Musk doesn't have any power other than what he was been contracted to do as an advisor to the white house.
This includes read only access to government systems in order to make recommendations to government on how to reduce waste.
https://www.vox.com/2016/8/29/12691276/trump-believe-flop-fl...
> 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.
- The team aren't accessing data they don't have appropriate security clearances for.
- They don't have write access to data, only read access.
- Musk is not authorised to review any agency or program where he has a material conflict.
That's certainly a material conflict.
He's an advisor with no lawful power to fire, no lawful security clearance for the DOGE team*, no lawful authority to terminate programs.
De facto, anyone standing in his way gets pushed.
Which is why nuclear weapons teams were let go.
* unless President said so. I think the office of President can do that, but has Trump actually done so, or is this like those classified documents he refused to return?
Sure, I agree he has no authority. He's only an advisor that seems to have any advice rubber-stamped. And he announces the changes personally before the executive action is announced. And opm employees get an email with basically the same wording as Twitter employees about a leave offer which legally cannot be offered to them.
We can pretend that "actually it's not Musk making those changes" but it's obvious he's telling others what to do. And not in an "advice" way. (He's obviously shielded from legal responsibility in this case.)
> The team aren't accessing data they don't have appropriate security clearances for.
You're arguing against a federal judge. Do you know something they don't? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjw4g2q62xqo
Even if they were allowed access, we know they disregard the access rules by posting NOFORN level data publicly https://www.huffpost.com/entry/elon-musk-doge-posts-classifi...
> They don't have write access to data, only read access.
Are you arguing that both Ron Wyden is incorrect and the treasury secretary is lying about granting write access? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/02/elon-musk...
> Musk is not authorised to review any agency or program where he has a material conflict.
Yet he's involved in the review of treasury which he has conflict with.
If justice is important to a democracy, these scientists did the right thing. That takes real courage.
I see no difference in what’s happening in the American public service. The processes occurring now are not democratic in nature. Musk’s role is extremely unorthodox and only ostensibly voted for ‘by the people’.
In the weeks since Trump took office, I see no hard evidence to support any kind of deep state corruption. I see inefficiency, and yet, I see that in how DOGE dismantles things as well. I see it in every organization I work in, in every industry, in every home. It’s inevitable.
Civil servants ultimately work for the President. That's how it works. There have been many reductions in force prompted by Presidents over time (my own grandfather took one in the seventies). I appreciate there is some disagreement about whether Trump is tripping over any specific laws, but to the degree he's not (the courts will answer that), then he's well within his right to take the direct advice of his advisors, and to act within the scope of his authorities. The President also has the power to get access to even the most confidential information (how could he not?), and to share that with his advisors who have the requisite security clearances (which in many cases he can dictate).
I'm just stunned by all the hand wringing about access to "government data." They're government employees!
Well someone should tell him: https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1892295984928993698/photo/1 !
I'm saying that focusing on an incorrect zero ($8b) distracts from the fact that $8m is easily spent wastefully by people (and systems) whose job it should be to be accurate.
Surely the people doing an audit should be just as accurate no? If they can't keep track of (several) zeros how can you trust them to accurately work through all the documentation involved in figuring out what is waste, what is fraud, and what is legitimate spending?
I'd actually support this effort if there was evidence any care was being taken. Instead I see wild statements like this, 100 million spent on condoms, people in the SSA database being too old with no discussion of if they are actually receiving payments or not (oh look they aren't!)
A real audit take time, discipline and attention to detail. I see none of that.
This is the sort of thing that happens when you refuse objectivity and spend all your time getting high on your own farts.
Yet teslas are still selling like hot cakes. If there were actual humans struggling we’d see an obvious decrease in sales.
Yes they should. These are not auditors though. They have an axe to grind with confirmation bias driving the zealotry.
The plus side is that they are publishing information in real time so we can all judge it, which one could argue is an improvement over not publishing.
A counter argument would be that this is just to create the illusion of transparency, but I suspect they are not playing 5D chess.
Beyond that, you're not going to make the Federal government efficient by cutting $8 million at a time. Musk's goal is $2 trillion in cuts. He said he thinks there's a good shot at achieving $1 trillion. The deficit in 2024 was $1.8 trillion. If your top item is $8 million, your task is utterly hopeless. Imagine being a family drowning in debt, with expenses exceeding income by $330,000/year, and a financial planner comes in and says that your top priority is not to buy that hot dog at the Costco food court this weekend. Not even that you should stop buying hot dogs weekly, that you should not buy one. They make you a list of things you should stop spending money on, and "One Costco hot dog combo planned to be purchased sometime in the coming year" is top of the list. Oh, and they also have it listed as saving you $1,500 because they didn't actually check the cost of a hot dog before they gave you the list.
No we can’t because they control the narrative. There should be more transparency in an objective manner without using the qualifiers like “wasteful” so that readers can decide for themselves. Or at the very least express both the arguments for and against, similar to how voter guides often come with a listing of arguments from both sides of the coin.
They're claiming to cut $16b and actually only cut like $6b and none of it was actually fraudulent it just literally matched grep trans or something.
I know this is how I and my definitely not a bot liberal friend want our country to be governed, fellow humans. beep boop bzzzzzzt
Do you have a source for this opinion presented as a fact?
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).
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.
The problem is that they benefit workers not through productivity increases, but via collective bargaining, i.e. at the expense of society. Consider that when unions go on strike, they reduce economic productivity and disrupt the economy. Likewise, when unions fight to prevent factories from closing to protect the jobs of workers, this causes an inefficient allocation of resources - so now companies must bid up the prices of raw materials to produce things that nobody wants just to keep some people employed. Unions oppose automation for similar reasons, which is why we have the most inefficient ports in the world (worse than Africa!).
So in sum, unions do literally nothing to make society better off. What benefits unionized workers receive come at cost of society (including other unionized workers!)
>If you could come up with an equitable and non exploitative system that works for everyone, suddenly you no longer have a need for unions.
Capitalism is working great, actually. It would work better without unions.
"Economics" in the sense of "any sort of understanding of how the world works", not so much.
Drain the rot from your brain. Ew.
By denouncing this right of peaceably assembling and negotiating at a table of law, means that you're wanting the old solution of mass widespread violence against workers and management. Because this is exactly what happened before. But dont believe me - go read how unions were formed.
Most civilized countries have good worker protections. The USA is speedrunning the elimination of worker protections. And it doesn't take too much history knowledge to figure out how that works out.
I think the zoomer term is "fuck around and find out". We're in the 'fuck around' stage. I dont want to be here during the 'find out' stage.
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.
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.
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...
This is peak ostriching. They haven't turned up anything so far, they've just been making monumental messes and lying about progress.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_tan_suit_controve...
It's objectively true no sane person would have cared about that issue.
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.
Where can I vote for these changes??
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.
#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.
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.
You are either delusional or purposely misrepresenting facts
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/fired-inspecto...
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.
The pushback seems to mostly be “I don’t like Musk in particular, and thus I don’t like that Musk in particular has this access”. But government cannot function this way, we have to respect the result of the presidential election, and their choice of advisors.