Comment by jb3689

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".