FDA staff reviewing Musk's Neuralink were included in DOGE employee firings | Hacker News Reader

FDA staff reviewing Musk's Neuralink were included in DOGE employee firings

reuters.com

Look, it doesn’t matter Doge’s intentions here. It’s obviously a major conflict of interest to have authority to fire most federal angency employees, while maintaining ownership of multiple companies regulated by said employees & agencies. All it takes is a teeny “hey, make this regulation tweak that benefits Tesla and you keep your job,” and we’ve crossed from conflict of interest to corruption.

Even if you appreciate what Doge is doing, you cannot keep a straight face and tell me that Elon doesn’t stand to personally benefit massively from his changes. Because he obviously does. It’s a well known fact this kind of power corrupts, and we used to expect people with this kind of power to divest from their companies before taking power.

What the FUCK are people thinking defending this shit? This is “preventing political corruption” 101, people.

Elon must divest from his political power or his personal interests (companies). You can’t — shouldn’t — have both.

People on this website for years have defended cars driving into the bottoms of trucks, year long waits on basic car repairs, libel, etc because of the line that goes up on their stock holdings.

It's an interesting departure from the usual method of just hiring former regulators as a delayed reward for the corruption.

Which should also be illegal. It’s insane how much corporate money influences politics even outside of the more blatant stuff like this

https://archive.is/Qo634

Sources said they did not believe the employees were specifically targeted because of their work on Neuralink's applications.

Let's say someone is in charge of regulating one of Musk's companies. They know that layoffs are imminent. They know that Musk's people are telling the agencies who to lay off. They know that Musk is vindictive, and that he has access to all the agency personnel information. They know that the structures that are supposed to protect the civil service from partisan interference have been co-opted (see for instance, Trump firing the head of the agency that protects whistleblowers (OSC) and the head of the agency that federal workers can appeal to if they are fired for political reasons (MSPB), and that the administration is perfectly happy to lie and break federal law when it fires people (for instance, when it fired thousands of probationary employees for "performance" even though they had good performance evaluations).

Under those circumstances, is it reasonable to expect that a regulator is going to make any decision that's detrimental to one of Musk's companies, no matter how justified it might be?

Doesn’t matter if they were specifically targeted or not; conflict of interest either way

The only "source" who would know this is Musk himself, given the shallow hierarchy of DOGE.

Yeah I’m not sure how this action would be beneficial to Musk.

Getting rid of reviewers of his stuff does 2 things: the first is obscure any existing observations, the second is to increase the chance that a Musk-friendly person will be in this position later.

The only way this could cost him would be if the government retaliates, which there is clearly no appetite for (and he could probably fire the people perusing a response anyways).

Fear.

Fear of what?

Fear of being fired by unfavorably reviewing political allies of the current administration. A basic form of political corruption.

They’ve already been fired…

Sure, and now they can be replaced with regulators who are more “aligned” with Musk’s ideas — definitely no opportunity for Musk to make a decision that could make his companies billions.

Let’s stop defending this tech CEO wet dream of applying “move fast and break things” to the federal government.

That’s nor how hiring works in the federal government.

a few weeks ago if you described how firing is currently happening, almost anyone would have said "that's not how firing works in the federal government"

yet here we are

I would have described it this way. This is and always was a a way in which firing could happen. You zero a budget and they people under it are let go.

Hiring necessarily has more steps involved.

How did Marko Elez get re-hired.

not all of them; what is happening is retaliation to previous decisions and a strong-arm to any whom are left to cater to their wants vs properly, fully doing their jobs, or be "randomly" fired in cuts. i put randomly in air quotes cuz we're all just plebs and will never know the full truth

I used to joke about the previous administration having an office in the prosecutors office where the message on calling them would go something like this: brrrring, brrrring, Hi you have reached the federal prosecutors department, elon division, to report that he said something bad please press 1, for bieng arogant while filthy rich 2, to make a baseless allegation 3.... whatever right! thing is that it is political infighting that has gotten out of hand, and all pretext of playing by the rules was gone, long ago.And that left a legal vacume, and lack of any current practice that is legitimate to point to. Elon is not responsible for the conditions he is exploiting.

Elon is partly responsible for the conditions he is exploiting. He was an active participant in pushing to get all sorts of "special" treatment.

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