Court Documents Shed New Light on DOGE Activity at Treasury Department | Hacker News Reader

Court Documents Shed New Light on DOGE Activity at Treasury Department

zetter-zeroday.com

104 pointsjbegley45 comments

This reads as a list of security fundamentals, however it is a "never at all acceptable" list; A blueprint for generating resume generating events. Nobody in a controlled environment could justify giving same-day hire developers write access to prod. Any mature financial institution would have asses hitting doors before the end of the day.

DOGE has shown how screwed up the balance between the 3 branches has gotten.

The executive should have the power to fire/remove executive associated departments/employees, obviously.

The executive should not be able to authorize drone strikes/war without congressional hearings (which has been occurring for decades at this point)

etc.

That ignores the history of how the government came to be run by a class of largely apolitical, professional bureaucrats.

The government used to turn over almost entirely with each administration. This wasn't good - the loss of institutional knowledge was largely thought to be harmful. So, the country decided to protect many of the bureaucrats, with only the top tier being political appointees.

Well, the problem is that they are not "largely apolitical".

They should be, but if they aren't, and if they are incapable of faithfully executing orders that go against their political preferences, they should be fired.

The loss of institutional knowledge is unfortunate, but the loss of democratic control over the bureaucracy is unacceptable.

Except that's largely not true - government agencies always (with very rare exception) implement the will of Congress, as directed by the President.

Never (in modern times) have rank-and-file government employees been required to pledge fealty to the president (vs the Constitution). That's happening now.

Never (in modern times) has the President purged massive swaths of agencies with whom he's had run-ins in the past (DoJ, FBI, etc). Or, in the case of USAID, it's Musk taking revenge because they had the nerve to investigate Starling outages over Ukraine.

Much of what we're seeing today is petty revenge.

> Except that's largely not true - government agencies always (with very rare exception) implement the will of Congress, as directed by the President.

That was indeed the norm. When Trump became President in 2017, things changed. It became politically acceptable to be political. [1]

I don't know why things changed. It coincided with a period of increasing political polarization, but some of it can only be described as Trump derangement syndrome.

What is clear is that things did change, and dramatically so. Unelected bureaucrats came to believe that their understanding of "the national interest" superseeded that of the elected President, and that that justified not just dissent, but insubordination and sabotage. Democracy cannot work like this.

What is happening now is the logical consequence of the short-sighted actions of these people 4-8 years ago.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house... / archived: https://archive.ph/jROnq

> It became politically acceptable to be political. [1]

Miles Taylor was a political appointee, not a nonpartisan career federal employee.

What do you mean by "The government" and "used to" here?

The executive branch.

How much of and what parts of the executive branch would turn over, and to what period are you referring?

The big change followed the Pendleton Act (passed following the assassination of Garfield by an upset donor). 1880s, with a steadily increasing percentage of professional bureaucrats (vs donors/friends) ever since.

OK. That only speaks to the fact that the government has grown. Your original point was about turnover. What I am driving at is surely, even going all the way back to 1880, mean that rank and file federal employees, until recently, turned over with every change in administration. Because that is what we’re talking about, not cabinet members or appointed positions.

I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make?

Prior to the 1880s, most of the government turned over with each administration. There largely was not a career bureaucratic class. Between the ending of patronage and the growth of the government, we collectively have added more protections for rank and file bureaucrats in order to keep stability. Trump and Musk are upending that tradition. The first post asserted Trump is within his rights to recompose the entire government as he sees fit. That simply isn’t true and ignores how we got here.

> The executive should have the power to fire/remove executive associated departments/employees, obviously.

I don't actually see why this is obvious. Firing employees, sure, good amount of leeway there, but I fail to see why an executive should "obviously" be able to remove or hamstring a department that the legislature has passed a law creating. The entire job of the executive is to "execute" on the agenda passed by the legislature. Removing or interfering with departments doing their job is the opposite of that.

> The executive should have the power to fire/remove executive associated departments/employees, obviously.

The executive has that power—with legal constraints on the how and in what circumstances it can be used. These constraints exist, in large part, because of widespread corruption and abuse before they existed, when executive branch positions top to bottom were both sold corruptly and used as currency to buy favors. (They also exist because of the fundamentl role of the executive is to execute laws; policy primacy rests in the legislature, and if it determines and puts in law that a department is to exist and serve a function, then the President’s job is to make sure that happens, not overturn it because he has other preferences.)

It is not an “imbalance” that the US is not set up as an executive dictatorship with an advisory legislature where Congress can pass laws but the executive branch is free not to execute them if it has other preferences.

GAO reported that there's over $200 B in fraudulent payments made a year, so it seems perfectly reasonable to let DOGE in and review that. It's new, it's messy, and unusual, but it's absolutely necessary.

Preventing fraud does not require allowing a 19 year old alleged cybercriminal have broad access to government systems.

There are more systematic, less disruptive ways to accomplish these goals.

Or, to put it a bit of hyperbole around it... "Burn it to the ground!" is rarely the best approach to changing a system that is largely working as intended.

I think there may be a false dichotomy in some people’s minds between a new emphasis on detecting fraud, and existing emphasis on maintaining the security of sensitive data and mission-critical systems.

This article shows at least some evidence that Treasury is actually trying to do both. And that existing security professionals have been involved in the process.

It's more nuanced than "let DOGE in and review that"

> Gioeli [told the court], however, that Elez may have "occasionally" taken screen shots of payment system data or records to share with a second DOGE employee working with him at Treasury

The problem is that there are legal definitions for fraud, but Trump and Musk are very prone to calling any spending they don't personally agree with "fraud".

The rule of law is important. This is not rule of law.

I don't question the need for an audit. I do question having a ketamine fueled oligarch and a rag-tag group of 20 year old software developers doing an audit, pretending audits take days, and somehow only finding things conservatives hate as waste/fraud.

But government agencies ARE audited!

EDIT - since apparently HN doesn't believe me, auditing the executive branch is one of the primary functions of the GAO. This started in 1997. And while DoD's finances are still extremely problematic, the government overall has made massive strides in making itself auditable and accountable. And there are very low levels of actual fraud being found. While statements like the "DoD failed it's audit" are technically true, it's not because fraud was uncovered - instead it's because of decades of poor accountability, a problem the government has been actively working on correctling for nearly 20 years.

Totally, the departmental audits happen yearly and are available to the public. It doesn't bother me if they want to do a separate audit but these aren't audits, aren't being performed by auditors, and are clearly just a partisan attack on our institutions.

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