Comment by isthisfoss
2 days ago
Why is this a bad thing if their job is to audit budget and spending? The article also does not go into technical details on what this supposed god mode actually is.
2 days ago
Why is this a bad thing if their job is to audit budget and spending? The article also does not go into technical details on what this supposed god mode actually is.
That's the issue right? No one knows what access they have, so you should assume the worst. They've already been claiming that they are making writes, so full write privilege isn't off the table.
It's not even the access that's the issue though, it's the lack of oversight. If I login to a Prod database, my commands are logged which allow the team to go back and figure out what happened if something didn't go as expected. We have backups and response processes to deal with "oops" situations. I strongly doubt the DOGE team has any fallback plan, and it would be irresponsible to simply assume they've thought fallback through.
This is more troubling with the systems being tricky legacy systems. You might have the best intentions, but it is really easy to make mistakes in brittle systems even if you are careful. We've already seen evidence that the team may have no idea how to interpret the data they're seeing. It'd be reckless to start making edits while only having a partial understanding of the system.
The story from DOGE is "look at all this fraud we've found, we're going to fix it now". It's not "here's a bunch of things we want to investigate further". It's not "here's how we're going to test whether this is actually fraud". It's not "here's what we're going to try and how we're going to revert if we are wrong".
They aren't auditing anything. Programmers/engineers don't audit budget and spending. If they were doing an audit, they would have accountants on their team, which they don't. If you bring coders/engineers into a system, it's for accessing/manipulating data/code/infrastructure. This is an enormous and unprecedented overreach.
They're data scientists amongst other things, you need to tie different data tables and sources together to get hotspot reports.
The DOGE is mainly staffed by former employees of Elon Musk's companies, many of them being in their early twenties and one being 19 years old [1]. The presence of so many Musk associates is a conflict of interest: supposing "god mode" means that DOGE has unfiltered access to the private data of US citizens, there's not much stopping Elon Musk from exploiting that data for personal gain. And besides, would you want your private data to be in the hands of so many very young people who have little prior experience in anything?
[1] - https://www.newsweek.com/doge-list-staff-revealed-2029965
This isn't an audit.