Intent to drop in, make major changes, and pretend like they won't break anything is ill intent

We criticize engineers who drop into a code base and try to make changes without understanding. You can be forgiven for doing it a few times, but after that you're doing it intentionally. And if they hired engineers that didn't know this, that's incompetence at both levels.

Not only is this different code bases and IT products, it's across organizations and done very rapidly.

I am also not convinced that they don't simply have malicious intent most of the time.

Elon has been operating in bad faith since the Twitter Files (so, the very start). Announce X, publish receipts that show ~X, but nobody reads receipts so checkmate.

The "140 year old people in social security DB" post is just the latest example of bad-faith. Either there is actually >>$100B of social security fraud and that's the story or he wants to pretend like that's the case when he knows full well that presence in the DB does not indicate eligibility or payouts.

Agreed. Show the check numbers, mailing dates, bank transfers, etc. If there's actually really tens of billions flowing out to dead people monthly... demonstrate that. Should NOT be hard at all.

Should not be hard... if it exists. Which is why I'm 99% sure it doesn't. But the lie will go twice around the world before the truth gets its pants on, as always.

For sake of testing your position, let's assume the fraud is true and he does what you want and publishes the details like that.

What about the corner-case person who actually is legitimate and now has incredibly private information out there to make stealing their identity trivial? As a statistical anomaly who is often that corner case, I'm glad you're not the one making the policy. I wish Elon wasn't as well, and I'm sure there's going to be a giant mess at the end, but using government power (which Elon has, whether rightly or wrongly) to publish personal information about people (which they get by force giving their monopoly on government power) especially without trial or due diligence is very wrong IMHO.

This is what courts and process and testimony are for. Doing this reliably in the face of bad actors with minimal stepping-on-fingers is a solved problem.

Unless you don't actually care about the truth and want to send a convenient lie twice around the world before the truth gets its pants on. Then you should act like Elon is acting.

> What about the corner-case person who actually is legitimate and now has incredibly private information out there to make stealing their identity trivial?

Elon usually has doesn't have any compunction about throwing innocent people under the bus if he thinks he gains something even if indirectly.

But that aside, you can show evidence of massive fraud, without revealing private information to general public. Can certainly reveal it to relevant authorities.

To relevant authorities who are properly vetted? Feels like ouroboros…

You would have to quantify what properly vetted is a unelected bureaucrat is. I guarantee vetting for three positions are probably little more than validating you don’t have outstanding warrants.

I understand that these 140/150 year old recipients are actually the results of incomplete birthdate data.

To steelman the argument though, it seems reasonable to audit these recipients so that we can get their true birthdate entered. The number of recipients who lack a valid birthdate because they found a way to fraudulently claim benefits is likely non-zero, but probably low. But in any event, cleaning up the data can’t be a bad thing.

If something costs more to fix than it costs to leave sitting around, fixing it is less efficient. In this case it's already been investigated prior to DOGE, and deemed not worth the effort to clean up [1].

[1] https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf

I think the problem they should be considering more acutely is, eventually the number of people trained in that specialized knowledge will go to 0, and they will then be paying the cost to either train more (and the increased risks of less familiar people) or replace the whole thing with no backup plan.

Given the age of the COBOL programmers I know, that window is rapidly shrinking...

You fix the system not because of the cost today but because the cost it will eventually cause.

Poor record keeping and bad policies about data validation tied to sending money to people if not today will eventually result in massive fraud.

Furthermore the notion you put forth is trash lazy thinking. Cost or no cost you do things the right way. But I don’t even buy you can calculate the cost of doing it wrong correctly to even have a sound conjecture that fixing it is more costly.

Your point is also covered in the audit report linked by the parent.

Cost was not the only factor. They seem to be trying to handle missing data the right way rather than use a kludge.

They did not want to add inaccurate death data to Numident records, for a variety of reasons, one being that it could cause release of information for living people when they're accidentally added to dead people records. The SSA also thought adding annotations would legally require a new regulation and would have impacts on other consumers of the data (ie. states, etc).

How to handle missing death data in this case does not appear to have a clear and simple solution. But it also does not appear to be evidence of poor record keeping for modern records or a major cause of concern for "eventual massive fraud".

Missing data means == no payments until data is updated.

This creates a driver, somebody who is motivated to get it fixed. If the person does not exist they won’t be calling for their check, or if the entry fraudulent, fraudster will run the risk of exposing them self in the process of trying to get the checks flowing again.

But what if the right way is judging the pros and cons of perfection and doing what makes the most sense?

OIG Response:

  We acknowledge that almost none of the numberholders discussed in the 
  report currently receive SSA payments. However, SSA issued each of these 
  individuals a valid SSN and these SSNs could allow for a wide range of 
  potential abuse. 

  [...]

  We also note we initiated our 2015 review upon the receipt of information 
  that a man opened several bank accounts using SSNs belonging to 
  numberholders born in the 1800s who had no death information on the 
  Numident. In addition to being used to obtain employment or open bank 
  accounts, identity thieves can potentially use these SSNs to create 
  synthetic identifies, obtain credit, government benefits, or private 
  insurance.

Why spend money chasing people who aren't collecting checks? That sounds like waste to me.

Also those identities can't collect checks, because if they tried it would set off alarm bells and reviews because they're over a standard "assume they're already dead" limit.

Imagine the brouhaha these same folks would be raising about "wasting your tax dollars hiring historians" if that other direction was in their self-interest.

This is also the same argument made against IRS audits on lower tax brackets. Basically, its not generally worth audits of low income citizens. Because the manpower required to perform the audit exceeds the revenues recovered.

Yet audits of individuals making < $25k per year is over 5.5 times higher than those in all other income brackets (1.27% vs 0.25%). So we chase down citizens when likely they probably don't even had a tax burden anyway. Maybe they misfiled some taxes and should be taxed a few hundred or even a thousand dollars more. But the manpower to chase down these little checks is a net negative on the department.

Sure, it is possible you find fraud in some of these low income cases. Someone claims to only make $25k but really they run a cash business and make $80k. But these are likely so limited thanks to other validations the IRS has access to, that the number of cases that reveal this is extremely tiny. So back to another argument on here, there an expectations that fraud is non-zero, and we accept that because getting fraud to zero is not worth the cost.

> these 140/150 year old recipients

What is the evidence these exist?

To quote patio11,

“The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero

He was talking about the banking system. But he was also hinting at something bigger. There is a game theory problem often referred to as the meter maid problem. What is the optimal amount of meter maids in a city, where optimal can be defined in at least a few different ways, but roughly means the cost to revenue optimal. You end up with a couple of obvious extremes, no parking enforcement means no cost, but no revenue (plus parking may end up out of control if charging for parking is more than just revenue generating). The other extreme is thay you have enough people policing parking that no one ever fail to comply, this is the highest cost, but not the highest revenue, because you don’t get revenue from ticketing. So the answer is that the optimal number lies somewhere where the number of meter maids allows some percentage of people get away with failing to comply with parking rules (whether deliberate or accidental can further complicate the problem since both will happen).

So back to your steelman. Cleaning data is most certainly a desirable thing, but it is likely not the optimal thing, especially if the cost is high. And unauditable access to systems is a very high cost. Seems to me much of this auditing could be done in a much more acciuntable way.

On top of that, there's an assumption that there's no existing cleaning effort. I'm sure there is and it's just a difficult problem. The cases left must be either in progress, hard to track down, or not actually meaningfully active.

Or, as is really common with the federal government, the agency is actually underfunded and hasn't been able to modernize because the Republicans in congress have been trying to starve the administrative capacity the classic, slow way until now.

Like with the IRS. I've made mistakes in filing, and gotten a notice from the IRS about it, but sometimes years later (!). In the meantime, if you "audited" the IRS records, you'd see that my records are out of compliance and could claim "See, there's fraud!". In reality, the IRS just has slow antiquated systems, and is barred from giving taxpayers direct access to their records. Which is by design from the rich and anti-government.

Presence in the DB allows for downstream fraud, even by accident. If that DB is the source of truth for SS payouts elsewhere, clean up the data. There's no reason for it to be there.

Social Security receives payments as well as makes them. SSNs are keys for both.

The “super old person” SSN numbers are in the DB mostly because non-citizens are using them to pay into the system. If you delete those numbers, the next payroll run will inject them right back in.

And you would remove important accounting metadata for each payment. Metadata that is consumed by the systems that prevent fraudulent payments from going out.

The only way to stop the fake/bad SSNs is to go into the field and address each instance with employers. This is time-consuming and expensive, which is why no one has done it much.

The reason given that the SSA does not clean up the data is it would cost too much for little to no administrative benefit. They also don't want to add new inaccurate data to the system.

The no administrative benefit bit checks out with napkin math. Of the 18.9 million entries for people age 100 or older they are paying out benefits to 44,000. The total number of people in the US age 100 or older is around 90k to 100k, depending on time period for comparison.

There's an Inspector General audit report in a nearby comment for source.

> Presence in the DB allows for downstream fraud, even by accident.

That's like saying null columns in a particular database table must be filled in (or have the row entirely erased) because someone, somewhere, somehow, might infer the wrong thing about them, if they completely ignore all the other tables and business rules.

___

"Hello, I am Oldy McOldperson. Give me money."

"...Sorry sir, but that person would be almost 150 years old now, and that's well past our Impossibly Old threshold of 115 years. Furthermore, one our other databases says that person was reported as missing 90 years ago."

"But Oldy's--I mean, my precise confirmed date of death is still blank, therefore I'm alive, so give me money!"

"Sir, only a complete moron would believe that's how it works."

Show us the (public) Court Filings. The formal start of education to evaluate if there is truth, if there is a guilty party, and to legally render a verdict. The check numbers and other PII can be evaluated by the courts. We the People can know the numbers; the scale per case and in sum, of the 'fraud' identified.

Elon has been operating in bad faith since he called that hero diver a pedo

Elon has been operating in bad faith since he came to the US on a student visa and then illegally worked for a startup.

And then faked his degrees

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice

This is correct. Depending on the stakes, the right answer would be to err on the side of caution. Certainly repeated incompetence in a private setting would be grounds for suspension or termination.

Yes and: fraud and errors are often indistinguishable.

People with malice like Elon Musk have noticed the widespread use of this aphorism and repeatedly leverage it to their advantage.

At what point does incompetence /become/ malice?

There is certainly a level of incompetence that requires active ignorance to one's naivety. I'd certainly consider a stubborn person who arrogantly ignores concerns of experts malicious. The active nature certainly matters.

Yes. Consider the concept of negligence. It is malicious to take action without exercising reasonable care, and part of reasonable care is ensuring that you are the slightest bit qualified to perform the action.

I obviously agree, but for anyone reading along, this is also the legal definition: reasonable care. Reasonable is determined by peers, not the general population. So...

I 100% agree on the need to move slowly and carefully in production systems, and especially in governance systems.

The reason I still give them benefit of the doubt on their intentions is...because they did come out and say that 20% of the savings should go back to taxpayers as a refund and that 20% should go directly to reducing the debt. That being said, these are nice things that people would want to hear so I too am paying attention.

> The reason I still give them benefit of the doubt on their intentions is...because they did come out and say that 20% of the savings should go back to taxpayers as a refund and that 20% should go directly to reducing the debt. That being said, these are nice things that people would want to hear so I too am paying attention.

I'd rather the government keep the money and use it to pay for the many services that it provides. Like ensuring that I have clean water, unadulterated food, clean air, a functional banking system, healthcare, safe vehicles, making sure that unemployed people don't starve, researching infectious disease remediation, performing scientific research, maintaining national parks, making sure that kids have a baseline education, doing humanitarian work around the globe, and a thousand other things I don't have the time to enumerate.

Should the government get a blank check? If there is waste and removing it won’t reduce efficacy, it should be purged.

> and removing it won’t reduce efficacy, it should be purged.

This is the load-bearing idea that is made of toilet tissue.

It will create inefficiency. In the best case because it's not how the decades of built up institutional knowledge knows how to get stuff done. If the worst (and most probable) case, because what you're removing is actually needed... and we'll get an "oops sorry" later when the damage is done.

>This is the load-bearing idea that is made of toilet tissue.

Needed to save that line,

Be careful what you wish for, as the saying goes. I have seen so many times (in private organizations) clearly inefficient processes getting ripped out, only to be replaced with much more inefficient ones.

Sometimes there are no shortcuts: You have to know what you're doing. The "This is 'something', therefore we must do it" bit only gets you so far.

You are both correct. It's not an either-or.

Deeming things as waste within days of gaining access to the info is 100% in bad faith. There is no possible way that musk and his minions took the time to find out why anything is the way it is. Nevermind the fact that you don't have to shut anything down to perform an audit. He is going through with a bulldozer and saying "oops" when he destroys institutional knowledge and capabilities. The damage is the point.

Jumping into a complex system and trashing big swathes of it without taking the time to understand why it's there, what it does, and the consequences for destroying it will be, is one of the worst possible ways to 'reduce waste' that I can think of.

Does this same reasoning apply to social and cultural systems…?

This is not how to accomplish that. Musk is looting the government for personal gain and installing lackeys that are loyal to him.

I think that addresses the root issue here- the money is not efficient in getting those things done. It's not even hidden and the freeloaders really seemed to feel no shame since covid (maybe social media is the cause?). It happens all over the world in every organization. Usually companies die off, but the budget just increases for the government.

Of course we don't want to toss the baby out with the bath water, but it's high time for a major course correction. In our government it is very hard to turn the ship around, and motivate people to serve.

I'd much prefer if we could magically motivate the 3/5 of govvies who are in cruise mode to try harder.

I feel like people lose sight of exactly how ridiculously much money a trillion dollars is. You’re mentioning a bunch of desirable things you’d like the federal government to do, while ignoring the millions wasted on everything from a $90,000 bag of bushings to $1,300 coffee cups to $150,000 soap dispensers to billons on empty government buildings. You can simultaneously want the government to reduce waste and provide these services. Lately it feels like folks are getting too carried away and becoming “pro government waste” as some type of political flex. Really, the problem is _who_ is doing the reduction and _how_, not _that_ we’re doing it.

> ignoring the millions wasted on everything from a $90,000 bag of bushings to $1,300 coffee cups to $150,000 soap dispensers to billons on empty government buildings

Who's ignoring it? Once the problem is identified by someone, you fix it and move on. This already happens.

$1,300 coffee cups: https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/10/22... Audit of C-17 Spare Parts: https://www.dodig.mil/In-the-Spotlight/Article/3948604/press...

See also, the myth of the $600 hammer: https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the...

Trashing whole departments/agencies first and then trying to find all of the 'waste' amongst the wreckage creates more work in the long run when you have to rebuild all of the processes and try to reclaim some portion of the institutional knowledge that got flushed down the toilet for no reason.

In the case of one of my examples, it took someone dragging a bag of bushings to congress. And though these specific examples may have been addressed, the point is there are likely many more in every corner of the government. It needs to be systematically reviewed and prevented; waste like this should never have happened and should never happen again. I’m not at all saying I support DOGE’s methods here, but I do want to eliminate government waste, and I don’t think the existing methods have worked. The national debt is out of control, and I think the reality is 25% of government spending could be eliminated without anyone even noticing a reduction in service.

I guess the question that should be asked if the examples of waste presented thus far are exceptions or if there's just rampant waste everywhere that nobody has been able to find. We have (well, had) a Government Accountability Office that's supposed to be empowered to audit the federal government's spending, and should be able to catch fraud and waste on the scale of billions of dollars. If they're not able to find it, then I can only think of three reasons why that might be: fraud and waste on that scale doesn't exist despite certain outlets constantly insisting that it must be there, it does exist but they're either understaffed or otherwise not empowered to adequately remediate what they do find, or it exists and they're complicit in hiding it.

I'm sure I'm missing something, I'm no expert by a long shot, but government spending isn't a secret. Budgets get approved by congress and spent by the executive out in the open. Maybe someone interested in curtailing waste could start by auditing budgets? Making sure that the money allocated got spent where it should have and that the budgets weren't padded with unnecessary spending? But that takes a lot of time, effort, and energy, is kind of boring, and wouldn't generate dozens of headlines every day.

Musk doesn't give a shit about any of that waste. People aren't pro government waste, they're anti political grandstanding about meaningless crumbs as a distraction while a literal nazi-saluting fascist eats the rest of the pie.

That’s really the reason for my comment—there’s a fine line, and the person I responded to said something (IIRC) along the lines of “take my money, I don’t care, I just want good government services”, and that can’t be the message. Everyone should be in favor of reducing waste and increasing accountability, and where and how our tax dollars are spent _does_ matter. This just isn’t the way we should be doing it, and the way we were doing it before wasn’t the best answer either. I’m scared that people are going to start being anti-waste-reduction simply because we hate Trump and he’s (claiming to be) pro-waste-reduction.

I assume you're talking about me. I said that I want the government to keep the money I paid them to provide services that I and 340-odd million other people rely on. You seem to think that means that I want the government to spend as much money as possible. I've never heard anyone argue in good faith that they want the government to spent limitless amounts of money to do those things, but it needs to spend some amount of money to provide services. Providing services for every American is expensive.

It's not an either/or situation. You can have responsible spending and also services to benefit everyone. Cutting me a check to give me back some of the money I've paid into the system doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you only got the money by destroying the CDC or whatever.

It would be kind of like the gas company tearing my house down because my windows aren't insulated and then giving me a couple hundred bucks because they technically eliminated the source of the wasted energy

You are not paying attention if you believe that a crack team consisting of the world's richest man and half a dozen tween interns physically invading government offices and dismantling entire departments fast enough to make your head spin is anything other than "ill intent".

You realize that the entire executive branch excluding defense is like 10% of the federal budget.

There isn’t enough money to be saved to give you back anything.

People don’t understand scale. They will cut spending $800B, cut taxes by $4T and people will say that action is budget neutral.

You're giving them the benefit of the doubt because they made a vague promise to give you a bigger tax refund?

Did you read the entire post you are responding to? I clearly said this at the end:

"That being said, these are nice things that people would want to hear so I too am paying attention."

It is in my nature to give the benefit of the doubt.

> It is in my nature to give the benefit of the doubt.

There should be little to doubt at this point, however. "Dismantling of the administrative state" was a mantra for many who are now in positions of power.

Then: "Prices will come down on day 1!" Now: "It's hard to get prices to come down once they're up".

At some point, there's not much reason to doubt someone's goals, regardless of what they say. You can look at past say/do combinations and make reasonable predictions.

Stop giving 'benefits' to people with years of documented track records under the aegis of 'doubt'.

> It is in my nature to give the benefit of the doubt.

I would implore you to develop the skill of judging one’s character overtime. Some folks have proven they don’t deserve the benefit.

Otherwise, I fear that your good nature will become a vulnerability instead of the strength that I can be.

TINSTAAFL. When someone promises you tax cuts, you should be able to name the specific brackets getting their cut and by how much. Otherwise, yep, you are being fooled into padding a billionaire's pocketbook.

> It is in my nature to give the benefit of the doubt.

Then you should be giving the benefit of the doubt to the people and institutions that are accused on flimsy evidence. Then you should be giving benefit of the doubt to Harris and Clinton too, to progressives, to SJWs, feminists, to centrists.

Did they mention which tax payers those 20% will be going back to?

Small temporary income tax cuts, big permanent capital gains tax cuts.

Always has been, always will be.

So far they said 20% refunds, 20% against the debt, and the rest...presumably they are determining to what extent to put that into tax cuts and the other two buckets some more. This way everyone wins, assuming their savings so far are sustainable and annualized.

No, suggesting that you have found $100B in fraud without having found $100B in fraud is still bad, even if the 1/1000th that they did find (I'm being generous here) is real goes into tax cuts / debt.

Also, the capital gains taxes ARE low and the income taxes ARE high, so just paying down the debt and other "even-handed" measures are less even-handed than a refund.

While I agree with you on the opinion that capital gains taxes are low (I should not be paying less on my winnings from bets on the stock market than I am on the income from my work). I think you need to justify the opinion that income taxes are high.

Personal income taxes are the larges revenue source for the U.S. Government, so it is the main way we have decided to tax ourselves. Arguably it is one of the most steerable, and we have long health that progressive taxation is for the common good (as much of a mockery as some high-income individuals have made of that).

So with that as the background, the U.S. ranks towards the bottom of the OCED countries in taxes vs. GDP. Yes we get less than the citizens of the countries paying the most, but not that much less.

https://taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-do-us-taxes-co...

> 20% against the debt

That seems insignificant when their other proposed policies are intended to massively increase that debt?

The rampage isn't going to save money on net, and even if it did, it would amount to a fart in a hurricane.

Like.. we could just personally tax Elon a little bit more while changing nothing else and recover more money, most likely.

Elimination (or indefinite pause) of the CFPB that was a trade of 21 billion in consumer savings for like 750 million in expenses.

If they wanted to improve efficiency, there's an easy place to start: the IRS. And you wouldn't start by firing, you'd start hiring lots and lots of people.

Not yet as far as I've seen.

Here you got then - https://docs.house.gov/meetings/BU/BU00/20250213/117894/BILL...

Spoiler: Nobody is _directly_ getting a refund. That money will be less than the planned increase in the deficit. (This is the house's budget bill which is the supported version of the president unlike the senate's version).

Yep, and even if they weren't planning on just ignoring the deficit (as republicans always do when they're the ones doing the spending), any money "saved" by these assholes was going to go straight into the pockets of Musk, Trump, and their assorted superrich cronies.

You give them the benefit of the doubt because they tell you exactly what you want to hear?

It is in my nature to give the benefit of the doubt, but as my post clearly says at the end: "That being said, these are nice things that people would want to hear so I too am paying attention."

I appreciate that nature, but not when the stakes are _this_ high.

Post your bank account number here. Give us the benefit of the doubt.

Typically i would agree with the harsh tone, but this person is being clear about their position. Perhaps I sympathize since I may also have a habit of being too credulous.

Credulity is a fine default for human interaction. It is gift of assumed sincerity.

Deciding at which point that gift was misplaced is a learned skill and one I cannot claim to have expertise in.

I may credulously assume that our poster friend is sincere. However, as I read replies that the poster has made to sincere responses, I observe:

  * a claim of mutual empathy via mutual distrust "I've criticized Musk!" ... "I've been contradicting DOGE on things since they became a thing"

  * a surrender of high-ground via tenuous appeal-to-authority "Bibi says he's not a nazi"

  * a veneer of emotional maturity over others: "we don't have to be so stressed about needing to trust DOGE's changes"

I've seen enough of on-line conversations to understand the "I'm just asking questions" type -- the kind who only grows in power as response after response is parried with "my goodenss, how rude?!" aplomb.

Buffeted yet calm, our poster friend claims the high-ground while having-and-eating cake.

Our poster is in an incredulous superposition of:

"So yeah, I don't trust him." and "I was shocked"

or

"I don't think they'd renege on it. I'm certainly not naive!"

I've wasted too much time discussing our mutual friend. I should not have done my drive-by, and I apologize to you both for the energy consumption of my this and my previous post. I shrink away cowardly from responding anymore.

I do not apologize for lacking credulity.

My position is very clear and I maintain it. DOGE should be audited by CAT and CAT should operate alongside DOGE to review all changes. DOGE should also be on a leash, even quarantined, while reviews are ongoing as to ensure sustainable changes and accesses.

My interest in having any kind of "superposition" is simply to be impartial and accurate to the greatest degree possible as to get the greatest results possible. That is it. In any case, you got it wrong when you said:

> * a veneer of emotional maturity over others: "we don't have to be so stressed about needing to trust DOGE's changes"

There is nothing like that at all in my posts. What I was saying is that DOGE should operate with such a level of transparency and controls that would eliminate needing to simply trust DOGE's changes. Tthus the stress that goes along with that level of trust would fade away.

> * a surrender of high-ground via tenuous appeal-to-authority "Bibi says he's not a nazi"

That is not an appeal to authority. It is saying that the people who are most equipped to answer the question, because it is a matter of their own history and hide, are the ones saying that it warrants overlooking or good faith. By all means, continue that line of investigation on your own if you want.

> I should not have done my drive-by

I agree! Because it's poor faith and on top of that you're questioning my own consistency and integrity to boot, even though it's clear that in one case X has premium features warranting a credit card...whereas there's no reason at all to blast my bank account details on here...

Anyway, to summarize it all...CAT should audit DOGE and DOGE should be on a tighter leash or quarantined if they cannot be trusted to make changes.

What feature on HN requires a premium membership?

So you do give them the benefit of the doubt because they tell you exactly what you want to hear.

What will you do when they break your benefits of the doubt. Wait for the next time for more of the same words?

Do you give the same benefit of the doubt to the 10s of thousands of civil servants who have already been abruptly fired without cause? Do you assume that they are capable and productive members of their departments who have been making good faith efforts to improve the lives of their fellow Americans? If so, then shouldn't the administration take a bit more than 30 days of careful analysis and deliberation before declaring their jobs wasteful and fraudulent?

Do you think they can be trusted to tell the truth?

I think they can be trusted to at least state a goal that they truly intend to follow through on...and then get it wrong if the reality is more complicated. Example: Elon was initially saying 2 year severances for those who get laid off. The best I've seen was an offer of 8 months, though, which is definitely less than 2 years. But...with unemployment benefits as well, perhaps that ends up getting close enough.

The reason I don't consider this to be a lie, per se, is because they make promises around goals with incomplete understanding and data and then recalibrate as more information becomes available.

It would still be excellent to limit the surface area of what DOGE can touch and do and how fast, though, so we don't have to be so stressed about needing to trust DOGE's changes.

Trust is objectively bad for systems design and processes, especially without audit and oversight! Everything should be trustless whenever it can be. They have broken every best practice in the book.

> because they make promises around goals with incomplete understanding and data and then recalibrate as more information becomes available.

Perhaps you should simply announce an investigation, then deliver findings of the investigation and recommendations.

They're starting with the end in mind - the dismantling of the administrative state - then making cuts. Then finding out what the impact might be, then continuing cuts.

There is no good faith here, and there is nothing in 'doubt' that someone should benefit from.

> I don't consider this to be a lie, per se, is because they make promises around goals with incomplete understanding

They didn't even try to formulate an understanding. All of their actions show willful and deliberate disregard for how the system works. That's not "incomplete understanding" or a good faith effort.

Even if you believe that trust shouldn't be earned, it is inadvisable to believe anything that Elon Musk says is in good faith. How many more examples do you need after the Hyperloop debacle? Here's an expanding list: https://elonmusk.today

How many times do you need to be lied to by the exact same person before you realize that facts don't mean anything to them?

At this point, I'm surprised when I hear something from Musk that is verifiably true.

>I've seen was an offer of 8 months

Wasn't that actually "if you agree to resign and leave next September we'll continue paying your salary until then and you wont have to RTO if you work remotely" rather that actually 8 months of severance?

> then recalibrate as more information becomes available.

So you are waiting until they will start actually lying when they have more information (instead of "just" being incompetent)?

Giving someone who has proven time and time again to be exceptionally dishonest (Trump but also arguably Musk) the benefit of the doubt seems unwise. Why would they suddenly stop lying?

The fact alone that they have promised a huge tax cut to high income earners will will inevitably outweigh any potential savings by DOGE means that any claims about reducing public debt are inherently dishonest.

>with unemployment benefits as well, perhaps that ends up getting close enough

It won't be, unemployment benefits are a fraction of what the severance benefits are. Its disingenuous to bundle them together due to that fact alone.

I did have a question about that. Where does the other 60% go? Isn’t the whole point to reduce the debt?

I’m sorry but the naivety of your comment is absolutely hilarious. Good luck getting your refund when the IRS is being ran by a handful of angsty young adults

DOGE and POTUS are incentivized to follow through on this type of thing because it would increase good-faith in the masses big time. I don't think they'd renege on it. I'm certainly not naive! You can see that I've been contradicting DOGE on things since they became a thing. (@cyrsbel on X)

I'm still waiting on orange to release his tax returns like he promised from his first presidential debate. That audit's gotta be almost complete by now, right?

How are those public contradictions going?

> increase good-faith in the masses big time

What incentive is there for anyone in the Trump administration to care about that? I don't see one.

> I don't think they'd renege on it.

Lower prices on day 1. Stopping Ukraine war on day 1.

Trump just says things in the moment to play for approval, then says something contradictory later if need be. There is no fallout, pushback or consequence from his supporters, and they have control of ... all branches of government right now.

> DOGE and POTUS are incentivized to follow through on this type of thing because it would increase good-faith in the masses big time.

Trump has no interest in increasing good faith. He doesn't need to. He can't run for office anymore, and even if he could, there's literally nothing he could do to lose voters. And he certainly doesn't give a shit about the future of the Republican party.

The people that voted for Trump fully support everything that's being done.

I am not reading your twitter history to say that assuming Elon and Trump wont renege on something is the worst bet of your entire life.

The point of that comment was to show that I am not naive about these matters. They need to be called out for reneging so that they stop doing it.

Hi, I’ve read a lot of your comments, and you are going to get short shrift for it.

The core issue is the idea that they are incentivized to act in good faith.

Theres a great article which was shared here: "Why is it so hard to buy things that work" https://danluu.com/nothing-works/ The idea here is that since its the right thing to do, firms will do the right thing. or: "markets enforce efficiency, so it's not possible that a company can have some major inefficiency and survive" > Although it's possible to find people who don't do shoddy work, it's generally difficult for someone who isn't an expert in the field to determine if someone is going to do shoddy work in the field. and > More generally, in many markets, consumers are uninformed and it's fairly difficult to figure out which products are even half decent, let alone good.

This is a Wikipedia article about you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_information_voter

Sadly, there were enough people like you to enable a fascist coup.

This is Clientelism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clientelism

It's what authoritarian populists do when they get control of governments. They "hack" the economy with short-term stimulus and giveaways to keep the rubes content and happy while they dismantle civil society and the rule of law and entrench themselves.

Economic stagnation and decline usually follow within a couple year, but if they've entrenched themselves well enough, they don't have to care about public opinion very much and can shift to repression.

I thank you for highlighting that the intent isn’t actually the problem. I do feel the opposite to you but I’m happy you can see the practice itself is not acceptable / is a bad practice.

So far, there's no evidence they're delivering either transparency or auditing in any sense that anybody is familiar with.

In fact, their operations -- in as little as they've been made public -- have been pretty opaque and sweeping (i.e. not detailed, as in transparency), and what little we have seen of their analysis techniques seem to be shallow and unconventional (i.e. not formal and measured, as in auditing).

I'd warn you not just take what public figures say at face value. Transparency and auditing are indeed virtues to strive for in governance (and we have many running systems for those already), and maybe they'll someday reveal that they're actually contributing to those virtues themselves. To date, they have not done so.

I'm all for cutting government waste, I think there is probably quite a lot. Here is why I do not like Doge:

Doge is using a sledgehammer when they need to be using a scalpel. There's already been so much chaos with things like federal disbursements being frozen then unfrozen, firing and rehiring employees, moves being blocked by courts due to being unlawful, etc. You can't "move fast and break things" with a trillion dollar bureaucracy, people's lives are at stake and something might break catastrophically.

I also don't trust Musk with so much power because (1) he's an ideologue and (2) there are numerous conflicts of interest. I am skeptical he would be held accountable for any potential wrongdoing in this political environment.

I don’t believe they actually think that transparency and auditing are bad. I think that many people are either excited for possible benefit or horrified by what they are watching and have understandably been unable to detach themselves enough from what is happening to recall their own expertise to guide them.

We all should know the way this is being done is wrong and it will either have to be removed or redone, which is equivalently costly and might as well be the same thing at the end of the day.

I would expect the same practices from all of you in your own day to day work. We expect it from each other.

The lack of transparency is enough for anyone here to worry. It bucks every best practice and is a red flag in itself. We do not accept this in our work - it is what we all value and that has to be the north star.

It’s an issue of who watches the watchers. If their intent is transparency and auditing, why are they not reflecting that intent?

This is why I do suspect their intent. They are not walking the talk.

Have you ever participated in an audit? You literally have no idea what the words you quack mean.

How can they be described as transparent when they fired people who administer FOIA requests?

There is nothing transparent about DOGE. They are also not doing an audit. Can you share why are you opening offtopic content?

I don't believe you believe this is about transparency and auditing. You're sealioning.

Where are the forensic accountants? Who uses CompSci-track college kids to audit billion-dollar orgs?

I don’t think you know what an auditor is

You mean misunderstanding the data, coming to the wrong conclusions, etc? Data science always has an issue with bullshit KPIs, shallow depth of statistics, and mostly mangling stuff keeping the manager happy. Still it's much better than not having any data analysis.

Whether it benefits from being in a single datalake idk. We really don't know how the operations are being done, we're mostly just reacting to news reports and outside guessing.

I'm assuming it will be basically how Palantir works in government health care and intelligence agencies where they aggregate multiple data sources from a bunch of old and new databases and have complex analytical tools on top.

This time you're not dealing with a data scientist, you're dealing with someone who willingly spews lies, those situations aren't comparable

Furthermore, another comment went in depth about how boosting the irs and following other agencies guidelines would have had a positive return, but none of this happened. On the contrary, we're seeing agencies such as the irs being infiltrated by this thing that resembles a metastasis

In the abundance of precaution, DOGE should indeed be quarantined and all its work reviewed. CAT should be operating alongside DOGE to review everything.

Irrelevant. Even if they did nothing, the amount of exposure to the foreign intelligence services will devastate whatever we don’t footgun for a generation.

They should absolutely be regulated as to not expose data to foreign intel.

Regulated?? The entire point of DOGE is to be unregulated. They are ignoring existing regulations (read: laws), and specifically targeting regulatory and oversight bodies for destruction. Wake up!

Different contexts. Regulated in my comment meaning observed, reviewed, audited in kind. They should not be operating on any site and in any system without someone watching over their shoulder, figuratively and literally too.

Whereas the regulation in your context pertains to regulations that are codified as laws or rules to follow.

Yeah, if only we had independent regulators in our government who could oversee and regulate it in order to prevent and reduce corruption. Oh wait, Trump fired them all like 3 weeks ago. On purpose. Because they are not operating in good faith, my dude.

Like many Elon fans, you quack “audit” and don’t know what the word means.

Audits measure compliance to an process or objective. They require that you have written down the process or objective, and retain sufficient information to measure whether you achieved it or not.

In this case, the DOGE boys do whatever Elon says. What is said isn’t recorded or written. People who attempt to do their duty who are seen as obstructive of the whim of the DOGE “agent” are fired.

If any of the income tax data they are touching at IRS is out in one of those AI tools that have been referenced, each disclosure is a federal felony punishable by up to 5 years in prison.

But remember, Elon doesn’t follow the rule of law, and has no doubt engineered things in such a way that his little minions are accountable.

> I don't think they have ill intent

Perhaps you could read their statements? DOGE communications are filled with ill intent, and their publicly stated goal, and the goal for which their supports seem to support them, is the destruction of the bureaucracy. That's ill intent.

That's before we look at their actions.

Most of government agencies are errors themselves

[delayed]

> Even if DOGE is operating without any ill intent, and I don't think they have ill intent

Eh, they are going in like a bunch of bloodhounds smelling blood.

Musk killed USAID because he had a personal axe to grind.

He is being criminally reckless

I think they have nothing but ill intent. Everything they've said and done so far just screams it.

Elon wants to build the X everything app and nuked the CFPB to do it and now has access to the fed system… I think he’s just biding his time. Aaaaand now that he has every American’s info he can dox anyone on Twitter. Makes you think twice about telling Elonia to go fuck himself on X … which is why I do it on Mastodon and BlueSky ;-)

Yes, exactly this. The chilling effect caused by this is real and terrifying.

I have definitely contradicted Elon Musk on my X profile (@cyrsbel) quite a lot. I have never once lost my blue checkmark, though, so I believe he is well-intentioned and a good person who is trying to do the right thing. (I am also subscribed to him and having that sub and the blue checkmark means he has payment details already so I'm not worried about doxxing via CFPB data.) However, you raise a legitimate security risk and concern. It is not feasible to trust a single person with this much power and access. Furthermore, regardless of how much I or anyone else love Elon Musk...he has said things that didn't happen multiple times and too much is riding on his claims about what can or will happen.

So yeah, I don't trust him. Ever since he reneged on interns, I noticed that...he has a tendency to think about things as if they're entirely meat and to worship the false god Scarcity. He's been gargling Ron Paul's gold coins so much that he completely fails to comprehend basic nation state financing and why deficits are manageable and our debt is also manageable given our $160T+ net worth and climbing...

Are you talking about the man who does Nazi salutes from the bottom of his heart? A good person?

The complication here is that the ADL and Netanyahu and others at that level all said they do not believe it was a Nazi salute. I am relying on what they said.

https://x.com/netanyahu/status/1882392668497756279?lang=en

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5097676-elon-mus...

They're siding with the Republicans because they don't want to be seen agreeing with the folks who hate what the Israeli government has been doing in Gaza; Netanyahu especially so. So the strongly pro-israel sources are too biased.

Bibi wants to curry favor with Trump. Of course he’s going to say it wasn’t a Nazi salute.

The ADL doesn’t want to get sued out of existence so… of course they going to say it wasn’t a Nazi salute.

This is the same chilling effect that Trump suing ABC and ABC settling so yeah nobody feels comfortable enough to speak truth to power because nobody has the money or the army to back it up

But those of us with ears to hear and eyes to see know what we saw. He might not want to exterminate Jews but he knows what MAGA likes and he like they loves the power a fascist dictator like Hitler wielded

But you did see the videos? You still trust a right wing politician, who stands to profit immensely from Trump and Musk in power, more than your own eyes? That's wild

Netanyahu a fascist war criminal and ADL a back pocketed political party paid by elite right-wing evangelists.

Of course they'll claim not.

Who do you trust, the Party, or your lying eyes?

If I had to make a determination about it, I'd trust my eyes and quarantine DOGE's access until its accesses and changes can be audited by CAT. That is because the consequences of being wrong on this are too high, and there is plenty of time to be cautious about things and to ensure that everything is good. Zero legitimate reason has been provided for the level of rushing observed.

I would agree! Let us both continue to trust our eyes.

It was a nazi salute.

So you trust a war criminal and Israels propaganda arm more than your eyes?

Seriously??

you are delusional if you believe he is a good person, seek help

> I believe he is well-intentioned and a good person

You should read more about the things he says, does, and the way he treats people, especially from those who are close to him. The picture it paints is something I'd consider "cruel, bordering on inhuman" (and thats before the nazi salute.)

Alternatively, I have a lucrative investment opportunity I'd love to get you in on.

There is no reason to think they don't have ill intent.

Your default assumption should be ill intent when it comes to information security, my friend.

In this case, DOGE should be quarantined from making further changes until CAT can operate alongside DOGE for auditing purposes. Every change and access should be reviewed.

Yes. But it's not. That's the issue. They have unlocked access to systems to which they can control how they desire, unmonitored.

If this was the case at any point, or is still the case, DOGE should definitely be quarantined until CAT audits DOGE's accesses and changes. There should be two teams operating alongside each other on this. Not just DOGE. I do believe so far they were claimed to have received read-only access...but other reports were that they even had some admin access. Do we know for sure what access they had unmonitored?

My nature is to give the benefit of the doubt, but after seeing that they are rushing and it manifests in laying off even teams of highly skilled and critical nuclear safety staff...that means someone there doesn't know what they're doing or the chaos could be the point as well. I would hope it's not to that extent, but this is why I maintain that CAT should be auditing DOGE's changes.

I generally try to assume that people are well intentioned. But when they start doing Nazi salutes...

I was shocked by the appearance of that aspect too but then a day or two later, the ADL and Netanyahu supported him on that.

https://x.com/netanyahu/status/1882392668497756279

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5097676-elon-mus...

Definitely good to keep a watch, though.

So, the guy who held off a genocide to get trump elected and the people who are in direct cahoots say its ok, big "All my black friends I can say the N word so its ok" energy there.

And then he went to speak at an AFD rally so I guess we are back at the Nazi interpretation

If you believe right-wing-specific sources about Musk's intentions, then I've got a bridge to sell you.

Who do you trust, the Party, or your lying eyes?

And prior to this he was forced to do a 'nazi death camp PR tour' because he agreed with the nazi agenda on X. But sure, it's unfortunately old boy just keeps accidentally being a nazi. Last is he now tweets 14 flags.

And many, many reasons to think that in fact they do. See my favorites for flagged stories about the DOGE staff.

Even their stated reason - to fund trillions in tax cuts for the .1% [0] - is heinous. Inequality is already breaking the economy. 4.5 trillion dollars ($13k for each and every American) being transferred to the yacht class will inflict generational harm.

0 - https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2025-01-10/trump-tax...

Man it's pretty crazy seeing all those reasonable looking stories flagged and made dead.

Also what's with the blue non-link links? Never seen that before on HN.

> it's pretty crazy seeing all those reasonable looking stories flagged and made dead.

It really is. There have always been 'third rail' topics that get rapidly flagged despite community interest, but I've never seen so many.

> what's with the blue non-link links? Never seen that before on HN.

No idea; all the links seem to work for me anyway.

What's interesting to me is how what constitutes a 'third rail' topic changes over time.

A quick search will show that it used to be fine to talk about Curtis Yarvin on here a decade ago but now that he's more relevant than ever it's suddenly taboo?

Did Curtis Yarvin and the ideas he espouses suddenly become less interesting or are a group of people working together to prevent critical discussion of his ideas?

The Mump playbook relies on wild exaggeration.

In this case Musk reckons he can save $2tn which some (better informed) analysts are saying is bollocks.

In fact, it's cover to let him destroy/neuter agencies they don't like and get endless material to pressurise any opponents.

One positive though: if there is any alien tech, Musky will find it. You can bet that's high on his list, as improbable as it may be.

> In this case Musk reckons he can save $2tn which some (better informed) analysts are saying is bollocks.

A lot of this depends on how you measure. For example, there are a lot of social assistance programs that provide in-kind benefits (e.g. you get subsidized housing) and those programs both require a bureaucracy to administer them and are less efficient than cash transfer payments, so they could be converted into refundable tax credits. Then the program costs somewhat less (you eliminate the administrative bureaucracy) and is more efficient and with better outcomes, but you can count the entire cost of the program as a reduction because it's now a tax credit (i.e. a tax cut) instead of a government budget item.

Do that with the entire social assistance system and you could get a sizable budget reduction before you even get into overpriced government contracts etc.

Even the theory that the executive can just not spend money it finds wasteful doesn't extend to the executive being able to unilaterally reconfigure an in-kind assistance program into a refundable tax credit. Admittedly, an even bigger grab of dictatorial power is not out of character for this administration, though.

Oh, they couldn't reconfigure those programs by executive order. But they could reasonably be doing this to find ways to reduce the budget and then pass new legislation through Congress.

>One positive though: if there is any alien tech, Musky will find it. You can bet that's high on his list, as improbable as it may be.

That tech has been handed over to the private sector as a precaution and also as a method of keeping the politicians' hands off it. Gives them cover to honestly say "I know nothing, I was briefed on nothing, we have nothing". Plausible deniability.

Elon Musk is also quite possibly the last person I'd ever want to touch world-changing technology. let alone be the sole arbiter of who gets to get near it.

> to fund trillions in tax cuts for the .1%

That isn't even what your link is saying. To begin with, it's citing a Treasury Department document requested by the Biden administration to do an analysis comparing the proposed tax cuts with a contrived alternative.

If you do generic across-the-board tax cuts, not targeting any particular income group, everyone's taxes are reduced in proportion to how much they were paying to begin with. Obviously then the people who make more money and pay more taxes have them reduced by the given percentage and that is a larger absolute number.

The same thing happens even if you target only the brackets for people who make less money. Suppose you lower the rates by 2% for every bracket below $400,000. That's not even enough to be in the 1% (for which you'd need to make ~$800,000), much less the 0.1%, but what happens in that case? Well, everyone's taxes go down by 2% of their income up to $400,000. If you make $40,000, they go down by $800. If you make $400,000, they go down by $8000. If you make $4,000,000, they also go down by $8000, from your first $400,000 in income. The absolute amount of the reduction is still highest for people who make more money, simply because it's a percentage of higher number.

The analysis the Biden administration requested was to do the tax cuts for people making less than $400,000 and then raise the tax rates on people above $400,000 to make sure they didn't get any net reduction, and their contrived example would have people making $400,000 paying a higher tax rate than people making $500,000+. Basically the purpose of the analysis was to generate a large number to put in a headline rather than compare it to a real proposal to lower taxes in general. This is also why they announced the cumulative total over a decade rather than listing the annual number as you would when comparing it against an ordinary government budget. Because "~3.5% of the budget" sure sounds a lot less than "trillions of dollars".

> that isn't even what your link is saying.

You can find any number of links talking about how unequal the tax cuts are. No one in the bottom 60% is going to be better off. The .1% are benefiting the most. That's an insane thing to do in an economy that's already breaking records for inequality.

> If you do generic across-the-board tax cuts

That's not what these are. The reaction of every billionaire to Trump's admin ought to tell you that on it's own.

> Because "~3.5% of the budget" sure sounds a lot less than "trillions of dollars".

Trillions of dollars are trillions of dollars.

A million seconds = ~11.5 days A billion seconds = ~31.7 years A trillion seconds - 31,710 years.

We're not talking about play money, or monopoly money. Musk bought the election for a fraction of a billion dollars, ffs.

And again, America is already on record inequality, about the same or more as right before the French Revolution.

Money IS a zero sum game, and when too much of it is going to the 0.1% it inflicts massive harm to millions of people. If you want to learn more about this, and what's about to happen to the US economy, you can listen to one of the world's best traders talk about it here [0].

0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCnImxVWbvc

> You can find any number of links talking about how unequal the tax cuts are.

All of those links are comparing dollars rather than percentages. It's obvious that a given percentage of $400,000 is more than the same percentage of $40,000.

> That's an insane thing to do in an economy that's already breaking records for inequality.

The cause of inequality isn't taxes, it's market consolidation. Rich people are rich because they own a large fraction of a megacorp. Under the existing system, higher corporate taxes, if anything, increase market consolidation because massive international corporations can use cross-border avoidance mechanisms whereas smaller purely domestic corporations can't, so they're effectively a tax on businesses too small to get out of them.

> That's not what these are.

It's essentially what they are, and the rate reduction in the lower brackets was slightly more. The highest bracket was lowered by 2.6% whereas the brackets from ~$12k to ~$100k were each lowered by 3%. And as a percentage of taxes paid, 39.6% was only 7% more than 37% at the top, whereas for the working poor 15% had been 25% more than the current 12%.

> Trillions of dollars are trillions of dollars.

You can turn any annual amount into trillions of dollars by multiplying it by an arbitrary number of years. And the only reason it can get so big so fast is that the US government spends a stupefying amount of money, so if you reduce it by even a small percentage it's a big number.

> Money IS a zero sum game

This is definitely false and is one of the major fallacies in the taxes vs. inequality problem.

In general people don't actually store wealth as money. Rich people store it as stocks and things. So if you tax them, you're not causing them to have less cash, or even causing them to sell their car or mansion. You're causing them to sell stocks.

If the person you transfer the money to is doing anything with it other than buying the same exact stocks, you're reconfiguring the economy, which is very much not zero sum and could be negative or positive sum depending on who gets it and what they do with it.

But Wall St. and Main St. are somewhat isolated pools of money. Making a transfer from one to the other has effects not entirely unlike printing new money and handing it out, because it gets spent very differently than it would have otherwise. And this is the nasty part: The sources of inequality are money sinks.

If you're paying high rents because there is a housing shortage as a result of captured zoning boards inhibiting new construction, and all the tenants suddenly have more money, the rent is going up. That's one of the reasons you can't solve it with taxes. You have to address the actual causes of inequality -- market consolidation and regulatory capture. Otherwise the incumbents just take the money right back out of your pocket.

If they did have ill intent, towards what is that ill intent targeted, and why should I care? These aren't organizations or missions I much care about. This isn't my government, except by an accident of geography. I have little say in how it's managed or what it does, but I have a high burden for it. It's unclear that this government protects me in any substantial way (or even in indirect, insubstantial ways). Meaningful reform is impossible at the sociological level, it requires too much buy-in too slowly, and that will always be hijacked by those with influence or watered down to meaninglessness.

Otherwise said, you want to destroy government, because you never cared about learning what various agencies do. And you want reform it, but without knowing what it does and without knowing what you want to improve other then "let it go away".

If on DOGE, that is ill intent.

> I don't think they have ill intent

...

Their intentions are irrelevant. They are actively attacking the United States. They are enemy combatants and should be treated as such.

Well when you have a white supremacist on the dodge team (confirmed by his comments on social media) working in this team, and you know white supremacists are very hateful... then I would assume there's obviously risk.

The intent is completely ill. DOGE is RAGE. Move fast and break everything before the courts can step in.

The intent is to dismantle the federal government.

"and I don't think they have ill intent"

Elon Musk absolutely has ill intent or else DOGE wouldn't have all this access that they absolutely DO NOT NEED!