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Comment by donnachangstein | Hacker News Reader

The correct answer is no one outside US Government IT knows for sure what is or isn't approved per their own rules. Every article (and comments therein) are just speculation and people trying to confirm their own biases, desperately looking for something to blame someone for, to produce more rage-bait and thus feed more ad clicks.

Every single article is written with the presumption that there are no actual IT people in the White House, that someone wheeled in a Starlink dish on a dessert cart in the yard which is somehow running the entire government. It's silly and ridiculous.

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> It's silly and ridiculous.

As is putting someone with a brain parasite and anti-vax beliefs as the head of HHS, but here we are.

“Silly and ridiculous” does not mean “implausible” with this administration. It’s the standard.

> The correct answer is no one outside US Government IT knows for sure what is or isn't approved per their own rules

Veterans Affairs actually publishes a list of approved software as part of their Technical Reference Model: https://www.oit.va.gov/services/trm/ (don’t know how complete it is)

But I’m not aware of other agencies doing this. I suppose that VA, given the nature of what they do, likely feels that there is less risk in publicising this information

There’s also the FedRAMP program for centralized review of cloud services - fedramp.gov - I haven’t looked to see if Telemessage is listed as approved but I see some references to FedRAMP and Telemessage online suggesting that it may be

Another source of info is SAM.gov - https://sam.gov/opp/ab5e8a486e074d73bfe09b383ba819ab/view (that’s for NIH) - if there is an agency paying for it, you can assume they’ve approved it for use (or are in the process of doing so) even if they haven’t otherwise publicly said they are. But, not all contracts are public, so just because you can’t find it on SAM.gov doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist

>that someone wheeled in a Starlink dish on a dessert cart in the yard

That situation was ridiculous, in that to score the marketing points, but fighting with the whitehouse IT the starlink is installed at a remote location with much the same point of failure as their fibre services.

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