This isn't a payments crisis; this is an auditing crisis. There's no way to ensure proper accounting procedures are being followed. At this point, Congress' continued inaction is bordering on criminal.
It's shocking how many billions of spending are completely unaudited. Official gov't auditors have tried for years, but the target agencies stall and stall. You have to assume there is some malfeasance there.
Doing an audit starting with the treasury department seems like the right first step. Every outflow of money ultimately has to start there. It's the root node of the Sankey diagram. Then you follow the money outwards from there.
Audits can be done 'read only'. Audits don't actually have to impact the behaviour and operation of an organization either. Stopping all activity because of an 'audit' is ... wrong.
So you're fine with USAID funding the development of Covid-19 through EcoHealthAlliance (it's been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt) and you're even finer with USAID then financing media (like the BBC and Politico but so many are very likely recipients of these funds) to do the coverup and pretend that it "couldn't have possibly been a lab-leak"?
If you're not fine with that, how do we suggest we even fix this?
The USAID literally financed the development of a virus that killed tens of millions of people worldwide. And then it greased many wheels to try to make people believe it couldn't possibly have been a lab-leak.
Trump just asked an audit of all the US donations that have been made to Ukraine: this looked like one of the biggest operation of money laundering in a long time.
Could I get a source of proof for the USAID-EcoHealthAlliance funding and development? I’m googling a lot of variations but I can’t find a good article. Just curious. Thanks.
Based on Musk’s tweets, the depth of this “audit” seems to be entirely surface level, e.g. “Lutheran in the name? DELETE.” (Not that they could do any better even if they wanted to given the blitzkrieg nature of the audit, size of the team, and complete lack of expertise.)
> Doing an audit starting with the treasury department seems like the right first step.
That's complete nonsense.
Imagine you're trying to track spending of departments at a massive company.
You wouldn't start by looking at a giant list of wire transfers from/to the company's bank accounts and work your way backwards to find what each payment refers to would you?
That would make no sense. Not only would it be practically impossible to do but plenty of resources might be shared between departments and lumped into single payments to a single company for many services, some payments or reimbursements might span several transfers, some things might be paid upfront, other bills may be only due later etc...
That would be a ridiculously bad way to go about it.
And then imagine someone starts canceling random wire transfers that they think "look suspicious" lol.
Not if the company had up-to-date audited financials, no. You'd start with those.
The problem is agencies that haven't been audited in a decade. The agencies literally don't report how much money they get, their current balances, or where it goes.
I’m all for better accounting practices and better tracking of government spending as well as eliminating waste. Absolutely.
But pretending that Musk and co are doing an audit by accessing treasury records and payment systems or that it will help with government waste in any way is laughable.
Again, literally no one would be able to make any kind of credible department spending audit out of the bank records of a mid-sized company.
This is the US government’s treasury we’re talking about here! This is several orders of magnitude bigger and more complicated!
Not to mention an audit would not require any write access.
If only there were a part of the government whose job it was to proactively and continuously crawl the interiors of the bureaucracy to identify opportunities for improvement...
If only they had a standing list of more than 5000 such improvement opportunities...
> a top DOGE employee, 25 year old former SpaceX employee Marko Elez, has not only read but write access to BFS servers
> One senior IT source can see Mark retrieving “close to a thousand rows of data” but they can’t see the content because the system is “top secret” even to them. No source I have has knowledge of what DOGE is doing with the data they are retrieving
You think the treasury doesn’t have a metric ton of procedures, and laws, on data management, integrity, access, backup and retention?
Breaking these protocols by giving unfettered write access to this data to ridiculously inexperienced and ignorant goons exponentially increases the risk of data tampering and corruption…
It makes any kind of audit LESS likely to be accurate.
But they’re very obviously not doing any kind of credible audit. As mentioned, that’s literally impossible and nonsensical to do this way.
As far as worrying about who has write access to these systems, I think the article makes it fairly clear that even if you're a COBOL programmer with years of experience, that doesn't mean you know these specific COBOL systems and their logic.
Age aside, I feel uncomfortable about anyone new (even experienced COBOL programmers) being able to make changes in these systems, especially given their approach has been portrayed as broadly antagonistic to existing engineers and staff.
I agree with that and write access is concerning but there is no evidence or information about doge employees modifying cobol code.
From the article, the closest thing they have to an evidence is a search query. Rest of it is pure speculation since none of the people who reached out to author has any kind of visibility into what is going on.
At the rate things are going: give it a day. Maybe two. DOGE hasn't even tried to honor it's "transparency" pledges and all the info we get are pretty much from people inside these systems... who speak out less because Musk is also firing anyone he can.
>Experience in what? Do you know their roles and responsibilities?
> How do you judge competence of someone whose job and responsibilities are not known?
It's actually very easy to judge, based on the fact that someone who has never done an audit before is now trusted to do one.
I mean, I wouldn't trust Einstein himself at age 24 to audit a small business, no way am I going to think that some rando, maybe brighter than average, will know what they are doing when performing an audit at age 24.
I also think that, if the story is true, the fact that they started at the wrong end of the financials is a dead giveaway that they do not know what they are doing.
IOW, if I saw someone tasked with designing a new car, and they started by opening up MS Paint and drawing tread patterns for the spare wheel, I'd certainly consider them unable to design a new car.
Even if we err on the side of benefit of doubt, even the smartest 24yo in the world is not going to be competent at doing even a basic audit when:
1. This is the first audit that they are doing, and
2. They have never before had any accounting background.
So, yeah, it's quite reasonable to consider them incompetent that the chosen task in the circumstances.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
No we don't. They get small arms. Fighter jets, aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and the like are commanded by much older and experienced people. An M16 is not "billions in military hardware."
If you were panicked when a developer at GitLab accidentally deleted the production database, just wait until some coder merges a half-tested patch into the Treasury’s production environment. The Musk bros might lose the US ability to reassure the global bond market... Hopefully Spacex has policies with this Dutch Insurance company...:https://youtu.be/3r7mIDycJsE
It's not that simple. Congress can't specify every pen and pencil expense, so they allocate large buckets. The executive can decide how each bucket is spent. Like when your mom gives you $20 to go to the movies. She doesn't care what movie you see, but she'd be mad if you skipped the movies and spent it on weed.
And what they are doing now is "skipping the movies and spending it on weed." Shutting down USAID, even if eventually Rubio came in and rolled that back is what you just described. That was an office created by congress.
If they find serious issues they can likely go to congress and have them canceled outright. If not, they need to distribute the funds during the fiscal year.
I don’t understand the pearl clutching. The government shuts down often due to spending issues. Payments pause when this happens. Moreover, everybody has known for decades that nobody is reading these 50,000 page appropriations bills.
I’m willing to give musk and his guys some time to sort this out.
The president has asked them to do this. If they go against his wishes there is no reason they will not be thrown under the bus. If he pardons them for obvious malfeasance it will make big political waves and likely change the outcome of the midterm elections, where a congress could begin impeachment.
>If they find serious issues they can likely go to congress and have them canceled outright
uhh, no they can't. Those are also government elected representatives. Checks and balances. To "cancel congress", you need the courts to charge and convict them. You're going to find it very hard to do that from treasury records alone (AKA, how the executive branch spends the money allocated).
>I don’t understand the pearl clutching. The government shuts down often due to spending issues.
With that dismissal, you're not opening yourself up to understanding. Maybe there's wrongdoing; The answer isn't to charge into the treasury and hack it.
That's the stupid part: Musk doesn't need to. He's clearly not TSI/TS clearance level, so he just needs trump to go in and look. Or have trump hire someone with that clearance to look in on his orders. Remember, this is the executive branch; Trump has all access powers here (within reason).
>I’m willing to give musk and his guys some time to sort this out.
I'm not. I didn't vote for him. You didn't. He was not approved by Senate, as is executive apointee tradition. He does not have clearance. "Asking" isn't enough. Where's this willingness coming from? Even if you just like the guy, you really want the man who laid off 80% of his staff to handle your money?
>If they go against his wishes there is no reason they will not be thrown under the bus
You are just wrong here. You misread my comment. The “them” in my 3rd paragraph refers to the paused payments. If it turns out that what congress appropriated funds for is actually fraud, congress will want to know, and can amend that spending retroactive to this fiscal year. How is this controversial to you?
Elon Musk was hand picked by the president to do this job. Clearly you do not like the president nor Elon but that is a personal view not held by a majority of voters in the last election.
A better analogy might be that mom bought groceries for the starving family down the road with a check and you cancelled the check, stole the checkbook, and changed the bank account password.
But clearly: did not spend it. Did not misappropriate it. That is much different.
To me it’s more like mom gave me money to pay the rent but my landlord is likely violating laws so in the meantime I am putting the rent in escrow while we sort out the facts.
But that wasn’t your decision to make. Maybe your picture of the landlord is incomplete, and you act as the hot-headed, short-sighted teenager your are, instead of sitting down with mom to discuss the situation.
Disagree. You are allowed to have agency. Mom would be proud of you for not wasting her money. If there is no crime, the landlord will be made whole. Maybe with a little interest at the prevailing rate.
And that's where the analogy falls apart, because yes, maybe it's okay for a teenager to have an agency, but billionaire friends of the president are not, in fact, allowed to have an agency on government spending! People who waltz in and have no fucking clue of how things work generally are not allowed to have an agency!
Remember when Musk built the submarine to save the kids in the cave, was absolutely useless, even actively obstructed others from saving them, and finally resorted to denigrate the diver saving them as a pedophile? That's exactly the same thing he is doing right now.
He’s not a “billionaire friend” in this role. He was asked by the president to do a job and he’s doing it. You expect the president to do everything by himself? Trump likes businessmen. Steve Mnuchin was another “billionaire friend” and it’s hard find fault in his tenure running treasury.
> He was asked by the president to do a job and he’s doing it.
1. And he did it in an illegal way, yes. If you wanna go back to Mom, you can go to the grocery but you cannot throw a bank heist and lock all employees out of the store so you can grab some bread
2. He doesn't have access to the store. Mom sent him to Costo without her card. You can't just storm into Costco. Go back to mom and get her card, if possible.
Is it illegal? My understanding is that paused appropriations are tied to the fiscal year. That’s September 30th. Are you sure they are not? Or are you just being an ideologue?
Nobody stormed anything. They just filed a dispute with their credit card company. Costco will get the funds if they win the dispute. If there is malfeasance at Costco don’t you want to know? What exactly are you afraid of?
Meanwhile the laywer refuses because the constitution says that you cannot "save up money" that "your mom" allocated. Let alone choose to spend it on a lawyer instead of groceries. You need to argue with Mom about lawyer Money next quarter.
Congress mandated the creation of USAID in 1961. I don't hthink the executive branch has the legal authority to just abolish it by fiat or change its status from independent to a subordinate organ of the state department.
We are a nation of laws still. At least three judges have told Trump/Musk to stop what they are doing. The problem we are running into right now is who enforces the laws when the Executive branch decides they don't want to follow them?
How would you change the tone? I feel like that was a plain and matter-of-fact sentence. I get the term "misinformation" is feels loaded but it wasn't unfair to say.
edit and the fact that the poster did have the good sense to add an edit was part of the reason I decided to say something because telling someone who didn't would just be a waste of time
"Confirming your beliefs prior to posting would be useful here."
That edits the swipe of "spreading misinformation", which whilst accurate is charged and puts the reader on the defensive, as well as the more egregious "you know what you are talking about" which is nakedly aggressive. HN discussion is highly sensitive to nuances of tone, a point dang makes frequently:
(That last isn't too significant for a well-down-thread comment such as yours, but still plays a strong role, especially in politically-tinged discussion, and especially in the present environment.)
(I make a point of confirming information I provide in comments, largely through inline links or footnotes. Of which I am ... inordinately ... fond: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>. I've more than once changed my comment significantly on discovering my initial beliefs were false.)
Agree that there are ways to say it nicer, but I still contend that what I said was not aggressive. The poster started with "Correct!" and they didn't understand the thing they said was "correct." I think it's fair to point out that they inappropriately made statements about something they didn't know. They even admitted to learning it afterwards. Its fair criticism and if folks wanna be making claims online they should be able to handle it.
If you read dang's admonitions (as I have, for many years) you'll find that his viewpoint and official HN policy is that tone matters immensely, and is often read as diminished / positive by authors and amplified / negatively by recipients.
Searching for "personal attacks" and "swipes" will turn up many such examples:
I hear you. But like I said, I didn't make a personal attack or swipe. I pointed out that the person shouldn't confidently make claims for things they don't know lest they spread misinformation. It was a fair comment.
(I'm not dang, I'm not a mod, just something of a student of how HN (dys)functions over the years. Which is generally far above the online norm, not that the bar isn't low.)
> Correct, the executive branch can always opt to not spend the money it was allocated.
No, they cannot. Trump was impeached during his first term over this very issue. Congress had appropriated funding for the Ukraine, Trump didn't want to provide it without obtaining concessions from Zelenski. Just like Trump doesn't want to provide California any FEMA money for the LA fires without concessions. Trump has been through this before, he knows it's illegal, but he doesn't care. It's kinda funny that people expect a felon to care about the law.
Well, Biden tried to not spend money to build a wall on the border. And he essentially ran out the clock in that one, so I guess there has been recent success.
The false equivalence is so tiring. It’s okay to admit things are unprecedented.
When asked about the news on Oct. 5 that new border wall construction would indeed commence under his administration, Biden told reporters: “The border wall — the money was appropriated for the border wall. I tried to get to them to reappropriate it, to redirect that money. They didn’t. They wouldn’t. And in the meantime, there’s nothing under the law other than they have to use the money for what it was appropriated. I can’t stop that.”
Trump intended to build the wall with no environmental assessments or permits and congress wrote in a waiver since the border was “an emergency” but Biden chose to rescind the emergency declaration and follow the long-established federal construction process instead of using the waivers which does indeed slow things down.
That’s nothing like what is happening with Musk “deleting” entire departments or unilaterally stopping funding because he doesn’t like the phrasing of the grants.
I wasn’t trying to claim any equivalence. I was replying to “It's just that as far as I can recall no one has ever really tried to spend less in the government.” Biden did, in fact, try to spend less than was appropriated.
I'll just be in good faith and believe you wholesale. Yes, that is one way to fight the spending. Make the government argue until a deadline is hit and then they either shut down or compromise. Happens much too often.
But that's the point: the budget wasn't made yet. Trump wants to argue over funding that was already in place. If he wanted this chaos legally, he'd have been stalling out the March funding next quarter. But once it's finalized, it's finalized and many challenges over the centuries were shot down.
I get how the system works but I also don't understand how congress can force the executive branch to take out a loan but also sets a debt ceiling which could shut down the government unless it's raised by congress. So congress blames the president for taking out debt, which they force, and refuse to raise taxes to reduce the deficit. Something in that loop is broken. I don't think the president should have unilateral power but I also don't think congress should be able to set both the spending and the debt limit.
I agree. I just think we need to focus more on congress' role in this. The checks and balances only work if we force congress to act as a check and as long as congress keeps voting along party lines and doing the president's bidding, not much is going to change. It shouldn't be normal for the senate to confirm radically unqualified people to positions of power just because the president nominates them.
we can focus on the future when the present isn't tearing down before us.
Sad thing is no one is really talking about this in any branch, so it's just theory crafting until then.
if you want to change that you need a huge voter base that is anti-partisan. Given that we can barely mobilize within parties to protest properly: good luck.
That disconnect is why some people argue the debt limit is unconstitutional - Congress authorized the spending and if they didn’t authorize enough revenue the executive is still obligated to spend regardless.
To do otherwise the executive has to pick and choose what to fund.
The topic usually gets raised every time we get close to a debt limit. If we truly broached the limit it’s possible the Biden and Obama administrations would have just ignored the limit since the consequences of the full faith and credit of the US failing are so dire and there’s a solid argument it’s the least bad option Constitutionally.
Clearance could be granted on a whim by POTUS, as far as I can tell, so that has no leg to stand on. The biggest threat would be that one of the DOGE employees is a foreign actor. Hope they did some vetting...
He can' (but shouldn't). But there's no word that was granted to Musk. Since, he didn't name them. He probably doesn't though, because he should not have been stopped at USAID with the right credentials. Unless...
>Hope they did some vetting...
we both know he didn't. If he does have clearance, his interns definitely don't. Hence the kerfluffle at USAID.
He's an illegal immigrant from South Africa. I don't know the diplomatic status of the USA with South Africa, but the current party in power would certainly not agree to the idea that illegal immigrants should be given total control of the Treasury.
It remains a matter of import. It is both true that they don't have clearance and true that in a more functional environment that they would not have earned it.
You misunderstand how clearance works. Any one can get "read-on" to anything with the proper authorities giving them access.
It is an administrative step. It might undergo review but access does not need to be prevent until the review happens. It is all about who is granting the access.
The commander in chief has considerable authority to provide access.
This was not the case when I worked in the Federal government. There were different levels and kinds of clearances and while it was true that you could work with less sensitive stuff while the background check process worked its way through, you couldn't go into and view anything elevated w/o the right clearance, or even be in the room pretty much.
This has always been the case, though you generally need to be a US citizen as a practical matter. Whether or not you are exposed to it likely depends on which part of the government and who you are. The common case is when they need the help of outside subject matter experts.
For the sake of timeliness and being able to move quickly, some people in government are authorized to make a judgment about the risk/benefit tradeoff when someone doesn't have an active clearance. It isn't a case of waiting for a background check process, you don't even need to apply. Some organizations will do an informal check of their own in the background if they don't already know who you are. Sure, they would prefer if you already had formal clearance, but it isn't strictly necessary.
I could see many people with this abstract concept of a system that governs itself with it's own rules and policies, not quite understanding that it's all customary.
It's like people thinking that the President can't declassify a document or make foreign policy decisions without the NSC's advice or consent.
If they don't have clearance aren't they committing a number of offences under various acts of national security and computer misuse and thus liable for arrest?
>If they don't have clearance aren't they committing a number of offences under various acts of national security and computer misuse and thus liable for arrest?
Arrested by who? The executive branch who ordered his actions? Americans voted for this, and now we have to live with it.
The judicial branch can't prosecute, that's what the executive branch does, and it's the executive branch that's doing these things. The legislative branch has the power to keep the executive branch in check, but they're not exercising that power - which I'm saying is bordering on criminal. Obviously, the executive branch is unlikely to prosecute the legislative branch for not taking action against the executive branch. Our constitution has the implicit assumption that all three branches wouldn't be in cahoots with one another, and should they be, the electorate was expected to have enough sense to vote out the legislators and replace them with ones that would keep the executive in check. The million dollar question is how much pain and destruction will be endured until that happens?
Two years - Congress is replaced every two years. 1/3 of the Senate is replaced every two years. Given that they've only been in office for two weeks, two years seems like a long way off.
Arrests need warrants. And if you're thinking about the police, that's also part of the executive, mostly. Judges can't do anything unless some other branch of the government asks them to.
Arrests need probable cause. They can either be done on a warrant or without a warrant (in the latter case, in the federal system, a complaint must be filed and the arrested person must be brought before a magistrate for a hearing on probable cause within 72 hours after arrest.)
>No, the judicial branch which is supposed to enforce the law regardless of who was voted for…
The judiciary has zero enforcement power. They make the laws which the executive is meant to enforce. If the executive fails to enforce a law, congress can impeach. That's not happening.
The legislative branch makes the laws. The Judicial branch judges whether laws were broken. The executive branch has the power to enforce laws (or to not enforce them, as they see fit).
The current executive branch will not enforce laws against itself, and nobody else is legally allowed to enforce the laws, so all the courts & congress can do is write strongly worded letters.
You're almost right. The thing is that Congress absolutely has the power to impeach the president and strip them of all legal office. Of course, most of Congress is perfectly happy with what's going on, so this won't happen.
No, we did not vote for this. Show me the campaign ad that said Trump was going to give Musk and his gang of losers complete control over the treasury.
It’s all spelled out in the project 2025 doc that was widely publicized as the game plan.
Also, trump was impeached last time because he tried to shut down funding approved by congress. So, if you’re surprised it’s happening again, I suppose you can’t be helped
Oh, the one that Trump heavily distanced himself from? Project 2025 was something skeptics pointed out as being the game plan, but Trump denied (or agreed, then denied).
I think a quick view of my comment history would show that I am not a fan of Trump. In fact, I would go so far as to characterize him as "if a wet dog turd were a person". I had zero doubt that 2025 would be a blueprint, just another of his lies.
I'm over across the pond - it was pretty obvious to me that Elon was going to take a wrecking ball to the ship of government. if it wasn't clear to you, I'm afraid you can only blame yourself and possibly your diet of information.
Trump said Elon would get to run a new department called "department of government efficiency". if you know what he did at Twitter, you can easily join the dots.
If you think that a politicians advertisements are the full picture of what they will do, I have a bridge you may be interested in buying.
That said, DOGE was well announced and widely publicized prior to the election, by Musk and the media. Musk was up on the stage with Trump quite a bit.
Those who did not know this was going to happen are either easily fooled or were paying no attention.
If we are going to discuss this, we should be clear about the details. "Americans voted for this" is a hot take. Some did. Many did not vote at all. Of those who voted, Trump barely won those votes. It was just enough to get the electoral college votes. Even those who did vote for him did not vote for his current Project 2025-based plan. On the contrary, his campaign denied he was going to do all this.
If you don't vote, you effectively vote for the winner.
When the 49ers lost the 2024 Super Bowl, the second and third string players didn't go around saying they didn't really lose because they never hit the field. No, they lost.
Trump has been the dominant figure in American politics for almost a decade now. It's quite obvious who he is and what he stands for. And he's more popular now than ever before. That's the reality. Accepting that and planning around it is the first step to countering it. Burying your head in the sand and saying "people don't actually want this!" is unactionable talk.
While they are absolutely committing crimes, the complicit Trump administration justice department and Republican congress are happy to let it go, at least thus far.
If there is some credible reason to believe this might be the case, then an audit should be done. Carefully, not recklessly. With oversight, especially if the auditor gets write access to anything. That oversight should include, at an absolute minimum, a system, not controlled by the auditor, that logs every interaction with the system being audited.
Here's the thing, I'm very happy with uncovering fraudulent spending. I strongly doubt that's actually happening. If it was we'd be seeing careful audits and lawsuits against those submitting fraudulent invoices, not this fly by night takeover of systems.
Angry? Why are you coming off so strongly? There's nothing wrong in questioning an unethical approach. If a kid is good in AI/ML to spot a pattern in an image, maybe they should work in healthcare and, not forcefully and illegally poke into someone's financial records. You are the one who needs some serious soul searching.
I've read in multiple articles that people were placed on leave for trying to require proper clearances from him and his team as obligated to by law, and this article also references how clearances impact the fact that nobody knows what they're actually doing.
As someone who has had to clear an SF86 for a USDS hiring cycle (IRS and DHS systems), I would be shocked if you can get this access without a clearance.
The voters don't directly decide what is a crime. At best, they elect congress that can change the laws and constitution that in turn rules out what is or isn't illegal. None of this was done, none of this is democratic. This is nothing else than a coup perpetrated by the richest man on Earth.
I’m sure the current Supreme Court (which was selected by elected Presidents and Senators) will have no trouble explaining how recent events have been "reasonable" and 100% followed constitutional procedures.
>the voters decide (through their elected representatives) what is a crime
In the long term yes, in the short term, no. That's the check and balance of the Judicial branch. In theory they should be insulated from the politics of the world and properly interpret laws based on various cases.
So you can't just, say, repeal the first amendment just because all your voters suddenly became anti-1A. They need to work to make a represenative base that can eventually vote in that new amendment. And that all takes time (in terms of culture and the bill proposal).
From "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45", an interview with a German about what it was like living during the rise of the Nazis:
Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk alone; you don’t want to “go out of your way to make trouble.” Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, “everyone” is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.”
And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.
But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.
But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions, would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all of the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jewish swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.
But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early morning meetings of your department when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.
Hitler started by imprisoning those suspected of being in opposition. First concentration camps started right after he took power. The estimation is that they locked 50,000 of political opponents arresting 100,000. Purge of SA happened a year later.
In 1933, right after getting power, Jews were excluded from civil service, their numbers in schools were limited and a year later they could not be actors. The restrictions came in quick and were felt a lot by their targets.
So, this extract kind of underplays the beginning of it all. It was violent from the start.
I'm going to assume (foolishly) that this is an honest question. The answer would be: The DOGE situation as described in the article this comment chain is about.
TWTR -- the publicly traded company -- dipped so badly that Musk needed to make it private. It's effectively less of a public commons now than it is Musk's investment on manipulating information.
Afaik, open nazi were actually silenced on twitter prior Musk. But, you could talking in euphemisms and it would be mostly fine. Also, when you went really really far with harassment.
I guess I know why you're getting downvoted. Saying Twitter is at death's door is like saying that sanctions are going to crush Russia any day now. People really really want to believe it despite all the evidence. Twitter is very much alive, and it's doing exactly what Musk wants it to do.
Exactly. When he fired 90% of the employees everyone here and on Reddit said it would fall apart within days due to the complexity of the systems that Elon’s employees and the remaining traitor engineers had no hope of maintaining.
When it didn’t fall apart in days, the goalposts were moved to “technical issues won’t become obvious right away, give it a few months”.
It’s been over 2 years and on a technical level running better than ever. You can disagree with the content and users all you wish, but pretending it’s dying because you hate the bad orange and mars man is delusional.
>"It’s been over 2 years and on a technical level running better than ever"
Isn't it also simply doing less? Weren't some APIs shut off or reduced? My limited memory is having me think they reduced or shut down some functionality altogether, which would also help something run smoother. Fewer things running means fewer things can break.
They just closed a single API which was also abused by botfarms. Closing the API immediately improved the site from a spam perspective and was welcome by most actual users, likely all users who understood the impact.
This is pure cope - the site is doing a TON more than it used to, and more stable than ever.
Also arguing that a site that is designed to scrape and re-represent a website without ads or other stuff 'was likely a huge load' is a very weird argument to try and claim the site is no longer being used.
I can say anecdotally I used to use nitter, and while it didn't work for a few days I switched to the regular site. Now I would never go back. The actual site works better now, I have no need. On old twitter 1.0, nitter worked better.
Thats a black eye on Dorsey twitter, not the new twitter (or X or whatever you prefer)
>It’s been over 2 years and on a technical level running better than ever.
Ask the worker's how they are doing, and then maybe I'll be convinced that it's "running better". When you grind 10x the users into the dirt, you can make up for cutting 90% of your staff. For a while. Especially in a crap economy like this where job hopping is harder.
I also agree that most of the cuts may have been managerial and logistics. It's probably a clown circus trying to do anything more than maintain.
I agree only on a surface level that it looks better. But old tech dies very hard. Digg is technically still up today. Myspace is technically still up today. hell, 4chan is still arguably bustling.
“Move fast and break things” seems like a horrible approach when things like Social Security and Medicare payments are on the line. If a few thousand random tweets get lost in a refactor, nobody cares. If somebody stops receiving their checks because Whiz Kid #3 doesn’t know how to work with an enterprise database system, what does that person do? Who do they escalate to?
I think Elon Musk and his lackeys' action is literally criminal, but law enforcement work for the same team. And Congress is controlled by the same team.
>but law enforcement work for the same team. And Congress is controlled by the same team.
And I'll never understand why. There's a lot of partisan issues but I thought "not fucking around with our money" was as bipartisan as a plutocracy could get?
Because it's not about just power and money. People need to stop cynically thinking that all the social stuff is just noise so they can get power and money. They actually intend to upend the social order to establish a white, evangelical Christian state with utter disregard for the Constitution.
That is literally the power of the Executive, to choose which laws to enforce and which to not. Congress makes the laws, and the Courts adjudicate. That is the whole basis of the federal government.
The executive is formally required to execute all constitutional laws by the take care clause of article two. It's been politically expedient for most presidents to ignore a few policies they dislike, but it's very much not a central pillar of the American government to grant them that power.
I mean that's what they teach 8th graders but it's reductive. Congress makes plenty of laws that restrict how the executive performs its functions (including how they allow people within the executive to do so), and it's an open question over how much power the executive has to create departments and appoint people to run them.
At the moment though, what they're doing is very much illegal. They just have a bunch of collaborators in the DOJ who won't bring charges or arrest anyone, because they're co-conspirators.
The 8th-grader understanding is that each branch does what it's supposed to do with virtuous motives. The adult understanding is that they exercise as much power as they can until forced to stop.
I mean if that was true then the current situation wouldn't be happening. The story of the US Congress over the last two decades (probably longer) is they have ceded an enormous amount of power to the Executive via inaction, and continue to do so.
The problem with simplistic narratives where you give stuff names is it masks what's actually happening: the Executive is near enough to a dictatorship - power and authority is deliberate vested in one person. This makes it very different to Congress, which only wields power by the collective decision making of hundreds via majority or even super-majority vote.
So "Congress" doesn't really exist as an entity: because there is no guiding consciousness or collective in it which is deliberately trying to seize more power, and the story of its power is the exact opposite: it keeps giving it away (because the individual members of Congress can only retain that position and it's local benefits by staying in Congress, best accomplished by deliberately avoiding responsibility of any kind).
If you've ever tried to get 4 people to decide what to get for dinner, the guy who simply says "Let's get tacos" usually gets his way because everyone else keeps deferring.
It sounds like you think SOX auditing means “super secure and careful accounting”.
SOX is a specific law with the motivation of giving markets more confidence in public stocks (for example must hire external auditors, certain board member rules, how certain assets must be valued, etc).
The SOX audit is to make sure that law is followed.
One criticism of SOX is that encouraged many startups and other businesses to remain private.
So long story short, no. Our government does not resemble a public stock corporation and these things don’t have an analog.
I specifically meant the parts of SOX related to access controls, infrastructure, and codebase management to ensure a baseline level of security for processing payments and PII to ensure this does not represent a risk to the valuation of the enterprise.
These measures are universal to running any payment platform, not a public/private issue.
*No, I'm not thinking of PCI, but that is also a valid measure here. There are recent updates to SOX in the past few years covering these aspects of payment operations. Some old-school SOX experts may not be familiar and the strictness on these aspects of the audit varies by auditor in my experience. I recently helped a client navigate these developing and responding to a very strict audit process covering their entire IT landscape including process flows, deployment planning and user/role management.
Yes, rules and roles for reporting, ie accounting.
I don't know what you think you are implying with the "super secure and careful" comment, we are looking for the roles that ensure the accountability of SOX.
Your complaint is that SOX "nationalizes" companies because apparently it becomes so transparent, or something? If that's what you mean by "nationalize" shouldn't that be used for our nation's accounting?
To be fair, no 19 year old in the world concerns himself with audits or proper regulatory procedure, including law students. There is a reason proper structure exists
FWIW, you're thinking about the DoD/the Pentagon, not the federal government as whole - and yeah, the Pentagon hasn't been able to pass an audit in ~6 years.
The defense budget is somewhat more opaque, though, for national security reasons. I don't know if they are good reasons or not, but that's the story at least.
Why would you trust the man who's been heavily subsidized by the government to do an audit? A significant chunk of Elon Musk's money came from government contracts his companies had with the US government.
Exactly — this isn’t good will. The only subsidies he cares about are his own. Though all involved don’t seem bright enough to realize that destabilizing the government, its finances and the perception of the dollar will have consequences for their own wealth.
It’s hard to pass an audit when unfettered access has been granted to a billionaire without access and cronies installing unauthorized software and strong arming everyone they encounter.
The only thing thats public is highly abstracted and euphamistic descriptions of where the money is going. Any FOIAs seeking more granular information would be politely asked to stop asking. After all if this information is classified and relating to national security why would it be handed out?
The budgets for all these agencies have congressional oversight. Additionally, there's an entire agency devoted to making sure there's a minimum of grift, the GAO. For example, here's a recent report they did on NASA's large projects:
> It would be stupendous if voters were aware of where all this to date untraceable money is going.
It would be stupendous if, for example, everyone knew when I receive an interest payment on a savings bond, and for how much? Or some schmuck gets his social security payment?
As far as I can tell Elon has had security clearance since 2019 because Space X was (and still is) contracted to do work for the DOD. However I don't know what kind of clearance it was at that time.
> The Wall Street Journal reported citing people familiar with the matter that SpaceX lawyers recommended that the company's leadership not pursue a higher security clearance for Musk because he would have been asked about contacts with foreign officials as well as his prior drug use.
