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Comment by giantg2 | Hacker News Reader

I don't see how blaming the pre-existing website on the current administration makes sense.

Indeed, the real problem is a pervasive attitude that the USA is the best country in the world by far and everyone is clamoring to get in. We don't really care if foreigners come or not, and they'll come anyway, so why bother making the process friendly?

It's not new. Rabid ideologues on the other side blamed Obama for things that pre-dated his administration, as well. Some people just can't be rational when it comes to politicians they don't like.

I don't see how blaming the pre-existing website on the current administration makes sense.

Many federal web sites were very quickly altered or replaced by the new administration.

This is common. Work begins on some web sites immediately after the election. For example, when a new president is sworn in, the White House web site flips immediately.

More to the parent poster's point, it has been widely reported in the legitimate media repeatedly that many federal web sites have been replaced or significantly altered by the current administration. There's an entire pseudo-department for it that also makes headlines for its greater transgressions.

Add to that severe and sudden budget and staffing cuts, and like all government functions -- you get what you pay for.

So you claim the visa website was also changed by this administration?

People really really dislike when you point out that the democrats are also broadly anti immigration in practice. They forget Biden deported 4.6 million people vs Trump's 2 million.

Elon Musk set out hundreds of very young and arrogant programmers to modify code throughout the federal government including to change decades old code used by Treasury, Social Security, etc. While this went on he would tweet idiotic statements like "Dead people are getting social security!" (because he didn't understand the deceased have beneficiaries) and "we're giving social security to people who are 150 years old!" (because he and we presume some subset of his young programmers didn't understand date fields being set to the epoch indicated the date of birth/death had not been recorded).

All this is to say we probably shouldn't assume any current US government website, especially ones that have to do with immigration, hasn't been completely modified by this team.

Is your claim that they found zero people fraudulently collecting social security through a dead relative?

no, this is an entirely bad faith representation of my words as written

he most certainly did not understand that the vast majority of what he perceived as "dead people getting benefits" were completely legitimate cases where beneficiaries were receiving those benefits and/or the data was encoded without a real birth/death date

since you appear to be of the opinion that Musk was somehow indicating a useful fact of some kind, here's mainstream media reporting of the claims made by Trump and Musk (we can assume Trump was advised by Musk) and their extreme inaccuracy:

https://apnews.com/article/social-security-payments-deceased...

> since you appear to be of the opinion that Musk was somehow indicating a useful fact of some kind,

No but I am glad he took action to fix it.

The Cobol 150 year thing is also incorrect and was widely criticized in tech circles: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/31288/did...

Musk wasn't criticizing COBOL he was criticizing a specific thing he misunderstood in social security code which people in that thread said as much. I think you're trying to see something you want to see there.

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