Treasury agrees to block DOGE's access to personal taxpayer data at IRS
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
(and the fact that the executive branch can be sued out of their pants for civil damages).
if the government agrees to allowing itself to be sued...
> The USAID systems the DOGE team tried to access included personnel files and security systems, including classified systems beyond the security level of at least some of the DOGE employees, according to three of the sources. The systems also included security clearance information for agency employees, two of the sources said.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/usaid-sec...
So some agency, authorized by the president or not, barging in asking for read/write access to card numbers should not be allowed, because the data aren’t the president’s to give.
Same should be valid for social security numbers. You can’t guarantee that 100% of DOGE’s employees are benign, or that they are have the best opsec, or that their devices are not exploitable (or exploited already). So you minimize this attack surface by minimizing access.
Because if anything happens, then you can be 100% certain that Musk/Trump will not voluntarily answer for it/make people whole. They will at best be taken to court where they will fight for years while the victims suffer the consequences in the present.
So you do everything you can to prevent this nebulous, blameless “we meant well, we couldn’t know this would happen, we’re sorry for all the pain, let’s move forward together” outcome.
Since the president and members of Congress are not posted up in there 24/7, the IRS has created internal controls and procedures so that when the president or Congress asks for a report, the IRS can give them an accurate one. It’s these controls that people are thinking of. The article has an example:
> Political officials do not have access to the Integrated Data Retrieval System, or IDRS. The IRS’s commissioner, national taxpayer advocate and even senior officials in the office of the chief information officer, do not have IDRS access either.
“Do not have access” in this case means they have made internal rules, essentially denying themselves access, in order to better document that they are doing what Congress wants them to do.
This is true in many agencies, and one of the concerns with DOGE is that they seem to be trying to circumvent these controls. That may impair the ability of an agency to meet their legislative mandate (e.g. protecting taxpayer privacy), and also impair the agency’s ability to even document what they are doing.
So the answer to “what oversight” is that Congress ultimately has the power of oversight, and the executive branch has the responsibility to operate in such a way that they can accurately satisfy requests from Congress.
Probably you wouldn't do that.
I do understand why this administration is trying very hard to centralize authority because it's faster than vetting a bunch of people they can trust to act on their behalf. But on the other hand federal employees making it as hard as possible to do what they perceive as bad/immoral is a soft-check on the executive.
In fact, if you were a cto and you carried out this request without any kind of due diligence or vetting, you'd probably be legally and criminally liable for it.
The same applies to anyone under the cto management (so basically all IT); they don't respond to the ceo, their top boss is the cto. I know, in smaller companies, where the ceo is also the owner, there is a tendency to confuse the boundaries of the roles - in my experience, it is up to the cto to politely deny these requests and educate the ceo on the "why"; if he still wants to move forward, he can hire another cto
Why
Their sense of world order requires there be a shadowy threat actor such as Russia or China, instead of the obvious truth that this is American capitalism operating as designed.
"Requires a shadowy threat actor such ad Russia and..."? Trump is trying to normalize US-Russian relations.
"This is American capitalism operating as designed" - Honestly what do you mean?
Trump and Musk's reforms looks different enough from anything else tried in the last 25 years that I am super curious to see where it goes. I'm not into fear porn that this is the end of the world, H*tler, or whatever.
I'm also curious about Billionaires being independently evil - what do you mean, are virtually all billionaires evil? Are they really morally worse people than the average or do they just have access to more resources and influence?
Are you are okay with Trump splitting Ukraine with Russia and blessing Russia's war on Ukraine?
There are historical parallels with Hitler annexing other countries. You not being into that reality is a choice.
Things will get better once more brown people are at Guantanamo. /s
Arbitrarily firing arbitrary amounts of federal employees on the belief that this will make the gov't function better? Are you also currently in talks to buy the Brooklyn Bridge?
Take CCP is an example to form an emotional attachment to.
DOGE has enough real problems that we don't need to cry wolf about its hypothetical (although maybe "inevitable") future actions.
I wouldn't discount such reckless vulnerabilities happening here. Any decent IT department would faint imagining the overtime needed to fix such issues.
I feel like this is a bad episode of the Twilight Zone.
No, “vetting” basically means they checked to see if you ever got caught embezzling money, or in the case of clearances, if you lied about committing any crimes (committing them is ok). They are regular people and getting them to abide by sensible IT policies is a giant nightmare and compliance is poor.
Heck, have people already forgotten Trump’s tax returns were leaked by politically motivated “vetted” people working for the IRS? Not the first time that happened either. And they didn’t even find anything interesting!
I am so primed to parse emoticons eagerly that I thought that the philosophy was :《
However little is involved in vetting, it's something that has been done for regular government employees and hasn't been done for these employees. I'd rather have minimal safeguards than none.
It is very much under dispute whether or not the data has been used/shared in a legal manner.
Imagine a new CEO arrives at <b2b platform tech company> and has stated their top goal is to cut costs and improve efficiency.
Then imagine this CEO brings in outside technical people and instructs the existing security team to grant full access to all customer data. They plan to analyze this data to assess how customer’s use of the platform impacts operating costs.
This would be insanely inappropriate and would likely breach customer contracts and break privacy laws. It is of little comfort that the “breach” is wholly “inside” the company.
In almost every large organization, there are numerous internal boundaries that large amounts of data should never cross for any reason. Framing this as “the government having access to government data” is problematic, for the same reason a tech company allowing unfettered access to customer data for some analysis project could not be described in good faith as “the company having access to company data”.
Exactly who it is within the organization that has access to the data and how that access aligns with existing laws/policies is extremely important.
Our company would sign a confidentiality agreement with McKinsey.
This would be perfectly valid.
There are restrictions that some clients put on consulting companies like everyone on the project has to go through background checks, be US citizens (some government contracts) or have security clearance. But those are some other rules that Musk and team are breaking.
In other words, any contract between businesses usually has a broad chain of confidentiality that goes down to subsidiaries and sub contractors.
Imagine working IT and having to train people that even when their jobs are directly threatened they are still supposed to withhold data, and then those same people are fired anyways for complying with security policy.
And people are gleeful that these people are losing their jobs.
One of the main points of privacy legislation is to functionally limit the government's ability to collect, use, disclose, and retain personal information in the first place. That's entirely contrary to the idea that government departments can share or access it pell-mell.
This absurd oversimplification needs to be called out.
The 'government' is not a single individual, nor should 'government data' be treated without regards to specifics.
The exact entity doing the accessing, and the exact data that's being accessed, all need to be accounted for, and the appropriateness of the access will change depending on the context.
DOGE hasn't been transparent in any of this, which is my chief complaint at the moment.
It is entirely possible for an insider or internal data incident to be a "breach," regardless of whether the data leaked outside the org or they had the permission of the President. If someone came in to my office with an employee badge, said that they had been personally hired by the CEO, and demanded super admin access to all systems, I would laugh in their face. If anyone actually agreed to that person's demands, it would be a massive, all-hands-on-deck incident to figure out what they touched and how much we were going to get fined for the breach in security controls.
Yeah in theory they’re both parts of “the government” but “government” is a big umbrella that comprises a bunch of separate entities, each with varying degrees of independence from each other. We’re used to thinking of it all as one entity because we’re used to operating under political leadership that isn’t actively trying to destroy the government. But now that they are, the separation of duties matters a lot more. All of this stuff is happening either in violation of, or indifference to the actual law.
Obviously we have an extensive framework for data security within the government that is built upon the idea that compartmentalization of data and limiting access is incredibly important.
Even in situations where it is unavoidable that someone have access to data as a function of their job requirements, we very frequently have strict logging and auditing of access to that data. You might not be able to reasonably prevent a DBA from having access to the information in a database and allow them to still perform their work, but plenty of places will log and audit every action they take and review them accessing that data.
We know there are people in DOGE that clearly would not pass security screenings for access to the data that they have - one of them was recently fired for leaking data from their previous employer!
Acting like the fact that they are nominally part of the government so it is OK for them to have basically unfettered access to all sots of sensitive information is bizarre to me.
> the career official who was in charge of that program resigned rather than grant the request. He was later replaced by a DOGE staffer on assignment to Treasury.
Obviously though, it’s the dirty hands problem. 99% of the time we don’t want civil servants to do this because 99% of the time the President isn’t actively trying to unmake the Constitutional order. It’s very problematic to have civil servants thinking their judgement should overrule their leadership, but we’re in extraordinary times and there is no leadership of an opposition movement that can coordinate to set any sort of guardrails around that kind of willful insubordination.
Civil servants use their personal judgment 100% of the time because they're tasked with bringing local context to decisions made elsewhere. 99% of the time this isn't a problem because most of the people involved understand the process and their role in it.
The Republic is designed to protect and preserve the rights of its citizens. That government workers have consciences is a feature, not a bug.
The machinery of the American state is built on the voluntary cooperation of millions of Americans. Trump is not entitled to that; he is not a king and that's not how we do things here.
If he wants to gut the government and be ruler of the ashes, he may do that. If he wants to be the most powerful man in the world, he must earn the cooperation of the civil service.
While I sort of agree, there is also the very real threat of retaliation that could severely damage or destroy person's life. Both Trump and Musk are known to be very vindictive, and have both massive power and money. I'm not really sure what I would do when presented that kind of choice.
I've never made over ~$60k/year, and I'm fine with that; many ways to be rich.
Also, I like the idea of public luxury, private sufficiency.
Join that with Drivers license -> Voter registration number.
Search the voter records (if the states still have them) with the issued ballot number to that voter registration number and bingo. You got voting records.
Think most states discard actual ballots over time though so maybe old data might be gone. Republican states garbage as they are probably stored this election for some reason. I bet you can guess what that reason is.
I believe this involves a court order and to physically access the ballots in most states, where the ballots haven't been destroyed.
I would be very surprised if such a database existed in most states and if it was easy for someone from the federal government to make a query without many hoops and ladders.
Blue states will probably resist, trump will probably threaten loss of federal funding(if he hasn't already taken it away by then) and the states will either comply or resist by doing things like rapidly destroying records.
Are you suggesting that how I voted is stored somewhere by my Social Security Number?
In some states maybe you can do primaries without registering.
To be clear, you can’t find out how someone voted this way. You can only find out if they submitted a ballot, not what the ballot said.
The issue is that these are likely different databases and would require active participation by the states. Blue states will probably find a way to resist. (Maybe destroy the voting records quicker?) Although they can probably still find party registration.
Best I can find is this infographic which seems to indicate your point so i'll concede that you are likely correct: https://www.essvote.com/storage/2018/11/How_It_Works_Ovals_a...
Who cares how someone voted at that point. Voting just becomes an exercise in futility.
If that is the implication then I disagree.
I wasn't looking forward to Musk posting my tax return on a twatter rant.
The new Trump head of Treasury is just making a statement confirming what already was.
It's not weird wording, we just have a complex government.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/taxes/treasury-agrees-to-blo...
Text-only:
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1ztoSy
The public deserves seeing what the richest rich pay in taxes, the middle class, and the poor. There’s so much fud and fog in the political discourse around tax burden.
Current POTUS famously, notoriously, refused to disclose his, as has been tradition.
Basically if you're paying close to the "full amount" of your tax rate in say the $5 million dollar range, then no disclosure required. If you're substantially under that your deductions should be public.
It would not be discriminatory to say "we're going to publicize the returns of anyone who commits tax fraud". It would be discriminator to publicize the returns of anyone the Marxist hive mind thinks should pay more taxes than they are legally required to.
If the rich commit tax fraud, put them in jail. If they don't "pay their fair share of taxes" but don't commit any crime in so doing, be mad at the people who wrote the tax code.
No, I think they're defining it as something like "the tax you would have paid if all your personal revenue that year had been ordinary income". The baseline is not an opinionated criterion, it's what most people deal with.
We know these are different, it also seems quite unfair that their standard of living would be unaffected by higher taxes but poorer people are sometimes disastrously affected.
To be honest, I have no special qualms with businesses doing their level best to minimize their tax obligations, provided they invest in their workers and/or R&D. Its just that they don't. The whole point of the old-timey ridiculously high highest marginal rate was to induce companies to do literally anything else than just pay their top executives more. Higher wages for the rank and file, investment in facilities, R&D, charitable giving, etc etc etc all have far greater impacts on society than the equivalent quantity shipped to the fed as taxes. If the ultra-rich want to avoid paying taxes by instead donating large sums of money to charities with broad socioeconomic impact, I have no problem with that either, for the same reason.
The issue is not that the ultra-rich don't pay their "fair share" (whatever that means), its that the tide that raises their ships does not raise all ships equivalently, and the ways they avoid paying that "fair share" disproportionately benefits only them. I don't really benefit if Jeff Bezos donates a lot of money to Jeff Bezos' nonprofit to manage his art collection or whatever. I do benefit if he just paid an equivalent amount into the general tax fund (or donated it to the March of Dimes or something).
I regularly pay out 20% of my annual income in the form of taxes. Its hard to be super sympathetic to e.g. Elon "I paid $11 billion in taxes last year!" Musk, when most years he pays far far less than that, and his net worth (as figured by his borrowing potential) grows proportionally a lot faster than mine does.
Questionable. Tax receipts that get spent on roads, bridges, other infrastructure that over time increase your and everyone's standard of living? Sure. Funding of boondoggles and sinecures for political allies? Not at all.
> his net worth (as figured by his borrowing potential) grows proportionally a lot faster than mine does
You were talking about income tax, so net worth shouldn't matter, right? And I think you're alluding to the fact that the ultra-wealthy can often temporarily avoid capital gains tax by borrowing against their stock holdings instead for their income; I don't think this matters that much in the end, because it's all taxed anyway. Interest paid to the lender is income to that lender which is taxed, and eventually the bill comes due, at which point shares will have to be sold and capital gains taxes incurred.
Stepped up basis is one good Google search to explain one way.
Having said that, upon, say, Elon Musk's passing, his estate would still owe billions of dollars in tax.
It would be entirely reasonable to put a cap in there if we are concerned about it hurting the middle class and wanted to just be a tax benefit.
The whole idea is that capital gains taxes are lower than income taxes because it comes from something that was already taxed, but that isn’t even true a lot of the time either. As Warren Buffett always says his overall tax bill is still lower than his secretary’s.
It’s not even just the idea that progressive taxes are better, it’s that this is a regressive tax system. One more accurately, and uneven one because two people who make the same money could end up paying very different tax bills throughout their life.
The comment to which I was responding was suggesting some mechanism other than the tax code to determine “the full amount”. What is that and why isn’t that just the tax code?
It’s because they’re just determining “the full amount” to be something that makes them feel a certain way which isn’t really a sound basis for law. The full amount is whatever the tax code legally obligates one to pay, no more, and to suggest we should expose people’s private data simply because we don’t like the tax code is preposterous.
I feel this doesn't happen as often as it should. I don't even think the IRS is catching enough wealthy tax cheats. The GOP has traditionally cut funding to the IRS which lowers their audit rate and/or limits their audits to those to the less wealthy. (Since going after the really wealthy requires a lot more work.)
I'll add every dollar of IRS funding nets many more dollars of taxes--if we ran the government like a business (for the sake of argument) we should invest a lot more into the IRS. It's free money.
I don't know if I agree with that but you're arguing against something else.
Do I believe it’s unfair that the wealthy pay a lower effective tax rate than me simply because their income is passive and not wages/salary? Yes.
Do I blame them for perpetuating this state of affairs to the detriment of the nation as a whole? Yes.
If I vote against my own self-interest it’s my own fault for not knowing better, or because I think something else is more important.
I think maybe the point is to shame those using aggressive tax strategies. You can always exploit the law as written, if you put enough money behind the endeavor. It's impossible to write a law that is bullet proof.
If someone thinks that a tax payer who hasn’t even been accused of tax fraud should be punished, and that “the full amount” is one penny more than the tax code dictates, they’re certainly infected. Someone who wasn’t would instead simply advocate for changing the tax code.
Which isn't to say that they shouldn't pay more in income taxes. It's just to say that it's important to identify the real problem and address it directly, and to realize when you're not going to be happy with a solution beforehand.
I can only speculate, but I wonder if the reason a lot of people shout "tax the rich" isn't that they want a bit more resources for geniunely deserving causes, but that they hate uber successful people and just want to see them "cut down to size".
In this view, higher taxes aren't meant to bring in more revenue (Laffer curves place limits on the effectiveness of higher taxes), but to hurt Rich people. Bring them down so we don't see some people doing 100,000 times better than the average person.
Maybe they think hurting Rich people will make the world a better place? Maybe they just wanna hurt them because they feel jealous? I'm super curious about what the true motives are.
Why are people so unhappy to see the existence of centinares and billionares?
I'm especially talking about people who made their money by creating new things, or made the world more efficient in some way.
The simple fact is that people want their lives and their loved ones' lives to be comfortable, happy, and secure. If they believe they are being denied that, they become unhappy.
At the end of the day, money, markets, taxes, wealth, etc. are just tools for creating happy societies. Nobody (to first-order approximation) wakes up thinking "tax the rich" merely because they're jealous they don't have a private jet. Certainly nobody wakes up deciding we need to upend the entire system of government merely because they see other people being happier than them. They do these things because they see the juxtaposition of others' obscene wealth side-by-side with the fact that they themselves e.g. can't even afford the basic necessities, or don't see security in their future, etc. At that point, they think: "if you're going to support a system that makes some of us miserable, it's only fair that you feel it too."
Obviously, the solution in this case isn't to make everyone be miserable. It's to help everyone be happy.
The problem I see we have right now is that people focus solely on the mechanism (taxing income) while forgetting the goal. Or they focus on the current state, while missing the trajectory. Taxing income more steeply could be one component of the mechanism for creating a happy society, but it's neither sufficient (it's quite possible to do that and still have everyone have worse lives...), nor necessary (there are lots of other ways to generate revenue too).
To give just one extremely vivid example that hopefully puts into perspective just how insufficient (and pointless) taxing the rich can be if it is done carelessly:
America's top 20 billionaires have some ~$3T in wealth. Tax the rich, right? OK, let's say the government somehow just seized all their money.
What would happen next? It's not exactly rocket science.
Spoiler: America's national debt would decrease from $36T to $33T. Which is like turning the clock back to... 2024? or 2023 at best?
Exactly what problems would turning the economy back 1 year solve?
Discriminatory pricing could become a private income tax.
The real issue is that there are too many articles on the front page that everyone can participate in (news, 150 word anecdotes on AI, language/editor wars, ...). If there is too much pent up demand for those topics, it should just be moved to a certain day of the week. I think you could more or less violently suppress it while having very limited collateral damage on actual technical discussions. And by allowing politics to remain on the front page for many days, you basically slowly change the composition of the community to people who want to debate politics all the time, which is explicitly not the intent of HN. I'm probably violating the guidelines by complaining instead of silently flagging the article, but hoping this inspires other people to start flagging as well.
^Judging by the fact that they make the front page daily I seem to be in the minority though, so whatever.
I sure wish they'd slow down as well.
Like, HN's in an awkward position.
The actions by DOGE and the Trump administration are extremely relevant in a VC-hosted forum.
Honestly tired of the overreach by the federal government.