Comment by maCDzP
2 days ago
European here, giving my two cents on how this looks from the other side of the Atlantic. Heh
In my country there are laws stopping agencies doing a simple SQL join between two databases, even within the same government agency. There is a separate agency that handles the requests when agencies want to join information.
I am not an expert in the matter. But my gut is telling me that our experiences with east Germany and Stasi left a scar.
It can quickly turn into a real nightmare, and there for there are check and balances to make it slow. It’s deliberate inefficiency.
Do you know why in Portugal they have 4 different ID numbers?
It is like that to prevent the state from persecuting people on the base that it is hard for a branch of the government to figure out who is someone based on a number from a different branch.
Do you know why they want to prevent the government from persecuting people?
Because it has already happened, and the portuguese don't want it to happen again.
Dictatorship from 1926 to 1976, and yet a strangely obscure one, probably due to neutrality during world war two.
Same here in Germany, only recently we got the tax ID number as a global primary key to the objections of many privacy activists.
Ex-Yugoslavian countries have had a global ID forever - the JMBG or, in Croatia, OIB [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_Master_Citizen_Number
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> they are parallelising the work
That's an interesting rephrasing for "sidestepping all security to get access".
> The access is read only, and they are not linking personal data between agencies
Yup, that's exacly what someone who wants to change the beneficiaries of a few contracts and payments, as well as fire some of the people overseeing my companies would say.
No, the animosity is coming from the belligerent way DOGE is going about its work, and the lack of security clearance or any oversight of these people, some of whom are very inexperienced and some of whom have clear conflicts of interest, and the enormous power they are accumulating.
And where can one find technical and transparent details about what data DOGE is looking at, why, and what safeguards they're taking?
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Since you seem to know what you are talking about:
I am a bit confused by your stressing the access is read-only. Isn't that obviously given (apologies for the redundant words, but I really don't know how to convey my confusion). For what purpose they could ever be given a write access to the hundreds of federal databases they are supposed to analyze?
Also, if they don't have the manpower to go over the data one by one then they don't have the power to go over them in parallel. When you say "parallelising the work" what exactly does that mean? What is it specifically that they are "parallelising"? Is there an engineer/analyst looking at multiple screens simultaneously and arriving conclusions for multiple agencies at the same time?
All of these assertions are provably false.
The ends do not justify the means.
These means can easily lead to a nightmare. We've been through that a century ago. Look up Dehomag. Never Again.
> they are not linking personal data between agencies
> Trump has prohibited Musk from being involved in with the review in agencies where he was a material conflict
I'm not saying these are or aren't happening, but it seems like a lot of "good faith" assumptions here. If you assume Musk is an unethical actor, these seem mostly meaningless.
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DOGE is literally making up that people had bad work reviews to justify firing them. They are liars 100% down.
They are literally firing people first and then calling them back? How is that efficiency?
I cannot believe we are talking about these people seriously with all the BS "We saved $* Billion dollars to stop Mind Control News" on the DOGE "website".
Musk is not in a position to identify waste and fraud.
What does he know of the genesis and status of these payments? Congress directs spending and oversees the administration, not the other way around.
Why does he have to finish in an arbitrary time frame?
This is all justification after the fact for those who support Musk/Trump unconditionally.
It's all fun and games until your Medicare/Social Security/Tax Refund or other legitimate payment gets cancelled arbitrarily, illegally and unconstitutionally.
Trump has prohibited Musk from being involved in any reviews where he was a material conflict (FAA for example).
You keep saying things that are blatantly untrue, people give you massive evidence they aren't true, then you keep saying them. Why is that?
Elon Musk’s Companies Were Under Investigation by Five Inspectors General When the Trump Administration Fired Them and Made Musk the Investigator
https://wallstreetonparade.com/2025/02/elon-musks-companies-...
https://www.levernews.com/trump-purges-inspectors-general-in...
Agency sent a memo to all agency staff notifying them that “all election security activities” would be paused pending the results of an internal investigation. The memo also stated that the administration was cutting off all funds to the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center—a Department of Homeland Security–funded organization that helps state and local officials monitor, analyze, and respond to cyberattacks targeting the nation’s election hardware and software.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/02/trump-doge-layof...
FDA staff were reviewing Elon Musk’s brain implant company. DOGE just fired them.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/02/17/fda-...
https://gizmodo.com/doge-reportedly-cuts-fda-employees-inves...
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This sort of thing already exists in America for cases where Americans actually care about privacy: the gun tracing system is forced to be on paper.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/s-just-insanity-atf-now-needs-2...
Guns are constitutionally protected in a way that humans aren't.
While I agree in principle, that's not an entirely intellectually honest evaluation. The government is prohibited from creating an electronic registry of guns, not because of the guns themselves, but ultimately because of the judicial understanding of the Second Amendment confirming (not granting) an inherent right of citizens to possess them. The restriction is in service to the gun owners by protecting them from government overreach. The guns are merely a layer of abstraction on that.
That's putting it mildly. What it really looks like is a fast descent into madness.
It is to avoid totalitarianism.
Having a slow and archaic birocratic system doesn't stop governments going totalitarian on their citizens.
Case in point In Germany the Polizei will SWAT and arrest you if you post a meme on social media that angers someone's dignity. That's not a joke that actually happens.
This typical German "our government is not slow and inefficient, it's just protection against totalitarianism" is pure cope.
Edit: @helloplanets Source: https://youtu.be/-bMzFDpfDwc?si=eIUkEuDBx3iX_TEx
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Which law are referring to? I work in such an agency and I’ve never heard of such a thing
Dunno about Germany but in Belgium there is Crossroads Bank for Social Security which effectively controls the flow of information between various social security and public health organizations: https://www.ksz-bcss.fgov.be/
In its current form, it's a set of SOAP or REST APIs that your organization gets access to after completing paperwork about your needs.
It was established by a 1990 law [1].
There is also a similar legal and technical setup for information on companies [2] where most information is public, and the register of residents [3] which is even more guarded.
[1] https://www.ksz-bcss.fgov.be/fr/page/loi-du-15-janvier-1990-...
[2] https://economie.fgov.be/en/themes/enterprises/crossroads-ba...
[3] https://www.ibz.rrn.fgov.be/fr/registre-national/
Yes, that makes sense, we don’t allow people to connect to our databases directly either, and in any case the systems should be built so they are separated, it’s good architecture.
I was very much more intrigued about the statement that data can’t be easily/legally shared within the same agency
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Culture is more important on whether or not a country can slide into a dictatorship.
Americans are ultimately conditioned to accept leadership. Belgians have never and never will agree on anything.
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Well, in Italy the "IRS" (Agenzia delle Entrate) is not allowed to cross-check banking statements with its own data from Tax Returns.
Whenever anyone proposes to allow it, the members of the informal "Party for Tax Evasion" scream and denounce the descent towards "Taxation Fascism". It's so pathetically cheeky, that it feels a bit endearing (how dare them, what rascals!)
It's not inefficiency. You don't drive 200km/h on city streets, although you can. Limits exist for the safety of others and you.
Very few countries have as strong executive branch as the USA.
We call those ones “monarchies” or “dictatorships”.
You call the first and one of the most successful democracies in the world a monarchy/dictatorship? The American Executive branch is given broad powers since the very beginning and considering the success there might be something to it.
In contrast the Europeans have descended into petty mass wars and dictatorial regimes multiple times, and each time America has come to save Europe through that very Executive branch.
A bit thankless don't you think?
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The person you respond to explicitly said the US wasn't the only one (and didn't suggest they were the worst either). Seems likely that they would agree that Russia and China are amongst these "very few" indeed. Don't be so aggressive please.
How many countries are they?
>The CCP through the NPC enacts unified leadership, which requires that all state organs, from the Supreme People's Court to the president of China, are elected by, answerable to, and have no separate powers than those granted to them by the NPC
This is the situation in China. In theory NPC is their governing body.
[insert random ad hominem attack here]
When it comes to government spending though, shouldn’t the public have a right to know precisely, with dollar-level accuracy what they are being asked to pay?
As far as the experiences of the Stasi and previous German governments, it must not have too much of a scar: Germany still asks people to register their religion — ostensibly for tax purposes, but if I recall correctly, Germany had a problem in the past with having a list of all people in a specific religion.
Some insights or decisions cannot or should not be placed on the public, thats why you elect representatives in the firt place. Insight can be granular, like an oversight commitee publishing a redacted report, but i agree on full transparency about anything regarding our representatives.
> When it comes to government spending though, shouldn’t the public have a right to know precisely, with dollar-level accuracy what they are being asked to pay?
Doing that does not require anywhere remotely near the level of data access DOGE has been given.
a lot of countries already have this, and without handing e.g. Elon Musk the keys to the kingdom. America for example has this: https://www.foia.gov/
European here. Governments in Europe, even ones that have GDPR on their books, literally act as oppressively as they want to act: U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users' encrypted accounts [1]
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/02/07/apple-e...
European here.
There are vast differences between how the different governments operate.
It's a classic Motte and Bailey. "Europe acts in this way, so much better than America. [...] No no, not THAT Europe, I of course was only talking about this other part of Europe!"
How is the most populous state in the EU doing?
> The German parliament amended two laws on June 10th granting enhanced surveillance powers to segments of the federal police and intelligence services. They allow the use of spyware to hack into phones and computers circumventing encryption used by messaging applications such as WhatsApp and Signal, raising concerns about the right to privacy.
> The new federal police law allows interception of communications of “persons against whom no suspicion of a crime has yet been established and therefore no criminal procedure measure can yet be ordered”. This fails to ensure the necessary protection against unjustified and arbitrary interference in people’s privacy, required under international law. Human Rights Watch and the United Nations have pointed out the importance of encryption and anonymity for data protection and the right to privacy.
> The government argues that new legislation is needed to keep up with technological developments and claims the new powers are to help federal police stifle human trafficking and undocumented migration.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/06/24/germanys-new-surveillanc...
...oh
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That's orthogonal to what op is saying.
You're saying agencies can be directed to opress people and organisations.
Op is saying agencies don't get to willy nilly look into the db of other agencies.
> check and balances to make it slow. It’s deliberate inefficiency.
It’s an important thing about free countries that is seldom appreciated: aspects of their governments are designed to be tar pits, on purpose. It’s a way of restraining government.
I have a personal saying that touches on something adjacent. “I like my politicians boring. Interesting government was a major cause of death in the twentieth century.”
When I think of governments that are both interesting and streamlined I think of the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, Stalin era USSR, Maoist purges, etc.
It's worth noting all those regimes were really only streamlined at getting people killed one way or the other. Their internal history is always a story of wild incompetence and corner-cutting. The Nazis in particular got a lot of undue credit for effectiveness.
> It’s deliberate inefficiency.
Inefficiency is a useful property of many systems [0,1]. Current cultural obsessions around the word are a burden and mistake, and the word "efficiency" now feels rather overload with right-wing connotations.
[0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/efficiency/
[1] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/cash2/
I have strong feeling that in the past 50 or so years, we often have traded resiliency for efficiency. I think we might have gone too far.
That doesn't mean that being deliberately inefficient will improve resiliency. Also, some of the deliberate inefficiency (i.e. looking at weird thing us healthcae/health-insurance system has going on) is more ... extractive? That sounds like the word I am looking for.
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> $50,000 to Sri Lanka for “climate change” isn’t a “popular program.”
Is that $50,000 annual? Because if so that's less than a rounding error for the budget of almost any country, much less the US. The costs associated with ending this program (organizational, employee time) may even be higher than just continuing to pay it.
> Paying dead people social security isn’t popular.
Is there any public statistical data on this? As far as I know US social security does periodically verify if recipients are still alive. Of course some cases will slip through the cracks, but unless DOGE plans to individually track down every recipient and see them in person I don't see how they can solve this problem. This inevitably happens with pretty much any social security system, anywhere.
> Sending money to the Taliban isn’t popular.
Is there a source for this?
> When you say Trump doesn’t care about waste, that isn’t supported by the facts. The deficit isn’t about waste, fraud or abuse, it’s about overspending. They aren’t the same thing.
He could start by reducing overspending on the US' titanic corporate subsidies, but something tells me he won't.
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I do not see how checks and balances that are there to limit data access via previously unauthorized organizations negatively affect Europe/Europeans. It is true Europe if facing a hard time, but saying that it's caused by the checks and balances we have on privacy feels misguided to me
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Except that they, an unelected private group, have already attempted to get all private and confidential citizen data from the US treasury, and have been blocked by the courts as it is illegal.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/08/judge-tem...
They have tried to get data of all payments to US citizens including pensions, 401k, benefits and allowances etc. All foreign aid and diplomacy payments are included, and they have been charged with trying to find ways to illegaly stop these payments.
Be very careful in supporting what Musk and DOGE do. They are unelected, and have been given unprecedented access to government data. Scary times are ahead.
Doge isn’t private. They are government employees. Also USAID was unelected. Nobody working at the IRS was elected either.
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Just on the un-elected private group bit. This would apply to every one of the staff members of these departments. How many elected software developers worked on the original software? How many private contractors were elected? Are there a pile of elected software developers working as cobol and java devs?
It's not the stupidest argument, but it applies to every last staff member of the us treasury.
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The motion to block DOGE has also been dismissed by courts
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/judge-denies-states-bi...
Nobody complained about "unelected" Obama or Biden appointees accessing the treasury or SSN, but now that Trump is exposing corruption en-masse and stopping the gravy train, many folks are suddenly very concerned. The FUD is unfortunately not working.
All this will probably go to the Supreme Court. And just like Biden ignored the Supreme Court ruling on student loans and even boasted about it proudly on twitter - saying they cannot block the executive, the precedent was also setup for Trump to do the same.
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> Except that they, an unelected private group, have already attempted to get all private and confidential citizen data from the US treasury, and have been blocked by the courts as it is illegal.
It is not illegal. You can bookmark this comment for when it finally winds its way through the courts. Whether you love or hate the idea, this is a clearly legitimate exercise of executive authority and this judge is going to get smacked down hard, and the foolish abuse of TROs is going to wind up getting their use by lower-court judges severely curtailed. Read the legal justification in the orders yourself.
Unfortunately a lot of people have lost their minds over this, and are burning through their credibility - some judges and journalists included. I don't know why, other than Musk is a moron and a polarizing figure. The Alantic breathlessly quoting government employees terrified to file their taxes because they're afraid Elon Musk will have their bank account number and routing info had my eyes rolling into the back of my head. This is fearmongering, not journalism.
I don't understand why we can't oppose this without reporting on it honestly. The problem on matters like this seems to be getting much worse over time.
> They are unelected, and have been given unprecedented access to government data.
So is everyone else in the Treasury Department.
What are their guardrails? Do they have accountability? Does "parallelise" mean compiling data on people from different systems? Dossiers? Are they even following the law?
> They have simply...
Oh yes, because this is all very simple. What is "waste"? How is it defined? Who decides what is waste and what isn't?
Serious question to those who are cheering for the 'elimination of waste'. What do you expect to happen to the money thus saved? In what ways do you expect those savings to benefit you or the broader citizenry?
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if it's not funding tax cuts and corporate handouts for Elon's companies, it's waste.
That's actually not what they've been tasked with:
> This Executive Order establishes the Department of Government Efficiency to implement the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.
There's nothing about government spending programs or staffing in there. Also the EO includes this funny sentence: "USDS shall adhere to rigorous data protection standards."
that that moron has been tasked with finding inefficiency is so concerning, he is a man so convinced of his own intellectual superiority that he has zero respect for complexity.
We see every day how technically inept and incompetent he is, I just wonder when the other shoe is going to drop for the average observer.
It is the emperor's new clothes writ large, and why I find Bezos's comment about taking him at face value so funny, is he slyly telling us he thinks the guy a fool, a troll, and nothing more?
Do you have an alert setup to tell you when people are bashing the DoGE?
Wouldn't be a DOGE thread without scarab92 carrying water for this nonsense.
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Including the copy pasta that the department created by an elected official is "unelected".
”Simply been tasked with X”
We’re on a community that discusses, amongst other things, the running of firms and startups.
Just because someone is simply tasked with X, doesn’t mean we all agree to ignore the big picture. The big picture of
1) Complex projects
2) Security
3) High functioning teams
4) Ethics
This is fundamentally unethical, and irresponsible. I 100% think you agree with me on the irresponsible part.
You may sincerely stand on the reduction of waste, which frankly no one is going to argue. But a team this small, for a project this vital? This fast?
What was that saying? Good, Fast, Cheap? Pick 2? Why the flippty flip, is anyone here OK with fast and cheap?
Hell, What precisely are these people doing? What are the project milestones? Where can we see what’s going on?
And if the transparency of their actions is a cybersecurity risk - then which independent body is checking them?
Edit: Forget their elected, unelected status. Why should we turn around and trust them? What are they planning to do. I don’t want more outrage - you could find the whole thing was running on alien souls. What is the replacement method, and what is the gain we can expect from the changes?
If they’ve taken charge - then they should do the work, and do it well. And if it’s tech related or s/w related stuff, then talk about it, and explain.
Who has been tasked? Under what authority? Not Elon Musk, according to Donald Trump.
More seriously, if it was true it would be a stupid task, with stupidly inappropriate people selected to do it. What is actually happening is idiot destruction. Whether that was the intent or simply the obvious outcome of stupidity is irrelevant to the damage being done.
Maybe it's temporary, not 'once you build it they will use it'. Time will tell, if in the end a dictatorship proves itself to run things more efficiently and make everyone richer, then other countries will follow the US and adopt the same model.
Ahem, tell me this again once you get punished for what you are as an individual, for your striking, for not joining the political party (...)
I can't believe I'm reading such comments
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still, Germany arrests citizens for calling a politician an idiot.
Which country and what law are you referring to?
Laws rarely include technical language like SQL joins.
They obviously didn't mean the laws prevent sql joins directly. Those prevent data aggregation, which in practice prevent various technical implementations of that.
It was not that obvious to me.
I think the advantages of this in a digital age are vastly overblown. If an extremist government comes to power they won't care and they can just do the SQL join. Let it go to court, the extremist government will decide anyway so the outcome is already predetermined.
Compare this to a physical storage of paper documents that need to be SQL joined, the effort required is several magnitudes more.
What it is good for is data breaches, it effectively limits the data that can be leaked at once.
I would not count on those separate databases using a common key. Joining could be quite a pain.
Regardless of the actual implementation, do you agree that it's likely much easier to match data when you have it in an organized digital form than an organized physical form?
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What you're describing is very similar to what most large enterprise companies do: layers upon layers of red tape and convoluted regulations for the sake of "security."
This is a big reason they can’t get anything done or retain talent.
Government is no different.
European democracies have been dying from the same sclerosis their legacy multinationals have.
The US is going through actual change. The outrage over things not being done as they always have is nonsensical.
It's not euro democracies that look like they are dying, comparing government to companies, yeah, iro ic that is USA that forgot the meaning of the word democracy
Have you heard about Chesterton's fence?
Apart from government being very different from private business indeed; I wouldn't want to eat food, drive a vehicle, or use software made by a company made with that mindset. "Safety first" is also a hard rule in all sorts of sports where people move faster than non-expert spectators can fully comprehend. If you need to cut corners to "gain efficiency" it just means you're bad.
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> Trump tasked "DOGE" with reviewing government spending across it's 400+ agencies, and coming up with recommendations on how to reduce wasteful spending.
"Make recommendations" ?
Firing the folks that maintain nuclear weapons sounds like an action, not a recommendation:
* https://apnews.com/article/nuclear-doge-firings-trump-federa...
Firing the folks dealing with bird flu sounds like an action, not a recommendation:
* https://apnews.com/article/usda-firings-doge-bird-flu-trump-...
Then there's the folks making a list of all the agents who were pulled off other tasks and told to investigate Jan 6:
* https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-administration-compili...
Also firing a whole bunch of folks at the FAA even though it's already short staffed:
* https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly9y1e1kpjo
Seems to be it's less about finding savings and more about blindly purging people with no regard to how useful or inefficient things actually are.
This is either woefully naive or active disinformation.
Edit: OP dramatically edited their post. It originally made all kinds of claims of process and propriety that just aren't happening. This was the original that I was replying to:
”Most of the animosity comes from misunderstanding. Trump tasked "DOGE" with reviewing government spending across it's 400+ agencies, and coming up with recommendations on how to reduce wasteful spending. They have 1 year to complete this task. To make sensible recommendations, DOGE needs data about the major programs within each agency. They can't tackle each agency consecutively, since there are more agencies than days until the deadline, so they are parallelising the work.
The access is read only, and they are not linking personal data between agencies, but rather doing a bunch of separate audits in parallel.
Trump has prohibited Musk from being involved in with the review in agencies where he was a material conflict (FAA for example).”
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