Comment by stuaxo
2 days ago
They will have had to impose this too.
The systems were built as separate systems to avoid (in a systems designers most fevered nightmares) a scenario like this.
2 days ago
They will have had to impose this too.
The systems were built as separate systems to avoid (in a systems designers most fevered nightmares) a scenario like this.
The executive branch was intended to be separate from the judicial and the legislative branch, not separate from itself.
And this is why the executive branch was never meant to have as much power as it has today.
We've spent the better part of 80 years moving power from legislative to execute and granting executive a whole host of new powers.
We made this bed, now it sure seems like Trump is making us sleep in it.
I remember reading Glenn Greenwald in the 2000s when he was railing against the expansion of executive power under GWB.
> But the same individuals peddling this theory are simultaneously objecting quite vigorously to the notion that they are bestowing George Bush with the powers of a King. Bill Kristol and Gary Stevenson, for instance, called such claims "foolish and irresponsible" in the very same Washington Post Op-Ed where they argued that Bush need not "follow the strictures of" (i.e., obey) the law, and the President himself angrily denied that he is laying claim to a "dictatorial position" in the very same Press Conference where he proudly insisted on the right to eavesdrop on Americans without a warrant even though FISA makes it a crime to do so.
https://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2005/12/do-bush-defender...
And he was equally critical of Obama admin not only keeping those powers but further expanding them.
Americans stopped caring around the Patriot Act and executive power has only grown under every administration since
2 replies →
Why do people seem drawn to having a king? What is it in human nature that makes us want a strong man in charge with absolute power?
12 replies →
[flagged]
In clearance there is the concept of classification by compilation, which means that the clearance required for a piece of information can be higher than the one required by any single component that makes up that information. Being able to combine data across agencies makes it much more dangerous than keeping it separate and compartmentalized. Parallelism is a gigantic risk from a security perspective and ripe for abuse, especially given that DOGE itself has flaunted court orders trying to hold it accountable.
The organisations were designed to be separate, and the systems design follows that.
Not really, agencies are merged and split and have their remit changed all the time.
If there were a way to efficiently manage 2.5 million staff in a single department, then we'd likely do that, but it's more efficient to specialise, so we do that instead.
Firewalling data between departments is rarely a design consideration, except in obvious cases (military), and it hardly matters in this scenario anyway, because it's not like Musk is walking into all 400 agencies with a laptop. DOGE is hiring an army of advisors and dividing them up between agencies.
2 replies →
So cooking the books and defrauding the citizens of the United States by exaggerating your progress by x1000 is crucial, you mean.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/upshot/doge-contracts-mus...
DOGE Claimed It Saved $8 Billion in One Contract. It Was Actually $8 Million.
The biggest single line item on the website of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team included a big error.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/musk-s-doge-accuse...
Musk's DOGE Accused of 'Cooking the Books' After $8 Billion Savings Is Immediately Debunked
Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) falsely claimed an $8 billion cost savings from a canceled government contract, which was later revealed to be worth only $8 million.
https://x.com/electricfutures/status/1891898336208105676
Momentum Chaser @electricfutures
After several delays, @DOGE has finally posted its purported savings. Why did it take so long to create a simple webpage with a 1000-row table? Who knows! Let's dig in.
Headline number: $55B saved. They list the savings per nixed contract. This should be easy to verify then. [...]
I can't believe people believe that it's actually an "audit". Both Trump. and Elon are famous liars. The reality is they think they found a loophole to destroy the government without having to pass any laws by fiting as many people as they can and stopping payments randomly. It's all illegal and evil.
Have you read Article II?
1 reply →
> It's just the default nature of systems that were created by different agencies, under different projects with different teams.
... Yes, because those teams by default do not simply get to share access, because of various very well understood security and privacy issues by doing so.
> Trump only granted DOGE a 12 month window to eliminate waste, and there's 400 federal agencies, so parallelism is crucial.
That's what he says, at least. Also, if their current blatant lying[0] about the """waste""" continues then I don't really see a point. It seems clear Musk and the Breakfast Club boys who are unilaterally changing government finances have no idea how a government contract works (or it's willful ignorance).
[0] https://x.com/electricfutures/status/1891898336208105676
None of what you are saying is true.