnish their reputation and decrease their odds of winning elections in the future.
The way it’s currently playing out the people complaining the loudest seem like the most guilty benefactors of corruption, they are damaging their reputations and don’t even realize it.
Even SCOTUS, by the time it gets all the way there, the damage would be done and it would take years to rebuild.
A complete clusterfk by design.
I don't think anyone from the new DOGE would actually be helpful in responses anyway.
The article also states that 'DOGE is gutting...' when that's not true. They're advising the President, and the President is cleaning house. They investigate, recommend, the President decides, and those decisions get acted on. This is how a task force like this is supposed to work.
So, yes, impoundment is a relevant term to use.
To say nothing the freezes that have been put on hold by the courts.
If you think there’s a violation of the impoundment act, you need to identify what the “program” is and why you think the administration won’t spend the whole program amount within the relevant time period.
That may be a distinction without a difference. The reason to have advisors around is so you can rely on them to make a proposal you can sign off on, because they understand your overall vision. If they're not proposing cuts he agrees with, he'll replace DOGE leadership until he finds people who do.
Now, USCSB makes some incredible YouTube videos, I somehow doubt Doge will do the same
> "Just changing the name alone under the Executive Order doesn't affect DOGE's recordkeeping status,” Jason R. Baron, professor at the University of Maryland and former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration told 404 Media in a phone call. “The administration apparently has made a determination that DOGE will be a presidential component subject to the Presidential Records Act. However, that will surely be challenged in the courts in connection with FOIA lawsuits. Under FOIA, it will be for the courts to decide whether under existing DOGE is acting more like a federal oversight agency or as a presidential component that solely advises the President.”
Congress needs to do their job here.
> This would make DOGE a Presidential Records Act entity, meaning records it creates are not FOIAble until years after a president leaves office rather than a Federal Records Act entity, which would make its records FOIAble now.
It's how soon you can make a request.
and worry not, anyone owning tesla stock is getting their punishment eventually :)
> The messages indicate that, under Elon Musk’s leadership, DOGE is actively taking steps to make sure its communications and records are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act,
> This would make DOGE a Presidential Records Act entity, meaning records it creates are not FOIAble until years after a president leaves office rather than a Federal Records Act entity, which would make its records FOIAble now.
Regardless of where you stand on the topic of cutting federal budgets, the lack of transparency should be alarming to everyone.
Broad actions like this should have the utmost transparency, not a team of lawyers doing their best legal maneuvering to keep it out of the public's reach.
By the way, you failed to address his main point that the US is taking a turn towards authoritarianism, and instead chose to critique a secondary part of his claim. Why is that?
Salesforce gets all the Slack data and can do whatever it likes. This is utter incompetence.
Why can't software come in a box, like it used to - then it can run on a machine that I control, and only talk to machines that I control too.
Then it's not a matter of belief and blind trust and hoping against hope that nobody's spying on me - it's the matter of basic common sense and due diligence.
At some point you will want or need to talk to machines you don't control, because society consists of people other than yourself, and machines that they control. And in this hell of other people, "basic common sense and due diligence" are synonymous with blind trust.
Websites are usually hosted on machines the owner controls, running software the owner controls, yet have no trouble talking to the external world.
Except for the server, which is usually run on a box you don't control.
> Websites are usually hosted on machines the owner controls, running software the owner controls, yet have no trouble talking to the external world.
Most websites are absolutely not ran on machines the owner controls...
In the case of Slack, Discord or Teams I have to implicitly trust the mothership.
In a world where all these companies are eager to hide clauses that allow them to train on your data, and where controversies pop up where Tesla employees share your in-car camera videos among each other, I'd rather have a product where I can limit who I need to trust, especially if I'm running something as sensitive as a government agency.
So who watches the Watchmen?
Do you remember all his promises about full self driving Teslas? He's one of the most honest and truthful people in the world, and has been for years.
You know what this is simply getting to idiotic now. Why are comments this daft and childish allowed here now? I know it's a "way of speaking" among certain trolling Trump/Musk supporters but it's so unfathomably shameless and idolising i'm not sure what's going on exactly.
If people like you are over 20 years old, then wow. "He's the most honest person in the world", literally come on now even if you believe in his way of doing things.
Why are you protecting Slack business?
Even at my company I was in charge to replace Slack because is damn expensive in comparison to other options like Teams or Rocket Chat.
Discord seems to be way better
Teams are good enough
The only thing better about teams is that it comes 'free' with Microsoft 365. Though you can now take that without it for about 1.50 per month less. But slack costs a lot more.
On paper they can do the same but slack is just so much better in terms of UX. Though i do hate that they dropped the IRC bridge. I have been active in slack communities a lot less as a result. I always have my IRC open but not slack.
It's not clear to me that you actually save money by using worse technology, if it takes more time to do stuff (after you've restarted teams three times to try to get share screen to work, for example).
Internalise the profits, externalise the negatives. It's what companies do but also what departments do within companies.
Discord seems to be way better
why would you compare Slack to half baked products that have only some of Slack's features?
Rocketchat is mostly a clone of Slack for a quarter of the price.
Teams may not be the exact solution but brings Sharepoint, OneDrive and Outlook into a same place. For most companies using Microsoft 365 is great as you can comply with security policies and easily collaborate and join meeting groups with other companies without extra accounts.
Slack works fine for engineering teams, but still very expensive and not much professional for the corporate world.
The journalists from Politico have just been ousted by DOGE has having had received $8 million in annual funding from USAID (another Government-run institution that has been ousted by the same DOGE), so I can understand how come Musk would want to keep DOGE's dealing away from journalists that might see this agency as very antithetic to their (the journalists') material well-being.
But, the sad part is, that this also means its an idea which is impossible to challenge, because you cant trust anyone who counters it.
I'm not "assuming", I know that for a fact.
> because you cant trust anyone who counters it.
Do you happen to live in a part of the Globe that has been under direct USAID (and NED) influence? Something tells me you don't, I do (I live in Eastern Europe), so allow me not to receive lessons from people who know nothing, absolutely nothing, about this type of organisations.
Also, where I'm from was historically on America's shit list. Still benefited from it.
The entire US govt did pay Politico about $8.2M, presumably in the form of buying their subscription products. Politico really does do deep-dive analysis behind a paywall, and I can see why government people might want access. (I have no idea how justified this is, honestly, but I wouldn't immediately dismiss it.)
This seems like a fair enough summary: https://www.axios.com/2025/02/05/politico-trump-musk-governm...
Or dig through https://www.usaspending.gov/recipient/fa0cefae-7cfb-881d-29c... yourself if you want, I guess. That site is super-overloaded at the moment, unfortunately.
I've yet to hear why this is a corrupt or inappropriate purchase. I might change my mind if I hear evidence on why this was an inappropriate contract, but right now this reeks of dictator-grade fear-targeting of political opponents.
This is why a government is supposed to have an independent judiciary. Or inspector generals who haven't been purged.
For what it's the worth the NGOs supported by American institutions like USAID have been raising hell accompanied by cries of "democracy is dying" when our Government here in Romania had done a similar thing, i.e. paying Government money to the local media (supposedly in order to advertise Government initiatives in said media).
So you can see how hypocritical this all seems to us, Eastern-Europeans, us who had been called naughty and worse for doing the same thing that organizations like USAID had been doing on their home-turf ($8 million, $24k, it doesn't really matter, the intention was there, we've had a former political leader thrown in jail for corruption/political influence that involved no money, so $0). Samantha Power and those that stood behind here deserve prison-time, the same prison-time that the NGOs that her organization supported had called for the corrupt leaders here in Romania.
LAter edit: Now that I've gone through that Axios article more at length, come on, they can't be serious with stuff like this:
> A fake theory about Politico being funded by the government is catching fire in right-wing circles
They call this "fake"? They call the Government actually giving money to Politico as "fake"? Pardon my French, by what the hell? What did they expect? For the Government to have written on said money: "this is corruption money"? Of course that the Government "bought" something from Politico, that's how it's done, that's how our corrupt government here in Romania is also doing it when it needs the media on its side. Again, the US "liberals" should smarten up, that's why they've lost last year's elections, because they though the rest of the populace as still being stupid, stupid enough to believe that the Government giving money to Politico is "fake".
To say nothing of the "right-wing" innuendo, for what it's worth I'm pretty left-wing, the "I want communist nationalizations" left-wing.
In this specific case, Politico is apparently worth over a billion dollars based on its sale in 2021, so I think that the US government giving it $8M would be a shit bribe and insufficient to hurt its independence. Based on its subscriber number boasts, it's getting at least $350M in annual subscription revenue. (Probably more, since I'm assuming the cheapest subscription there.) Would they care about a 2% drop in subscription revenue? Likely not enough for it to affect their coverage.
USAID spent $24k on those subscriptions.
Musk is full of shit. I have yet to see an example of such a claim that didn't end up being massively exaggerated or outright false.