DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data
(theatlantic.com)866 points by perihelions 3 days ago
866 points by perihelions 3 days ago
The executive branch was intended to be separate from the judicial and the legislative branch, not separate from itself.
And this is why the executive branch was never meant to have as much power as it has today.
We've spent the better part of 80 years moving power from legislative to execute and granting executive a whole host of new powers.
We made this bed, now it sure seems like Trump is making us sleep in it.
I remember reading Glenn Greenwald in the 2000s when he was railing against the expansion of executive power under GWB.
> But the same individuals peddling this theory are simultaneously objecting quite vigorously to the notion that they are bestowing George Bush with the powers of a King. Bill Kristol and Gary Stevenson, for instance, called such claims "foolish and irresponsible" in the very same Washington Post Op-Ed where they argued that Bush need not "follow the strictures of" (i.e., obey) the law, and the President himself angrily denied that he is laying claim to a "dictatorial position" in the very same Press Conference where he proudly insisted on the right to eavesdrop on Americans without a warrant even though FISA makes it a crime to do so.
https://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2005/12/do-bush-defender...
And he was equally critical of Obama admin not only keeping those powers but further expanding them.
Americans stopped caring around the Patriot Act and executive power has only grown under every administration since
Why do people seem drawn to having a king? What is it in human nature that makes us want a strong man in charge with absolute power?
In clearance there is the concept of classification by compilation, which means that the clearance required for a piece of information can be higher than the one required by any single component that makes up that information. Being able to combine data across agencies makes it much more dangerous than keeping it separate and compartmentalized. Parallelism is a gigantic risk from a security perspective and ripe for abuse, especially given that DOGE itself has flaunted court orders trying to hold it accountable.
Not really, agencies are merged and split and have their remit changed all the time.
If there were a way to efficiently manage 2.5 million staff in a single department, then we'd likely do that, but it's more efficient to specialise, so we do that instead.
Firewalling data between departments is rarely a design consideration, except in obvious cases (military), and it hardly matters in this scenario anyway, because it's not like Musk is walking into all 400 agencies with a laptop. DOGE is hiring an army of advisors and dividing them up between agencies.
So cooking the books and defrauding the citizens of the United States by exaggerating your progress by x1000 is crucial, you mean.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/upshot/doge-contracts-mus...
DOGE Claimed It Saved $8 Billion in One Contract. It Was Actually $8 Million.
The biggest single line item on the website of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team included a big error.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/musk-s-doge-accuse...
Musk's DOGE Accused of 'Cooking the Books' After $8 Billion Savings Is Immediately Debunked
Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) falsely claimed an $8 billion cost savings from a canceled government contract, which was later revealed to be worth only $8 million.
https://x.com/electricfutures/status/1891898336208105676
Momentum Chaser @electricfutures
After several delays, @DOGE has finally posted its purported savings. Why did it take so long to create a simple webpage with a 1000-row table? Who knows! Let's dig in.
Headline number: $55B saved. They list the savings per nixed contract. This should be easy to verify then. [...]
I can't believe people believe that it's actually an "audit". Both Trump. and Elon are famous liars. The reality is they think they found a loophole to destroy the government without having to pass any laws by fiting as many people as they can and stopping payments randomly. It's all illegal and evil.
> It's just the default nature of systems that were created by different agencies, under different projects with different teams.
... Yes, because those teams by default do not simply get to share access, because of various very well understood security and privacy issues by doing so.
> Trump only granted DOGE a 12 month window to eliminate waste, and there's 400 federal agencies, so parallelism is crucial.
That's what he says, at least. Also, if their current blatant lying[0] about the """waste""" continues then I don't really see a point. It seems clear Musk and the Breakfast Club boys who are unilaterally changing government finances have no idea how a government contract works (or it's willful ignorance).
[0] https://x.com/electricfutures/status/1891898336208105676
Federal level government is not a startup
Breaking things will destroy lives if not literally kill people
If it was this "easy" someone would have made a proposal years ago even if it was turned down
And Congress, not ANY President controls spending
We do not elect Kings in this country, there was an entire very brutal war to make it that way
This data is going to leak if it's not copied already into insecure sources and every foreign adversary is going to have it
Cannot be undone
And there should be investigations and prosecutions for this to prevent it ever happening again by ANY President
> Breaking things will destroy lives if not literally kill people
It is already killing people. They fired people giving out food and medicine. They fired people on suicide hotlines. And of course, people have been killing themselves in response to being fired.
The President is the head of the executive branch. If _anyone_ in the executive branch has access to information, it feels like the presidents office should too.
Why is this hard to accept?
He is not a monarch. The core principles of a well functioning democracy include that there are multiple, balanced powers and that none of the powers can overrule the other too much. It is cumbersome by design, because the other path leads to dictatorships.
That was the whole basis of your constitution.
Under U.S. constitutional law -meaning the Constitution itself and the binding judicial precedents and the impeachment precedents (mainly from the failed impeachment of Andrew Johnson)- the president is plenipotent within the executive to do things like:
- fire principal officers without
the Senate's advice and consent
- fire other appointed offices who
did not require the Senate's
advice and consent to confirm
- lay off federal employees in the
executive branch
- audit the executive branch's
agencies
- set policy for all executive
branch agencies
The president can also abrogate treaties without the Senate's advice and consent.
Most of the above are not explicitly in the Constitution as such, but are understood to be constitutional law either due to SCOTUS decisions, longstanding and unchallenged practice, or the result of the failed impeachment of Andrew Johnson.
Not only that but also most if not all recent presidents going back decades have done some if not all of the above. That includes Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama, Trump, and Biden.
In other words: there is no innovation here, no judicial controversy. This is all standard fare for any new administration. The only difference is the extent of what Trump is doing in his second term compared to any other recent presidency. The sheer number of EOs, the auditing (which basically hasn't been done recently), and the layoffs (which are rare in DC). And yes, he's goring a lot of oxen -more than other presidents in recent memory-, but they all do that, just not eliciting so much outrage from the opposition.
If the CEO of my ecommerce company had easy, unmonitored access to all our data, we would fail industry audits and not be allowed to take credit card transactions. Sure, they have access if they really need it, but it's logged and monitored, and if you use it too much there will be questions.
It's a joke that any of you assholes are defending this. This does not pass any sniff test.
Stop making excuses.
The president has absolute authority to access to all secrets within the executive branch, and has absolute declassification authority, both statutorily and presumptively constitutionally as a result of a) being the president, b) being able to nominate his cabinet, c) being able to issue executive orders to his executive branch officers and acting officers.
The president therefore has the authority to access every last secret and every last system within the executive branch. No statute can limit this power. The president also has the authority to delegate (to some extent; only the president can issue EOs, but presumably his officers can recommend EOs to him) these powers to his or her officers.
The titular of the U.S. Digital Service (DOGE) is statutorily not subject to Senate confirmation, though considering how Trump's controversial nominees have sailed through Senate confirmation it's easy to suppose that Musk would also likely be confirmed to head the USDS were it an appointment subject to Senate confirmation. Since the president can appoint someone like Elon Musk to head the USDS, and since the president can delegate his clearance and declassification authority to someone like Elon Musk, his doing so does very much "pass [the] sniff test".
Because it isn't the case. For good reason. So it isn't acceptable. Spend some educating yourself about security standards like FedRAMP and build a mental model of things that are or have been true, and the reasons they were made so.
> If _anyone_ in the executive branch has access to information, it feels like the presidents office should too.
Are you an idiot? Can you point to the last time some foreigner was given access to American's personal data without any oversight?
Yes, when you're not from this country (a foreigner), you need a citizenship card to reside and work here (or a visa). Thanks for verifying that for me.
Because it's Musk following his own agenda and he apparently isn't the president
Most people in the US don't know that there are three branches of government, or if they do, they don't know WHY there are three, and even if they know that, they don't know what each branch's purpose is.
This is absolutely the job of the executive branch.
Perhaps DOGE should have been created by an act of congress, but in reality that's just a formality because the Republicans control Congress right now.
Trump renamed USDS to DOGE via executive order. It's true that it's not an agency, but it was created during the Obama administration.
I'm not sure it'd be better as an agency because there are strict rules and hierarchies around agencies. The way DOGE is operating right now, seemingly, is:
- Agency directors are directed by executive order to work with DOGE and give them access to what they need
- DOGE team members are actually hired as employees of the agencies in which they are operating
- DOGE makes recommendations to agency directors on what things to cut
- Agency directors review recommendations and make cuts
This means that all cuts are being recommended and made within the scope of each individual agency. It is not the case that one agency is telling another what to do, and all decisions are ultimately being made by each agency's director. It simplifies the hierarchy and authority.
Correct. It also sidesteps all questions of legality.
DOGE was created by an act of Congress after Obama first created it by an executive order. Its formal name is United States Digital Service.
It is only the job of the executive because Congress told them so via Acts of Congress. Looking at e.g. the firings of the inspector generals, Congress has put very clear language into its laws on why and when those inspector generals can be removed by their post, yet Trump and his cronies ignored this.
It should not be a formality because while it is true that the Republicans have a slight majority in Congress, the founding fathers never intended this most powerful of the three branches to be run by parties. The power in Congress is split up geographically for this very reason, but the party system, that secured its seats with gerrymandering, is highly toxic for a functioning legislative power in the US. It is disappointing to see Republicans in Congress not restricting the executive orders of the new self-proclaimed King.
The president can fire any executive branch officer at any time for any reason regardless of what any statute says about it.
There are two precedents for this to my knowledge, though there may be more:
- the failed impeachment of
Andrew Johnson established
that the president can fire
principal officers without
the Senate's advice and
consent
- Spicer vs. Biden, which
established that the president
can fire officers with fixed
terms
He was clearly trolling. Grammatically that tweet does not parse like himself calling himself a king. For all you know he loves the British king, or some other king, or maybe he was referring to Jesus. But he got what he wanted from that quip: it got reported, along with credit for ending congestion pricing in Manhattan. Why the media still falls for that, I don't know.
So are you saying that the President's office could not get this information, or any information it needed, from government agencies before? Of course it could. doge going in and getting unfettered access to computer systems is not at all the same thing.
It's about whether the president can legally do this.
You're right. Though the replies you get will sound like the end of the world.
You'll have to deal with people replying who have been driven literally insane by propaganda.
Money was sent to media agencies (e.g. 9mil Reuters) , to run this massive psyop.
You can't put a band aid on what has been done to them, and they can't critically think their way out of it.
"In the coming weeks, the team is expected to enter IT systems at the CDC and Federal Aviation Administration, and it already has done so at NASA"
If this isn't a glaring conflict of interest and corruption, I don't know what is.
> Even though there isn't a single moment in history they can point to that's similar
In US history, maybe. But you can look at the raise to power of almost any dictatorship, you'll find the same exact concep of cleptocrats taking unrestricted access to whatever entity used to fight them.
> But you can look at the raise to power of almost any dictatorship, you'll find the same exact concep of cleptocrats taking unrestricted access to whatever entity used to fight them.
Good point.
Is there any reason this data shouldn't be public for everyone to read?
USAID collaborates in fighting for worker rights when they are in exploitation or near-slavery.
They likely have records of the people inside organisations who provide data for them. These people usually want to remain anonymous because they fear retaliation. And in many cases, we’re not just talking about being fired or legal actions as retaliation.
You personally are cool with me personally knowing your salary and where you live? Please just post that here right now.
That might sound incredibly foreign to you, but this is the norm in many Nordic countries, see Norway, Sweden and Finland, for a start. Tax returns for everyone are public, and so are addresses through a national registry.
Yep! In Sweden, this is part of the constitution. I think it beautifully demonstrates that the state works for the public, and that all information held by the state should by default also be accessible to members of the public, unless there is an important exception, such as personal medical privacy or national security.
It acts as a great tool for journalists, who are able to obtain meaningful insight into the actions of the state at all levels. While of course there are downsides, I think this is a very important principle.
Neither is really true at least for Finland.
Addresses are not public information, you can opt out from having your info public. They are not even a national registry (one exists, not public) but your telco will put you in "the phone book" if you don't opt out.
Taxes are public information but only to a degree. You can opt out from having them shared en masse (primarily to the media) but you can still inquire someone else's paid taxes from the tax office but it requires you to know their full given name, year of birth and home town.
Salary is not public information, only the total amount of paid income taxes. You can correlate them to some degree but you won't be able to know how many jobs a person has or where their capital gains are from.
Access to this information can also be limited in exceptional cases (politicians, harassment victims, identity theft etc).
Agreed.
As a foreigner who moved to Sweden, it was quite shocking first to see all this info displayed online for everyone to see but there are definitely some good sides and bad sides to it.
One of the good side is that, you can look at the people living in a given area and decided if this is the kind of neighborhood where you want to live. Lower (declared income) can have a correlation with crime so if you just want to have a quite life, you may want to select an era that has loads of working people with a higher than average income.
One bad side, some people have used it in the past to harass people, think ex-lovers and so on. There is a procedure in place where if you are afraid of being stalked you can ask for your information to be removed from these registries or at least be hidden from public view.
While true, this is currently being debated if the access of public data should be reduced [0].
[0] https://lexing.network/swedens-latest-inquiry-into-protectin...
In New Zealand public servants salaries were published in the “Public Service List” from 1866 through to 1988.
https://teara.govt.nz/en/zoomify/33070/page-from-the-public-...
Anecdotally they were mainly used to evaluate potential dates.
Tom Scott video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bO8zEaSuWg
Why do they need it? Besides dumb envy, why would I need someone's tax return? What's in it for me?
Which works, until you have mass immigration from MENA-countries that results in a huge rise in criminality which makes everyone afraid because any criminal can look you up from the license plate or simply by searching for your name and instantly know where you are.
I hate this system. It used to be a good system when most people was law abiding and there was no gang criminals. But today? Jeez, you are like a fish just hoping not to get struck by the sharks and there is no protection available due to the failing state.
What is it called when people cry free speech, democracy, and transparency while actively assaulting these ideals?
> Employers almost always know the salary and location of their employees.
Employers do, individual stockholders of the employing firm do not, generally.
> Government workers are (in theory) employees of the citizens.
No, they are in theory employees of the government, in which the citizenry are stakeholders. They are not, even in theory, direct employees of the citizens.
A US Attorney is not, in theory, your attorney just because you are a US citizen.
A lot of jobs don't use TWN. None of the ones I've had did so.
It's not the employers themselves that use TWN directly, but the payroll companies the employers use. Perhaps in your industry or at your particular choice for jobs, the choice of payroll software does not end up aligning with TWN? _All_ of my previous salaried tech jobs do use TWN (I had to call each one, when a background check company seemingly couldn't do it themselves)
It seems most payroll companies send data to TWN [0]. Though I'd question the quality and breadth of each data feed. I also haven't looking into the percentage of US companies who use payroll software from the big providers and/or do it themselves
[0]: this comment tree at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41510103#41512326
Give it time. Centralised access managed by junior engineers pretty much guarantees the data gets stolen.
Perhaps the first foreign adversary nation state getting there will patch the security flaws after stealing the data?
European here, giving my two cents on how this looks from the other side of the Atlantic. Heh
In my country there are laws stopping agencies doing a simple SQL join between two databases, even within the same government agency. There is a separate agency that handles the requests when agencies want to join information.
I am not an expert in the matter. But my gut is telling me that our experiences with east Germany and Stasi left a scar.
It can quickly turn into a real nightmare, and there for there are check and balances to make it slow. It’s deliberate inefficiency.
Do you know why in Portugal they have 4 different ID numbers?
It is like that to prevent the state from persecuting people on the base that it is hard for a branch of the government to figure out who is someone based on a number from a different branch.
Do you know why they want to prevent the government from persecuting people?
Because it has already happened, and the portuguese don't want it to happen again.
Same here in Germany, only recently we got the tax ID number as a global primary key to the objections of many privacy activists.
Ex-Yugoslavian countries have had a global ID forever - the JMBG or, in Croatia, OIB [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_Master_Citizen_Number
> they are parallelising the work
That's an interesting rephrasing for "sidestepping all security to get access".
> The access is read only, and they are not linking personal data between agencies
Yup, that's exacly what someone who wants to change the beneficiaries of a few contracts and payments, as well as fire some of the people overseeing my companies would say.
No, the animosity is coming from the belligerent way DOGE is going about its work, and the lack of security clearance or any oversight of these people, some of whom are very inexperienced and some of whom have clear conflicts of interest, and the enormous power they are accumulating.
Since you seem to know what you are talking about:
I am a bit confused by your stressing the access is read-only. Isn't that obviously given (apologies for the redundant words, but I really don't know how to convey my confusion). For what purpose they could ever be given a write access to the hundreds of federal databases they are supposed to analyze?
Also, if they don't have the manpower to go over the data one by one then they don't have the power to go over them in parallel. When you say "parallelising the work" what exactly does that mean? What is it specifically that they are "parallelising"? Is there an engineer/analyst looking at multiple screens simultaneously and arriving conclusions for multiple agencies at the same time?
> they are not linking personal data between agencies
> Trump has prohibited Musk from being involved in with the review in agencies where he was a material conflict
I'm not saying these are or aren't happening, but it seems like a lot of "good faith" assumptions here. If you assume Musk is an unethical actor, these seem mostly meaningless.
DOGE is literally making up that people had bad work reviews to justify firing them. They are liars 100% down.
They are literally firing people first and then calling them back? How is that efficiency?
I cannot believe we are talking about these people seriously with all the BS "We saved $* Billion dollars to stop Mind Control News" on the DOGE "website".
Musk is not in a position to identify waste and fraud.
What does he know of the genesis and status of these payments? Congress directs spending and oversees the administration, not the other way around.
Why does he have to finish in an arbitrary time frame?
This is all justification after the fact for those who support Musk/Trump unconditionally.
It's all fun and games until your Medicare/Social Security/Tax Refund or other legitimate payment gets cancelled arbitrarily, illegally and unconstitutionally.
Trump has prohibited Musk from being involved in any reviews where he was a material conflict (FAA for example).
You keep saying things that are blatantly untrue, people give you massive evidence they aren't true, then you keep saying them. Why is that?
Elon Musk’s Companies Were Under Investigation by Five Inspectors General When the Trump Administration Fired Them and Made Musk the Investigator
https://wallstreetonparade.com/2025/02/elon-musks-companies-...
https://www.levernews.com/trump-purges-inspectors-general-in...
Agency sent a memo to all agency staff notifying them that “all election security activities” would be paused pending the results of an internal investigation. The memo also stated that the administration was cutting off all funds to the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center—a Department of Homeland Security–funded organization that helps state and local officials monitor, analyze, and respond to cyberattacks targeting the nation’s election hardware and software.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/02/trump-doge-layof...
FDA staff were reviewing Elon Musk’s brain implant company. DOGE just fired them.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/02/17/fda-...
https://gizmodo.com/doge-reportedly-cuts-fda-employees-inves...
This sort of thing already exists in America for cases where Americans actually care about privacy: the gun tracing system is forced to be on paper.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/s-just-insanity-atf-now-needs-2...
Guns are constitutionally protected in a way that humans aren't.
While I agree in principle, that's not an entirely intellectually honest evaluation. The government is prohibited from creating an electronic registry of guns, not because of the guns themselves, but ultimately because of the judicial understanding of the Second Amendment confirming (not granting) an inherent right of citizens to possess them. The restriction is in service to the gun owners by protecting them from government overreach. The guns are merely a layer of abstraction on that.
That's putting it mildly. What it really looks like is a fast descent into madness.
Having a slow and archaic birocratic system doesn't stop governments going totalitarian on their citizens.
Case in point In Germany the Polizei will SWAT and arrest you if you post a meme on social media that angers someone's dignity. That's not a joke that actually happens.
This typical German "our government is not slow and inefficient, it's just protection against totalitarianism" is pure cope.
Edit: @helloplanets Source: https://youtu.be/-bMzFDpfDwc?si=eIUkEuDBx3iX_TEx
Dunno about Germany but in Belgium there is Crossroads Bank for Social Security which effectively controls the flow of information between various social security and public health organizations: https://www.ksz-bcss.fgov.be/
In its current form, it's a set of SOAP or REST APIs that your organization gets access to after completing paperwork about your needs.
It was established by a 1990 law [1].
There is also a similar legal and technical setup for information on companies [2] where most information is public, and the register of residents [3] which is even more guarded.
[1] https://www.ksz-bcss.fgov.be/fr/page/loi-du-15-janvier-1990-...
[2] https://economie.fgov.be/en/themes/enterprises/crossroads-ba...
Yes, that makes sense, we don’t allow people to connect to our databases directly either, and in any case the systems should be built so they are separated, it’s good architecture.
I was very much more intrigued about the statement that data can’t be easily/legally shared within the same agency
Well, in Italy the "IRS" (Agenzia delle Entrate) is not allowed to cross-check banking statements with its own data from Tax Returns.
Whenever anyone proposes to allow it, the members of the informal "Party for Tax Evasion" scream and denounce the descent towards "Taxation Fascism". It's so pathetically cheeky, that it feels a bit endearing (how dare them, what rascals!)
When it comes to government spending though, shouldn’t the public have a right to know precisely, with dollar-level accuracy what they are being asked to pay?
As far as the experiences of the Stasi and previous German governments, it must not have too much of a scar: Germany still asks people to register their religion — ostensibly for tax purposes, but if I recall correctly, Germany had a problem in the past with having a list of all people in a specific religion.
Some insights or decisions cannot or should not be placed on the public, thats why you elect representatives in the firt place. Insight can be granular, like an oversight commitee publishing a redacted report, but i agree on full transparency about anything regarding our representatives.
a lot of countries already have this, and without handing e.g. Elon Musk the keys to the kingdom. America for example has this: https://www.foia.gov/
> check and balances to make it slow. It’s deliberate inefficiency.
It’s an important thing about free countries that is seldom appreciated: aspects of their governments are designed to be tar pits, on purpose. It’s a way of restraining government.
I have a personal saying that touches on something adjacent. “I like my politicians boring. Interesting government was a major cause of death in the twentieth century.”
When I think of governments that are both interesting and streamlined I think of the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, Stalin era USSR, Maoist purges, etc.
It's worth noting all those regimes were really only streamlined at getting people killed one way or the other. Their internal history is always a story of wild incompetence and corner-cutting. The Nazis in particular got a lot of undue credit for effectiveness.
Very few countries have as strong executive branch as the USA.
You call the first and one of the most successful democracies in the world a monarchy/dictatorship? The American Executive branch is given broad powers since the very beginning and considering the success there might be something to it.
In contrast the Europeans have descended into petty mass wars and dictatorial regimes multiple times, and each time America has come to save Europe through that very Executive branch.
A bit thankless don't you think?
The person you respond to explicitly said the US wasn't the only one (and didn't suggest they were the worst either). Seems likely that they would agree that Russia and China are amongst these "very few" indeed. Don't be so aggressive please.
>The CCP through the NPC enacts unified leadership, which requires that all state organs, from the Supreme People's Court to the president of China, are elected by, answerable to, and have no separate powers than those granted to them by the NPC
This is the situation in China. In theory NPC is their governing body.
[insert random ad hominem attack here]
> It’s deliberate inefficiency.
Inefficiency is a useful property of many systems [0,1]. Current cultural obsessions around the word are a burden and mistake, and the word "efficiency" now feels rather overload with right-wing connotations.
I have strong feeling that in the past 50 or so years, we often have traded resiliency for efficiency. I think we might have gone too far.
That doesn't mean that being deliberately inefficient will improve resiliency. Also, some of the deliberate inefficiency (i.e. looking at weird thing us healthcae/health-insurance system has going on) is more ... extractive? That sounds like the word I am looking for.
> $50,000 to Sri Lanka for “climate change” isn’t a “popular program.”
Is that $50,000 annual? Because if so that's less than a rounding error for the budget of almost any country, much less the US. The costs associated with ending this program (organizational, employee time) may even be higher than just continuing to pay it.
> Paying dead people social security isn’t popular.
Is there any public statistical data on this? As far as I know US social security does periodically verify if recipients are still alive. Of course some cases will slip through the cracks, but unless DOGE plans to individually track down every recipient and see them in person I don't see how they can solve this problem. This inevitably happens with pretty much any social security system, anywhere.
> Sending money to the Taliban isn’t popular.
Is there a source for this?
> When you say Trump doesn’t care about waste, that isn’t supported by the facts. The deficit isn’t about waste, fraud or abuse, it’s about overspending. They aren’t the same thing.
He could start by reducing overspending on the US' titanic corporate subsidies, but something tells me he won't.
European here. Governments in Europe, even ones that have GDPR on their books, literally act as oppressively as they want to act: U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users' encrypted accounts [1]
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/02/07/apple-e...
It's a classic Motte and Bailey. "Europe acts in this way, so much better than America. [...] No no, not THAT Europe, I of course was only talking about this other part of Europe!"
How is the most populous state in the EU doing?
> The German parliament amended two laws on June 10th granting enhanced surveillance powers to segments of the federal police and intelligence services. They allow the use of spyware to hack into phones and computers circumventing encryption used by messaging applications such as WhatsApp and Signal, raising concerns about the right to privacy.
> The new federal police law allows interception of communications of “persons against whom no suspicion of a crime has yet been established and therefore no criminal procedure measure can yet be ordered”. This fails to ensure the necessary protection against unjustified and arbitrary interference in people’s privacy, required under international law. Human Rights Watch and the United Nations have pointed out the importance of encryption and anonymity for data protection and the right to privacy.
> The government argues that new legislation is needed to keep up with technological developments and claims the new powers are to help federal police stifle human trafficking and undocumented migration.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/06/24/germanys-new-surveillanc...
...oh
I do not see how checks and balances that are there to limit data access via previously unauthorized organizations negatively affect Europe/Europeans. It is true Europe if facing a hard time, but saying that it's caused by the checks and balances we have on privacy feels misguided to me
Except that they, an unelected private group, have already attempted to get all private and confidential citizen data from the US treasury, and have been blocked by the courts as it is illegal.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/08/judge-tem...
They have tried to get data of all payments to US citizens including pensions, 401k, benefits and allowances etc. All foreign aid and diplomacy payments are included, and they have been charged with trying to find ways to illegaly stop these payments.
Be very careful in supporting what Musk and DOGE do. They are unelected, and have been given unprecedented access to government data. Scary times are ahead.
Just on the un-elected private group bit. This would apply to every one of the staff members of these departments. How many elected software developers worked on the original software? How many private contractors were elected? Are there a pile of elected software developers working as cobol and java devs?
It's not the stupidest argument, but it applies to every last staff member of the us treasury.
The motion to block DOGE has also been dismissed by courts
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/judge-denies-states-bi...
Nobody complained about "unelected" Obama or Biden appointees accessing the treasury or SSN, but now that Trump is exposing corruption en-masse and stopping the gravy train, many folks are suddenly very concerned. The FUD is unfortunately not working.
All this will probably go to the Supreme Court. And just like Biden ignored the Supreme Court ruling on student loans and even boasted about it proudly on twitter - saying they cannot block the executive, the precedent was also setup for Trump to do the same.
> Except that they, an unelected private group, have already attempted to get all private and confidential citizen data from the US treasury, and have been blocked by the courts as it is illegal.
It is not illegal. You can bookmark this comment for when it finally winds its way through the courts. Whether you love or hate the idea, this is a clearly legitimate exercise of executive authority and this judge is going to get smacked down hard, and the foolish abuse of TROs is going to wind up getting their use by lower-court judges severely curtailed. Read the legal justification in the orders yourself.
Unfortunately a lot of people have lost their minds over this, and are burning through their credibility - some judges and journalists included. I don't know why, other than Musk is a moron and a polarizing figure. The Alantic breathlessly quoting government employees terrified to file their taxes because they're afraid Elon Musk will have their bank account number and routing info had my eyes rolling into the back of my head. This is fearmongering, not journalism.
I don't understand why we can't oppose this without reporting on it honestly. The problem on matters like this seems to be getting much worse over time.
> They are unelected, and have been given unprecedented access to government data.
So is everyone else in the Treasury Department.
What are their guardrails? Do they have accountability? Does "parallelise" mean compiling data on people from different systems? Dossiers? Are they even following the law?
> They have simply...
Oh yes, because this is all very simple. What is "waste"? How is it defined? Who decides what is waste and what isn't?
That's actually not what they've been tasked with:
> This Executive Order establishes the Department of Government Efficiency to implement the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.
There's nothing about government spending programs or staffing in there. Also the EO includes this funny sentence: "USDS shall adhere to rigorous data protection standards."
that that moron has been tasked with finding inefficiency is so concerning, he is a man so convinced of his own intellectual superiority that he has zero respect for complexity.
We see every day how technically inept and incompetent he is, I just wonder when the other shoe is going to drop for the average observer.
It is the emperor's new clothes writ large, and why I find Bezos's comment about taking him at face value so funny, is he slyly telling us he thinks the guy a fool, a troll, and nothing more?
Do you have an alert setup to tell you when people are bashing the DoGE?
This is the type of indoctrination we need to fight against (not your comment but what it references), and it's an open question as to how.
Including the copy pasta that the department created by an elected official is "unelected".
”Simply been tasked with X”
We’re on a community that discusses, amongst other things, the running of firms and startups.
Just because someone is simply tasked with X, doesn’t mean we all agree to ignore the big picture. The big picture of
1) Complex projects
2) Security
3) High functioning teams
4) Ethics
This is fundamentally unethical, and irresponsible. I 100% think you agree with me on the irresponsible part.
You may sincerely stand on the reduction of waste, which frankly no one is going to argue. But a team this small, for a project this vital? This fast?
What was that saying? Good, Fast, Cheap? Pick 2? Why the flippty flip, is anyone here OK with fast and cheap?
Hell, What precisely are these people doing? What are the project milestones? Where can we see what’s going on?
And if the transparency of their actions is a cybersecurity risk - then which independent body is checking them?
Edit: Forget their elected, unelected status. Why should we turn around and trust them? What are they planning to do. I don’t want more outrage - you could find the whole thing was running on alien souls. What is the replacement method, and what is the gain we can expect from the changes?
If they’ve taken charge - then they should do the work, and do it well. And if it’s tech related or s/w related stuff, then talk about it, and explain.
Who has been tasked? Under what authority? Not Elon Musk, according to Donald Trump.
More seriously, if it was true it would be a stupid task, with stupidly inappropriate people selected to do it. What is actually happening is idiot destruction. Whether that was the intent or simply the obvious outcome of stupidity is irrelevant to the damage being done.
Maybe it's temporary, not 'once you build it they will use it'. Time will tell, if in the end a dictatorship proves itself to run things more efficiently and make everyone richer, then other countries will follow the US and adopt the same model.
Ahem, tell me this again once you get punished for what you are as an individual, for your striking, for not joining the political party (...)
I can't believe I'm reading such comments
He doesn't need to follow that recipe for dictatorship. He just needs to do whatever he wants, being a bully without consequences both internally and externally, transforming the image of the US into an aggressive nation. At this moment Americans are as guilty as Russians for allowing this to happen.
still, Germany arrests citizens for calling a politician an idiot.
I think the advantages of this in a digital age are vastly overblown. If an extremist government comes to power they won't care and they can just do the SQL join. Let it go to court, the extremist government will decide anyway so the outcome is already predetermined.
Compare this to a physical storage of paper documents that need to be SQL joined, the effort required is several magnitudes more.
What it is good for is data breaches, it effectively limits the data that can be leaked at once.
What you're describing is very similar to what most large enterprise companies do: layers upon layers of red tape and convoluted regulations for the sake of "security."
This is a big reason they can’t get anything done or retain talent.
Government is no different.
European democracies have been dying from the same sclerosis their legacy multinationals have.
The US is going through actual change. The outrage over things not being done as they always have is nonsensical.
Apart from government being very different from private business indeed; I wouldn't want to eat food, drive a vehicle, or use software made by a company made with that mindset. "Safety first" is also a hard rule in all sorts of sports where people move faster than non-expert spectators can fully comprehend. If you need to cut corners to "gain efficiency" it just means you're bad.
> Trump tasked "DOGE" with reviewing government spending across it's 400+ agencies, and coming up with recommendations on how to reduce wasteful spending.
"Make recommendations" ?
Firing the folks that maintain nuclear weapons sounds like an action, not a recommendation:
* https://apnews.com/article/nuclear-doge-firings-trump-federa...
Firing the folks dealing with bird flu sounds like an action, not a recommendation:
* https://apnews.com/article/usda-firings-doge-bird-flu-trump-...
Then there's the folks making a list of all the agents who were pulled off other tasks and told to investigate Jan 6:
* https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-administration-compili...
Also firing a whole bunch of folks at the FAA even though it's already short staffed:
* https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly9y1e1kpjo
Seems to be it's less about finding savings and more about blindly purging people with no regard to how useful or inefficient things actually are.
This is either woefully naive or active disinformation.
Edit: OP dramatically edited their post. It originally made all kinds of claims of process and propriety that just aren't happening. This was the original that I was replying to:
”Most of the animosity comes from misunderstanding. Trump tasked "DOGE" with reviewing government spending across it's 400+ agencies, and coming up with recommendations on how to reduce wasteful spending. They have 1 year to complete this task. To make sensible recommendations, DOGE needs data about the major programs within each agency. They can't tackle each agency consecutively, since there are more agencies than days until the deadline, so they are parallelising the work.
The access is read only, and they are not linking personal data between agencies, but rather doing a bunch of separate audits in parallel.
Trump has prohibited Musk from being involved in with the review in agencies where he was a material conflict (FAA for example).”
Government should have access to its own data. Justice and Congress should have the same access for oversight. The only problem I see is personal data about non-government people is being exposed to the entire planet.
They should have developed good security practices first and maybe spent more than a week reviewing a plan, and not having a double standard about their own activities.
The government already had access to its data, including oversight and regular auditing. This was solely about removing the safeguards so they didn’t have to follow good security practices or have a plan, and given how intensely politicized it has been it’s hard not to think that’s because the plan is not something they’d want to document where the public could see.
As an example, Musk mislead the public with claims about Social Security fraud. None of that was unknown, and in fact the independent inspector general had a much better quality report years ago where they confirmed that the old records did not show signs of fraud and recommended paths for improvement. DOGE made a lot of noise but added nothing but risk.
The thing is, Government already had access to its own data. It just was required to follow the law that was put in place by the voted in Legislature to prevent abusive situations that could arise from limitless unrestricted access without oversight. It was there, and even non-government citizens could get access to it by following the procedures; procedures put in place to prevent "selling the farm," voted on by elected officials, with the support of their constituents.
Government is doing a lot of work here. We’re talking about thousands of people, who, other than working for the government, also are humans with their own agenda. Are you okay with just giving all of them access to your most personal data? Even if some of them live right next to you, have a personal grudge, and may be slightly psychotic? No? Well apparently, then, it’s not just as hand-wavy as you claim it to be. The only reasonable thing is granting access to data on a need-to-know basis, with tight access control, audit logging, and anonymisation where not strictly impossible. That would be the reasonable thing if you’re handling data for hundreds of millions of people. It isn’t what’s happening.
> Government should have access to its own data.
You think it didn't already have access to its own data? Please explain how it did not.
> Government should have access to its own data. Justice and Congress should have the same access for oversight.
On its face, that’s a reasonable comment. But that’s not what’s happening here. This is not oversight. This is the world’s richest man arbitrarily seizing control of the government’s data. He’s able to do this because he bought the presidency for Trump.
Are you ok with that?
I blame the people who were bought as much as the buyer, and the Citizens United decision for facilitating the buying.
I'm OK with democratic elections and executive appointments. I'm OK with the "read access" part of the control, the "write access" should only go as far as the laws passed by Congress permit.
The reality is that just because something has been “known for decades” doesn’t mean it has been addressed—especially in government bureaucracies, where inefficiency, inertia, and misaligned incentives often prevent meaningful reform. The persistence of outdated Social Security records, massive waste, and fraud is a perfect example of systemic dysfunction.
The president, as the chief executive, has broad authority to ensure that executive agencies function efficiently and effectively. While there are statutory and congressional constraints, the executive branch is ultimately responsible for implementing policies and running departments. If existing bureaucrats and Treasury officials have had access to this data for years but failed to act, then it is not only within the president’s prerogative but arguably his duty to bring in outside expertise—whether that be Musk or anyone else—to tackle waste and inefficiency.
If you think this data won’t be used to disenfranchise and target democratic voters and give the GOP perpetual rule, I have a bridge to sell you.
“Oh no! Big mistake we cancelled hundreds of thousands of people from voting just before the election! It just happens to be 99.9% Democrats in swing states who all happen to be marked as dead in all government systems!”
It will be similar to Cambridge Analytica - with all the US Government’s data on one side, this is a massive advantage for targeting even without direct cheating.
The States operate their voter registration rolls, not the president.
illegal aliens, and the NGOs who have been bringing them in and supporting them, that the democrats brought in as future voters so they would have complete control, Well, no more funding for them!
At least, not from America! It's no secret that these NGOs are now trying to attach themselves to Brussels to continue ops in the US, leeches will be leeches
They will have had to impose this too.
The systems were built as separate systems to avoid (in a systems designers most fevered nightmares) a scenario like this.