If you can’t understand that difference, you’re missing something very critical.
One is serious because a foreign adversary is compromising us; the other is serious because we are apparently designing the compromise ourselves via the whims of a demagogue.
You don't need read-write access for auditing. You don't need root/admin-level privileges.
So far the only evidence of that is a wired article [1] with anonymous sources, even those source were not 100% sure about it.
Since then wired has posted another article [2] claiming the access have been revoked after announcements from senior officials, which again is from anonymous sources.
I'm really skeptical of these anonymous sources tbh.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-associate-bfs-federal-...
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/treasury-department-doge-marko-e...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-21-year-old-u...
Did the ancient scrolls involved accounting ledgers? Because some kind of auditing experience would be useful to figure out how where Treasury or USAid payments went.
> I find it strange that neither activists nor politicians nor journalists cared about that enough to make it a continuous news cycle.
Because (a) that was a month ago and that's a long time given recent events. And (b), it's implicit that someone 'inappropriate' having access is a bad thing, but with Trump/Musk/DOGE it's being done on purpose.
It's the purposeful part that's at issue now.
There are people who have reportedly just graduated high school that have root-level access to things:
* https://futurism.com/elon-kids-gutting-opm-doge
Beside being party loyalists, do they have any kind of qualifications?