DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data
(theatlantic.com)853 points by perihelions 2 days ago
853 points by perihelions 2 days ago
There are laws, but you will get fired if you try to follow them, and lawsuits to remedy that take time.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/usaid-sec...
Is it true to say that in practise there are no laws here? If anyone in DOGE breaks the law, can't the President just issue a blanket pardon?
If the President himself breaks the law, he argues that it was in the course of his official duties [1].
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf
There is a principal in democracy that there Should Not Be strong institutions that prevent a majority of the population from harming itself with its choices. We balance that against a Supreme Court in the US, but that court is almost uniquely powerful & active in forming policy relative to its place in the rest of the world, and right now, most of it has been appointed by fascists; Ultimately the population will have its say in the long term.
Do you want an extra-democratic body who is capable of telling the population "No"?
I think such a body (which exists in some system) would obviously be nice right now, but I am a lot less convinced that it would be a net positive in general.
If we want to find our way out of this, I suspect a lot of people are going to need to feel directly harmed by this administration, and are going to need to basically erect a strong protest culture out of whole cloth. Something like 5% of the population in the streets can topple an authoritarian regime in the right circumstances, but not the 0.5% we might expect for a "large" protest.
> Is it true to say that in practise there are no laws here? If anyone in DOGE breaks the law, can't the President just issue a blanket pardon?
For federal laws, yes.
If you can find a state-level law that's been violated then he has no jurisdiction to pardeon.
Trump himself was charged at the state level twice (and already convicted once):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecution_of_Donald_Trump_in...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_election_racketeering_...
See also the civil case against him for rape:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Jean_Carroll_v._Donald_J._T...
Trump has explicitly said he is above the law: "He who saves the country cannot break the law" is what he posted.
He pardoned people who stormed the capital, threatened gov officials, and killed police officers. Pardoning DOGE employees is child's play -- but it would never get that far because the DOJ and FBI have been purged of those not fully subservient to Trump.
Yes, that is always true. It usually doesn't happen. Mainly because DoJ usually doesn't look. Congress can perform oversight and impeach if need be.
In that case, can't the next president just illegally imprison Elon or trump or whoever for their entire administration, ignore supreme court rulings or lawsuits or whatever, and then issue themselves a pardon at the end?
And when you have an executive on one hand stating that only the president and the AG can interpret laws for the executive [0] and that you can't break laws if you're "saving the country" [1], that approach also just doesn't seem too promising.
[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/ensu... Sec. 7
[1] https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1140091792251...
Or, as JD Vance wrote, "Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power." (https://x.com/JDVance/status/1888607143030391287). You really have to read it twice to understand just how far out that phrase is. So now it's the executive itself deciding what's "legitimate" (=conforming to the law), not the courts, whose role it is to interpret and enforce laws?
Or Trump fucking referring to himself as king yesterday .. signs are clear.
Honest question: who else, internal to the executive branch, and besides the president, should be able to interpret the laws for the executive branch?
By my reading, this is a clarification that if an agency makes a significant policy change or regulation, they ought to run it by the president first.
It doesn't preclude other branches of government from checking this power.
Agencies all have their own lawyers, and it’s frequently useful to have them hash out agreements for the same reason that it’s useful for scientists to get peer review. Beyond the basic efficiency argument, it’s good to have multiple people validate your reasoning.
Security clearances are based on laws, such as the ones compiled in Title 50 U.S. Code §3341.
Statutes can't really constrain the president's authority to do this sort of thing (firing appointees, firing employees for cause, laying people off, auditing the executive agencies). Constitutionally the president is just plenipotent within the executive branch.
The enforcement of these laws should be a function of the executive. There are ways for the supreme court or congress to intervene when the executive isn't doing their job. Sadly that requires them to believe a series of checks and balances is necessary.
Given that it is down to the voters, and they thought a racist, rapist, conman should be president giving them the power of the executive - which has been growing increasingly powerful for my adult lifetime.
It seems the only thing the supreme Court can do now days is rule if something is unconstitutional or if a last has been broken. But has no check on the executive according to the regimes arguments. The only check is for Congress to impeach and convict apparently. And there are too many demagogue followers in those changes for that to ever happen.
The real check here is for congress to write laws that are actually specific in their text. That is hard, though, so they instead write laws that empower parts of the executive branch to do some broadly-defined thing, including the power to make the relevant rules. When you get an executive who doesn't play your game, those poorly-written laws come back to bite you.
> [voters want STRONG MAN] which has been growing increasingly powerful for my adult lifetime.
Political scientist Robert D Putnam suggests that this is in part due to the culture fragmenting and isolating.
Watch 10m video https://youtu.be/5cVSR8MSJvw?si=5NxRUnYENhfzTbXe easy interview with him from recently on that. Interesting.
> Given that it is down to the voters, and they thought a racist, rapist, conman should be president
And multiply-bankrupt, and (on the second term) multiply-convicted felon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_and_business_legal_af...
Vox populi, vox Dei, but unfortunately the Deus in question is Κοάλεμος
Musk Crassus and Donald Caesar comprise a de facto duumvirate.
> Given that it is down to the voters, and they thought a racist, rapist, conman should be president giving them the power of the executive - which has been growing increasingly powerful for my adult lifetime.
It's this kind of contempt that got him elected. You have no empathy or interest in the will of the people. Maybe if you talked with some of them, you'd understand their grievances. But something tells me you'd sooner ironically prejudicially dismiss them all as racist bigots.
The most distressing thing I learned in the past 3 ~~Years~~ edit: months,, was how MUCH laws are about norms.
Norms, are basically the way laws work in the real world.
I despaired, because this is natural to lawyers, and alien entirely to the layperson.
No one is going to think Justice, and then accept “Oh, our norms are how laws work”.
The past three years? Why that time period? (I thought trumps first term was when it all became obvious).
Democracy is held together by people willing to follow the rules.
In Trump's first administration they realized the trick is to just move so fast that you flood the system and can do whatever you want before anyone sees through all the noise or has a chance to stop you. Steve Bannon was interviewed on camera saying as much.
Here's Bannon's quote verbatim -- "I said, all we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang. These guys will never—will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity."
Indeed, VC culture (esp. for the fabled "unicorn" wannabes) is DOGE culture.
It might rarely be admitted openly, but it sometimes is alluded to... e.g. Eric Schmidt's Stanford talk where he said:
"I want to say that if your product becomes popular, you can hire a bunch of lawyers to sort everything out. If no one uses your product, don’t worry -- no one will care that you stole someone else’s content."
The Constitution vest all executive authority on the president. The president can delegate that authority. That's what all is happening here. Within the executive branch the president has practically total power, hardly if at all possible to constrain by statute, and that's by design in the Constitution.
The president needs the Senate's "advice and consent" to hire principal officers, and does not need the Senate's "advice and consent" for certain other officers as specified by statute. The US Digital Service ("DOGE") is an agency where he did not need the Senate's advice and consent.
The president does NOT need the Senate's advice and consent to fire anyone in the executive branch. For principal officers this was established by the failed impeachment of Andrew Johnson for firing a confirmed cabinet secretary nominated by Lincoln. For other officers this was established by judicial precedent fairly recently when Biden terminated two Trump appointees to minor offices and they sued (and lost).
Similarly the president needs the Senate's advice and consent to enter into treaties. The Constitution is silent as to terminating Senate-confirmed executive officers, officers whose appointments did not require Senate confirmation, or treaties (abrogation). It's essentially settled law that the president does not require the Senate's advice and consent for any of those kinds of terminations.
Therefore, under the Constitution and the political and binding judicial precedents, there can be no law "onto which government workers can cling to refuse these requests."
Thanks for the explanation. Like I said, sounds wild that yes, the American Constitution does establish the president as basically a king over the Executive branch.
Copying what I typed elsewhere, I guess it's a testament to American democratic cultural history that no coup has occurred in American history when the president has such an absolute authority over the executive branch. Let's hope for the sake of the whole world it remains like this.
Is it not the same pretty much in all systems with unitary heads of state? Prime ministers surely have similar powers, subject only to votes of no confidence by their parliaments. Kings, where they have power, are also like this.
> I guess it's a testament to American democratic cultural history that no coup has occurred in American history
The various assassinations of presidents were kinds of coups, don't you think? Soon we'll find out if the CIA did or did not kill JFK. Suppose the CIA killed JFK -for argument's sake-, surely that would have been a coup, no?
'Audit' is not something where you turn in the keys to your locker unconditionally to some random stranger who just walks in making demands. Audits are based on pre-determined and documented criteria, with the participation and supervision of responsible in-house officials. They just check if everything is in order. Auditors are rarely given unsupervised access to any data - especially to sensitive information. Meanwhile, the auditors themselves have to be held to a high level of integrity - elimination of conflicts of interest being the most important. This is a sham audit if it can be considered to be one at all.
Same reason you won’t send me the credentials to your bank accounts.
Waste is all things i do not understand? And i dont understand all things, because i fired the experts. Thus all is waste. Its running a state, how hard can it be- my cousin was major of a town once.
That's misinformation. They are not "audits".
They are sincerely following Project 2025, decimating government, and very likely to fire A LOT more federal workers over the summer, then they will install Loyalists throughout.
Billionaire Musk .. aka "The Auditor" .. is "primarying" or threatening to fund opposition candidates for Senators who fight him on this.
It's an autogolpe.
Yes, and they have sued over several events so far. I don’t know what advice they could give in the moment.
If I were in their shoes I would take some small comfort from a constitutional lawyer even saying "officially we don't know".
It's not often you're asked to do something that could break the law, with the whistle-blowing chain being potentially broken at the top.
There is no constitutional way the president to not have access to any data in the executive branch. And since doge is reporting to him - it just send the data to the president and he will forward it to whomever he pleases.
Even the concept of independent executive agencies is probably more vulnerable constitutionally than more people think.
All the court cases being brought is going to end up in the SCOTUS over https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory . There is a pretty good chance that this will be confirmed.
Yeah, that's my point. Not even the president should have unrestricted access to that data. He's not a king or the head of a corporation. And government workers aren't his subjects or employees. In most places, at least honest government workers can stand their ground because they're backed by a law governing this access.
Should have made it clear that I'm not American and I'm just finding it wild from afar.
I guess it's a testament to American democratic cultural history that no coup has occurred in American history when the president has such an absolute authority over the executive branch, as informed to me by the other comments. Let's hope for the sake of the whole world it remains like this.
Laws are only a suggestion, they are not being enforced and there are no consequences.
The other thing is that in the US, people's lives depend on their jobs, with half of polled people indicating they live paycheck to paycheck. This makes them easy to manipulate into complying, putting their morals aside because standing up for morals or indeed the law will mean they lose their job.
I mean the US president declared yesterday that only he gets to decide on law and called himself king on his social media. There's heaps of 'legal' texts that indicate it means he can be deposed and yote into jail, but if there's nobody enforcing them they're useless.
Advisors with unlimited power and endless conflicts of interests with zero obligation for transparency? Whether I like Musk or not has very little to do with it.
> The president is not king, just chief executive.
Well someone should tell him: https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1892295984928993698/photo/1 !
He literally declared himself king multiple times yesterday. He literally campaigned a promise that we wouldn't need future elections. He literally states he is the one true interpreter of the law with respect to the federal bureaucracy.
We don't when said President illegally fires the inspectors general responsible for independent oversight.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/fired-inspecto...
This administration's legal theory is that executive power is concentrated entirely in the person of the president, which, to be fair, is because the Constitution says that it is.
That's not conducive to good government and is not the current precedent set by the Supreme Court, but it's been the conservative legal view since the 1980s and to be fair again, is again what the Constitution actually says. It will pretty much certainly be the prevailing view after this returns to the Supreme Court.
If that legal theory is true then Congress cannot create independent executive power and so it is not illegal for the President to fire anyone in the executive branch for any reason, including inspectors general, the chairman of the Fed, etc., regardless of any law to the contrary. Again, to be clear a third time, the effects of this will be bad, but the constitutional language isn't really ambiguous.
This is a straw man argument.
I don't like Musk. That's true. The reasoning is irrelevant.
Let's take someone I do like. Linus Torvalds. If Trump (or Harris or ...) appointed Linus, unilaterally, to do what Musk is doing, I'd still have a problem with it.
Now the two responses you might have are:
- I don't believe you.
- Linus wouldn't be bad either.
Both of which completely miss the point. Nobody should have singular, unilateral, unsupervised access to governmental systems like this.
Then why did Trump illegally fire all inspector generals?
Most people probably don't know what inspector generals are nor what they do.
Yeah 99% is sour grapes from the other team. I like what doge has turned up so far and will give them the benefit of the doubt. My wife is a long time liberal Democrat and even she admits the main problem is Musk is just doing out in the open what is usually done behind closed doors and people don’t like it.
Do you like them turning up a wasteful $8 billion contract that turned out to be $8 million, but they’re a bunch of incompetent ninnies who can’t even verify they have the right number of zeroes in their figures before they tell the world?
I think what you mean to say is that you like what doge has claimed to have found so far. Unfortunately it doesn’t hold up to even the slightest scrutiny.
It's like we go out to a twelve course dinner and get home and there is one 10 calories carrot on the table and we are tweeting to no end about our genius and our total transparently and robust diet of throwing away that carrot. "Carrots don't taste good anyways" they screen and people cheer.
Meanwhile we are actually losing vision and dying of obesity.
There is plenty to do to get more healthy for real; but that's not where we are heading with these initiatives so far:
https://prospect.org/economy/2025-01-27-we-found-the-2-trill...
There is no rhyme or reason. That's the problem with it. Not that it's out in the open. Not that it's musk.
There is no rhyme or reason, other than stripping off the parts.
I'll bet you. Once the stripping is complete, Musk and Trump have the brilliant idea of replacing the old, "bloated" government functions that were cut with private for profit contractors (that are obviously "more efficiently" run because they're for profit).
A team of kids without the capacity for discernment and bad morals to get through government agencies data is unprecedented. This is not sour grapes, this is a radical shift to how things have been done. These kids talk about bling bling, pull pump and dumps in the crypto world and are now at Elon Musks command. This is pushing any conversation away completely because you cannot have a normal conversation with trolls. What’s next, uncontrolled violence?
Stop being naive. This is an unelected billionaire successfully couping the government and replacing competent people with incompetent lackeys. Musk is fucking you over and you're cheering him on because you've suckled at the teat of propaganda for far too long. Get your head out of your ass and actually think
Denial on what is actually happening is rampant at the moment. When in weeks, months, and years the consequences of these actions maybe, maybe, it will be acknowledged, though the pattern has been so far scapegoating the 'other'.
> Yeah 99% is sour grapes from the other team. I like what doge has turned up so far and will give them the benefit of the doubt.
This is peak ostriching. They haven't turned up anything so far, they've just been making monumental messes and lying about progress.
I concur, but White House staff that are not confirmed by Congress have limits placed on their power when dealing with some agencies (as legislated by Congress) and there are of course many other laws and regulations pertaining to information security (FISMA), security clearances, data privacy, employee protections, and so on that I would expect such a White House functionary to respect.
See I know something of what actually wanting to fix the government's waste fraud and abuse would look like. It would be beefing up the IRS (where every dollar more than pays for itself), it would be banning people in congress from buying individual stocks; it would be a lot of things that deeply nerdy policy wonks have been saying for years.
That's not what I'm seeing happen. I'm not seeing cost benefit analysis, I'm not seeing the use of existing experts.
What I am seeing... well perhaps we'd have different perspectives. To pick an example, look Musk saying that people who are over 200 years old are marked as alive.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891557463377490431
If you assume the worst of Elon Musk, you might think he's an idiot who doesn't understand how COBOL represents dates in the SSA system, nor how large government databases deal with missing data.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/new-social-security-chie...
I've worked, not for the SSA, but with public health data. Real people and historical records and old databases are messy as fuck.
The SSA neither throw out data, nor do they add data they haven't received, except when there is funding appropriated for it.
So these old people are simply actually people they never got death info on.
Could they just add a date? Well you have to consider the data integrity issues around date of death. If you pick a nonsensical date, can you assume that the SSA, department of commerce, and other orgs, not to mention the internal SSA progroms that rely on processing SSA data can handle it? Nope, an engineer can't assume that, there's an implicit API.
Oh yeah, agencies for state governments deal with that data too. https://www.ssa.gov/dataexchange/documents/sves_solq_manual....
But the fact is, this has been looked at. Per this 2023 audit the SSA estimated it would cost 5.5 to 9.7 million to mark people as deceased in the database when they don't have death date information. They didn't do that, probably because no money was appropriated for it.
https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf
Does that mean there's massive SSA fraud of dead people? Nope. back in 2015 they decided to automatically stop giving benefits to anyone over 115. The oldest living American is, in fact, Naomi Whitehead, who is 114.
In other word, Musk is acting like saving the government 5.5 million minimum is a "HUGE problem".
Now, I don't think Elon Musk is an idiot who doesn't understand COBOL or how messy data can be from real people. I also don't think he thinks that 200 year old benefits fraud is really an issue.
Which begs the question, why bring this up at all?
My interpretation is perhaps less charitable than yours, but I'd be interested in hearing what you think.
What’s especially frustrating, if you care about governance being more serious than pro wrestling, is that we have a couple organizations in government that’d happily provide all kinds of ways to reduce the deficit: the GAO and the CBO.
But they tend to say reality-based things like “no, your tax cuts won’t pay for themselves, in fact they’ll cost $1.2T over ten years” or “no, this war won’t pay for itself, lol, what the fuck even” or “no, you can’t make meaningful progress on cutting the deficit by attacking benefits fraud, because there’s not very much of that.”
All things Republicans would rather pretend aren’t true, and certainly don’t want to act on. So what do you do when you need to show progress but are constrained by operating based on fiction? You tout tiny wins and hope the numbers seem big to people who don’t know much; you make things up; and you cause harm or even incur long-term costs or cause waste and call that savings by doing bad accounting.
> See I know something of what actually wanting to fix the government's waste fraud and abuse would look like. It would be beefing up the IRS (where every dollar more than pays for itself), it would be banning people in congress from buying individual stocks; it would be a lot of things that deeply nerdy policy wonks have been saying for years.
Where can I vote for these changes??
This is a great article on finding actual savings. Surprise surprise, it doesn't look like scapegoating and witch hunting the enemy of the week. https://prospect.org/economy/2025-01-27-we-found-the-2-trill...
As the article says, "The Musk/DOGE plan is one of self-enrichment and outward punishment. Someone should outline a different path."
Let's suppose for a second you're right - Musk is just trying to do a transparent audit. Why do they feel to need to have DOGE and Musk operate outside of the usual channels for transparency?
https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-doge-white-house-layoff...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/us/politics/trump-musk-do...
The reason they're now pretending that Musk is an "advisor" is that there are laws against what he proudly says he's doing, and Trump has said Musk is doing.
He can't lead a government department without being confirmed by congress. If he's just an advisor, he and his Musk Youth army can't actually give orders to government employees the way they've been doing, much less fire them.
If someone keeps lying every other breath for years and years, at some point you should stop taking their word at face value.
We've had a lot of these in 3 weeks, but this is an emperor has no clothes on moment. DOGE is running around saying they have access because of Musk. Even Trump has a hard time saying anything else. Now they are saying Musk isn't really in charge and has no power. They also won't say who runs DOGE. Everyone knows it's bullshit, but people accept it. That's the real lesson from 1984, and here we are.
I'm really at a loss how anyone still believes or supports these people.
That's a gross misrepresentation of what's happening here.
We don't have to respect anything, except the law. Trump and Musk's actions are neither legal, ethical nor sensible. If you're of that mind then removing Musk and Trump via any legal or political means is not only acceptable but, if you care about your country, an imperative.
The biggest problem America has is how readily it normalizes incompetence and evil, to its detriment.
No they don't. Do a bit of googling before you post. Trump's actions are in defiance of the conventions of government and the written constitution. It's not even a judgement call, it's bleedingly obvious.
Is respecting the result of an election what Trump did for 3 months after he lost in 2020?
Trump ordered Mike Pence to overturn that election. Is that respecting the result of an election? When Pence refused the order, Trump sent a mob to have the VPOTUS assassinated and to stop Congress from doing its job. Not at all respectful.
This is a political party that went apoplectic about Obama wearing a tan suit, while insisting he was illegitimate, i.e. the racist lie of birtherism.
And then they elected a pussy grabbing rapist, felon, and vile insurrectionist.
I think they're getting all the respect they deserve.
Anyone is quite welcome to escalate to whatever level they think appropriate in opposition to whatever they feel motivated by.
Just be aware of the consequences of failing, or succeeding.
Why do you have to accept it? Trump doesn't accept the actual law.
In most rule of law democracies the law is above the president. The civil servants are beholden to the law as passed by the representatives of the people, the chief executive can only give orders as allowed by the law. Granted there will be times of murkiness that require interpretation. But "fuck it I'm the president and everything I say is legal" is not a valid interpretation in any democracy I know of.
Important to note that USA is a republic, typically in Europe parliamentarianism.
In the USA, both are true. Civil servants can (and should) refuse to follow an order they think is unconstitutional, illegal, or simply unwise. But this won't stop them from being fired for insubordination. I don't think the courts will attempt to force the president to retain subordinates that are actively opposing him on the job.
Probably not.
This was the specific argument raised in the SC verdict - but this is a question of whether the President is immune.
The question here is just BS. The President created organizations to enact the executives will.
The executive is now saying they want the power to come back to them. Which it always was - they had to work through the structures they created.
Apparently they dont want the institutions.
My understanding is that everyone takes the same oath of office to the constitution, not their boss:
> The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution …
Yes, like the 7 DoJ prosecutors who chose to resign last week rather than sign a dismissal of the charges against Eric Adams, because it was an obvious quid pro quo, and the case against Adams is very strong. There's absolutely no legitimate justification for not prosecuting Adams.
The dismissal was eventually signed and filed by Emil Bove, a very recent Trump appointee, whose former job was as one of Trump's criminal defense lawyers.
The stink of corruption is heavy around Trump and Musk.
Why would you want a law that says government workers have zero accountability over how they spend the money they extract by threat of violence from the citizenry?
We should all have "root access" to everything but the most national-security sensitive topics.
One side is understandably on edge but nothing DOGE has been doing is unexpected, except in the sense that it's actually happening or seems to be happening. It went through the whole political process's standard change control mechanism, in other words the current Administration literally campaigned on it and received a mandate via both the EC and popular vote.
I find it wild that apparently there is no law onto which government workers can cling to refuse these requests. Is it all just based on conventions, goodwill and culture?