Comment by randerson

Comment by randerson 3 days ago

22 replies

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An audit only needs read access, not God mode. It should be conducted by a neutral third party, not someone on a witch hunt who has conflicts of interest. The people on the ground should have auditing qualifications, clear background checks, and knowledge of specific systems or processes, not a random 19-year-old named "Big Balls" with a history of selling company secrets to a competitor. Their findings should go through QA, and they should take the time to come up with an accurate report, rather than rushing through and blurting out whatever they think is happening.

myflash13 3 days ago

Ah, so more bureaucracy, bureaucracy, bureaucracy.

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  • 28304283409234 3 days ago

    Yes. Democracy's intent is not efficiency. It is to provide a rule of law that is fair enough for most citizens. All other forms of rule are worse. As soon as you have 'efficient government', you no longer have democracy. But something worse.

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  • mexicocitinluez 3 days ago

    This response is so funny to me.

    You'll be on your knees begging for bureaucracy after all your info is sold to the highest bidder and you spend the next 20 years fighting identity theft.

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    • lucasRW 3 days ago

      https://www.zetter-zeroday.com/court-documents-shed-new-ligh...

      "New court documents shed light on what a 25-year-old DOGE employee named Marko Elez did inside Treasury Department payment systems. They also provide extensive new details about which systems Elez accessed, the security precautions Treasury IT staff took to limit his access and activity, and what changes he made to the systems. The documents indicate that the situation at Treasury is more nuanced than previously reported."

      (...)

      "Additionally, he could only connect using a government-issued laptop that had "cybersecurity tools" installed on it to prevent him from accessing web sites or cloud-based storage services with the laptop or connecting a USB or other external storage device to it to copy large amounts of data from Treasury systems. "

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      • mexicocitinluez 3 days ago

        It's so funny you think quoting a newspaper that says some random staffer doesn't CURRENTLY have access is some sort of gotcha. Do you know how time works?

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    • dionian 3 days ago

      Is DOGE releasing private info?

      Reply View 6 replies
      • mexicocitinluez 3 days ago

        I don't know AND THAT'S THE POINT. No one knows. There is ZERO oversight except for a guy who just coincidentally made his billions on US government subsidies.

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      • lesuorac 3 days ago

        Yes.

        They're using public LLMs to analyze it. Every single LLM provider collects the data you put into it.

        There's also the NRO incident recently where they publicly released the classified org chart.

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      • actionfromafar 3 days ago

        DOGE should not be even near private data without a clearance.

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        • mexicocitinluez 3 days ago

          I think that ship has sailed.

          His first term, he handed out security clearances to anyone who would ask. There is even less stopping him from just giving them out this term too.

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  • randerson 3 days ago

    Would you buy shares in a company if the sole auditor of their financials was the CEO's best friend, who had no experience or qualifications in auditing, and he was not accountable to anyone if he was wrong? "Trust me bro" does not cut it. These structures and processes can be onerous but they exist for good reason. BTW our government is not so strapped for cash that they can't afford to do this properly.

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    • snisarenko 3 days ago

      Your analogy is absurd.

      In a publicly traded company you get to chose whether to buy or sell the shares of a company based on how the CEO is running the company (including who he appoints to audit it)

      In US Govt, we don't get to chose whether to "invest" in the govt or not, our taxes our collected by force.

      So instead we have the power to vote for people in congress (who decide home much taxes are collected on how they are spend), and the president (who can execute on the spending directed by congress, but also has the power granted by constitution to audit and spend effiecntly)

      The US Govt Shareholders (Voters) have SPOKEN, and SPOKEN LOUDLY! (Electoral College victory, and Popular Vote victory). They elected republican majority congress, and President Trump. Thus the voters voted for a deep gov't audit headed by Musk (Trump publicly campaigned on auditing and cleaning up spending, and publicly stated who will be in charge of the audit).

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      • randerson 3 days ago

        The point I was trying to make is that DOGE is not doing a proper audit, and this should concern everyone including those who voted for him.

        Many of the findings Musk has published have been proven to be mischaracterized or erroneous (numbers off by 1000x etc), which gives us grounds to question the rest. Except their process and data is opaque. Trump is firing entire departments based on this bad information. This could ironically _increase_ govt expenditure when they realizes we need to hire new people, possibly at higher salaries (after paying the old people a severance).

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lucasRW 3 days ago

They have read-only access, as the latest court documents (Google "Zeitner DOGE") show, and contrary to the fakenews that were peddled in the early days of that stuff. Big Balls can only use this read access from a provided Treasury laptop, on premises, and he's operating under review of other Treasury employees.

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