Federal IT has tons of policies designed to prevent unauthorized access and mistakes. People go through background checks, they only work on secured networks using official devices, everything is logged and audited, and circumventing it is a crime with penalties potentially leading to jail time. Some of those policies have strong legal requirements for oversight: even if you’re not doing anything other than your job, the agency needs to be able to show how work is done to auditors, Congress, FOIA requests, etc. Anything with national security implications should be designed to avoid a single compromised person from being able to avoid detection, too, especially for people trusted with administrative access to IT systems.
These guys are widely reported to be using personal emails and devices (violating the record and transparency laws) and even if they’re acting entirely in good faith they are bypassing policies designed to contain the damage due to mistakes. For example, what happens if one of them gets an email with an attachment claiming to have evidence of politically incorrect activities and runs the payload on a device/network which has had safeguards removed by executive fiat?
My point is that there is plenty to dislike here, but if your argument against him is: he is a nazi, you have already lost, because you do not understand the sentiment out there.
Is one of the issues that an audit log of actions was created? Because it seems to me some of the levels of access given to the DOGE folks mean that auditing and traceability has now gone out the window like a Russian oligarch.
I'm a sysadmin who 'just' runs a bunch of HPC stuff—nothing 'important' like HIPAA or SOX—and even my systems have some level of auditing and logging.
This is basically my point and that point is the same point I make for Zuck, Thiel and others. There is already plenty of real things to complain about.
How about we focus on those?
The argument from the DOGE side is that entrenched interests are operating opaque systems and gating access to the information needed to identify inefficiencies. It's not a bad argument because it's no secret that you end up with waste in big companies or government programs and everyone should want to improve efficiency.
However, it's a bad faith argument because the public's being told they're being disenfranchised by a lack of transparency at the same time they're being told to accept a solution that has no transparency or oversight.
When you have tech billionaires with a lifelong goal of controlling payments since starting PayPal in the 90s, is it unreasonable to be skeptical of their motivations when they've managed to gain access to the government's payment system? Aren't these the same people sucking up our private information and telling us if we've got nothing to hide we've got nothing to fear? Why do they need to operate in the shadows?
<< is it unreasonable to be skeptical of their motivations when they've managed to gain access to the government's payment system? Aren't these the same people sucking up our private information and telling us if we've got nothing to hide we've got nothing to fear? Why do they need to operate in the shadows?
I don't want to argue for DOGE, because their fanbase is doing it on various fora already ( including this one ).
But to answer your question, it is not unreasonable at all. Those questions should be asked and, ideally, answered.
It is vital that the government officials are watched, their performance evaluated and our political will enforced by means we deem necessary. From where I sit, what is good for goose, is good for gander.
If I hesitate, it is around the level of emotion this generates. Some of it is warranted ( I would lie if I said I am not concerned ), but it does not help with making an appropriate response. In fact, that level of emotion actively inhibits making good choices.
You have to give it to him. It does look like Trump actually had a plan this time around.
As for the oversight requirement, it is fully and completely satisfied by: 1.) A guy who has the technical acumen, drive, and attention to detail to catch a rocket out of mid air with chopsticks. 2.) A man who won a presidential election twice (and could possibly have been 3 times if the Hunter Biden laptop story wasn't corruptly and improperly squashed).
The largest proportion of the complaints from media outlets come from defunded operations. Its in everyone's fiscal best interest for these audits to continue, and for them to be completed by people completely outside of the government's patronage (grant and funding) networks.
Every dime that the USAID spent was allocated via Congress through the budgeting process.
And many (11/12) of the published stories about supposed wasteful spending were not true:
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/07/usaid-tru...
More importantly, even if sending money to USAid is wasteful, that is Congress's prerogative. The President's job is to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed": if Congress wants to spend money on Foo then that's what he is supposed to do.
A thread on the general process:
> Every year, the White House (via OMB) puts together a federal budget proposal to Congress. Every federal agency (incl USAID) sends OMB their budget wishlist.
[…]
> So to be clear: every dollar that USAID requests from Congress goes through White House review.
[…]
> Once USAID gets its budget from Congress, it must go straight back to Congress again with a further level of detail on how it will satisfy the various budget directives - via "Congressional Notifications."
* https://twitter.com/JeremyKonyndyk/status/188866737886876071...
" “$32,000 for a ‘transgender comic book’ in Peru”
This is wrong. USAID did not fund this, and it was not specifically transgender. Instead, the grant says the State Department provided $32,000, under the guise of public diplomacy, to Peru’s Education Department “to cover expenses to produce a tailored-made comic, featured an LGBTQ+ hero to address social and mental health issues.” "
So the comic existed, but it was funded by another equally corrupt department? This doesn't make USAID look any better at all, it just means Trump and Elon's team need to do MORE of what they have been doing, and expand their scope further.
I don't really care that a 2500 page omnibus spending bill that no one could read in full (minus an AI) specifically said that some pork goes to some unethical and corrupt action. Its evil and it needs to stop. If the government's normal checks and balances cant fix it, the answer is not to give up and let corrupt liberals desecrate the union. The answer is to fulfill the promise of the 2nd Amendment and to break the system of government in whatever way is necessary until it is no longer tyrannical. Remember that a 2% tax on tea without sufficient and effective representation is an acceptable threshold for such actions.
Before DOGE, somebody obviously had to have this access as well, and similarly could have copied and stored. Why be concerned with DOGE but not their predecessors? Honest question.