Comment by scarab92
Comment by scarab92 2 days ago
[dupe]
Comment by scarab92 2 days ago
[dupe]
None?
> Advisors with unlimited power
Apparently they have the power to fire people, ignore access clearance rules, get full read/write (this was already confirmed and documented by multiple sources) access to data, terminate federal programs and agencies. Or at least there's no executive opposition to them trying to, so... in practice they do have the power. So far a few judges are still holding the ground, but we'll see how long that is allowed. Musk announced a few big changes as done before they were officially confirmed by Trump.
> and endless conflicts of interests
Musk practically leads the efforts to cut government spending while receiving government funding in defence and comms spending. And with weird procurement entires appearing https://www.ttnews.com/articles/armored-teslas-government Those are conflicts of interest.
> with zero obligation for transparency?
There are no obligations for transparency. The agencies being reviewed don't get a report of things to implement and we don't see any of the audit reports.
I get you may like how this unfolds, but denying it happens is weird.
This is the line the White House told us, but it contradicts what Musk and Trump themselves have said. It's also clear from their actions and social media posts that if Musk is merely advising, then Trump is rubber stamp approving whatever Musk tells him without any independent verification.
"Trump tends to echo the words of whomever last spoke to him, making direct access to him even more valuable" is what people said about him in 2016 [1]. Being his advisor is an incredibly powerful role, much more so than with most other government leaders
https://www.vox.com/2016/8/29/12691276/trump-believe-flop-fl...
> 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.
The people on Fox would have literal heart attacks on air. I'm remember them going crazy because Obama wore a tan suit (it's got a wiki page!).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_tan_suit_controve...
Truly an incident where I couldn't tell how much of that was legitimate insanity, and how much of it was carefully curated fake-controversy-as-distraction. A common question I ask myself about conservatives every single day. Multiple times a day, lately.
It's objectively true no sane person would have cared about that issue.
I'm not a fan of Bill Gates in a lot of ways, but he actually has experience building and running a large, successful, long-lived organization. There's no way he'd come in and make drastic changes to an organization he knows absolutely nothing about in the name of "efficiency".
That basically does describe his philanthropy in education though.
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?
Are you saying that federal spending should always be done in chunks of less than $8 million?
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?
That's where I think things are headed.
For example, when the NLRB was crippled by trump firing a member and losing quoroum, they forgot an important part of union history.
Prior to a proper process of grievances, the old answer was to basically wage war, guns and all, against the bosses and their families. The companies also hired Pinkerton's and every so often had the national guard also fight for the companies.
Union history is a bloody and murderous affair.
The NLRB was the compromise to "go to the bosses house and shoot it up to leave a message". With the NLRB effective destruction, the next logical devolution for worker rights is violence, and a lot of it.
As for me, I'm looking at what it would take to get out of the USA. Already interviewing with a few places in EU. The USA is basically an invaded country at this point. And I really dont want to be around when the violence picks up.
IMO firing the people inside the agency wasn't enough. He needs to install anti-union replacements to destroy it from the inside.
> What’s next, uncontrolled violence?
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/how-did-adolf...
Hitler was elected, loved to hear himself talk, many people did not take him seriously, blamed Germany's weaknesses on minorities, anti democratic.
Even teamed up with Stalin's Russia to invade Poland.
If the pattern continues then the push back will be used to grant himself emergency powers.
Black flag attack next, like Hitler did, the right wing is obsessed with those. Or will crack down hard on a protest and when they try to fight back he'll declare a state of emergency.
Doubt anything short of a military coup that dismantles maga can stop this. Hopefully neither party survives and the US will have an actual democracy.
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 exactly what the dems need. Currently we have two options.
#1 status quo complacency which does things like congressional insider trading, identity politics, is completely ancient, and useless and ineffectual in identifying or implementing any actual changes that would improve people's lives.
#2 is a wing of the party ready to take a wrecking ball to things (bravo), but thinks taxes are the solution to everything.
We need more wrecking ball type options than just #2. We need a diversity of wrecking ball options that are energetic, smart, able to identify the places where the system (both private industry & governmental) isn't functioning properly and have the guts to actually push change through.
The AOC and Bernie wing of the Dem party have been pushing this for years, but were repeatedly shut down by the Pelosi wing.
That's not exactly true, to pick some examples Bernie quitting the race in 2020 used his connections with biden and got a lot of things into a unity party platform, and I've seen it argued that AOC and the green new deal pushed the overton window for the infrastructure recovery act, and while it definitely wasn't everything they hoped for, it did include elements, including a massive investment in clean energy.
https://www.usnews.com/news/elections/articles/2020-07-08/bi...
https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/thank-green-ne...
The Dems cooperate more, so the media highlights their occasional disagreements.
Pelosi is the top grifter. Instead of spending her last years with her kids she stays “employed” in order to keep her and her families crimes under wraps. She will die in office, there will be great fan fair of how amazing she was, followed by countless breaking stories of her and her families corruption of over half a century.
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."
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.