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A comment on The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Government Takeover. Parent comment

Re:The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Gov... by tonymet on Monday February 03, 2025 @05:26PM (#42924178)
Between Elon's stated goals, the systems under scope and my personal experience from state & local finance, they are performing a strategic efficacy audit of treasury spending. The US Treasury normally doesn't audit transactions -- they execute requests for transfers from other agencies and defer governance to congressional oversight.

The GAO doesn't even audit in the intuitive sense. They audit that spending is being recorded properly, and for many agencies even that low bar isn't met. In other words GAO is okay with you dumping money into a hole as long as you count how much.

DOGE is doing a practical audit of the spending. i.e. taking high-level spending principals from trump and identifying specific budget items to eliminate.

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Re:The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Gov... by Trasmatta on Monday February 03, 2025 @08:05PM (#42925969)
This is propaganda.
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Re:The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Gov... by liontwist on Monday February 03, 2025 @09:10PM (#42926690)
and the messaging saying that it’s a fascist power grab by oligarchs is not propaganda?

This is politics. All parties are presenting messaging that supports their goals.

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Re:The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Gov... by tonymet on Monday February 03, 2025 @09:17PM (#42926771)
how so?
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Re:The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Gov... by tonymet on Monday February 03, 2025 @05:30PM (#42924227)
It's worth noting the difference between Budget & expenses since families normally blur the two. Budgets are the plans developed by the President and approved by Congress, and expenses are what actually get spent during the year-- and they vary widely.

DOGE's unique approach is to use the Treasury as the "chokepoint" for telemetry so they can cluster and classify all of the transactions .

Imagine a massive microservices platform with 10k services and you want to know which ones are viable ( cost/benefit). Rather than survey all 10k, you would surveil a router or LB chokepoint to measure the input & output of all 10k services. That seems to be their approach with the treasury.

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Re:The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Gov... by kelnos on Monday February 03, 2025 @07:01PM (#42925218)
One minor nit: while presidents do usually present their version of the ideal budget, Congress is responsible for developing the budget, and what they pass can sometimes look pretty different from what the president proposes.
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Re:The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Gov... by tonymet on Monday February 03, 2025 @07:58PM (#42925905)
Good point
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Re:The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Gov... by guax on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @07:30AM (#42931497)
Asking the treasury to do ideological/legal analysis of transactions is the same as giving your bank the responsibility of approving your credit card expenditure based on their idea of what you need/should buy.

The fact that they're going for the payment system and not for contract/orders analysis is exactly the red flag people are and should be concerned about.

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Re:The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Gov... by mike_hearn on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @09:26AM (#42932727)
Banks actually do that though. Credit cards have massive risk analysis engines behind them, and the limits are tied to your creditworthyness. So maybe it's not a good analogy.
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Re:The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Gov... by guax on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @01:21PM (#42936449)
Thats for giving you credit. Not for spending your own balance.
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Re:The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Gov... by mike_hearn on Wednesday February 05, 2025 @04:22AM (#42946060)
It's about spending your balance too. They will block transactions if they think there's a high risk of the transaction triggering a chargeback complaint, if they think the recipient might be sanctioned, if they aren't sure if the card was cloned etc.
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Re:The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Gov... by tonymet on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @02:06PM (#42937082)
What would be your recommendation?
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