DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data
(theatlantic.com)855 points by perihelions 2 days ago
855 points by perihelions 2 days ago
At my first gig, I had "god" level access to our production database.
All I learned is that nobody should have this level of access unless it is some sort of temporary break glass situation. It is extremely dangerous and even experienced engineers can cause irreparable data loss or some other bad outcome. In our case, some engineer accidentally sent around 10,000 invoices to customers that shouldn't have gotten them.
There are far better data access patterns. In the case of US gov data, I don't see why the DOGE team would need anything more than a read replica to query. It could even be obfuscated in some way to protect citizens' identities.
Ah, I remember a time 30 years ago when I logged accidentally into the PROD database (forgot to add the suffix "1" to the connection ID), thinking it was a Dev instance, and then issued a "truncate table CUSTOMERS"... the reaction came within 75 seconds - and restore from backing took several hours.
I've worked with older governmental systems, and chances are they are running a wide variety of systems, some of which, the oldest and most critical, are probably written in COBOL running on IBM mainframe hardware. In those environments, there is no real distinction between "database" and "application". COBOL systems are very file- and batch-oriented, and are "monolithic" in the extremist sense. The technology itself makes it impossible to give read only access to such systems.
> The technology itself makes it impossible to give read only access to such systems.
This isn't true. Mainframe COBOL systems commonly store data in VSAM files, or DB2, or IMS, or sometimes some more obscure non-IBM database (e.g. CA/Broadcom's Datacom/DB or IDMS, or Software AG's ADABAS). But whichever one they use, there are multiple ways of granting read-only access.
For example, if it is VSAM, you can configure RACF (or TopSecret or ACF2) to allow an account read (but not write) permission to those VSAM datasets. Or, you can stick DB2 in front of VSAM (on DB2 for z/OS, CREATE TABLE can refer to a pre-existing VSAM file, and make it look like a database table), and then you can have a readonly account in DB2 to give you access to that database schema. Or, there's a lot of other ways to "skin this cat", depending on exactly how the legacy app is designed, and exactly how it stores data. But, probably this is already implemented – most of these apps have read-only access for export into BI systems or whatever – and if it happens for whatever reason not to be, setting it up should only be a modest amount of work, not some multiyear megaproject.
>Or, there's a lot of other ways to "skin this cat", depending on exactly how the legacy app is designed, and exactly how it stores data. But, probably this is already implemented
Given that neither of us knows the actual systems in question, what is more likely, that it's a well-designed system or one that has organically accreted over time? It seems like you tend to believe the former, and I the latter. I suppose my view is based on the fact that, like in statmech, you enumerate all possible systems that can do a particular job, the vast majority of those solutions will not have any organizing principle and will not be amenable to surgical analysis or change.
This implies good faith actor, which is not the case.
You know that annoying thing where someone joins a new team, looks around, declares all their friction points to be easily solvable, dives in & starts making changes, and turns out to make a big giant mess?
And the reason is they don't understand the specific domain & context well enough to know what the actual hard problems are. Instead they're just pattern matching to things they do know and extrapolating. And it usually doesn't go well.
Dealing with a system that's replicating 50 years of regulatory rules is going to be that times infinity.
I don't think that's annoying. If they make a mess, then by the time they're done cleaning it up, they'll be an expert, and you won't even have to train them. That is exactly what you need when the system is broken. The existing people should be encouraging, let them try, and lend their wisdom when they can. Disruption has always helped the tech economy thrive and government should welcome the opportunity to learn this aspect of our culture.
>They don't even know how to build a website that works.
What percentage of people who know how to make a "website" do you think could make an automated tax system?
>the tech industry has been the beating heart of this country
Agriculture? Construction? The heart means something without which you can't function. How did people in the 1950s survive?
The agriculture industry is a skeleton crew for something that's largely been automated by tech: https://justine.lol/tmp/agriculture.jpg There's not much of a construction industry either, since the government doesn't let us build anything except sprawl.
The USG does in fact know how to build a website and it is intellectually lazy (so very lazy) to suggest otherwise. A high profile illustration of this is login.gov, which is SSO used across USG agencies. It's not possible to take a comment like this seriously, at all.
Elon Musk is also not an auditor. DOGE is not an auditing entity. You bring in accountants to audit. These are 20 y/o something programmers. How DOGE has been operating has been completely opaque and this lack of transparency just plays to the point that what someone says their goals are and what their actual goals are are not mutually exclusive, so no, Elon Musk shouldn't be allowed anywhere near these systems.
"fixing the government" in this case seems to mean "destroy the government" for somewhat hidden purposes.
DOGE literally took over the agency that competently modernized and integrated US gov technology (United States Digital Service), gutted it, and is now using that agency's pretense of needing access to data to now pilfer citizens' private information and grossly violate the constitutional separation of powers.
This is the mechanism by which this administrative coup (declared here in https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/ensu...) is being enacted. None of this is legal or constitutional in any way.
The rule of law is not a partisan issue nor a matter of "government efficiency". Those who aid this coup should be considered traitors.
All I've seen about this DOGE stuff is negativity based on hypotheticals, this is the first optimistic hypothetical I've seen so far.
It's an interesting point. As a thought exercise, tech is absolutely the core of modern America, #1 export (I assume) and a key market. Private sector influence probably can give huge amounts of low hanging fruit.
I think peoples main concerns stem from not trusting Trump (which seems odd given he's a second term president, he is objectively wanted) and not trusting Musk (which is probably fair, he's publicly and openly an arsehole).
Speed probably concerns people too, however "move fast and break things" is a pretty fundamental American tech mantra, so entirely unsurprising and usually effective.
> That's why all this stuff is backed up to an iron mountain.
When one of your threat vectors is a massive ball of nuclear fire right on top of the federal government in DC, your offsite backup policy is going to be absurd overkill by the standards of any other organization on this planet. That doesn't mean it's flawed.
> ...many of the people in charge don't even know how to use a website. Now for the first time, tech industry people have the opportunity to help run these computer systems, and you're afraid they're the ones who'll be incompetent and accidentally break everything?
Are you honestly suggesting that the people who built these systems, maintained them, and updated them to reflect often significant changes in rules and regulations over the course of decades somehow don't know how those systems work? If they were so damned clueless, those COBOL systems would have sputtered out and died decades ago. The fact that they've continued to run for all this time is practically prima facie evidence that the system works just fine by industry standards for that kind of legacy code.
No doubt there's plenty of stuff buried in the codebase that bugs the hell out of the developers working on it, but you get that with any complex legacy code. It's the nature of the beast. Do you think there's nothing in Google's monorepo that some of their engineers don't quite like but doesn't rise to a big enough issue to warrant refactoring right now? Any other FAANG company? Or large tech company in general?
You're writing as though a bunch of junior developers--and that describes pretty much all of the publicly known DOGE employees so far--are wizards who can just waltz right in and magic up a better solution just because they're from the "tech industry."
Setting aside the unlikely chances that those juniors--no matter how skilled or talented--have any experience with COBOL, mainframes, or even just decades-old legacy code, is anyone going to suggest that something like the federal government's payment system isn't defined by an immense amount of complex business logic so as to comply with legislative requirements? It's not something you just start playing around with.
I can't think of any tech company that would take a junior developer, toss them overboard in the middle of the freezing Atlantic, grant them sudo access, and tell them to do whatever the hell they want with critical systems before they drown and--somehow--take the ship with them. Worse yet, those juniors were chosen for ideology fervor and/or purity, so what happens when the normal review processes and experienced senior developers are pushed aside because they're in the way and part of the "deep state conspiracy" that doesn't want them to "[fix] the government" as you put it?
Not only is that a recipe for disaster for the company itself, it's a damned good way to take an otherwise talented junior developer and permanently ruin them. Instead of mentoring them so they can work well as part of a team, you're basically creating a toxic working environment that's going to turn them all feral. By the time they crawl out the other side and the public hears all about what they've been up to, what company is going to be stupid enough to a developer with "DOGE" on their resume? Beyond that, you're conflating a whole bunch of different issues here with federal software contracts and IT, while putting the tech industry on a really peculiar pedestal.
Besides, if the goal is to discover waste/fraud/abuse, the obvious answer is to hire a bunch of forensic accountants and let them dig into everything. Those are the people who actually find that kind of stuff, and they're incredibly skilled at their job. If it's there, given the time, they'll find it. But it's a slow-going process, so we instead see a bunch of engineers focusing on random transactions so they can ask themselves (1) "do I like that one?" and (2) "do I think it's legitimate?" because it's faster.
That's not exactly how you fix anything, least of all a country.
I'm not questioning the reliability of their systems but the content of their databases.
The DOGE workers are already legends in their own lifetime, having saved $55 billion, and they haven't even gotten started. That's like 20% of Google's yearly revenue, all in a few weeks, and without needing to write petabytes of code in a monorepo.
I don't think it's accurate to mentally model these payments as though they were counter intuitive algorithms in a deeply embedded software system. Waste fraud and abuse can be painfully obvious. So it's not the complexity of the problem that has prevented it from being solved. It's the political cost. Senior people have spent a lifetime accruing political capital. They're afraid to lose it. They're only going to spend political capital if they get something in return. They know and have cultivated relationships with the people who will be unhappy if particular instances of waste get solved.
So it makes sense that Elon is unleashing his crackerjack juniors.
They're perfect for the job.
> For decades the tech industry has been the beating heart of this country that's kept the American dream alive
By "tech industry" do you mean the consumer surveillance industry? Maybe your vision of the American dream involves inescapable corporate control, but mine certainly doesn't!
Never mind the direct risks, if you have "god mode" to basically any government thing, you instantly become the target of foreign intel/military operations. You can bet good money that there are entire teams, if not divisions, working around the clock to exploit this situation.
I can imagine Chinese and Russian hackers laughing at the DOGE l33t hackers.
And if I was advising the Ukranians I'd tell them to try to exploit it too, hey, if you're fighting 2 superpowers with another 1 quietly backing the fight against you, you need all the help you can get.
> It is extremely dangerous and even experienced engineers can cause irreparable data loss or some other bad outcome
HERE BE DRAGONS
I remember having some kind of C programming bug where output filenames got scrambled (string memory error probably). And output files in the same folder as the source code.
That seems innocuous, but remember then some of the output files might have the character "?" or even "*". So imagine trying to remove these files and going an asterisk too far. All gone!
I've had a company give me full admin access to their cloud account. Thankfully, I learned the lesson earlier in my career and immediately created myself of more mundane user. Break glass access is important, but definitely not as the usual level of access.
> I don't see why the DOGE team would need anything more than a read replica to query.
They shouldn't need more than limited read access. The fact that they have more access, very likely demanded and not accidentally given, is due to their intent to do more than simply query data.
I loathe working places where they just give you all the permissions because it's "easier". One risk is if something does happen, and they don't have exceptional tracing and logging, (and let's be honest, at an organization sloppy enough to hand out privileges like candy, what's the chance of that?) it's difficult or impossible to pin down the source to any individual. As a result, both responsibility and suspicion is diffuse.
The appropriate restrictions are relative to the size and momentum of the organization. It's easy to spend months setting up safeguards rather than working on product development that won't proportionally return.
Of course, this involves being honest with yourself about risk and reward, and we all have implicit incentives to disregard the risk until we get burned and learn to factor that in.
I have so many horror stories from there.
When they did decide to lock down the database, the DB admin only locked in down in the sql server client most people used. If you used some other client, you still had access. _sigh_
A second thought. It leads to lazy application development. Whenever you have production intervention that happens more than a few times, you should just make a feature that does it safely via application code.
I've definitely worked in places where "Move fast and break things" tended to focus on breaking things. There would be bugs that we didn't fix because "We can just fix the database when it happens." It would take 2hours to fix a bug that would cause of 10's of hours of weekly support request, but the focus would always be on building new features, of which 10% got any real usage.
Meta completely restricted graph data access to requiring a specific business purpose and managerial approval tied an articulable, concrete task need.
Why should they even have read access? They're not a legal government institution, and they're being led by a private citizen that's not been elected or appointed by Congress to access our data in agencies that were made by Congress under particular rules to keep these kinds of snoops out.
Ultimately someone has root permissions. Re: federal agencies, in the United States, that someone is clearly, constitutionally, the President. Article II of the constitution vests all power of the executive in the person of the President. The President has authority to appoint agents. That same article _does also_ say the President has to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed", but the "Care" there is highly debated. But the idea that the President doesn't have the right to appoint Musk to get root access to federal agencies seems legally incorrect.
I'm not make a value judgement on this, it's just how it is. At a startup, the founder ultimately has root access to the database, no matter what the technical controls.
Now, maybe it's stupid, and maybe it should be some other way, but to my mind the other way is that Congress gets together and writes a law saying "the executive cannot get root access to X, Y, Z". In absence of that law, the executive can do whatever they want.
Not to be THAT GUY, but "an append-only database which cannot be modified by anyone" is something HN has spent the past 10 years saying is completely useless...
And Trump can launch the nukes to blow up the world too... but building a system where he can just click a button to do so would be idiotic. Same idea with giving godmode to the guy who thinks carrying a sink and saying "Let that sink in" is hilariously clever.
IMHO it's a bit of a shame that the productivity and efficiency gains that computing and cybernetics can bring to complex systems -- including government -- are always tainted and currently championed by anti-social elites that use them to break apart these collective machines.
Bureaucracies are a common good, and it should be in everyone's interest to apply state-of-the-art system engineering to make them as valuable as currently possible.
Not always. Both the Digital Service and 18F appear to be (to have been...) good faith efforts to apply state of the art system engineering to the federal bureaucracy, and quite successfully.
This is just one administration co-opted by one anti social elite to do the opposite. Don't extrapolate it out. Place blame where blame is deserved.
I don't think it's just one, unfortunately. It's not even much of a co-opt; more just an inevitable progression of the ideology that was held by that administration since the beginning.
Trump tried to make DOGE, and was slapped down by congress, so he took an existing department, removed all the people, switched it to do a different job, moved it to a different state, and replaced its name.
It's not just a co-opt; it's a complete replacement. DOGE is in no sense USDC; it's just wearing its skin.
> IMHO it's a bit of a shame that the productivity and efficiency gains that computing and cybernetics can bring to complex systems
They're just firing people at random, they haven't discovered any innovative new way to make systems more efficient.
("at random" is a bit generous and ignores the retaliation against political adversaries)
You need to find more reporting then. It's both, and more, and worse. The folks fired at DOE's NNSA were not exclusively probationary employees. DOGE doesn't even know the function of the departments they're eliminating. It's not evident they even know _what_ they're eliminating. See the "find and fire" approach to the word transitional. Oops... turns out that one's used in more than the context of gender.
Even firing all probationary employees explicitly _for cause_ when there's no evidence of performance problems with most of them is worse than random, it opens them up to legitimate legal backlash. Have you ever worked anywhere where the last two years of hires were all just completely worthless as employees? Of course not, that's basically impossible. Eliminating these people would have been harsh but understandable if it were said to be done for simple budget reasons, because yes they indeed are in a vulnerable less protected situation, but to call them all poor performers at the same time is worse than random, it's an obvious and transparent lie.
Not just new hires, but also anyone who took a promotion or lateral move, which also puts them into a probationary period. So they're firing all the new employees and all the employees exceptional enough to be promoted or recruited to another department.
The people they fired at the VA weren't probationary and one of the first changes they made to the VA was removing gender identity from the account information.
This isn't about efficiency, money, or employees. It's about power and the consolidation thereof. They will have ransacked the VA and the American people not only gave them the keys but they cheered them on.
It's not just new hires. Employees who move to a new position, even if they've been in that agency for a long time, also have less protections and are being fired.
But as others have noted, these are not the only ones being mass fired.
Not just new hires. They are firing people on "probationary" status, and people in civil service go through a brief probationary period after being promoted or moved to a new position.[1] This means some people being fired are long-time senior civil servants with expertise and knowledge. The reason they are firing probationary people is because they are easier to let go, by civil service rules.
I suspect the people in charge of the firings are under the same mistaken impression as you are, that all the probationary people are new hires who aren't yet essential. Witness the "oops, we fired the wrong people" rush to rehire.[2][3]
1 https://www.npr.org/2025/02/15/nx-s1-5298182/trumps-probatio...
2 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g3nrx1dq5o
3 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/usda-accidentally-fire...
It's not "at random". Every shuttered department had been investigating one of Elmo's properties...
> It's not "at random". Every shuttered department had been investigating one of Elmo's properties...
¿Porque no los dos? Firing the folks that maintain nuclear weapons:
* https://apnews.com/article/nuclear-doge-firings-trump-federa...
Firing the folks dealing with bird flu:
* https://apnews.com/article/usda-firings-doge-bird-flu-trump-...
Also firing a whole bunch of folks at the FAA (including maintenance mechanics) even though it's already short staffed:
* https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly9y1e1kpjo
Random and spiteful (?).
He's going to fill the empty slots with loyal cronies he can fire at will.
This is, I think, just "stage 1"
Changing the rules so gov employees can be fired "at will" is an explicit goal of Project 2025
This[0] doesn't seem random, and is just one example of many similar ones.
And that's not counting the firings at the DOJ and FBI which were explicitly retribution (though you could argue DOGE had nothing to do with those firings, which may be true, but I'm referring to Trump's mass firings in general).
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-18/fda-offic...
> Bureaucracies are a common good
Bureaucracies are just organizations of humans, who have the same motivations, biases, and incentives ans everyone else, everywhere else in society.
They're not a "common good", they're just people, and because they have de jure authority over certain domains, they need be subject to oversight and accountability if we're to trust them.
Bureaucracies often have perverse incentives, ulterior motives, and are themselves co-opted by the very "anti-social elites" you're complaining about (and such language indicates a conflict-based rather than an error-correction-based approach to dealing with these issues, which is itself an error). Increasing the efficiency and efficacy of such organizations without proper oversight can easily lead to more abuse and corruption.
In this situation, I think that neither the established federal bureaucracy nor DOGE and the current administration have interests and intentions that are necessarily aligned with the broadest interests of the public at large. At this point the best we can do is hope that the adversarial relation between them leads to a favorable equilibrium rather than an unfavorable one.
> Bureaucracies are just organizations of humans, who have the same motivations, biases, and incentives ans everyone else, everywhere else in society
No, the biases and incentives are different in government than in business. Yes, there are biases and incentives, but they are different.
The main attraction of government work is the ability to serve your country, and to be rewarded by taking actions which produce (what you believe is) long-term social good.
Your belief that an adversarial relation between forces of government leads to a favorable equilibrium is indeed the basis of the US constitution, and the very thing which DOGE/Trump are attacking with such force.
> No, the biases and incentives are different in government than in business
Not really, no. Certain cognitive biases and elements of self-interest are fundamental to all humans in all situations, and while different scenarios lead to those biases manifesting in different forms, they still share the same underlying substance.
> The main attraction of government work is the ability to serve your country, and to be rewarded by taking actions which produce (what you believe is) long-term social good.
No, the main attraction of government work is the ability to have a decently-paying career with a high degree of job security. Most people in such jobs simply dutifully do the tasks asked of them in exchange for a regular paycheck, and don't deeply consider the broader effects of their work on society (except to convince themselves of the importance of their work, as we all do).
A few outliers will prioritize theoretical ideals about doing "social good" over their own career goals, and a few outliers on the opposite end will prioritize having access to political power and opportunities for graft. (And some mistakenly think they are doing "social good" by forcefully advancing their own particular normative ideology.)
> Your belief that an adversarial relation between forces of government leads to a favorable equilibrium is indeed the basis of the US constitution, and the very thing which DOGE/Trump are attacking with such force.
No, I don't DOGE and Trump attacking the concept as much as participating in it here. None of the parties involved have good intentions, as far as I can evaluate, but, again, there's a chance that things will work out in the balance.
> apply state-of-the-art system engineering to make them as valuable as currently possible
Sure, and if DOGE was doing that, it would be a worthy mission. But we have seen no evidence of that, while we have seen a lot of evidence of ideology and retribution based purging.
There is already a government agency who has been working to overhaul and modernize the government's systems -- very much needed -- for years, and they all just got sidelined and/or fired. The DOGE team that took over that agency (USDS) isn't even talking to them.
The people at the FDA responsible for oversight of Neuralink's medical device approval just got fired. Don't tell me you believe that was to make the FDA's system more efficient.
Bureaucracies are a “common good” because of their human element: the ability to exercise discretion, recognize unique circumstances, and be held accountable to the public they serve.
The challenge is harnessing technology while strengthening these essential human capacities. Anything otherwise erodes public trust and sows division.
It’s HN, I can’t write a full abstract here. Of course, my view is full of assumptions, just as any general discussion of governance is. And dare I say, idealism too. Democracy itself is an ideal -- one that depends on human participation to exist at all.
Not at all. Bureaucracy isn’t a flaw: it’s how governments function. Civil servants work, usually beyond politics, to keep society running -- from veterans’ healthcare to highway construction. That you, and others, may not realize that points to a really painful reality that people don't see democracy as participatory, but a spectator sport. Elected officials steer, but we -- those in the system -- propel it forward. Or in my case, have.
When systems fail, people step in to fix them. Sometimes, the failure is a person, and their supervisor or colleague is the safeguard. Replacing that with AI/ML is political offloading -- shifting responsibility from elected officials to code that can’t dissent, negotiate, or care. You’re lucky if it can even explain itself.
I know I’m on HN, where this isn’t the prevailing mindset. But public systems aren’t startups. They don’t get to fail. The common good isn’t about efficiency; it’s about endurance. It’s about ensuring society functions for everyone -- not just those with money, power, or influence. Public systems safeguard the commons, whether it’s infrastructure, social services, or even the basic principles of justice. They exist to serve not just the people you identify with, but those you ignore, fear, or even condemn. Bureaucracies, with all their flaws, aren’t meant to be efficient, they’re built to endure.
I don't think unelected bureaucrats should have more power than the elected leaders of the Executive. Try the "shoe on the other foot" principle: Imagine if Trump put lifetime leaders in those agencies and they fought against the next Progressive president.
> I don't think unelected bureaucrats should have more power than the elected leaders of the Executive.
It depends on which bureaucrats we're talking about. Most agencies are the creation of congress, and the executive should have minimal power over them. The president's job is to implement the laws of the legislature.
They don’t have more power. Whoever is telling you that has been lying to you, starting with the idea that these are lifetime jobs or lack accountability.
The American system of government is based on checks and balances between the branches. Congress passes laws which delegate some power and the Executive Branch implements them. In many cases, the high level positions are presidential nominees who are mutually agreed upon with the Congress and serve a set number of years or until recalled by one or both parties. Each agency has specific rules governing what they’re allowed to do and how they do it, as well as oversight and transparency for their actions.
What we’re seeing now is the conflict caused by Republicans deciding that following the law is too hard and creating conflicts with people who are following the law. When Musk was pushing people to grant access to restricted data, for example, it was proclaimed as disobedience but was simply that the people charged with protecting that data do not have person discretion in that matter: the operator of a SCIF knows they face heavy consequences if they allow unauthorized access. In all previous administrations, this hasn’t been a problem because people just waited a few weeks to get clearances.
Similarly, when Trump illegally tries to fire inspector generals it isn’t that there’s no way for him to do that, he just didn’t feel like giving Congress 30 days notice.
In all cases, the law is what matters: if there is a real disagreement about how one of the independent agencies operates, Congress can change it at any time and given the Republican majority it would not be hard for any reasonable change to be quickly enacted, at which point an agency head would be removed or even prosecuted if they fail to comply.
I don't think elected leaders in the executive branch should be allowed to supersede the role of the elected legislature in formulating public policy.
The whole problem can be sidestepped by pulling back on the excessive levels of discretion and rule-making that have been delegated to executive agencies in the first place.
The unelected bureaucrats should be responsible for upholding the Law and the mandates of their position, not to any individual or party. And the Law is set by Congress, not the Executive. The Law is enforced by the Judiciary, not the Executive. The whole point is to have an engine that can keep working and keep accumulating domain expertise regardless of which political party is in control, beholden to the Laws set by the Congress over time, representing all constituents over time, held responsible by the courts, and not the whims of any given administration (or, for that matter, any single Congress). The entire problem _is that_ we now have what may effectively be lifetime leaders being put into positions and _being told to ignore the law and their government issued mandates_.
And so much reeks of a Watergate like situation, except done publicly instead of in secret, with Congress and the Judiciary refusing or unable to hold any of these people to account. "We will now gather all information about our adversaries and fire anyone who doesn't give us the keys to the vaults, and if anybody doesn't like it, good luck, because the courts are going to be VERY busy, indefinitely, as we proceed to break every law the Legislature has issued, and is unlikely to have time to hear your case for a few decades."
But let's take at face value the idea that the Executive doesn't need to follow or even acknowledge the decisions of the Legislature, and that they can tell anyone to do anything whenever they feel like it. There's a pragmatic issue, not just a separation of powers issue: How can you possibly accumulate domain expertise, and what motivation would you have to accumulate that expertise anyway, when every agency is going to be dismantled every 2-4 years?
Besides, these bureaucrats are "elected" in a way similar to the Electoral College. We vote in the Legislature, and the Legislature votes on the appointments. If we don't want "lifers" then we should be voting on term-limits for these positions, not allowing the wholesale remodeling of our bureaucracy every election, where "just anybody" can come in and walk away with whatever they can loot each cycle.
It's not uncommon for some agency leaders to be replaced - particularly those dealing with policy-oriented matters, like say the FTC. But that doesn't apply to the rank-and-file because of various civil service reforms which are designed to provide continuity between administrations and avoid partisan flip-flopping of large numbers of employees. They were also designed to avoid corruption or the "selling" of government positions to those favored by the president, which was common back in the 1800s. Trump is taking us back towards greater corruption while disguising his acts in a cloak of "rooting out corruption".
Elon Musk is an unelected bureaucrat, as is all of the DOGE team.
Unelected bureaucrats don't have more power than the elected leaders of the Executive. The power to remove them arbitrarily is simply not a power that the leaders should have. Ideally, Trump's lifetime leaders in those agencies would have been installed by committee between both parties and so are apolitical whose sole focus is their job duties and serving the people, and can fight against the next Progressive president purely on that basis.
Bureaucracy is always risk averse. Without outside intervention, they will always try to operate as before.
Every human knows that governments and bureaucracies are inefficient in some way. It's been mocked since the dawn of times. The issue is that you don't toy around with big legacy systems like you do with twitter. To satisfy their little immaturity and get political points on their fans they start ripping off everything without enough time. If they started real medium term efforts to analyze, organize and then migrate it would be different. Plus there are other factors due to human group and political time that will come back later and muddy things up again when someone feels like fixing elon's patch.
> governments and bureaucracies are inefficient in some way
Also, what's important to understand is that inefficiency in a corporation is a bug, but inefficiency in government is a feature.
Government needs to have checks and balances at every stage, which by definition is inefficient. Which in the case of government is a wonderful thing.
There is a word for a perfectly efficient government: dictatorship
I disagree with that, if a system needs time to check, then it's not inefficient, it's right at the speed it needs to be to work. What I'm thinking of is absurd structure beyond the need for checks and balances.
Some examples of "stupid" ineffiency: delegating tech support outside government. Meaning no technician could fix a laptop on-site, their role was to notify a private company to come one day to take the device and come back later with a fix. The delays were bad, and compounded rapidly, the employees couldn't work, citizen wasted days off and had to reschedule a month later.. really bad. Plus technicians skills were unused/wasted, they hated their jobs, and communication with partners was mostly hostile/red-tape adding more friction. They didn't have enough money to change LCDs but didn't allow you to give some even though there were plenty of working ones for free. Same for printers.
This is the kind that needs to be pruned.
Also I believe there's another form of "perfect" government, that is not a mechanical human grinder like a dictatorship: harmonious. It might be a naive dream but .. maybe not.
But is that a problem? Or is that functioning as intended?
Generally speaking, I want my government to be stable, predictable, and consistent over fairly long time horizons.
This is the point: A well functioning bureaucracy allows for repeatable predictable outcomes
Bureoucracies are invariably the most efficient way to concentrate corruption efforts. There is no better spot to corrupt and make elite unelected decisions. Revolutionaries love to infiltrate these because they can covertly use their profession to move promote designs and budget flows that exlusively forward their mission hidden in complexity.
Is a system and everyone here knows what Moore's Law is.
It's true if you're ignoring the no-true-scottman fallacy.
Bureaucracy doesn't have to be to the detriment of society. As a matter of fact, it can potentially put breaks on the worst exploitative behavior.
But over time... It has the potential to grow too much with bad legislation, effectively making the positive potential into a very real negative that stifles unnecessarily.
> Bureaucracy doesn't have to be to the detriment of society.
Bureaucracy is an organizational model that reflects human intentions and choices, just like every other organizational model in society.
Attributing specific moral inclinations to an organizational model is as absurd as attributing them to any other tool. Debating whether bureaucracies per se have good or bad intentions is as ridiculous as debating whether handwritten documents convey better or worse intentions than printed ones.
You have to think about who you’re listening too. The economic sustainability of the actions Trump has taken so far is a pittance:
* The beauracracy today is about the size it was in 1980 on a per capita basis. It’s not the largest per capita it’s ever been.
> The federal government’s workforce has remained largely unchanged in size for over 50 years, even as the U.S. population has grown by 68% and federal spending has quintupled, highlighting the critical role of technology and contractors in filling the gap.
> Compensation for federal employees cost $291 billion in 2019, or 6.6% of that year’s total spending
So firing everyone is a 6% improvement to the federal budget while a complete government collapse for a number of reasons including that the government won’t have anyone to collect revenue or prosecute crimes.
[1]
* The largest discretionary spending area is the military at 800 billion in 2023. Of that, personnel accounted for 173 billion, or 20%. Personnel is a tiny fraction of the government’s spend each year. Even [2] which is a right wing think tank supporting this effort, claims that the liabilities improvement is 600B over 10 years which makes it a <1% dent seeing as how we spend >6T each year and just hand-waves the pension improvement as “significant”. But cuts aren’t focusing on the biggest employer within the government like the military.
* The people Trump & Musk are firing now are people who haven’t been on the job long enough to have protections. This drastically reduces the numbers above as a best case since that assumes a uniform 10% reduction across all salary bands whereas the current 10% reduction is almost certainly across the lowest bands since the government pays based on seniority.
This is what Trump does - he often identifies a real problem and then does a sleight of hand trick to make you think the actions he’s taking, because they’re highly visible, are solving the problem when in fact he’s not actually making any meaningful dent. That’s why he made a big show about the deportation flights but not talking about how the places he’s sending them to aren’t the places the people are from - he’s bullied Costa Rica into accepting whoever he send [3].
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/is-government-too-big-ref...
[2] https://epicforamerica.org/education-workforce-retirement/fi...
[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/us-deportation-fl...
> Bureaucracies are a common good
never saw it like that. to me bureaucracy represents inefficiency. today we have automation that can be quite advanced. as long as you have a structured, rules based system there is no need for bureaucrats. i do understand that there will always be edge cases, or moral issues with automation, but there should be a constant drive in society to dismantle as much bureaucracy as morally possible, as that implies adopting automation and as such efficiency.
> as long as you have a structured, rules based system there is no need for bureaucrats.
Bureaucrats consider, implement, and modify the structured, rules based systems our society comes up with.
what you write is true, but very concerning.
in theory, laws and policies are crafted by elected officials or experts, and bureaucrats are just the executors. but in reality, bureaucracies interpret, refine, and sometimes even reshape these rules through policy implementation. this is where a lot of inefficiency, red tape, and unintended consequences creep in.
Even if this was true, breaking things with reckless abandon has real human costs today and will until they’re fixed. That’s part of the reason government is ‘inefficient’ is the responsibility to serve everyone and get as close to zero downtime as possible.
yours is a stability-over-change argument: bureaucracy exists to prevent reckless, harmful disruptions.
you're assuming the alternative to bureaucracy is reckless destruction, but what about the harm bureaucracy already causes? slow government processes, redundant approvals, and outdated rules waste time, money, and even lives. how many people suffer due to delays in healthcare, housing permits, or business licenses?
you're framing efficiency as 'reckless abandon' but efficiency doesn't mean chaos, it means designing systems that work smoothly without unnecessary friction. if private companies can process global transactions in seconds, why does it take months to approve basic permits?
if bureaucracy ensures stability, why does it fail so often? government shutdowns, dmv backlogs, and welfare mismanagement don’t scream 'zero downtime'. in reality, bureaucracy is often fragile, not resilient.
other industries use automation and streamlined processes to reduce friction without 'breaking things recklessly'. why should government be any different?
I'm framing these specific DOGE initiatives where they're firing people at random as reckless. Because they are and there are real human costs that are just being glazed over.
I 1,000% agree that in general, we should reduce bureaucracy and minimize the steps people need to take / the approvals required and make things as streamlined as possible. But if those things are small fires, having the current Republican majority with DOGE in support is asking arsonists to put them out. Often you need substantial upfront investment to fix e.g. the social security infrastructure - but when one party is opposed to all government spending, the infra will never be improved and the proposed fixes are to fire a bunch of employees that are maintaining the current system to save costs.
You do realize one of the first users of private computers was the IRS. You miss the other side of the coin when it comes to efficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is a large bureaucracy. There is no possible way the IRS could do it's work today without computers. The rules are too complex, and computers made it possible to have such complex rules.
> who are pushing things in dumb directions because their careers and wealth are tied to what they do for work so they advocated for those things to be advanced to the point of absurdity and everyone on their coat tails cheers for it because they benefit too.
Could you give a concrete example of what you're describing there?
I work on software for government agencies. Some of the paperwork processes are absurd. There is a high number of people in leadership positions within government that push for processes and make software purchases that quite frankly have little to negative benefit. It is sad because I think government can be a force of good, but people are too busy spending effort on processes that don't matter. That leaves other work undone. An example is industry specific SAAS software that costs millions to pass documents around in the cloud, for a small group of users, which is no better than MS office solutions.
>Could you give a concrete example of what you're describing there?
Pick any pro-1984-esque smart city article that normal people would recoil in horror at the implications of yet HN generally endorses. The author is your example.
Now repeat for every industry and its own insane trends. Manufacturing people endorsing green regulation because they know it gives them a competitive advantage over their competition despite causing off shoring and making the world worse on the net. Lawyers, legislators and law people peddling inequality under the law but dressing it up as DEI. Lead people at regulatory agencies advocating for expansion of their own scope and mandate. Etc. etc. the list goes on.
It's like a stupid reverse gell-mann amnesia effect where people can spot stupidity outside their own industry but lack the ability to be a disciplined adult with self awareness and ability to see consequences when something benefits them.
But of course outsiders don't make decisions until things are so insane that the public weighs in so what happens is the tech industry peddles pervasive surveillance, manufacturing off-shores to countries that belch pollution, etc, etc, until it reaches a critical mass and a populist gets elected on promises to kill all of it no matter what it is.
If you want me to literally cite an example I'll do that but we all know that doesn't really matter because no example will satisfy everyone.
Efficiency efforts are common.
It's just that the abusers are the only ones who make an effort to talk about it, because talking about it provides them cover.
Otherwise it's a regular part of the daily job.
Perhaps the whole situation will finally convince the "I don't mind, I have nothing to hide" crowd about the need to scrutinize & limit as much as reasonably possible the personal data collection and retention by government and other entities. What good are rules, statutes, checks & balances, passwords and ACLs, if at some point someone you don't like or trust can just come in "as a root" and circumvent everything?
The "I don't have anything to hide" argument usually misses that you can't know today what you should be hiding from the government tomorrow.
You have everything to hide by default and the onus is on every actor to prove why they need information and how it's isolated from other information.
The "I don't mind, I have nothing to hide" people are cheering this on. They don't know or care about any of the things you just said.
Do you have cause to believe "nothing to hide" is a partisan position? I'd expect that half of such people are on the left and are critical by default of the new administration. Seems to be supported by the second chart here: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2023/10/18/how-american...
It’s a position held by extremists on both sides and the natural ally of extermists, the lazy.
In real life, I hear people of all political stripes embracing positions between "nothing to hide" and "the govt can find out my personal info anyway, so why not email it directly to nameless scammers overseas?"
Online it works like most things. Everybody pretends it's a partisan food fight, even if they have to lie.
Best angle with that crowd is that insurance companies are going to screw them over with all the data.
I don't have anything to hide but I still close the door when I take a dump.
Good reminder of why people should be wary of governments collecting data because this a stark reminder that the government can change at any time.
"I have nothing to hide" really misses the point of what privacy is for. I don't close the door when I'm taking a crap because I have something to hide, I do it for privacy.
Also, blackmail isn't the only way to have personal or intimate information used against you. As the absolutely massive advertising industry can tell you, knowing more details about people makes them easier to influence and manipulate.
The "I have nothing to hide" perspective on privacy is immediately revealed as disingenuous when you ask them to place a web cam in their shower.
Privacy clearly is valuable for it's own sake.
This is an interesting side effect indeed. The people I know irl who have espoused this view are, ironically, the people who never liked Elon Musk in the first place. It'll be interesting to see how their narrative evolves now, if at all, as they stare at a practical example which contradicts them!
It's a bit of a straw man. I might get labelled as part of that group. But in reality, I have nothing to hide given a search warrant of my digital data, issued by a court in accordance to tight privacy-respecting laws. And I am happy the bandwidth-limited court can issue these against me, and against everyone around me, as opposed to no data ever being available for anyone.
That's quite different to Musk's minions taking a DB dump onto a USB stick.
Another very negative long-term effect of all of this is how is the government going to recruit talent in the future? How many people, who have good prospects elsewhere, are going to work for a government agency -- usually a lower pay -- to put up with shit like this that doesn't even happen in industry? Would you? Sure there are sometimes mass layoffs that are handled pretty badly in industry, but not these Gestapo-like purge tactics that are clearly designed that way to instill fear and loyalty.
I think that is part of the point. "As hire As. Bs hire Cs." A-tier folks want to work with the best, B-tier folks want to work with lackeys that will do their bidding. It's pretty clear there's no A-tier folks in charge at the moment.
This is not and has never been true as a blanket statement. Contractors perform to expectations just like in every other sector of the economy, so variation is high, just like in every other sector of the economy.
I’ve seen both high and low-performing teams in .com, .edu, and .gov and there’s nothing magic about any sector: you get what senior management sets the incentives to get. The NSA gets really good hackers because they don’t leave that to chance, just like how NASA or MIT hire really good scientists and engineers, and the places which just trust the big consulting companies usually get taken to the cleaners.
It is pretty well known Elon companies pay shit and churn through young engineers willing to work long hours for no overtime fueled by “passion”. It’s why he is pushing for more H1B1s. He wants desperate people worried about being deported if they lose their job.
When is FSD shipping again? Why is Tesla falling behind in the market they defined for a decade? When will Boring actually deliver on the hype? Why is X suing former customers trying to get the revenue they so desperately need to pay off debts best on wildly over-estimating the company’s worth?
He’s been able to buy some good companies but nobody has a magic trick for being good at everything and the man is stretched really thin between all of his CEO positions and spending hours per day on politics.
In government, yes, he's hiring Cs. I can speak to SpaceX--they're all As. But it's also the company he's most shielded from himself.
Elon qua SpaceX and possibly xAI and Neuralink is an A. Elon qua Boring Company, X and DOGE is very, very clearly a B player. (Idk what's going on with Tesla, he seems to be treating it more like a piggy bank to be raided to get to Mars (A) and indulge his impulses (B).)
We've needed reforms to civil service and the general schedule pay scale specifically for a long time now. One can hope that a future Congress could write a bill that resets government hiring and compensation practices in the wake of this administration, but perhaps that's a fantasy at this point.
First, DOGE proposes to reduce the size of the federal workforce, so the need to recruit talent may not be that great, second they might recruit from the pool of talent that supports all of this -- it might be a small pool, but if the workforce is small enough...
>to put up with shit like this that doesn't even happen in industry?
The C-suite never bring in hatchetmen? What world do you work in?
> Sure there are sometimes mass layoffs that are handled pretty badly in industry, but not these Gestapo-like purge tactics that are clearly designed that way to instill fear and loyalty.
Isn't the difference here that in the private sector you have to do all that loyalty shit from day one, not just whenever the board restructures and you want to keep your job?
> How many people, who have good prospects elsewhere, are going to work for a government agency -- usually a lower pay -- to put up with shit like this that doesn't even happen in industry? Would you?
You could remove the "to put up with shit like this" part and the answer would still be "nobody". You have to remove the "who have good prospects elsewhere" part for it to make sense.
well, there are people with good prospects elsewhere who take gov positions out of civic duty and also because it is typically longer term and you're less likely to get laid off for no reason
I agree with everything you said, but it's also not impossible to be laid off by the govt for no reason so there may have been a false sense of security:
https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/nprrpt/annrpt/vp...
This is basic dictatorshipping, I think US folks need to refresh skills so common in rest of the world.
You want obedient lackeys as #1 rule, it means reasonably little threat and no resistance to molding from above. Competences are sometimes even frowned upon. Look at how potus literally demands that others lick his boots to keep it polite.
This is how russians run their dictatorships for example, including those they exported elsewhere under their iron hand / military bases. Talking from first hand experience.
Of course that part of the system is very ineffective. Regardless of what you think about government and its bureaucracy, that fascist manchild aint gonna end up with success story here, he lacks (any genuine) emotional intelligence to understand underlying reasons. This isnt technical problem to solve where he sometimes excells.
I intentionally didn't weigh in because on one hand, its main functionality is still going strong, and it hasn't had major outages. On the other, its user base has changed, advertisers are avoiding it because of its users, and we don't know what real usage numbers look like.
He ended up in control and the woke employees are gone. Isn’t that a win to his perspective?
He also lost a ton of $ and you can claim that was on purpose but he also made many attempts to get out of the deal so that would indicate otherwise. Also the sale of the subprime debt by holders suggest that risk was increasing in their outlooks and they wanted it off their books.
What should happen, and nobody is talking about this, is the USA is severely downgraded in its overall credit rating due to an unhinged and ongoing "fire, aim, ready" self-audit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_governme...
The last credit downgrade of the US by a major ratings agency was by Fitch in 2023. They cited projections for the US deficit to continue to rise, due to projected weaker revenues and increased spending.
https://www.fitchratings.com/research/sovereigns/united-stat...
I was thinking the same thing. If this even slightly jeopardizes America's ability to pay off its debt, the entire world will suffer. Something that occurred to me from talking to Americans online is that most of them don't realize just how much soft power they have across the world. I really feel that China becoming the global superpower might end up becoming the least bad option if America keeps destabilizing.
The deficit hawks don't understand how money works. Everything about DOGE and their mission has a fundamental deep misunderstanding of why governments with their own currency must have deficits. Literal accounting 101. Unfortunately Elon has an economics degree, which means he is completely uneducated in accounting.
> Everything about DOGE and their mission has a fundamental deep misunderstanding of why governments with their own currency must have deficits
DOGE has nothing to do with deficits, they're not even bothering to count it properly [1]. DOGE will remake the federal government for Musk's benefit. That's why he's using cannon-fodder DOGE bros instead of his best and brightest. That's why the collateral damage isn't of principal concern, and why they're moving quickly: they need to finish their work before checks and balances start swinging.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/upshot/doge-contracts-mus...
What does he think will happen after four years? Trump is old and can escape accountability by dying but most of these toadies are middle-aged.
> What does he think will happen after four years?
Musk will honestly probably be fine. These kids will get hammered, as they should, at the very least with a decade+ of litigation and possibly prosecution.
The only consequences that might last will hit Tesla in the form of tariffs and bans. But he seems to be fine raiding Tesla as a piggy bank to fund his ambitions on Mars and in politics.
It doesn't appear that DOGE is handling the problem with the appropriate amount of care or analysis, but the US does have a deficit problem. The issue is not simply that the US has a deficit, nor have I heard anyone argue this point, but that the deficit to GDP ratio is around twice as large as the historical average, and is projected to continue to increase.
No need to infatilize their behavior by pointing to a lack of education. If he can head up several corporations, he can read a balance sheet. This is smash and grab politics, the things that happen in places like post-USSR when there's a power vaccuum, everything is up for grabs, the courts are powerless and territories start getting carved up by a coterie of connected technocrats. How long was it before Yeltsin's uneasy alliance with oligarchs crumbled, paving the way for a ruler who wasn't going to make the same mistakes?
https://web.archive.org/web/20250220063358/https://www.theat...
https://archive.ph/Oa42l