"7. March 3rd - I received a call during which an ACIO stated instructions were given that we were not to adhere to SOP with the doge account creation in regards to creating records. He specifically was told that there were to be no logs or records made of the accounts created for DOGE employees."
Which part of doing an audit, or some other DOGE employee's job, requires logs or records not to be made of their accounts?
Another quote:
"They were to be given what are referred to as “tenant owner” level accounts, with essentially unrestricted permission to read, copy, and alter data. Note, these permissions are above even my CIO’s access level to our systems. Well above what level of access is required to pull metrics, efficiency reports, and any other details that would be needed to assess utilization or usage of systems in our agency. We have built in roles that auditors can use and have used extensively in the past but would not give the ability to make changes or access subsystems without approval. The suggestion that they use these accounts instead was not open to discussion."
Audits don't require being able to alter data.
Also, some of the data is mentioned as being sensitive. Although granting access to the data of another agency may make sense, I have trouble believing that direct access to data such as sensitive personal information of third parties would routinely be given to people from outside of the organization. Even within the organization the group of people given access to sensitive data should be as limited as possible.
> We have built in roles that auditors can use
… and we make sure doesn’t reveal our wrongdoing.
— that’s what DOGE is tasked with uncovering. The “deep state”, the lies, hidden costs, etc…
Now you may think this is counterproductive. You may think this is political posturing. You may think it’s borderline conspiracy theory nonsense.
We agree!
Trump, Musk and DOGE don’t agree with us and don’t trust the staff that they believe are providing carefully constrained access and curated data dumps with strategic omissions.
THIS is why they’re side-stepping the official processes and using the skeleton key.
Again, please, focus on disambiguating the politics from the technical steps being taken.
If the task is: “Get all the data, especially the data they’re trying to hide from us” then asking for Tenant Admin is the right technical choice.
I can pick apart every other statement but I don’t have the time. But as a quick note: it’s common for the RBAC permissions to be the inverse of the organisational permission. As a random subcontractor I often get granted Domain Admin or the equivalent and the CIO, CTO, and CISO staff are treated the same on the network as some secretary might. They’re meeting jockeys, not super admins! The fact that the staff member raised this “issue” automatically implies that they know nothing and that their opinions and statements are suspect.
PS: Most systems don’t have a built-in Tenant Reader role, they only have Tenant Admin. DOGE staffers would have been instructed not to trust any custom role, so… Tenant Admin it is.
I personally feel that they’re being reckless and sloppy, uncovering “waste” that is often simply an artefact of their hubris. In doing so, they’re risking exposing the internal systems of the government to outside attack.
This is the rough equivalent of the guards in a prison turning over everything in a cell looking for contraband.
It’s not nice. It’s rarely productive. It is also a tool of intimidation. That’s part of the point. The prisoner is not supposed to like it. They’re not invited politely to present what they want others to see. They’re humiliated and powerless. That’s what the MAGA and DOGE want.
2. DOGE is committing treason.
3. DOGE is humiliating those who were formerly in control.
A little of column A, B, and C in my opinion. At this point it doesn't matter what's true. I think all parties are involved to commit terrible acts, whether they're directly assets of a foreign power or just have something to gain. Inept, traitorous, opportunistic, inhumane, careless.. the whole party is here.
I hope when all is said and done, a true accounting is performed and those who committed the damage are held responsible. It won't matter what their associations or intent was. Manslaughter is manslaughter.
Ok, arguing with DOGE on their own terms… I confess I’m not knowledgeable with these systems, but how do you even trust it when it tells you you’re the “Tenant Admin”? Why would the deep state be unable to fabricate such a role that looks like the real one but is still lying to you? I did enough research to assume this is a Microsoft thing, so you might be viewing a Microsoft domain signed by a Microsoft SSL cert, and trust that Microsoft is telling you you’re really the highest admin. But… we’re talking a vast conspiracy with billions on the line… why would a true-believer DOGE crusader not believe there are also deep state agents in Microsoft, the certificate authorities, and ISPs?
Asking for Tenant Admin or whatever magic term seems like a start to get “the truth”, but completely inadequate to actually take down “the deep state.”
Of course, that’s the beauty of it. A super-powerful, secret enemy can never be vanquished, so they’re always a great excuse to take the next step to demolish the real government and trample the rights of the people.
The NSA might be able to do this, but even they’d be finding it a challenge if forced to do so on short notice with someone looking over their shoulder.
In fact, should the auditor find there is a way for them to access sensitive data without it being logged, they will flag it immediately. That would be the case even under simple financial regulation.
There is absolutely the risk that the people you audit will lie to you or present you with false data. In practice that's not common, because they stand to at the very least lose their jobs. It could also be illegal. Not worth it.
All of the public complaining is by staff that don’t understand their new position in the pecking order.
There is a King in charge and he cares not for the wailing of the petty nobles.
No its not. These prison searches in fact do tend to find knives and what not and do in fact have some role in managing prison violence.
This is not about anything like that at all.
It’s not about literal shivs.
Speaking of finding things under the mattress, they did find corruption and waste, which they feel justifies their approach.
In my opinion the tiny amount of “waste” they uncovered is arguably not worth the damage and risk done, but that’s my opinion, not theirs.
Again: the damage and humiliation is part of their agenda. They feel that departments are “disloyal” to the King… err… President and hence ill treatment is not only justified but warranted.
As far as I know, they did not found much. Every time their claims were checked, it was hot air. We do not have to lie on their behalf to appear reasonable.
Why would drone photos even be necessary when you’ve already demonstrated that you know where they live?
What possible purpose does such a threat serve?
- Who decided to threaten the whistleblower and why?
- Who approved such an idiotic idea?
- Who determined his home address?
- Who flew the drone, timed to capture photos of the whistleblower while on his way to/from his home?
- Who took the drone photography, printed out the images, and wrote a threatening note?
- Who then took all that and physically posted it on his door?
That’s a very involved process, with substantial risk, with no realistic upside. None of the incentives are aligned with the behavior. It simply doesn’t make sense.
Applying Occam’s razor, it seems a lot more likely to be fabricated — that’s a scenario in which incentives actually align with the behavior.
In practice, that shouldn’t make a difference to the investigation; given the physical evidence, they should investigate in great detail the origin of the threat — regardless of whether it’s a hoax or real.
That's not ethically excusable, but it's worlds apart from the kind of very real-world felonies involved in this kind of intimidation.
This kind of intimidation would be an incredible and extremely stupid escalation that carries the potential for decades in federal prison, and for what? DOGE has the ruling party and the full force of the executive branch backing their actions. They have no need whatsoever to engage in behavior so ridiculous and counterproductive.
To be clear, this would have required stalking the whistleblower at and around his home, in person. It would have required creating significant physical evidence that could trivially lead back to the perpetrator. There will be cell phone location records, security camera footage, printer microdots, camera lens/sensor fingerprints.
I hope that the threatening note and photos have been turned over to the police, where they can be analyzed for fingerprints, printer microdots, et al, and the police can canvas the neighborhood for security camera footage.
As a tactical move, this kind of threat makes zero sense for anyone in the government to carry out if they are even a semi-rational actor.
They refer to "lawfare", where you do whatever you feel necessary, and only engage in legal systems where absolutely required, and only to make whatever inciting behaviour legal in retrospect.
DOGE employees aren't simply doing their job. They are actively subverting the government to fatally wound it.
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-...
Besides, no one needs unmonitored write access for audit. Even less DOGE who does no audit and don't have knowledge how to do audit. Audits are supposed to he traceable.
Also, in some cloud systems full read access can give you direct or indirect access to service keys / API keys which then are write equivalent permissions anyway.
I find the argument the most absurd in relation to DOGE. There is no reason to give them more trust then to anyone else in goverment ... and multiple reasons to trust them less. Starting from personal histories of some of them and how they were selected.
As such, this "I dont trust" is just reflection of their incompetence, arrogance and a lazy excuse.
Clearly the (system) auditing infrastructure wasn't robust enough to still provide a lot of monitoring even in the service is being managed by someone else...
Also a several hundred line teardown of a 300line file is exactly what is wrong with some coders. Not having a CI/CL for every single short tool written once to do a job is called being productive...
Prove it. I want you to give examples of where you did something like this.
This appears to be DOGE employees simply doing their job.
You may not agree with what they’re doing in a political sense, but if you were tasked with the same problem you’d come up with a nearly identical solution.
For example: “tenant admin” is probably the special role that can bypass access control (not audits!) and see and read all data.
This sounds scary but I regularly request this right from large government departments and I get it granted to me.
Its use is justified when normal access requests would be too complex / fiddly and error prone. Generally, in a large environment, there is no other way to guarantee 100% coverage because as an outsider you don’t even know what permissions to ask for if you can’t see anything due to a lack of permissions!
Seriously: sit down for a second and think about how you would go about getting access to make a full copy of an organisation’s data for an audit if you fully expect both passive resistance and even active efforts to hide the very things you’re looking for.