I don't think you can extrapolate from the clusterfuck that's going on now to get any meaningful picture of what "the US Govt." has cared about at any time in the past. This is a completely unprecedented situation that nobody voted or asked for. (Not even the ones who voted for Trump, misguided as I may think they are, voted for this, because AFAIK there was no announcement before the election that Musk would be given this kind of power.)

I see Americans defending Trumps and Musk. Or acting as if everyone just overreacted. So I would say, quite a lot of Americans are either fine with this or actively want it.

There are 300M people here and Trump won by ~200K. You can safely say that some are fine with this administrations behavior, but many are not and starting to actively protest and resist. Both are true simultaneously.

He still got almost 48% of the overall vote, however.

He may not have won the popular vote by much, but he certainly has a dedicated base of staunch supporters.

By their unceasing jeering, bright hats, and constant online presence I'd be surprised if there's anyone hasn't noticed them by this point.

Somehow it's worse than in 2016

The masses are asses.

I heard a meaningful quiet after the H1B fight. The kind of guys who said “kick em out! Imma get me one of them high-pay tech jobs” Those guys had to watch Trump, revealed to employ a lot of H1-class workers, claim we need more.

The very fact that it's even possible to have this kind of thing happening unfettered, unconstrained, and unaccountable is evidence in and of itself that the US Govt. doesn't take its national security & secrets seriously though, isn't it?

In what sense?

In that taking those things seriously would have included:

* More creative threat-modeling.

* More effective prevention measures.

* More vigorous mitigation & stonewalling attempts.

* More rapid remediation & rejection of the intrusion.

Especially for a threat vector that was telegraphed so openly so far in advance. The circumstances might be unprecedented, but they're not at all surprising.

What sort of threat modeling would have prevented this?

There are plenty of mitigation and stonewalling going on, but mostly through the courts.

Executives must have some power, or else the process itself becomes the executive and there's no ability to respond to anything.

If there's anybody to blame, we must place the blame on the executive wielding the power, and those who have enabled this to happen by putting that particular executive in power by subverting the traditional vetting process. If a political party no longer performs basic vetting of that level then the entire party should probably be eliminated.

It was well known that this was exactly what Musk would do, by anyone paying the slightest shred of attention to what was going on.

He said it was what he was going to do, he was up on the stage, I heard many many people salivating for DOGE cuts like this before the election, and even today.

> It was well known that this was exactly what Musk would do, by anyone paying the slightest shred of attention to what was going on.

I agree, and frankly anyone feeling "surprised" right now probably still thinks strongly worded emails and letters are enough to solve the problems they're just now seeing. Those things rely on a stable democracy where constituents and what happens to them matter at all.

> anyone feeling "surprised" right now probably still thinks strongly worded emails and letters are enough

No, it’s completely different than that. Some of them I’ve talked to, they’re confused about this Musk Internet guy. And they’re confused why their news isn’t giving them the predictive edge those aware of Project 2025 seem to have in conversation. “I guess we’ll see…” “I guess we’ll have to have hope…” The same people willing to accept fabulist conspiracy theories for non-white-male candidates now openly rely on faith-based appeals about the character of the richest man in the world.

I don't think we disagree. I'm just saying they're so far behind that they're not useful; the republic is already gone. What we're talking in is the shell of it.

Musk buying Twitter and then spending millions to buy votes in PA weeks before the election seemed pretty obvious.

People like him don't spend without an expectation of something in return.

The more surprising thing is the amount of people who think successful capitalist = successful political leader, when the incentives and constituencies are drastically different.

On the contrary this is exactly what they said they'd do if elected. This is exactly what was voted for. Don't pretend like Americans didn't have agency in the destruction of their own country.

This is a good point. Aside from the objectively unavoidable and nigh-uncountable deluge of articles, opeds, social media posts, video news segments and direct statements from the candidate and his representatives describing exactly what they intended to do and a 927 page document detailing the plan that was released two and a half years before the election, what warning did anybody have?

The polls are starting to agree with you. Trump’s actions are extremely unpopular, and support from his base is eroding:

> In the CNN poll, Musk having a prominent role in the administration is viewed as a “bad thing” (54-28) by a nearly 2-to-1 ratio. The Post-Ipsos poll showed Americans disapprove by a similarly wide margin (52-26) of Musk “shutting down federal government programs that he decides are unnecessary.”

> And Americans said 63 to 34 that they are concerned about Musk’s team getting access to their data, which is the subject of high-profile legal fights.

> Even 37 percent of Republican-leaning voters said they are at least “somewhat” concerned about Musk getting their data.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/20/trump-pol...

Thank you. This’ll be cake compared to the inevitable bailout of DOGE.

You can't post like this here. Since this account has been doing it repeatedly, I've banned the account.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I believe the audit stuff is overblown [1], there are strict requirements for passing and it doesn’t mean the money is literally disappearing into a black hole. I don’t have every Chipotle receipt saved in the past year but that doesn’t mean my spending is mysterious. I assume that’s why being audited by the IRS is considered a nightmare, it’s nontrivial.

It seems the Pentagon audit process only started in 2018, and Congress gave a deadline of 2028 to pass a fully clean audit, which they have made progress on:

> Of the 28 military agencies, DoD leaders think 11 are expected to receive clean audit opinions, one more than the previous fiscal year.

[1] https://thenationaldesk.com/news/fact-check-team/pentagon-fa...

I'm very sure that there is a lot of spending that is used inefficiently. Any large organization does run into that problem. Resolving some issues, cutting red tape, making processes more efficient, all that is probably a good idea. However, "DOGE" and those cheering them on have not produced any evidence for the vast majority of the claims they made. Often they also just misrepresented facts (e.g., USAID supposedly funding media sites, condoms in Gaza and many other nonsense) or simply lied. I also don't see much promotion of actual nuanced views on the topic like the Hamilton Project's tracker of federal expenditures which you can find here: https://www.hamiltonproject.org/data/tracking-federal-expend...

At the moment, the US government seems to be mainly focused on causing headlines to make their base happy who want quick victories and have not shown a resilience to simplistic takes, and - of course - to make the opposition party and their supporters panic.

And what qualities of an audit would you trust from a department that acts like that? They’re not, for example, combining all prior audits into a sophisticated longitudinal audit research tool. They’ve prepared their conclusions to hold even if they misplace three orders of magnitude.

I have literally no idea how this relates to what I said. Did you mean to reply to someone else?

It’s that mentality of ‘flooding the zone’.

There are plenty of charts based on public budgets, you can pick your favorite. How shall we judge whether transparency is improved? What if all of this results in less transparency?

The only audits that have failed have to do with national defense budgets. athis is the one area of government that Republicans hate to cut.

Your question can be answered without giving away control and access to unauthorised and inexperienced auditors.

Governance, Risk, and Compliance has been missing. Too many decades of nepotism, insider trading, corruption ( starting with lobbying ), have led to the lack of transparency. The movie “The Big Short” has explained some of these issues.

Many many years ago I used to work at a drug store with two tills and we couldn't account for every penny.

What audits?

Pentagon audits, they've failed for 7 years in a row and they don't expect to be able to pass an audit until 2028 https://breakingdefense.com/2024/11/pentagon-fails-7th-audit...

Has Elon (I guess rather his "DOGE" department) so far even remotely touched anything military related?

Yes.

Yes.

Nuclear workers in the Department of Energy are militarized.

Poster is probably referring to the audits that the Pentagon keeps failing year after year: https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2023/11/16/pentagon-fai...

Don't mistake obliviousness for a conspiracy. The vast majority of the doge savings link straight to the Federal Procurement Data System that anyone can search or ingest from. You're of course free to disagree with the spending but if you weren't even aware you could look at these contracts then maybe you should ask if you're being shown the whole picture or if it's closer to a politically motivated hit job on our civil servants.

And one could peruse that under any administration. The challenge for an honest DOGE is that they must do better than 100% of past Federal efficiency policy, which is maybe a hundred incremental changes[0]. If they cause _any_ problems that those fixed, then they’re at best not up to the job and maybe even deserving cynicism.

[0](https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/omb/management/office-f...)

Well there was a Secretary of State email server that seemed secret enough to Bleachbit…

You do realize that whataboutisms don't actually prove your point? Implicitly you're saying that what Hillary did was wrong, but now that my guy is doing it, it's ok, since Hillary did it. You can't have it both ways. You either believe something is wrong, or it's not. To argue both sides usually means a bad faith attempt at pushing a narrative.

And people who made big deal about that while being silent now are quite massive hypocrites.

It is so clear in retrospect how fake the outrage was.

The outrage wasn’t only fake, it was literally manufactured by Russian bots.

I'm not sure I'm understanding the relationship to what I said there.

Is that example supposed to be an indication that the US Govt. does take its national security and secrets seriously?

The sheer number of flagged replies to this comment is telling.

Some political views are now prohibited on HN, it would appear.

EDIT: Case in point.