DOGE as a National Cyberattack
schneier.com
schneier.com
There is a difference between elected officials doing stupid or insecure things vs. unelected people being able to do this without any checks and balances.
(Off topic: I’m upvoting this post to counter the flagging that seems to be going on for all posts on this topic. I respect Bruce Schneier and his opinions on several things.)
Which boggles the mind when you compare it to what's going on right now.
Isn't the Treasury dept and most of the federal employees with access to this data unelected as well? They are appointed or hired as government officials and civil servants.
>. Article II, Section 2 empowers the President to nominate and, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to appoint the principal officers of the United States, as well as some subordinate officers .
Yes, there is a process: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R44083/6
> ...without any checks and balances
i.e. what they're doing is completely insecure and exposing incredibly sensitive data.
That said, I don't think this should be flagged, that seems counter free-speech. He's got plenty of other well voted articles here on HN, a lot of HN clearly value his insights. Disagreement would be better expressed as a comment rather than trying to make it go away.
However my theory is the goal is to actually train on what is essentially the output of all of these departments.
I honestly think what we are seeing in terms of the tech execution side basically boils down to BigBalls and co. asking an LLM what they should do next. If they ever get prosecuted I'd bet you good money that will be the defense...ROFL.
The problem with framing it that way is that it's a request to get flagged by the opposing partisans even if there is some point to be made about maintaining change control etc.
Blindly following Trump is partisan.
Pretending Trump cares about waste isn't just silly its ridiculous and should be dismissed out of hand.
Trying to characterize undifferentiated resistance to the leader of a party as non-partisan seems like a stretch.
> Resisting illegal acts causing damage yo the nation is not in any way partisan.
There are so many laws that basically everything is now illegal. If you want "illegal" to mean something you'd first need a legal system in which a non-zero number of people exist who follow the laws.
Choosing which laws to care about in a partisan way is partisan.
> Pretending Trump cares about waste isn't just silly its ridiculous and should be dismissed out of hand.
This is your non-partisan argument?
Has nothing to do with party, has a lot to do with authoritarianism and opposing destruction of the government. many people resisting Trump have been Republicans far longer then he has and have more invested in it then he does. See former Republican Colorado head of state senate and head of state house https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norma_Anderson
I personally am a democrat and a mildly to moderately partisan one buy opposition to Trump isn't partisan.
> Choosing which laws to care about in a partisan way is partisan.
Trying to compare laws against Jaywalking or pot to those against government malfeasance and corruption is ridiculous.
> This is your non-partisan argument?
Yes. Its based on facts not on partisanship. Trump is the most corrupt president we've ever had.
He welcomes the government spending stuff on him or his buddies. He sold access ay Margo Largo and not jusy for campaign contributions.
Also the closest he got to compromise was on the stupid and wasteful wall debacle, which was not stopped by democrats or concerns about waste but by resistance to even minor concessions wrt Dreamers.
I also don't find this part necessarily bad but Trump is less opposed to spending wasteful or not wasteful then previous Republican politicians.
The core of the problem might go to his "redefinition" of waste. Where a could of million specifically going towards minority groups or the environment (even when i5 has obvious value) is the swamp, while billions going towards corrupt implementation of a stupid and pointless thing like the wall are not waste.
Destruction of the government would be something like suspending elections or the executive using the military to disappear judges who make unfavorable rulings.
Destruction of the federal administrative state is fairly well inside the Republican platform at this point. It's what they said they were going to do and then people voted for them so now they're trying to do it.
> See former Republican Colorado head of state senate and head of state house
Parties change and then people change parties. "Former Republican opposes Republican" is the thing you'd expect them to do as implied by the word "former".
> Trying to compare laws against Jaywalking or pot to those against government malfeasance and corruption is ridiculous.
The laws against jaywalking or pot don't even scratch the surface. They're just the ones people know they're violating.
People have this problem where the law is supposed to specify ahead of time what is and isn't illegal, but doing that is hard and people also hate it when somebody is doing something they don't like but it turns out that thing isn't illegal. So what they've been doing, for a long time, is passing a lot of laws broad enough to encompass common behavior and then only enforcing them when somebody offends them, or rocks the boat.
There is also a variant of this for politicians where they pass a law that sounds good, and should be enforced against everyone, but is set up in such a way that enforcement is hard without the cooperation of insiders. So a politician is not allowed to solicit a bribe, but if someone pays them and then they pass a law that the someone likes, that's just fine, and if the bribe was solicited off-camera then neither of them have any incentive to report it because they both want the arrangement to continue. Which is how you get this:
> Trump is the most corrupt president we've ever had.
The amount of corruption in Washington is staggering. The place runs on it. The primary difference with Trump is that he has no shame.
It would be great if something was done about this, but nobody wants to throw the first stone because of all the glass houses, and targeting only Trump while ignoring all the rest of it is evidence of not liking Trump rather than not liking corruption.
> I also don't find this part necessarily bad but Trump is less opposed to spending wasteful or not wasteful then previous Republican politicians.
The true measure of this is whether government spending goes up or down during their administration, and by this measure every President of every party has been failing for generations.
But this is also the first time in a while that anything like DOGE has even been seriously attempted, and it's plausible that at least Musk wants it to actually do the thing. The real test is what they remove from the budget in a few months.
this is really your best retort? Just dismissing 250 years of the constitution, interpretations of the constitution, case studies, and various federal laws passed along the way?
Fine, let's throw away everything except the good old constitution... it's still illegal in 1790.
>Under Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 of the Constitution , Congress is granted the power to lay and collect taxes in order “ to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States. ”
These aren't some niche pockets of local law being defied here.
> To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;
> To provide and maintain a Navy;
Which wouldn't make much sense given that they're in the same article and were passed at the same time.
But let's suppose we're talking about a law where Congress is allocating tax money to something within their enumerated powers. Then that money goes to the executive. It would be pretty hard to argue that the executive could then spend the money on something else, but what if they don't spend it at all? Congress gave them money with the condition that they do a particular thing with it, and they don't want the money? It's not obviously true that they're required to take it, and would be consistent with the notion of checks and balances that they could turn it down.
> "Chesterton's fence" is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...
Doesn't matter how well you trace the behavior, you will hit some random quirk in your refactor because of some incocuous hotfix done over a decadde ago by an employee who no longer works there somehow keeping the entire repository from crashing in on itself. If you're lucky, there will be a:
//todo fix this (10/10/2013)
somewhere as a hint ;)
Would you even be able to trust the hardware anymore? If it's already compromised then it's safer to assume it goes deep (firmware).
it is somewhat “easy” to run against an incumbent, especially one as fradulent as Biden (not to mention Kamala…) but when you are an incumbent THE BUCK STOP with you. while portion of the US electorate is dumb beyond repair they alone are not enough to win an election. if shit isn’t right come 2026 and 2028 the blame-everyone-else-nothing-is-ever-my-fault Donald will suffer the ass kicking much worse than 2018 and especially 2020 when he got demolished by a senile corrupt lifelong politician grandpa Joe
Sad part is people will forget about that too, even though they are currently cheering on "government efficiency".
What's baffling is Trump seems to be fumbling the autocrat's handbook at first glance. There are existing autocrats still around that wrote the book on this. Purging the administrative state requires multi-term government domination. First, you're supposed get the economy or quality of life on track ASAP so you can cement your (or you successor's) seat at the top. Then you use the power the people voluntarily give you over multiple terms to dismantle any checks on your power while lining the pockets and minds of your base. After that, even if the economy tanks you've boiled the frog of resistance in such a way that no one can dethrone you. And then you start designing the opposition in such a way so that there's semblance of "political freedom" you can point to when people start whining about it.
Trump seems to be going about it in reverse. First feeding his base instead of focusing on the economy -- which is a higher risk strategy comparatively. But it hasn't even been a month yet so there is still time for him to start following the handbook properly.
EDIT:
I should add, this consequence should be legislative or legal in nature.
By modifying core systems, the attackers have not only compromised current operations, but have also left behind vulnerabilities that could be exploited in future attacks—giving adversaries such as Russia and China an unprecedented opportunity. These countries have long targeted these systems. And they don’t just want to gather intelligence—they also want to understand how to disrupt these systems in a crisis.
It's really hard to imagine this whole coup isn't some type of Russian / Chinese attack on the western world at this stage. It's too unbelievably good for them to just be a coincidence.
I remember all the posters here expressing their belief that Doge would do nothing and was just an advisory role.
Hopefully the voters come to their mind in the next election, and hope it's not too late.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/u-s-inflation-increases...
And yet those people are so quiet at best. At worst they think "it has to get worse before it gets better".
But yes, I do wish some signifigant portion of the voter base would simply inquire one step further on their represenatives. Trump had no action plans for this, and when sworn in he passed 100 EO's and left Inflation as "tbd". Still is, as far as I know.
Even during campaigning the republicans literally warned people their vision would incur economy hardships but that it would be worth it in the long run.
I get the frustration that the price of daily goods was too high but the incumbents did present an actual feasible plan to deal with it. So I’m not really sure it was about “the economy”.
Anyway everything outlined in this article seemed pretty likely to happen, they literally told people their plans ?
As usual, it's about the allocation of surplus value.
The US has enjoyed a great economy over the past four years, and really, even longer. I'm in my 30s and most of my life has been marked by economic expansion. The problem comes from the fact that we take all of the money generated by that economic expansion and pipe it to shareholders instead of labor. The average person cannot live solely off the returns from their equity investments; they have to work in order to pay bills. That work essentially started buying less over the last half-decade.
Now, is that partially because of the Biden administration? Yes. Any time you print money, it devalues the money that already exists.
But it's also, and more fundamentally, the fault of the first Trump administration. The PPP, funded with printed money, was a massive subsidy to upper-middle class Americans, and 35-ish years of GOP revenue policy made sure it has to be printed. The US had no reserves of cash to pay for an emergency like COVID. Why? Because we haven't had a real federal tax discussion since George HW Bush said "read my lips: no new taxes".
That, of course, doesn't matter: the buck stops at the Oval Office, and Biden didn't have the likely personality disorder necessary to shove the buck back in people's faces on the order that Trump does. Neither did Harris. So back to the "glory" years of 2016-2019 we go, reckless monetary policy and all.
2) People never want the bad things, which is why voters tend to ignore information that tells them that things will be bad.
People didnt realize that Biden had stepped down after the election. Voters were not aware that Obamacare and the ACA are the same thing.
Information that this was going to happen, was shared, repeated and told over and over again.
This is basically leopards-eating-face territory.
Sugar coating it, leaving people berefet of their own authorship of their life, of their choices? I have no idea how that results in anything other than a way to feel nice about each other.
young people are too poor and dont have much to lose.
They wanted a break from the status quo, some new faces, other than DC establishment in power, and Trump is delivering on that demand
Unless the youth of today are that dumb.
This is the most important one, once we get to the bottom of who created virus that killed millions and caused tens of trillions in economic damage, it will cause other more significant events.
Another one, how he explained the nature behind the Ukraine war, and how military industrial complex is stealing US government money and profiting off of artificially prolonging the Ukraine-Russia war[3]. Everyone called him conspiracy theorist, when he said BlackRock, Monsanto, DuPont have bought Ukrainian land, turns out it was true.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Real_Anthony_Fauci
2. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd9qjjj4zy5o
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWowuHMvpzUI completely get being rebellious. But is any of this "fun" for them? Just saying they are nihilistic makes more sense at this point.
The Democrat party can blame the other side for being stupid, or they can blame themselves for losing, what could have been a slam dunk election win, had they understood and addressed the concerns of the voter base.
Maybe I'm still naive, but I believe maybe 30-40% (At least) of trump voters simply 1) really wanted immprovements in their lives or 2)thought any pf the negatives of trump would not happen to them. Trump got the simple votes and discorded such people promptly. We'll see how long they, one by one, realize such a fact.
Likewise, I doubt that many supporters voted with the idea that Trump would be put back in as a Sino-Ruso puppet. They would dimiss any such talk as conspiracy, no matter how many calls he makes/takes from Putin and how many docs he mishandles.
At some point, enough destruction will have happened where the tools for useful government functionality no longer exist in usable capacity.
They fully intend to cause a constitutional crisis on purpose. It's all in plain sight, in their own words. America will get what it voted for.
The last ten years have been an exercise in "they will be in jail" without any one of import actually going to jail.
Hell, not many have even been arrested.
I'd argue these kids won't "be of import" in the long scheme of things. Maybe in future software ethics/security classes at best. I sadly don't think Musk will ever be in a jailcell, but I'll settle for him never stepping foot in a federal facility again.
Should it be?
Its illegal for a reason. The only good counterargument I've seen is that it might encourage worse actions to try to evade punishment.
But if blood is spilt, it'll slow things down in ways congress seems unable to do. Not stop, but slow down.
> The assessment, done by the contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, came before Treasury tapped an ally of Elon Musk to oversee the sensitive payment system.
* https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-s...
"A US Treasury Threat Intelligence Analysis Designates DOGE Staff as ‘Insider Threat’":
* https://www.wired.com/story/treasury-bfs-doge-insider-threat...
The report was later walked back:
> The government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton on Friday night said it had dismissed a subcontractor who prepared a draft report saying that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency access to the Treasury’s payment system poses an “unprecedented insider threat risk” and should be suspended immediately.
* https://archive.is/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2...
Considering that these are payment systems, how can they be used during wartime
Essentially yes. Certain users are flagging because they don't want any discussion related to DOGE on HN. See for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43036254.
There is no running away from certain conversations, especially when your information ecosystem is intentionally made partisan. The flavor of american political discourse is architechtured to achieve very clear rhetorical and emotional goals.
At best, HN can choose how it wants to handle the schism. For that everyone needs to realize it is coming.
Are you talking about HN or the constitution and our resultant system of government?
> In the span of just weeks, the US government has experienced what may be the most consequential security breach in its history
Which is a ridiculous level of hyperbole and just factually not even close to accurate. Solarwinds, the 2014 OPM breach, snowden leaks, chelsea manning leaks, the DNC email leak, moonlight maze - there's a massive list of real, consequential security incidents that are nowhere nearly as bad as Elon and whatever his dumb team are doing.
There are any number of places people can talk about this but the same is true of literally anything that gets discussed here. What value does HN ever add? What's ever the benefit of sharing something here?
Personally speaking this is the number one place I want to see these conversations happen because I have a deep respect for the technical understanding of my peers here. It's disturbing that at such an important juncture in history so many people are jumping up to say "go elsewhere, there's nothing of value for you here."
I have been looking for such a post since last week!
And this is hacker news, the exact site that is absolutely about this. We haven't even gotten to the part where people see the actual code that has been slung around here.
Here is a quote from NPR:
"The USDS launched in 2014 by the Obama administration in the aftermath of the botched rollout of HeathCare.gov as an office to boost the digital capabilities of the federal government. It has operated like a digital strike team of sorts, recruiting private sector experts in design and technology to work collaboratively with federal agencies on projects that make public-facing parts of the government more efficient, modern and user-friendly."
Link: https://www.npr.org/2025/01/29/nx-s1-5270893/doge-united-sta...
See, they said the FRAMEWORK was created by Obama.
In these cases, just jump to the end, and if possible go a step further. The Dems couldn't be corrupt efficiently! They created this framework, and didn't use it to drain the swamp?? See, the dems are always wrong.
(Underlying any such point is an emotional fear, that the country was brought to the bring by liberals and democrats. This is what is actually triggering the nation wide fight or flight response. Address this)
As you pointed out, they made this Framework, They had it since the Obama era! And they never used it like Trump/Musk are.
What fools! IF they had, who knows where we might be today.
(Things are really dire when I need to make a 2nd amendment appeal as a metaphor for a government system).
These discussions are not about logic or facts. They are about emotions and content.
Most people are arguing from conclusions.
I won’t go into why “the dems are wrong” is a conclusion, or why it’s so common - it’s just got that feel of being right.
But by jumping to the end, there’s a chance to break the endless cycle of arguments online. Or at least have some fun with it.
When you jump to the end, the current argument is the same as the conclusion, creating cognitive dissonance, and often forcing the brain to actually engage to understand what’s going on.
In your example - you are saying that the dems were good. They didn’t use the knife to kill.
This only leads to more argument. Consensus depends on the other side agreeing that not killing people is good.
Which they can’t, because - see point 1. Arguing from conclusions.
So they will be forced to take more complex positions, carve out exceptions and generally create frustration.
well, I'm a democrat but I never cared much for "hurting people's feelings" on the internet when I'm simply posting comparisons and links. I purposely try to involve as little of the user into my arguments as possible: I'm attacking their argument, not them.
I'm ultimately to others, a piece of text on the internet with a semi-anonymous handle. There is very little I can do to cheer people up. It is a magnitude harder to make people happy on the internet than making people mad. I'm already at a disadvantadge by not having a face attached to my words.
>it’s just got that feel of being right.
Likewise, I don't stop at "it feels right" when I scrutinize myself. I introspect and say "why do I feel good/bad from this" and I've overtime gotten good at elaboring on my feelings. Sometimes I even defuse myself when I realize my feelings aren't rational. I don't like riling myself up over trivial issues. Not when theres so many non-trivial issues in my life to deal with.
>In your example - you are saying that the dems were good. They didn’t use the knife to kill.
I never explicitly said the dems were good. But yes, the assumption from many people are "making food and clothes is good. This is a good tool". But the knife is a tool and a tool is as good as its weilder. Whether it was effective is a much ore subjective argument.
>This only leads to more argument. Consensus depends on the other side agreeing that not killing people is good.
Well those are not people I engage in discussion with. I know these topics are polarized but I still am trying to maintain the ethos of HN in exploring curiosity. People who simply want to preach is not someone to see curiosity from. Likewise, a closed mind with their conclusion set is not someone who's ready to discuss.
It seems to be decreasing as of late. But I "discussed" on Reddit for years and year, and even on 4chan. It's like a gold rush, but reading those few times where you actually convince someone, you get convinced of a point, or you simply have an insightful comment chime in does give me hope in discussions like this.
Why? What are you fundamentally working towards?
Is it to argue for your own benefit? If so then this makes sense.
If it is to convince the other person, then what matters is understanding them and how to get to them.
>It seems to be decreasing as of late.
You seem like a person who aims to be thoughtful. I will speak from my own actions - I anticipated and called this escalation out, probably a decade ago by now.
I am not very smart. If this is obvious to me, it should be obvious to any other thinking person, perhaps after moving some assumptions around.
This is how I work to continue to communicate and uphold my principles, in an environment that is changing.
If something ceases to work, and to repeat the behavior, is .. well its many things, but lets call it frustrating.
So I ask again - what is the point? You end with the goal of convincing someone.
I won't urge you to use my techniques, or my crack brained approach.
But is it fair to point out to you - that something is rotten in the state of Denmark, that people are increasingly immunized to our typical attempts at reason?
If you agree so, and if you also believe in the spirit of inquiry, the search for truth and the pursuit of progress (lots of "ifs"), then would it be a stretch to say new tools, approaches are needed?
(Side note - I read tons of stuff on misinformation, indoctrination, and communities. So I am not exactly completely flying high without a tether)
The questions include: is the strike team in question being transparent, is it violating any laws, is it protecting data in the way the law requires, is the team composed of people who have been vetted at a level corresponding to the access they've been granted, are any of them potentially compromised or plausibly so, does anyone on the team have conflicts of interest, is there oversight and auditability of their actions?
The reason, I think, these are good questions is simply that these are things we should demand of our public servants, regardless of political affiliation.
Tesla's valuation is 10x the rest of the Magnificent 7, obviously investors think his ties to government are worth something.
(edit- valuation means i.e. P/E ratio; I saw the chart about 2 weeks ago so forget the exact valuation metric)
Closing USAid isn't anything to do with Tesla etc - this is just a rich kid showing how powerful he is.
What he's getting is worth way more than money.
https://oig.usaid.gov/node/6814
Going after the Treasury, given that X is moving into finance?
https://fortune.com/2025/02/13/elon-musk-doge-cfpb-x-payment...
1. https://www.npr.org/2025/02/13/g-s1-48571/trump-administrati... 2. https://time.com/7221880/state-department-2025-procurement-f...
On the other hand it'd be strange to see that no one involved in corruption that DOGE tries to reveal would do something to attack it.
See Europe's fossilization, accelerated by the fact that we have put an administration of bureaucrats over countries to add one layer of rules. I'd love a DOGE in Eurppe because our administrations can only be cut brutally, like the Gordian knot. That may destroy some good things, but I'll happily pay that to get rid of the bad things.
I do think so. But we need proper leaders voted in first. We've been quite horrible at that, to be frank. But I guess it represents us: a political gridlock too busy fighting each other (often o petty issues) to proper come together and identify what's actually wrong in our lives.
> See Europe's fossilization, accelerated by the fact that we have put an administration of bureaucrats over countries to add one layer of rules
you mean the institution where a bad fall doesn't put you in debt? That mandate 30 days vacation a year? that doesn't just roll over and let technocrats steal and sell your data without consent?
Yea, caring for one another is such a fossilized concept.
>I'd love a DOGE in Eurppe because our administrations can only be cut brutally, like the Gordian knot. That may destroy some good things, but I'll happily pay that to get rid of the bad things.
I'll put this in your language: you're esssentially trying to make a proposal to a business to shut down its main product while your engineering team takes time to make a new, efficient product that guarantees a 10x ROI.
Now, maybe there's a chance you're right. But there's no way in high hell any business would ever agree to that. You may be willing to pay, but you're not the only one paying. That reboot will lose shareholder value, piss off and permanently turn off customers, and may even make you vulnerable to security breaches. It makes no sense.
Meanwhile, we can simply revisit our lovely fence and start things off the right way. You can make your own module and show how efficient it is before deprecating the old one. and you repeat that until you fully optimized the legacy code. There was no shutdown, you worked incrementally to prove your changes worked, and satisfied customers along the way. That's all I'm suggesting for such an "efficiency" process here.
Do not conflate "being efficient" that I was suggesting, and "being mean" that I never suggested. I don't think that social security is a bad concept. And anyway we'll probably all need UBI when AIs are more efficient than us at everything. Btw, conflating these two concepts of "efficient" and "mean" is one of the roots of Europe's fall.
> You can make your own module and show how efficient it is before deprecating the old one.
Are you suggesting doing A/B testing with laws? Maybe you were trying again to "put this in [my] language", but your proposal sounds delusional. A country's not a product, you can't have two parallel versions.
No agency would voluntarily modernize systems, which would inevitably reduce head count and put half of them out of jobs. This has been a on-going fight for 30 years. Every politician who previously tried to modernize agencies failed due to intense internal resistance.
Everyone in tech clearly fell on the modernization side. This is what many of us wanted since the 90s. Finally happening. In real time. Headed by one of the greatest tech disrupters since probably Edison. Now they act like the sky is falling?
I can’t find any steel-man argument against DOGE. No modernization plan proposed the traditional way through committees, consultants, contractors, has worked or will EVER work. You have to rip off the bandaid the hard way.
Only explanation I have for those opposing this is some combination of personality derangement spread by nefarious interests, financial incentive, or some crazy model of the world that glorifies bureaucratic power as some fundamental right enshrined in constitution.
Imagine being on the side of the Empire and trying to stop the rebels as they infiltrate the Death Star.
it's already happening. Does it have to literally already be on fire to see it?
>he federal government is not going to disappear due to 20% spending reduction
Yes, that's more than enough to throw the country into chaos, 20% of 2024 spending is 1.3 TRILLION dollars.
I don't think you understand how much money "20%" is in this scale.
>Reducing spending from ~$6T/year to ~$4T/year is not the end of government, which is the explicitly stated goal of DOGE.
1. depends on where we make the cuts. 20% from the military? Maybe we'll be fine. 20% from Social security? There will be blood in the streets. Even the most diehard trump supporter won't like their income being reduced out of nowhere.
2. where do you think that 2 trillion dollars is going? Hint: we're not getting it. They are reducing spending by not taxing billionaires as much. So no, we're not paying off a defecit, Corporate America isn't paying its share.It will still increase and nothing was accomplished. Just the rich getting richer.
Why does no one see this coming?
However, your views read like propaganda.
The "internal resistance" you refer to is simply people trying to follow the law, while being constantly whipsawed by changing political winds. We see similar stories here on HN about work in large corporations. What do you think it is like in an org with 2.2 MILLION employees, where their actions have the power of government behind them often including access to extremely sensitive information?
HN talked about leaking any Youtuber's contact information for 10K, with suggestions that Google should better protect people's data.
HN frequently talks about the dangers of non-accountability for police. Would you like that same non-accountabilty spread to all aspects of the Federal government? (if so, merry christmas because now you have it)
If you cannot find any steel-man arguments against DOGE, may I suggest that you read the remainder of this HN article?
This is why I flag all articles on DOGE/etc, because genuine conversation is assumed to be in bad faith.
Expecting someone to read an article having an obvious propaganda hit-piece title like "DOGE as a National Cyberattack" is silly.
Would you read an article titled "technology is the mark of the beast" and take your time to debate its merits?
I personally hold the belief that DOGE and president Trump are acting in good-faith to keep his campaign promises as best as they're able, in a messy and tumultuous environment.
At the same time, I have a lot of empathy for the great number of people that are afraid and hurting right now for a multitude of reasons. People are facing food/job/business insecurity, genuine threats to various core ideological beliefs, an environment of fear and uncertainty for many affected people, threats to the desired direction of our laws and societal moral compass, etc. I hurt for those affected, and I do what I can within my spheres of influence to help.
I don't see why we can't have an honest conversation with each other without assuming that the other is operating in bad-faith. I think BOTH sides should stop using propaganda, and start LISTENING to each other, that eventually we might determine paths forward together without cancelling each other.
I don't really think this argument merits a comparison to "technology is the mark of the beast" or that the only people that can be opposed to DOGE suffers from "personality derangement" or "glorifies bureaucratic power"
"We audited ourselves" typically doesn't fly, so no, I'd say not a reasonable position. Someone external has to do it, and DOGE is the one tasked by the president to do so.
The outrage is because they’re taking a lot of risk and clearly treating it as a political exercise when it shouldn’t be.
Same with ICE raids. People are upset because they built their house on sand and have to start again. Businesses are upset because they can't get around labour laws
I find it funny that you're getting downvoted though. Maybe in a few years it'll all blow over
>I think BOTH sides should stop using propaganda
Well you proved it right here. You're "both sides"-ing this when the responsibiliry and power at the moment is horribly disproprtionate. It isn't at all. We can throw all the links we want, but I've yet to see any "liberal propaganda" posted in response to suggest that Democrats are "playing dirty".
If we can't even talk about objective facts like "Musk retaliated on Judges who gave him court order", then we can't talk much. We're not in the same reality and facts like that aren't even denied by Musk. You're defending someone who is outright saying "I want to take down the courts". He isn't even defending himself.
What facts are you basing this on? Have you worked at one of those agencies? Do you have reason the believe that the many agencies whose senior leadership have asked Congress to fund modernization programs were being disingenuous?
If not, consider that the people who told you this were not acting in good faith and had motives other than government efficiency.
The IRS is notable because they’ve been requesting funding for modernization since the 90s.
This is speculative based on an idea that you have about what must be true. It can be shown to be untrue by one example: NASA, NOAA, and other agencies now host applications and data in a cloud environment. Before this, they were hosted at various NASA data centers. You can now search for, download, and operate on data in the cloud. In contrast, twenty-five years ago someone was required to order a physical magnetic tape. They could have kept those systems running, but they didn't.
This, by way of the same example in my sibling comment, is also not true.
If you're interested, I could give you some reasons, and other commenters here already have done so.
Its pretty clear and calm, from an expert on the subject.
Read the article at the least. He had earned that much of our trust - and yours, if I am not mistaken.
We don’t have to like what he says. He just has to be right.
1. yes, we do. DOGE was renamed from Obama Appointed DSA, which inevitably reduced other agencies as we centralized IT. How about you be specific and suggest what agencies are past their usefulness?
1.5 but no. The government doesn't just lay off people. They tend to move people around for their work when their old resposibilities decline. The government is not a tech company trying to maximize profit.
2. that's why we have actual audit agencies. Each agency audits itself and then the GOA is the government's general auditor.
>Everyone in tech clearly fell on the modernization side
Not necessarily, because again: the government isn't a tech company. And that's a good thing. You can't move fast and break the treasury. That's how you cause the next stock market crash.
>Headed by one of the greatest tech disrupters since probably Edison. Now they act like the sky is falling?
Yes, because you just equated a businessman in tech who's never touched anything in the domain to one of the most important innovators in history.
Read up on your history and Tell me Musk is some tech visionar. You may not have noticed, but this isn't 2017 anymore and Musk's persona has long faded. He's not exactly hailed here as a tech genius anymore
>I can’t find any steel-man argument against DOGE.
You're not looking then. How about this: they are breaking the law. A lot. And then antagonizing judges who reel them in.
Ignore everything else; how can you excuse this? What's the steelman argument around "well it's okay to break the law?" this isn't civil disobediance (quite the contrary), lives were not in danger at the OPM, USAID, and Treasury. What is your justification? How far does this need to go before you'd admit that they are breaking too many laws.
>Only explanation I have for those opposing this is some combination of personality derangement
You say this and wonder why we cannot have a civil conversation? A conversation is two way. Statements like this is inflammatory and preaching.
> or some crazy model of the world that glorifies bureaucratic power as some fundamental right enshrined in constitution.
If you even care, my viewpoint is this: your solutions change as your problem scales. inevitably, larger problem spaces need more time and nuance to resolve.
exmaple 1: is it okay for me to go back to my toy renderer and rewrite it from scratch? Yes. No one's using it, I know the scope of the code, and sometimes when you visit old code like that, it's best for me to just start over. I got my value out of that code (and my first job!)
example 2: I'm contracted to work on some existing project. They put abou a year into it. You want to rewrite from scratch. Is that okay? It can really go either way. Maybe the code is truly horrible and you're experienced enough to handle this rewrite. it works out. Maybe the work needed is minor and you're basically working against their best interests. They may resist without a good reason, not hire you on, reduce your pay for the contract, etc. You won't simply get your way without some sort of credentials or reasoning. But it may be the right call.
Example 3: I'm working at a multibillion dollar company and am touching a 15 year old codebase with 10m+ lines of code. You dont like a certain system and offer to optimize it (let's say you worked here a year). Will you get approved? Absolutely not. You need to at best go through a huge procedure to even get access to that part of the repo, propose a very smart plan, and then implement it slowly. Then you'll talk with various stakeholders for each commit. It maybe would take you a month if you went in yourself. It ends up taking a year of discussions and iteration.
So, the government is example 3. Is the right call to ignore your lead, product managers, release managers, and build engineers and put in your code, break the version contol, and jam in your barely tested code into Prod? I fail to see how any result short of multiple miracles keeping you from not only being fired, but blacklisted locally from any other software firm in that area. If you broke it enough, you may even be retaliated against for damages to the business. No programmer would sympathize with that.
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So, back to reality; why am I seeing people celebrate not only all of the above, but then threaning your boss's life for doing their job and keeping you from destroying the business? Why am I being called "deranged" for being aware of my data and not appreciating it being accessed without my consent, for no good reason (what is my social security going to do to fix the government? Request as little data as you need for your function)?
Using your odd comparison, Why would I sit by while someone destroys the death star? I'm in the Death Star (I don't know why, but I'm rolling with it)! I don' have a Pod Racer to get off like the rebels do. They are trying to kill me! Why is self-preservation derangement now?