Comment by randerson

2 days ago

An audit only needs read access, not God mode. It should be conducted by a neutral third party, not someone on a witch hunt who has conflicts of interest. The people on the ground should have auditing qualifications, clear background checks, and knowledge of specific systems or processes, not a random 19-year-old named "Big Balls" with a history of selling company secrets to a competitor. Their findings should go through QA, and they should take the time to come up with an accurate report, rather than rushing through and blurting out whatever they think is happening.

Ah, so more bureaucracy, bureaucracy, bureaucracy.

  • Yes. Democracy's intent is not efficiency. It is to provide a rule of law that is fair enough for most citizens. All other forms of rule are worse. As soon as you have 'efficient government', you no longer have democracy. But something worse.

  • This response is so funny to me.

    You'll be on your knees begging for bureaucracy after all your info is sold to the highest bidder and you spend the next 20 years fighting identity theft.

    • https://www.zetter-zeroday.com/court-documents-shed-new-ligh...

      "New court documents shed light on what a 25-year-old DOGE employee named Marko Elez did inside Treasury Department payment systems. They also provide extensive new details about which systems Elez accessed, the security precautions Treasury IT staff took to limit his access and activity, and what changes he made to the systems. The documents indicate that the situation at Treasury is more nuanced than previously reported."

      (...)

      "Additionally, he could only connect using a government-issued laptop that had "cybersecurity tools" installed on it to prevent him from accessing web sites or cloud-based storage services with the laptop or connecting a USB or other external storage device to it to copy large amounts of data from Treasury systems. "

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  • Would you buy shares in a company if the sole auditor of their financials was the CEO's best friend, who had no experience or qualifications in auditing, and he was not accountable to anyone if he was wrong? "Trust me bro" does not cut it. These structures and processes can be onerous but they exist for good reason. BTW our government is not so strapped for cash that they can't afford to do this properly.

    • Your analogy is absurd.

      In a publicly traded company you get to chose whether to buy or sell the shares of a company based on how the CEO is running the company (including who he appoints to audit it)

      In US Govt, we don't get to chose whether to "invest" in the govt or not, our taxes our collected by force.

      So instead we have the power to vote for people in congress (who decide home much taxes are collected on how they are spend), and the president (who can execute on the spending directed by congress, but also has the power granted by constitution to audit and spend effiecntly)

      The US Govt Shareholders (Voters) have SPOKEN, and SPOKEN LOUDLY! (Electoral College victory, and Popular Vote victory). They elected republican majority congress, and President Trump. Thus the voters voted for a deep gov't audit headed by Musk (Trump publicly campaigned on auditing and cleaning up spending, and publicly stated who will be in charge of the audit).

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They have read-only access, as the latest court documents (Google "Zeitner DOGE") show, and contrary to the fakenews that were peddled in the early days of that stuff. Big Balls can only use this read access from a provided Treasury laptop, on premises, and he's operating under review of other Treasury employees.