US Securities and Exchange Commission beginning to bring on DOGE staff
reuters.com
reuters.com
How do you make something that costs nothing more efficient?
>transaction fees imposed on the financial sector
This is literally a tax.
They do perform a service for the transaction fees they charge, but then, so does the government.
We could call postage for the usps a tax too, but nobody thinks of it that way.
Arguably, the will of the people (not the corporations) is to lower individual taxation—working class joe schmo isn't upset that companies and the wealthy have to deal with the SEC, he's upset about the income tax that he personally pays.
Ok, so, maybe you argue removing this tax will indirectly help jo schmo because corporations, banks, stockbrokers, hedge funds, and their leadership are such nice fellows who, given some extra cash flow always let it funnel back to the economy and ultimately to the actual workers and producers in the economy, who, after all, sweat for them and deserve a living wage, right?
I don't see how this form of cut and deregulation is supposed to help the majority of people unless you believe in trickle down style economics, an idea based on the moral rectitude and good will of the wealthy, which, at this point I think you have to be a complete and utter fool to believe in. Part of the entire reason the SEC exists is precisely because you cannot rely on the individual morals of financiers to protect the country from financial exploitation and overall collapse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecora_Commission
If this is a "tax" it's one of the few taxes we actually have on the rich and on corporations, and any reductions stand to make them even more untrammeled and powerful. It's a mistake to assume this will have any positive material benefit on the average citizen.
By fraudulently weakening the regulatory body, it makes scamming investors easy. This is more efficient for scammers. Not for investors.
"Exclusive: Interim SEC chief cast sole vote against suing Musk" - https://www.reuters.com/world/us/interim-sec-chief-cast-sole...
It appeals to people who think government is inefficient and wasteful. Government doesn't HAVE TO BE inefficient and wasteful, just people need to believe it. And if media channels are hammering people over the head with the message that government is inefficient, then the official-sounding Department of Government Efficiency will save the day and rid the government of these evil inefficiency.
What these people may not realize is that the US government was intentionally designed to be inefficient. The checks and balances of three branches of government are constitutionally imposed inefficiency to make sure that one individual or group of individuals doesn't take the country in an efficiently harmful direction.
So if people want a hyper-efficient government, then be honest about rewriting the Constitution.
What DOGE is doing is like getting up at 5 AM and sealing off the gas line to your furnace, then claiming that you saved a big chunk of your family's monthly finances, when in reality your heating bill is 1/100th the cost of your rent or mortgage, and you're going to be pretty sad that your furnace doesn't work when the winter comes, and you're going to have to pay a professional to un-break your heat, probably a lot more than you saved to begin with. And pissing off your whole family in the meantime.
Even in an alternate reality where Musk and Trump have genuinely good intentions to reform waste and corruption (narrator: they don't), it would be hard to imagine a worse way of going about it.
Pick one of the DOGE employees and try to articulate what fraud they are trying to commit for themselves?
As for the DOGE folks, I didn’t say they’re committing fraud. I just think a slick PR video shouldn’t be taken at face value. A little skepticism is healthy, especially when there’s hype and money involved.
They've exempted themselves from standard accountability tools like FOIA, so we can't really look into what they're doing. Their position is that the public has no right to that level of visibility.
The left gets too hung up on morality. So, they are prone to trusting slick talkers like SBF or Newsom, who say the right things and use the right language, with no actual substance.
Now, as to the DOGE folks, they have presumably given up their lucrative businesses/careers, and joined this effort to help the nation (according to them). Can you atleast give me a theorical story about how one of these individuals could have a sinister plan to defraud the american people?
If they are doing forensics on govt finances, I am not sure what is there to FOIA. Plus, they are publishing extensive data on doge.gov. Nevertheless, in principle, doge shouldn't be exempt from FOIA.
And ah yes, working for the richest man on earth is now 'giving up your career'. What an Orwellian starting point to your argument. Together your two points are a friggin dystopia, you realize that right? The rich are sacrificing for the good of cutting the social contract/safety net of the poor, government must be cruel and immoral. Crazy talk.
They changed how they publish on doge.gov when people called out that their claims were bullshit on the largest denominated savings listed. Please explain why changing to release less information than they originally did because it was being used to make them accountable is actually better.
Of course there are modern legal theories which disagree with what I’ve said above. However they are modern, untested, and largely ahistorical.
What about these people says to you that they are "principled" or "honest" when they've already been outed doing exactly the opposite of those traits?
Also I love this argument that’s like “this bad person did bad things, let’s follow their lead and have other people do bad things.
If all the Democrats jumped off a cliff, would you jump off too?
This the most tepid, pathetic generation there has ever been.
It's easy to accuse others of being "tepid and pathetic" from the comfort of your own home.
Until the citizens of the US are willing to shut things down, expect nothing to change. Look to other countries for examples of effective protest and understand that effective protest requires sacrifice, not just an afternoon walking around with a sign.
The people "spending an afternoon walking around with a sign" are doing a lot more than the people shitting on them for it. Mass movements have to start somewhere, they don't come out of thin air.
Why not criticize all the people sitting at home, rather than calling the ones actually trying "pathetic"?
This is quite the whataboutism. Just because I criticize the protestors doesn't mean I'm defending people that don't protest.
You're right, it's a start. But pragmatically it's still not meaningful. Until the protests are strong enough that the government actually feels fear there is no reason to expect anything to happen. That's just reality.
Yes, everything has to start somewhere. But that doesn't mean every start is meaningful if it goes nowhere.
protests aren't meaningful unless they get results but protests also have to start somewhere but these starts have no results so better not to start
Do you really expect a singular protest which will change the world order over night? It might give us some personal satisfaction to claim others are ineffective and weak, but in the annals of history, that amounts to even less than a sign bearing march. If you really want to make an impact put forward some positive prescriptions, like the strikes you mentioned, I agree that actual strikes would be a good step. I hope you are actively sharing these recommendations to people who can organize and not just putting forward diffuse ineffectual critique to strangers on hacker news
Maybe you should read my actual comments instead of jumping to conclusions. In my first comment I made it clear that protests are useless until the government fears you. If I can ignore you easily, so can the government. Nobody gives a shit about you holding a sign. Until you can make the government scared of you as far as I'm concerned you may as well sit your ass at home.
I'm not here to validate your feelings or cheer you on. I'm pointing out why you're failing and you're snapping back like I give a shit. You're welcome to ignore me just as easily as it is for me to ignore the current protests.
Now protests can be demonstrative and the more you protest the likelier you are at protesting again, and if the climate is right some organizations might join and call for others to participate. But what usually happens though is police violence suppressing them as soon as they look like they are gaining any steam (see e.g. Occupy Wall Street or BLM).
That said, as long as the opposition and the large unions are lame, any direct action will remain pretty restricted.
They do a few things, but actually causing change is not one of them. They show how many people support something; they group those people together enabling the spread of ideas; they group those people together enabling the state apparatus to take them all down in one go.
Due to the weird way our nation works, it was a minority of voters. (A plurality in this case, though our electoral system also doesn't require that.)
But yeah, the keys were handed over by the populace as much as was required by how our elections occur.
I keep wondering where the line is, for those on the right. It seems like wherever you would draw a line in the sand … we're past that point.
Been thinking about this for years. I've come to the conclusion that there might be two seperate groups.
1. People that have nothing left to lose. Their life is ruined due to their community falling on hard times and if they see the people they perceive at fault suffering then they are satisfied.
2. People who love to watch the other side suffer but have themselves not felt enough pain yet. It has to really hurt for them to stop. I think the economy crashing in 08 was a moment where many of them quieted down for a tiny bit until the pain stopped.
I also think there's a polarisation between people predisposed mentally for survival and others for thriving. Scott Alexander has a piece about this that I found very interesting: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory...
I wouldn't say "full knowledge," but it's not like the other guys were any good either. There was a huge spike in inflation and right before the election it became clear they were lying about their leader's obvious incapacity. All the options voters had were bad.
Personally, I blame the Democrats for this. Winning against Trump should've been easy, but they managed to fuck it up in all kinds of ways. They knew the stakes (and said so, loudly), but for some unfathomable reason they thought that meant they could coast. They also don't appear to know what the fuck they should be doing now, and seem to want to keep coasting.
Is there any reason in particular people should not be blaming Republican voters for "this"? The US had four full years of Trump and it was plain as day what he'd get up to from his campaign, and voters still think he was a good choice. At what point does the US stop coddling Republican voters and blaming Democrats, even if they ran a bad campaign?
The idea that a voter is ignorant and stupid to realize the consequences of their actions that they need a "campaign" telling them is frankly absurd.
There was a clearly worse choice this cycle, even if you felt both options were not ideal.
Apparently, though, most people do not have a memory capable of spanning back past four years time. That and, depressingly, many people are woefully uninformed voters.
But this is a natural consequence of poor labor structure. Work the wage earner to the bone so that they have no time to actually consider their options, learn, and make informed decisions. Cut their leisure to a minimum so that every vote is a vote of vibes and gut feeling.
I feel this myself when assessing local candidates. I would love to develop a complete picture of each candidate and their beliefs, but with what time?
Because if the Democrats want to be the grown ups, they've got to act like it. Not keep pointing at the other guy and saying "he sucks, vote for me."
Seriously, how do you even begin to counteract whatever it was the Republicans were throwing around? Narcissistic wild claims (Gaza/Ukraine wouldn’t have been attacked if I was president!), exaggeration (Biden’s non-recession was the worst ever!), the downright bizarre (I’m prettier than Kamala). It’s like running against Bizarro, what sane person would have even considered voting for him anyways?
The American voters are definitely at fault here, not the Democrats. They were given the smelliest, harmful garbage and they actually voted for it. What consequences come from this are their fault, not the Democrats that didn’t run a crazy bizarre candidate.
No, I'm saying they're both acting like children in their own ways.
The Democrats put up an alternative that wasn’t very exciting, but it’s ridiculous to claim the choices were somehow equally bad. One of them was boring, the other was an unprecedented level of bad, like literally historically bad.
Well, the Democrats lost to that "unprecedented level of bad," so I think you're missing something.
Assuming I did my sums right, DT won by approximately 1.5%. Hardly a ringing endorsement. He got 31.59% of the voter-eligible (VE) population. I count active yes votes as for a candidate and non-voter passive no votes. Some non-voters support a candidate, but since they didn't vote, their non-votes count against each candidate.
EC %EC pop vote %of ballots %of VE population
Democratic Kamala Harris Tim Walz 226 42% 75,019,230 48.34% 30.66%
Republican Donald J. Trump J.D. Vance 312 58% 77,303,568 49.81% 31.59%
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/elections/2024 https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2024-11-1...
I’d guess lots of people don’t actually want the entire government minus the military, social security, and medicaid eliminated, whether they admit it (or realize it) or not. Like the FDIC is pretty nice.
Also non-defense discretionary funding has not actually increased that much in recent years. There was a spike in 2020 due to COVID, but it has returned to pre-covid levels.
$130B added up real quick and it's only been a month. You can see the "Wall of Receipts" here, which is updated about every 2 weeks (in my personal experience) https://doge.gov/savings
Give some examples.
Atleast DOGE is trying to provide data (https://doge.gov/).
Threatening law firms that have previously been on the other side of the argument from Trump's various court cases.
Black-bagging students who write articles and take part in (and maybe even, shock-horror, organise) protests (in both these case: exercise their "right" to free speech).
There are daily updates to a lot of these examples.
DOGE's "data" hasn't exactly been consistent. It's been needing a lot of on-going correction and has been attempting to take credit for a lot of things that required no active participation (contracts reaching their natural end, contracts that ended under the previous administration but paperwork remains to officially end it, and various other examples). Amongst various other failures of understanding of the underlying information.
"Black-bagging students who write articles and take part in (and maybe even, shock-horror, organise) protests (in both these case: exercise their "right" to free speech)." - any citizens you can point to?
RE DOGE, can you point to any inaccuracies on doge.gov? literally everything is listed out, so should be easy to point out.
RE donors/puppet masters from getting richer at the expense of everyone else. - who are these donors and puppet masters? Elon's net worth has probably gone down. And for a guy who has created the most wealth in history arguably, doesn't need to get into government to secure a few lucrative contracts for himself. More likely that you are deranged sir.
University of Alabama doctoral student Alireza Doroudi[1]
[0]: https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2025/03/28/ice-kidnap...
[1]: https://newrepublic.com/post/193253/ice-iranian-internationa...
1. All three branches of government are controlled by the MAGA Party. I call it the MAGA Party, not the Republican Party, since the Republican Party has long been purged of serious Never Trumper opposition.
2. There are not enough Democrats in Congress to impeach and convict Trump of any unconstitutional acts.
3. There is no mechanism available to recall congresspeople or to trigger a special election, and the next election of congresspeople isn’t until November 2026, a year and a half away.
4. I live in a blue state (California) with blue representatives (San Francisco Bay Area) at the federal level. What good would it do me to write senators Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla or congressman Mark DeSaulnier?
5. The people who have the most power to change things are people who have red representatives, since they have the 2026 midterm elections to worry about. However, many of the people living in such districts voted for Trump and are largely on board with the MAGA agenda. Why would they write their representatives?
6. We could protest through demonstrations and boycotts, but the protests need to be effective in order for them to not simply be demonstrative. Moreover, protests run the risk of getting hijacked by extremists and saboteurs, and authoritarians love exploiting crises to crack down on dissent. Protesting could be a potential trap.
It’s a very bleak situation right now due to MAGA’s control over all three branches of government. The best we could hope for is:
1. Start planning for the 2026 elections NOW! Elections cost a lot of money and require a lot of planning. If MAGA loses control of Congress in January 2027, this could add a much-needed check to MAGA and could help with the 2028 election season.
2. With the way Trump, Elon, and others in power are carrying on, eventually segments of the MAGA voter base will be harmed by MAGA policies. I particularly see Trump’s tariffs to be quite painful. If enough Republican voters start openly expressing their discontent for MAGA policies, then this is a chance for MAGA to lose absolute control of power in January 2027.
https://www.reddit.com/r/50501/comments/1jatnk4/chuck_schume...
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/13/nx-s1-5327600/house-democrats...
This is the worse thing to happen to the US since Trump got back into office.
I don't know if Schumer had other motivations or if he just made the biggest blunder of his political career, either way it has not turned out well for him—not only are people actively calling for him to be replaced, it's clear that history will not remember this supposedly necessary shut down prevention as something "heroic".
Best of luck, and allow yourself to be forgiving of your past self.
Totally and absolutely that is the outcome I would prefer.
There are just too many data points so far in the wrong direction in such a short amount of time that I can't see even a satisfactory outcome, never mind an outcome better than what existed prior.
On the flipside: the co-operation of European countries is a good outcome, and a version of Europe that can defend itself against Russian aggression without any US assistance is a better situation than a worse one. I don't think it's good that NATO is essentially dead, but something better has a chance of rising from those ashes.
any significant achievements of the previous administration in bringing about a "better state of affairs for the world"?
"it arguably did not take any actions that directly make life worse for the average person." - I don't think you've talked to an average person. They are quite upset.
"you are rooting for people who are directly working against your own economic interest" - No actually. They have a plan and they have articulated it. It may not work in the end, but it is not a forgone conclusion. And they are most definitely striving to help the average person. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSma9suyp24, https://youtu.be/182ckTL2KBA?si=x6cRwNeMgAVFLTq0.
I actually have, and essentially everyone, when pressed to give an actual, concrete example of how their life has been directly, negatively impacted by the previous admin fails to materialize one.
Instead it's all some BS fairytale narrative or outrage they have bought into through, e.g. youtube videos and podcasts hosted by people who have essential zero accreditation other than wealth, and that they continue to concoct in their nutrient impoverished brains, without evidence or reason.
Newsflash: the all-in podcast finance bros are not looking out for you or hoping you make it big time. They are literally angling to run pump and dump scams off the backs of their listeners (there is an episode in which they admit as much in relation to crypto) and continue to peddle anti labor perspectives in hopes that they can keep a grossly inequitable financial system that rewards investors and financiers more than actual producers and laborers afloat long enough to live like kings themselves—they don't give a flying fuck about you, me, or anyone else that listens to their crock. Wake up and begin to invest your time in perspectives that actually benefit you and your immediate community, don't let these clowns take you for a ride.
"economic conditions for the bottom 50% improved more clearly and consistently during Trump's administration (2017–2020) compared to Biden’s tenure (2021–2025)."
6% vs 2%
https://chatgpt.com/share/67e786c3-82c0-8008-8ca4-3dae5d3a53...
"They" are referring to Tesla vandalism as domestic terrorism (it's criminal vandalism and seriously generous, yes, but if setting a car on fire is domestic terrorism then lots of countries have more terrorists than they thought).
"They" are black-bagging students who dare to suggest that maybe Israel shouldn't bomb Gaza so much.
"They" refer to any difference of opinion as activism from radical lefty loonies.
Fear is being sown in the general populace. But the rowdy Town Halls around the country are great signs of hope and resistance.
The tepid ones are the spineless Republican representatives being actively derelict in their duty to their country, still attempting to defend Trump and Elon despite their legitimately worried and angry constituencies.
The intent behind the vandalism is what makes it terrorism instead of just vandalism.
It is a creature of the New Deal where many of its programs exist on shaky constitutional ground, existing primarily because standing with the courts is difficult to achieve
Although the New Deal is heralded in the history books, most programs of the new deal were declared unconstitutional within 10 years, and everything that remains should be heavily scrutinized with that knowledge
The SEC stands out like a sore thumb when you really look at it
When its not blatantly separating classes, it is the state arm of FINRA and openly captured.
Just keep EDGAR for financial reports and thats it. They can’t even explicitly define what insider trading is and isn’t.
Which protest do I join? "Handsaws, not chainsaws! But do cut the trunk, and as close to the ground as you can!"
sounds like another 'budget-neutral' funding source for the bitcoin stockpile. moon
What any words mean don’t truly matter. Just what gets signaled to his brain. These people are effectively brainwashed. Or it isn’t a person, and is a bot. Who knows.
The big guns you see and hear about are complete amateurs.
I wonder when companies will start stock manipulations ?