i say this as a tesla owner, knowing that getting rid of my tesla doesn't necessarily help anything..... and having bought my car despite Elon (certainly not because of him) a handful of years back.
Tesla's value gives Elon his money which also gives him his power. For obvious reasons Elon is VERY associated with Tesla. People are viewing purchasing a Tesla as giving Elon money, which isn't totally wrong but isn't as direct as people as saying either.
In the case of Tesla the threat is Elon himself and how he chooses to use his power. The cars (in my opinion) are not a threat IRT surveillance etc. I think its easy enough to cover the cameras etc. Of course I can be wrong, as I often am.
In the case of Starlink.... being able to use communication and internet access during an emergency to make money, or use it for influence is pretty powerful. particularly as the US govt (which Elon is a part of) pivots towards an alliance with Russia, starlink is a massive liability that Ukraine cannot count on AT ALL. Nothing is stopping Elon from pulling access to starlink at the behest of Putin. America is already pausing anti-russian activity IRT cyber attacks etc under the guise of "good faith during active negotiations". Why wouldn't starlink be next? Why can't starlink be used to suppress access to things. Remember the stories about ISPs injecting ads into content that they didn't own? Why can't starlink just start serving propaganda and misinformation instead of actual content?
These are a threat because they are not being used for the good of humanity and civilization. Elon has deluded himself into thinking that he knows what is best for the world and is using his power/money/influence/technology to assert those ideas and opinions onto the world.
Until we have literally any evidence to the contrary, Elon, Trump, and Putin can all be named interchangeably
my phone is with me, netflix has streaming data... meta has my instagram data. the data is all over, and I'm confident that its for sale across the board
in my experience, symfony looked like a massive, old, gross, enterprisy solution... laravel got as far out of my way as it could and had absolutely unbelievable documentation.
I am not a php person, but was on a php project and we were trying to run absolutely as fast as we could.... and laravel let us do that very effectively. If i was a php greybeard or something maybe I would've preferred symfony... but looking at our legacy symphony system compared to the laravel system we stood up and replace it.... I cannot imagine making a different choice
Yes, and at this point Laravel has a healthy ecosystem built up around it. There's a large community, tons of plugins available, and professional support for it.
If there’s one thing I hate about Laravel, it’s the docs. Some things are documented, arbitrary others aren’t; many APIs offer multiple aliases or equivalent ways to solve the same problem, and the docs use them interchangeably. Sometimes there’s multiple paragraphs for an obvious feature, but a single sentence for something complicated, and you’ll have to try for yourself to find out how it behaves.
It's been interesting seeing several comments like this in the comments, since Laravel's docs may be one of the most highly-praised aspects of the framework. I suspect the divide may be that newer developers get everything they need explained in the docs in clear language, but the more advanced stuff requires some digging.
I use Laravel personally, and I've definitely seen both sides of this myself. For basic "happy-path" API reference, the docs are great. If I really need to understand how the framework is doing something, I pretty much always end up diving into the code. Unfortunately the heavy use of Facades can sometimes make it annoying to find the underlying code.
That’s fair in certain parts. I like the balance they struck (at the time at least) of not super in the weeds but not high level tutorial mode. A few things around their orm specifically were a little confusing or sparse at times if memory serves
The idea being that if common sense prevails and folks realize what a shit show/farce this DOGE thing is.... the underlying issues that allowed DOGE to exist in the first place will be unsolved.
My hot take is, social media alongside with TikTok showed the world to some people who usually wouldn’t venture out of their small bubbles. Eventually they see significant positive things about other countries, and a lot of negative about theirs. This subconsciously brings up “we have it worse for sure!” emotions in some people, that later translated into whatever it is right now when some people started targeting and exploiting these feelings.
I have no source, no data, nor examples to defend my point, it’s just the vibes.
Exactly. That's one thing that disappointed me about the US Democratic party after the first Trump election -- a complete lack of curiosity into why people voted for him.
Maybe people were voting for him because they were dumb? Or they were lied to?
But neither of those change the importance of understanding what those people wanted.
You can't win elections without understanding what most people actually want.
I think maybe 1 in 20 people I know have any clue about government waste, but they all have a "feeling" it's happening and it's the worst it's ever been. It takes very little these days for people to catch these vibes, and even littler to associate it with Democrats who are for social security.
This despite the fact that Musk is mostly firing investigators who were seeing if his company's were a budget waste. I guess we just have to assume agencies that say "black" are bad and what we really need to spend money on is luxury EV vehicles that can play angry birds. Surely not a conflict of interest.
There is no arguing with people who don't know what they want. This is all propaganda fueled hysteria.
> Maybe people were voting for him because they were dumb? Or they were lied to?
I cant tell if this is intentional irony or poe’s law.
When democrats that are curious about why people vote for Trump, conclude that the voters are dumb or naive, it’s kind of an unintentional demonstration of the kind of thinking that turns people away from the Democratic Party.
My point was that if they conclude that Trump voters are dumb or naive (i.e. the most dismissive judgement), even that still doesn't remove the need for Democrats to understand what those same people want.
The smug "some people are dumb, so I'm going to ignore them instead of being curious" elitism has lost the Democratic party two recent elections.
I appreciate that somebody somewhere may appreciate and enjoy this, but I am not that person. I love SQL. I have always loved SQL. I know why others don't, but I do and its beautiful.
While SQL is great, complex analytical queries are much easier to write, read and modify when they are written in pipe-based syntax because of the reasons outlined in the announcement:
- Pipe-based query is executed in clear sequential stages according to the pipes written in the query. SQL execution stages aren't clear enough.
- SQL requires mentioning GROUP BY fields twice - at SELECT and GROUP BY statements. This complicates modifying the query, since you need to modify the set of GROUP BY fields at SELECT too.
- There are no limits on the combination and the number of pipes, which can be used in a single query. There are various limits in SQL. For example, you cannot use WHERE after GROUP BY (there is HAVING workaround, but it looks unnatural). Another example - you cannot easily use GROUP BY multiple times with arbitrary additional calculations and transformations in the middle (of course, you can use subqueries as a workaround for these limitations, but this will complicate the resulting query too much).
It's insufficient to say that something is objectively better. Often times user preferences are multi-modal, and people cluster around groups. Pipe-based database query syntax may be objectively "easier" by some mathematical deduction, but by the laws of statistics > 50% of the userbase may prefer a different syntax.
this is SUPER interesting actually. I definitely didn't realize this. I'm still probably going to use a small army of CTEs for this sort of stuff, but I'm very interested to give this a shot the next time I'm exploring a dataset.
The main value proposition is that it unnests the code. Constantly moving logic into CTEs is another way to do it but comparatively it feels very clunky after a while. For example to inspect intermediate stages of a raft of CTEs, you end up having to write a different final clause. You also can't easily skip a stage. With pipes you just comment out the part of the query you don't want, at the bottom or in the middle, and you still have a syntactically valid query.
With today's pipe syntax CTEs are still needed to deal with teeing situations (multiple references to a single table) but for just a chain of transforms it is a lot simpler.
DOGE is obviously a completely illegal operation, and I really do hope it will be get reined in before they can cause an issue so big that _even trump's croniest cronies_ have to admit what is going on.
For someone who claims to love freedom of speech, Elon is pretty quick to determine who can say what, and how much access to _his_ data people have.
> DOGE is obviously a completely illegal operation
Could you share you reasons. From what I gather, the EO[1] does a few things to avoid potential law suits:
- It revised the purpose of an existing agency, USDS. The general purpose is not changed: "Modernizing Federal Technology and Software to Maximize Efficiency and Productivity". This avoids the issue of creating a new agency without the approval from Congress.
- It cites cites the sectio 3161 of title 5 of United States Code, to create DOGE as a "Temporary Organization" for only 18 months. This avoids the law suits that the EO creates a new government entity with out the approval of Congress.
- It orders each government agency to hire DOGE teams, each of which includes a lead, a lawyer, an HR, and an engineer. Agency heads should ensure that DOGE agenda is implemented. This is within the authority of an EO.
- The EO voids previous EOs to avoid law suits on future conflicts.
Thanks! I knew that Obama created the USDS, but I thought he still needed the support from Congress. Well then, in that case I'm not sure why Trump would rather repurpose the USDS. Maybe it's easier to set up a temporary entity for DOGE that way?
It is in the same way you would assume an existing admin role to perform the highly privileged actions you want to take vs attempting to bootstrap access from scratch.
USDS was already kind of set up the way you'd want to set up DOGE if you were Elon. It was designed for talented people from the tech industry to do "temporary tours" in the government.
And a curious question: I was seeking the truth on the qualifier "obvious" and the legality of the EO in general, and I presented my case with references to the actual EO. My reasoning could be very wrong but at least I tried to stick with the discussion of the actual legality of the EO.
What's your reason to flag it and downvote it without counter arguments? Anything that does not agree with your rage is automatically morally bad bad bad?
I believe that the existence of DOGE and the EO is legal. I don't believe that what they are actually doing (according to reports) is legal. I believe they are doing illegal things based upon Musk's own tweets, however, I do actually hope he is just trolling and it's not actually happening as he says it is.
That said, even if it's just trolling, trolling has no place in government. We all deserve better and we need to trust that what is said is the truth.
This grant [1]. "SUPPORT SEXUAL AND REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH (SRH) CARE CLOSE TO THE DISPLACED POPULATIONS. [...] Place Of Performance //XGZ GAZA STRIP GAZA STRIP". Though I don't think that it will be used exclusively for condoms, the one paragraph description doesn't give much details about how exactly the 45 million dollars will be spent.
It also shows that zero dollars has been outlaid for the grant over the last 5 months. It's entirely possible that none of the money would have been used by the expiration of the grant.
That said, I wish these were required to be a lot more verbose. I can envision a program with that description I would totally approve of, and I can imagine programs with that description that I wouldn't think are useful. Being more transparent around the programs would help in cases where wild unsubstantiated claims are made.
I dont think “but it hasn’t been outlayed yet” is an appropriate critique of something so fishy.
Whether the funds were used for condom balloons or lifesaving hospital deliveries of babies, the complaint from the masses should be “give us more information for exactly what this money is obligated to accomplish.”
Especially when the federal government is eager send me demands for additional backup and information on money I earned 3 years ago, after it had previously signed off on documentation presented.
It's weird seeing America going so hellbent against Wikileaks (Hillary jokingly saying "can't we just drone him") vs now where the top brass are live tweeting leaks
Musk is repeating his playbook from acquiring Twitter: Get wide access to systems, cherry-pick information, and then blast out a completely wrong summary of it, knowing that supporters will amplify it, believe it, and never check the source material.
For example, asserting that two groups are exchanging money simply because they're both customers at the same bank.
Just because you do not like the information surfacing and how they have used the labor of tax payers to support and fund totally ridiculous and/or illegal activities both in US and overseas, does not make these "findings" less important. I am surprised how many people are approaching this in such a partisan way, even in a place like Hacker News.
The Lutheran organizations were facilitating mass migration. The money was being given to them to help bring in millions of people from places like Haiti.
If you are going to quote X, then at least find another source, one that is legit.
The truth is that LSS got grants to pay for the resettlement of legal immigrants. LSS was NOT "facilitating mass migration." LSS has a long tradition of this work and from what I know of their work in Washington, DC (the city, not the cap), it was exemplary.
You do realize the guy you're talking about "dismantling and exposing" these immigration systems is the same one that wants to replace tech workers with H-1B visa?
Maybe ask yourself why you/they are against immigration of low-income workers but don't have a problem bringing in as many higher-income workers as they can(at lower salaries than they would have to pay non-immigrants).
I don't want to be working at McDonalds while companies like Tesla, Google, Amazon, etc. are importing labour for the higher-paying jobs in the country, but that seems to be the future a lot of people are excitedly running towards by supporting Musk.
Going into CMMS and IRS records almost certainly puts them in jeopardy of state crimes. Tight collections of only young, fervent ideologues have one role in military and political systems: cannon fodder.
Supremacy clause will likely protect them. Even fed lon horiuchi, charged with sniping an innocent woman with a child in her arms, was able to claim supremacy long enough the state case was too stale to win.
>In 1997, Horiuchi was charged with manslaughter for killing Vicki Weaver at Ruby Ridge; the charges were later dropped due to Constitutional supremacy, granting federal officers immunity from actions taken in the scope of their practice
I think we might be confusing "state" here. "this guy" as you say was an FBI agent, a federal not state agent. Elon is gaining access to federal data, not state data.
Maybe I'm confused, but why do we think Elon is committing offenses that a state could charge so that a pardon from Trump would not be possible?
Aside from the fact that I'm sure you can find such crimes ...
Prosecutors have the power to ask 2 years incarceration for jaywalking, without proof, 10 years for ignoring a stop sign and having not paying because the state has a wrong address for them and can let someone who empties a machine gun into a kindergarten walk free. But why go so far as to actually convict them of anything?
An IRS agent (and every state has them, not just the Federal government) could just accuse anyone of tax fraud 9 years ago, arrest, then deny bail (if the accusation is tax fraud it is the IRS agent that gets to approve or deny bail, not a judge), and then think about what they'll do next, for 3 years. They also have the power to block any particular bank account US-wide, or all bank accounts "that benefit an individual", so they can damage the person's family too.
No worries, after those 3 years, those now freshly declared innocent people will have to be paid 20 or so dollars per day to make it all alright (technically they don't, as they would not even be innocent, as the IRS does not need a conviction to declare you a criminal, but that's kicking someone hard in the nuts after incarcerating them for 3 years).
None of this requires even a single judicial decision, just an executive on your side. And Trump does NOT have the power to grant pardons over any non-federal matter (which is pretty ironic since part of the reason presidential pardons exist, is to prevent state or local governments from using state justice systems to influence the Federal government)
I think the fact that this is possible in the US is proof positive that your state needs exactly the sort of radical downsizing that Musk and Trump are trying to achieve.
I think you'll find neither Musk nor Trump nor republicans will change this. In fact, expect the opposite. They will do nothing that threatens or weakens state power, now that they control that power.
Who said that it is not problematic for Biden to pardon his son?
However, if you put them on a scale blanket pardoning the mob who stormed the capitol, attacked and injured police officers, threatened congress members, planted bombs and were looking to hang the Vice president because he would not overturn the election results where do you think it will lean towards?
The one is bad optics the other is literally giving blank checks to convicted enemies of the State.
Depends on who/when any of these theoretical charges occur. If they were to happen now-ish, then Biden would be thrown under the bus. Which I'm assuming is the opposite response to what you're trying to apply rational reasoning to. I think for at least the remainder of the next four years, applying rational reasoning will be a fool's errand.
I was assured right here on HN that the data was public to begin with, and downvoted for suggesting it was possible unseen corruption. Hopefully if that is true they find it just matches what has released publicly.
It is hard for me to imagine any entrenched civil service being cooperative with plans to shit can their jobs. So I'm not sure that means much. Almost by human nature, most people are uncooperative ( and deemed such ) with plans to end their dental plan and rent money.
In democratic countries, civil servants aren't supposed to be changed after each elections, while they have their individual opinions they know their duty and follow the orders that come from the political power (and should they not obey to the order from above, there are disciplinary sanctions that can be leveraged against them).
And it's not some theoretical idea, in all Western democracies, every civil servant that has been in place for long enough has seen governments from multiple political sides. That's how it works.
Using illegal means to purge the institutions from undesired people is not something that happens in a democracy, this is unprecedented in the West since Gleichschaltung.
>while they have their individual opinions they know their duty and follow the orders that come from the political power
Have you forgotten Trump's first presidential term? The resistance [1], the gleeful celebration of the "deep state" fighting back against Trump [2], a US general calling his Chinese counterparts before the 2020 election [3]?
Bureaucrats cannot fight against a democratically elected executive, call themselves the resistance and then be surprised when they are treated as the resistance.
I shouldn't have to mention it, but refusing to listen to illegal orders is obviously part of a civil servant's duty.
In a democracy, a civil servant must respect the law even if it goes against orders. When all you have civil servants who respect their boss's orders even when it goes against the law, you have left the domain of democracy.
if you actualy read past the thongue in cheek titles, you would realize the insanity of your argument.
for example, you are defending firing workers for: “People are just going to have to accept the results,” he told The Washington Post. “I’m a Republican. I believe in fair and secure elections.”
Yeah, I mean Musk has literally tweeted that DOGE is "dismantling the radical-left shadow government."[0] This is not about efficiency or rooting out corruption, it's about persecuting political enemies and purging wrongthink.
Which was something people here screamed bloody murder about when they accused Biden of doing it, just by asking Twitter to moderate content, but I guess this is all fine now.
> just by asking Twitter to moderate content, but I guess this is all fine now.
It's never wrong when it's something you agree with, and that's as far as Musk's belief in free speech goes. Allowing posts he agrees with, it's free speech. If it's something that sheds bad light on something he is, owns, or believes, it's bad and must be stopped. It's a classic as old as time
Hate to break it to you, but it doesn’t exist. It’s like me coming over to your house and saying that I’m going to root out the ghosts in your home by dismantling it.
Would you let me proceed because you don’t like ghosts?
He’s telling what he’s doing, but the reason is a made-up pretext.
I assume this is a prevalent mindset of a big chunk of Trump supporters. "I love it when half of my state government is at war with the remaining half, and I want the US government to be like that, so that it can't get anything done."
Well, I guess that's better than being outright neo-Nazi ...
You're asking when did this happen: "the left dismantling the shadow right"
here, when the IRS under Obama discriminated against conservative and Christian groups for applications for tax exempt status
> The consent order says the IRS admits it wrongly used "heightened scrutiny and inordinate delays" and demanded unnecessary information as it reviewed applications for tax-exempt status. The order says, "For such treatment, the IRS expresses its sincere apology."
In late September 2017, an exhaustive report by the Treasury Department's inspector general found that from 2004 to 2013, the IRS used both conservative and liberal keywords to choose targets for further scrutiny, blunting claims that the issue had been an Obama-era partisan scandal.[1][2] The 115-page report confirmed the findings of the prior 2013 report that some conservative organizations had been unfairly targeted, but also found that the pattern of misconduct had been ongoing since 2004 and was non-partisan in nature.
What's going on today with doge is what exactly? They're accessing payment systems, as advertised openly in a democratic election. You want analogies of a scrutinizing funding and then viciously calling for its retraction? Because pretty much all colors and creeds have done that.
Going line by line through payments to look for things that look politically affiliated with the opposing side’s viewpoints with the stated goal of ending those payments?
The argument 'but the right dismantling the shadow left, and the left dismantling the shadow right hopefully provides some balance' is merely a symmetric balance principle.
The person pretending to ask questions used an underhanded socratic method to assert what was happening about line-by-line and then demanded analog for their own premise as if it were mine instead of theirs. Youve fallen for a trick.
My claim is that symmetric behavior is balanced. You went on the goose chase dismissing the first example of your entirely different demand, then pretended I never said it. Your argument is a disingenuous fraud.
No I frankly have never heard of anything like this, and it doesn't appear the dozens of federal budget experts, Constitutional law experts, political historians, or policy legal analysts I follow closely have heard of anything similar either.
I don't think anyone at any location on the political spectrum would describe what's going on right now as "business as usual," but apparently you believe that's the case. So please share evidence. Definitionally, it should be abundant.
But uhhh… Isn’t that process actually going on currently in Congress, where/when/how it normally happens, and this process is going on separately, very atypically, and already changing government outflows prior to any congressional decisions?
I don’t think “every year a totally different branch of government argues over the budget” is analogous at all, and I don’t think you do either.
Im suggesting doing different non-analogous things can provide balance. At no point did I assert they must be analogous nor am I obliged to prove your own assumptions.
Got it, so the other party may some day eventually do something similar to what is happening today, and at that point, the two would be equal and symmetrical.
And if this were Congress passing a budget then people would be upset but wouldn't be calling it illegal.
There's a huge difference between Congress passing a budget (within its constitutional powers) and the Executive just killing anything and everything that seems "woke" them with no legislative authorization.
The unlawfulness is the part that is newsworthy and incredibly frightening. That's the part that matters.
If the executive can unilaterally decide to allocate funds to wherever it wants while ignoring Congress, then Congress is no a coequal branch and our constitutional order is dead.
> Every year's appropriation bill, there is a line by line partison fight over funding
And who normally does that, a billionaire with grudges loosely appointed by the executive branch mostly doing it on his own in secret or the representatives in Congress?
No it's not normal. What is normal is say congress and bankers meeting in secret under assumed identities on an (Jakyll) island to create institutions like the federal reserve that 'eases' massive inflation in while purposefully firewalled from democratic representation, and jammed through by their own admission before popular will can stop them.
So doing what was actually advertised is far less secret than much of what congress does.
They are illegally accessing information for who knows what, and fire everyone who attempt to stop them and make them respect the law, for starter.
They aren't "calling for retraction" of fundings (which is normal in democracy, but then this call have to be listened by Congress for the retraction to happen), then are cutting funds on their own, without a democratic mandate and are doing so in spite of the laws and the constitution. That's unprecedented in any Western democracy.
What Musk is describing is a deranged conspiracy theory, that "shadow left" doesn't exist except as a modern meme-driven equivalent to right-wing fears of communist infiltrators and Jews in academia. It turns out this generation's totenkopf is an AI generated shiba inu.
And there isn't a "shadow right" either, but only because they're acting completely out in the open.
It’s in-group/out-group narrative. In order to claim to be the good guys you have to invent a bad guy. It’s a power/ego game played by people who are abusive. Both parties play it.
The "bad guy" invented by the right isn't real. The "bad guy" of the left is real. There is no "radical-left shadow government" but there is clearly a radical-right shadow government forming and acting as we watch.
There can't be a "shadow left" anything in the USA because the US, by popular request dragged its systems of leftist organization out into the street and executed them decades ago.
When Reagan narc'd on his coworkers for having "communist sympathies" he became such a national brand he got elected in one of the best election outcomes for the right basically ever.
That's why the US "left" is reduced to whinging about how democrats don't do socialism (from a position of zero power in the government) and therefore you shouldn't vote for them. They don't seem to notice it has been 50 years of only making the problem worse.
> DOGE is obviously a completely illegal operation
What laws does it break?
I like to watch those "Auditors" on Youtube who film in public places. Every cop assures them that filming a police officer / police station / inside a public library is illegal. About 25% of the time they detain them, and about 10% of the time they arrest them.
When they ask what law they've broken, they never get a straight answer.
I think the one they're going for is that being a senior officer with material authority requires confirmation per the appointments clause, constitutional law instead of a federal statute.
Whether musk is operating as such seems dubious but possible.
Unfortunately we're well past "legal" and "illegal" when it comes to the federal government. The last 4 presidents have pushed things through without the proper procedures. DOGE is just the one you're noticing.
It’s obviously completely legal actually. The president has the power to do this.
Reducing bureaucracy, rooting out corruption, and shrinking government waste also polls really well.
Democrats should be much more careful about positioning themselves on this long term.
If they are seen as the party of more bureaucracy and corruption (they already are) this will further tarnish their reputation and decrease their odds of winning elections in the future.
The way it’s currently playing out the people complaining the loudest seem like the most guilty benefactors of corruption, they are damaging their reputations and don’t even realize it.
> DOGE is obviously a completely illegal operation
This narrative infuriates me. Either you are right, and entire wings of our government are abetting a coup, or you are wrong, and our government has huge back doors that no one is watching.
Both realities reveal something urgently broken with the United States. In a way that should scare the entire western world to its core.
DOGE is not illegal. However the legality of some of the things they do is under question. The current government, including DOGE is being operated like “Just do as many things as possible, so that the lawsuits can’t keep up”. While lawyers are busy trying to stop big things, many small but important items will slip through the cracks and will take decades to undo.
Edit: BTW this strategy has always been available, it’s just that career politicians aren’t incentivized to do this for “good” because they want long political careers.
> it’s just that career politicians aren’t incentivized to do this for “good” because they want long political careers.
That's not why: Reagan, Clinton, W, and Obama all had the opportunity for sweeping changes of this magnitude without regard to further political careers, but none of them wanted to make radical changes. Their view of the US government (even Reagan's!) was "basically doing a good job, but maybe needs a tweak". The current administration does not appear to share this view, though we'll see how that goes.
The presidents aren't kings. They need congressional support to get anything major done. They rarely support sweeping changes.
And more recently, congress essentially won't do anything, period. Either because the president is not of their party, or more recently, chaos within the Republican party itself.
Which is why you see presidents trying to do things with executive orders, but typically the courts (correctly) block overreach there. Trump is busy accumulating court rulings against his administration.
A simplified view: since FDR the main difference in presidential action is whether to crank progress at 1 or 11 in the ever expanding book of regulations, favored tax nook and crannies, and various benefits plans for pay-to-play voters like SS recipients.
Trump is threatening to turn that knob to -1 or lower, for good or ill.
> BTW this strategy has always been available, it’s just that career politicians aren’t incentivized to do this for “good” because they want long political careers.
Or, you know, maybe it's also because politicians who are not total psychos don't want to fuck over an entire country for their own gains.
Yes, or the psychos that were in control before were very happy with how the money machine was running for them, so they didn't need to change anything.
Now that some other psychos are taking over, the people that got used to the previous psychos are uneasy because change it not easy, especially rigorous change.
But maybe this will make people actually realize that the system was always flawed. The current administration just exposes that.
> While lawyers are busy trying to stop big things, many small but important items will slip through the cracks and will take decades to undo.
So the government is designed in such a way that someone can do illegal things without those currently running the systems simply saying "no?"
They have the power to do the things, and then we have to wait for it to be litigated. Watching the cases against Trump drop like flies after he got elected, knowing the Supreme Court is packed full of members of one party. This doesn't seem like a reliable solution.
Yes. That’s how branches of government are set up. Judicial and legislative branches are supposed to keep the executive branch in check. Judicial branch is right now working to keep things in check but it will take time, resources and money to address every small thing. Opening the floodgates is a good strategy to overwhelm this branch. Which is where the legislative branch comes in. If they see the executive branch over reaching, you act to stop it. But our legislative branch is not acting (on both sides of the aisle). Btw this is the same problem a lot of modern democracies are facing and is not unique to the US.
One side of the aisle is powerless. They can make speeches, but all legislative progress requires the approval of the Speaker of the House. Who will refer any legislation to a committee, which is also controlled by a committee chair of the same party.
I don’t buy that argument because that side of the aisle has been voting with the other side on pretty much everything in the new term. I also don’t buy this argument because like I said in my original comment, the tactic of using presidential powers in this way was always available, including when this side of the aisle had the majority.
Judicial branch has basically no enforcement. They can judge all they like, if the other branches or even states tell them to shove it up their ass, what can they do?
Not long ago Hawaii told the Supreme Court 'spirit of aloha' and the broken paddle trumps _Bruen_. And nothing stops them, the Supreme court has a few armed marshalls and little else.
Yes that does happen and ideally the executive branch is responsible for enforcement, which creates an opportunity for the President to say no. But that undermines the courts and affects the faith people have in the Judicial system. The ramifications of that trust eroding are far and wide, and the economy would take a massive hit. People will then vote differently in 2 years and hope the legislative branch does its job.
One thing to also consider is that sometimes, the execution of the court orders will rely on local governments and locally elected officials in local enforcement bodies (like the Sheriff’s Office or the local PD). In that case, enforcement will vary across the country.
The government isn't designed for one party to decide to play winner take all politics. It was assumed that people would find a way to work together, not that one party could punish bipartisanship within its own ranks, and then be rewarded for it.
Furthermore America has been moving towards this for decades. There has been openly shared plans on how this was to be achieved, for multiple different stages. From stacking the courts, to gerry mandering, to creating Fox, to strategies to stack the SC, to more recently project 2025.
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I am feeling dumb for having to mention this, after re-reading your message. Am i right in suspecting you are aware of these strategies and are driving to a specific point?
If Elon says one thing and someone else thinks the opposite, it comes down to a battle of wills... and Elon doesn't back down. Sure, it can go to the courts, but the courts only matter if they're listened to or enforced. Neither of which will happen here.
It's not reliable. It worked because Presidents had always been decent about it. The alternative would be to tie the system even further into knots, just to avoid a problem that would require cartoonish villainy.
If the answer is “they don’t” then they aren’t government employees or contractors and shouldn’t be inside private areas of government buildings and systems.
If the answer is anything else then it’s either a misappropriation of funds or an illegal private pay scheme.
IMO it might be a good time for a constitutional convention after this. Our system has always had gaping holes in it and I think the outcome of all this could be catastrophic for so many normal Americans across the political spectrum that they'd be willing to actually close many of them in good faith.
The broken part is the idea that the legislative and judicial branches can act as checks and balances for the executive branch. In the end, the executive branch is the only branch with the ability to do something. The other two are just a bunch of talking heads.
Many other republics have split the executive branch into multiple semi-independent centers of power. The head of state and the head of government can be separate roles. A directly elected president may be responsible for signing laws and appointing senior officials, while a prime minister subordinate to the parliament may be in charge of running the executive branch. And government departments may have dual leadership with a politically appointed minister setting the directions and a career director appointed by the president running the department. Because the director's term is independent from the political appointees, they can refuse to comply if the minister asks something illegal.
Republics have all kinds of failure modes. For example, Hungary was supposed to be a robust parliamentary republic. But due to non-proportional elections, slightly over 50% of votes were enough for a sufficient supermajority to rewrite the constitution.
DW covered this today with a professor who seems to generally know what he's talking about and from what I could tell is not spinning anything in particular: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpKhyL9PEPQ
He does a good job of explaining the facts of the legalities etc.
I'm not really sure if you can call it a "coup" if all parties involved admit he was legitimately elected. Furthermore, this isn't exactly a bait-and-switch. He told us what exactly what he wanted to do. We already knew he would try to do illegal stuff. If you break the law and nobody who voted for you complains (unrealistic I realize, but bear with me), is the rule of law really that secure? If we only criticize Trump when he breaks the law, but not the democrats when they send arms to Israel in blatant violation of the Leahy Laws, how can we get upset when people push the boundaries further?
It's been more than 20 years (or might be about that?) that we passed the law that said "if you prosecute Bush for warcrimes we will invade the Hague". Granted, we were never a treaty cosigner (sharing the lovely company of Russia, North Korea, and Iran), but it's very convenient we have a "laws for thee but not for me" attitude.
Look I'm just saying we've been headed in this direction for a while and I don't expect the institutions we're supposed to care about preserving doing much to stop it. Americans need to get a lot more mad if they want politicians to represent them well. I'd hazard a guess most americans have never contacted their representatives, vote in their non-swing state (effectively making their vote worthless), and pat themselves on the back for a civic duty well done. I think we've gotten ourselves into a position where politicians who have spent most of their careers failing to pass legislation now need to pull political ability from who the hell knows where to actually follow through on their promise to fight facism. Very grim times.
What most people do seem not to grasp here is that MAGA is full steam working to make sure it doesn't matter who you are going to vote. Trump is just the smoke screen.
IF, by a rare circumstance, the media moguls decide to not sane-wash the incredible fire-hose of lies, corruption, fake news, and religious extremism, and the DEMs get into office in some next term, those DEMs will find the state destroyed beyond repair.
Health epidemics, broken foreign relation relations, dysfunctional government agencies (filled to the brim with stupid or evil clients from the shadow elites), downright abolished agencies, information sphere completely muddied in Musk-style, tech oligarchs sworn allegiance to MAGA (done), abolishment of fact checkers (in progress), removal of experts and intelligentsia (busy), impoverished voters (in progress).
You can enter the cockpit, but MAGA makes sure you are never going to fly again. If you want to get somewhere, you will need the fixers.
People here are discussing legalities with a situational awareness of 3 millimeter maximum. This feverish is understandable, we MUST interpret things like they are normal. If you want to keep it that way, don't read the next sentence.
As soon as the news broke of Trumps reelection, all cases where dropped quickly. That is all you need to now.
No personal option stated or implied, but: exactly this was clearly promised before the election, and it is being delivered right now. The people voted for this: a majority of the American people. Democracy, no?
In American democracy winning a single election doesn't change the constitution or even the laws at all. There are separate processes for those things that haven't happened. The monetary decisions the executive branch is making right now are explicitly reserved for Congress, which notably hasn't passed a law for it.
Voting for someone doesn't imply they aren't bound by existing rules.
Edit: There's also more to be said here about restrictions on American democracy (e.g. gerrymandering, first past the post, disenfranchisement, financial barriers to entry for candidates, lack of choice for political parties, etc) that make the US not some bastion for democratic governance. I'm not an expert but the current chaos is at least partially enabled by the flaws in American democracy (rigid 2 party control is a good example of a generally undemocratic force, many Americans would prefer more parties but aren't being represented, that is enabling executive overreach).
People have to vote for one party or the other. Voting for a party doesn't mean they want every single thing promised by that candidate, it just means they think the sum of all things from that candidate is better than the sum of all things from the other candidate. If this whole DOGE thing was hypothetically not directly connected with any party, I would guess that most americans would have voted against it.
Yeah, all this chaos rather shows how flawed the whole American political system is.
If the current administration is able to do all this, imagine what previous administrations have all done without our approval. Only now people are shaken up about it, because the current administration is rigorously changing things. But it doesn't mean that it was better before, it was always corrupt, now the corruption just becomes more obvious to us.
> The people voted for this: a majority of the American people. Democracy, no?
Does this mean it was wrong of Republicans to have tried to stop anything Obama or Biden was trying to do? Or question it's legality?
I keep hearing this "the people voted for it argument", but unless your prepared to condemn things like limiting the scope of the ACA and refusing to confirm justices, it's hard to take the argument seriously.
Trump also said he could shoot someone in broad daylight on fifth avenue. I think that might be against some rules though. Idk maybe it can be a campaign promise!
The US believes in the rule of law. That means those in power cannot ignore rules and operational procedures put in place to prevent abuse of power.
What you are saying is Trump won so he can effectively shut down agencies and create new ones by fiat. And if those new agencies break laws that is fine.
As a hypothetical, suppose DOGE amasses a large dataset of every resident in the US and it then identifies “illegals” and instructs the deputized military to deport this group of people to prison in El Salvador via secret messaging beyond FOIA reach. This is not OK. Especially if the deported were not given due process to defend themselves in court. What if a few of the deported were actual citizens and had their identities mixed up with someone else.
I don't know? To this day people still fuss about concentration camps here, while the leader clearly had given authority to do so. People are just too political these days.
By the way, I heard the Palestinian Problem is going to be solved for good?
President doesn't have authority to shut them down by EO either. Congress does, yes.
(It's one of those "power of the purse" things. If Congress has created an organization and funded it, the executive is required to spend that money on it.)
I imagine the legality of that depends on the exact details of the law that created the organization. If it specifies that it be an independent organization, then that's probably not allowed either. If it's just "these things must be done" then State could probably handle it.
(Either way, the exact approach they've taken so far with the total freeze and shutdown, then later saying they'll totally start doing the job again somewhere else later on, seems sketchy.)
The state dept issued an evacuation order for all USAID staff overseas. How will they accomplish their mission? This includes medical care and distribution of HIV medication to up to 20 million people.
You can certainly disagree with whether we should be doing it, but the fact remains that Congress made a law saying that we are doing it. The vehicle for changing that is to change the law, not for the President to decide to break the law.
On a separate note, assuming that "it's good to help people if you can" doesn't move you, the cynical reason for USAID's existence is marketing and soft power projection. For a tiny fraction of the US budget, we get to look good for how nice we're being to people, and get other countries to want us to come in and get our hands all over their infrastructure until it'd be painful for them to oppose us and lose that aid.
(Also, HIV specifically? That's something where lowering the levels of it in foreign countries will directly help the US, because it makes it less likely that US citizens will get exposed to it when people travel.)
Unrelated: The hakenkreuz (swastika) was used by German nationalists and "Aryan" supremacists as early as the late 1800s, and was quite popular, even used by the Wandervogel. The swastika officially became the emblem for the Nazi Party on August, 7, 1920, so your quilt is almost certainly an Aryan quilt, and possibly an official Nazi one.
Heh - I can’t find the original comment here, but I remember it.
My grandparents have passed away, so I’ll need to track down exactly who has that quilt now. I know it came over to the US with their parents (my great-grandparents) when they immigrated, and that it was pre-Nazi-party for sure.
It may very well be associated with the false mythology that was adopted by the Nazis. I don’t think so, but it’s been a long time since it was new. No one who was there when it was made is still alive, nor is anyone who knew them well. I’ve not seen anything about that side of my family that would lead me to believe that they were ever sympathetic to that cause, but it’s entirely possible that it was hidden, not shared with the next generation, or otherwise just lost to time.
… but now I’m curious, and will have to figure it out :)
Yeah, that why I said both. It depends on what they are doing. USAID probably needs congress, but other things might just need an EO. The point is DOGE isn't doing this, the President is. Elon doesn't have authority that Democratics are saying he does. He simply informs the President, "Hey, USAID is spending taxpayers money to fund xyz in xyz you might want to shut it down". The President then goes "Yeah, I think we should shut it down let's freeze it and we'll abolish it". Then they go down the path of abolishing it and with the USAID they will probably get congress to do it. Until then they can freeze it because he appoint Marco Rubio has the acting admin.
That man is way too friendly. Just before the election he gave $300.000.000,00 to Trump. And he is so special, eh! He can read air-gaped, highly sensitive data that no one should see from government systems, just using his mind/indoctrinated minions. I hate it when people speculate this might have to do, amongst things, with dark money to be made in intelligence/elite level international crime.
Neither him nor Trump ever hid what Elon was going to do if Trump was elected. Unlike other donators of both parties, we always knew what Elon's goal was. He literally spent the last year on Twitter tweeting about it.
Many people, especially libertarians, voted for Trump for this exact reason.
Yeah, you might think he shouldn't have access to these system but it's the President, who the majority of the people voted for, that has the authority to grant him access, or ask for access from the appoint leaders of these departments.
Everyday when he posts list of things the US government is spending money on the more people are backing Elon in this endeavor.
Go here https://x.com/DOGE and read some of the things we are paying for and you tell me that we should be spending money on it.
Yeah, you might think he up to something bad but you would have always thought that because you don't like him.
Are you sure he's not just an American who cares about the US and doesn't want it too head into a death spiral from massive amount of debt with no one brave enough to stop it because it might cause them to lose an election?
The amount of tax money that goes to the rich in tax cuts, loopholes, and subsidies makes cutting humanitarian aid, school lunches, and your grandmas Medicaid for “efficiency” purely evil nonsense.
We already have departments for improving and reforming spending. Elon and MAGA are inundating you with bad faith justifications for what is ultimately a goal to fund their next round of tax breaks before they expire this year using the working and middle classes as livestock.
I think you are really young, so I am going to give you advice instead: do not open X, it fuels you adrenaline, but it is a trap for the gullible.
If you have honest policies, there is no need to ddos the democratic system, and it certainly does not require a bunch of insanely spoiled Accelerationist billionaires and the killing of science.
That would make the executive orders illegal, or at best invalid. It wouldn't make DOGE illegal. DOGE is private citizens giving their opinions about how the government should work to a politician who happens to be listening to them (for now, but probably not long given that politician's track record for getting into feuds with former allies.)
Citizens voicing their opinions about the government is clear cut First Ammendment activity, of precisely the sort the first ammendment was intended to protect in the first place. People need to get a grip.
> DOGE is private citizens giving their opinions about how the government should work to a politician who happens to be listening to them
No, DOGE was formalized as a division of the US Digital Service. Employees of DOGE are federal government employees. Some of them, like Elon are "Special Government Employees" which is a short-term category and avoids certain disclosures.
Creating DOGE and enabling them to have access to certain IT systems is legal ... but what data, how much control they have, what they can demand of other departments is subject to all sorts of laws and controls which may or may not be being followed at the moment.
Okay, so these citizens are federal employees. Guess what, the First Ammendment still gives them the right to tell politicians what they should be doing.
That sounds weird. I can understand that you cannot take money that was promised for thing X and spend in thing Y but if you can reduce the X spending I don't think there is any issue.
Now I do not know if Congress has explicitly required X to provide certain thing. If they did then there might be some issue if X fails to provide it. It's probably easy to say someone is accountable for it if it's something objective (let's say building for Congress) but if it's subjective it could get tricky.
No wonder everyone always tries to figure out how to spend money if they still have some left before end of the fiscal year. Some individual "I saved us $1 million by shutting down servers we don't use!" Manager "Fuck, now need to quickly figure out some way to spend $1 million..."
That's a much more mundane bureaucratic imperative that exists at every level in every budgeted system. But yeah, that more mundane imperative definitely doesn't help to control costs in the next budget cycle, for sure.
Most of the US Government spending is on things that are fairly fixed and fairly known. There isn't a lot of elastic spending like this, or at least not in a way that really turns a dial.
Correct. But Congress doesn't and didn't ever say "spend $250k on transgender operas." Congress' laws are ambiguous and rely on the administrative state to dish out money to a specific cause. The law probably said something like "promote health policy in the Europe".
The Trump administration will repurpose those funds to things more aligned with GOP preferences.
neither have happened and virtually all employees of USAID have been put on leave at the orders of the acting deputy administrator.
(via CNN) - It is not legal for the president to unilaterally “abolish, move, or consolidate USAID”. He needs to have congressional authorization to do so.
DOGE gets its authority through the president. The president definitely has the authority to audit and/or stop illegal, fraudulent or just wasteful transactions.
The exact shape or form of USAID is also up to the president. It was created through an executive order, and can of course also be transformed through one.
It was consolidated into the Department of State as part of the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998 as an agency with an administrator and responsibility for administrating the distribution of aid under certain preexisting laws. So it is straightforwardly outside of the authority of the president to disband the agency, as Congress has provided that it shall exist. And it is likewise outside of the authority of the president to reduce it to an inactive status, as it has certain Congressionally-established responsibilities that it must perform.
I have seen this regurgitated several times on this site now. This is blatantly false, congress passed a law in 1998 to establish USAID. The EO was made with authority that had been granted by another law.
That law does not allow the President to abolish it:
> Unless abolished pursuant to the reorganization plan submitted under section 6601 of this title, and except as provided in section 6562 of this title, there is within the Executive branch of Government the United States Agency for International Development as an entity described in section 104 of title 5.
The actual law is a high dimensional interaction of all active legislation. Predicting what the legal system will do is hard and often cannot be achieved with high reliability with a google search.
This is why lawyers exist. Presumably doge and trump have access to good lawyers. I’m not asserting that they are right, just that a shallow legal analysis is error prone and looking at a single law likely does not yield useful prediction making capability.
Also malicious compliance is an option. Maybe they could name a single person the official administrator, given them an office in a basement and officially comply, while effectively shutting everything down. The extent to which fulfilling the intent of legislation vs relying on the discretion of the executive to interpret it within, and as a matter of precedent deferring to executive discretion by default in court cases, probably enables many more abuses than have been contemplated prior to this presidency.
Unless they are paying that person in the basement the full funding of what Congress has budgetted for USAID that's Impoundment. If they are then it's still Impoundment because it's been redirected from it's original purpose.
The OP asserted that USAID was created by EO and that the president is free to do what he wants with it. That statement is blatantly false. How does court decide is not relevant to this discussion, because as you said it is speculative.
Well my luck, turns out he can't do transformations either.
> Sec. 7063. (a) Prior Consultation and Notification.--Funds appropriated ... may not be used to implement a reorganization, redesign, or other plan described in subsection (b) by ... the United States Agency for International Development ... without prior consultation ... with the appropriate congressional committees.
> (b) ... a reorganization, redesign, or other plan shall include any action to
> (2) expand, eliminate, consolidate, or downsize the United States official presence overseas ...
> (3) expand or reduce the size of the permanent Civil Service, Foreign Service, eligible family member, and locally employed staff workforce of the Department of State and USAID from the staffing levels previously justified to the Committees on Appropriations for fiscal year 2024.
It's remarkable how much effort some people put into portraying this as a 'highly complex' legal issue. In reality, laws like this one typically include standard boilerplate provisions precisely to prevent situations like the current one, regardless of the administration. A simple Google search is actually enough to establish what one _should do_ here according to the law.
Claiming that this is complex isn't just a matter of disagreement; it's a deliberate distortion of language and intent. This approach dismisses a clear legal bright line in favor of framing the issue through power dynamics and a 'what can I get away with' mindset. Without independent or ethical agents of enforcement or a process that's interested in keeping up, what we can get away with ends up being a lot and will likely be substantially impactful.
DOGE didn’t shut down USAID. Musk talked Trump and Rubio into doing it and they did.
Musk is essentially a presidential advisor, and legally an advisor can advise the President to do pretty much anything. Even if the thing they are advising the President to do is illegal, the President is the one who bears the legal responsibility for the action, not the advisor.
In really extreme cases, like if Musk were advising Trump to commit genocide, or carry out a military coup, or transfer a billion dollars out of US Treasury into someone’s personal bank account, and Trump followed the advice, Musk might be held legally liable for having given it. But shutting down a government agency isn’t anything like that. The legality of shutting it down is debatable, but even if ultimately held to be illegal, it isn’t the genocide or military coup or blatant corruption kind of illegal.
Train vs City of New York is almost as old as Roe v Wade. I wouldn’t assume a 50+ year old precedent would be upheld by today’s majority.
Plus, Train v City of New York didn’t actually consider the constitutionality of the Impoundment Control Act. It was about an impoundment decision made prior to that Act, under the rules in force before it. And although SCOTUS held the EPA’s impoundment action (directed by Nixon) to be illegal in this specific case, they didn’t rule on the validity of impoundments in general. In part, the case turned on the wording of the specific appropriation being impounded, and so it might not apply to another appropriation worded differently. Also, upholding congressional limits on presidential impoundment power in the context of one specific appropriation doesn’t mean they’d necessarily uphold the much broader limits on that power imposed by the Impoundment Control Act.
Another factor is this case was about direct grants to the states. It is plausible that SCOTUS might decide that (following Train), the states have the right to direct grants appropriated to them by Congress, yet still hold the President has some constitutional impoundment right in distinguishable cases
It is not debateable at all, the President has to ask Congress to rescind appropriated funds if the President doesn’t want to spend the money allocated by Congress. If Congress chooses not to rescind the allocated funds, then the president must spend the money.
The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Act of 1974 is explicitly clear about this, there is absolutely no room for debate.
> Title X of the Act, also known as the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, specifies that the president may request that Congress rescind appropriated funds. If both the Senate and the House of Representatives have not approved a rescission proposal (by passing legislation) within forty-five days of continuous session, any funds being withheld must be made available for obligation. Congress is not required to vote on the request and has ignored most presidential requests.
There’s a big difference between a law for which there have been longstanding serious scholarly objections to its constitutionality, and a law whose constitutionality has never been questioned in any serious forum
Really? Because SCOTUS actually ruled the President very well might be immune from any criminal repercussions from mowing down civilians from a helicopter-mounted machine gun.
It hasn’t been tested at the Supreme Court level, no.
However, other presidential administrations have worked within the framework of the law and requested that Congress rescind funding instead of running roughshod over the law and unilaterally attempting to defund programs and canceling spending that was authorized by Congress.
We’ll likely get a Supreme Court case testing the CBIA of 1974, we’ll soon find out what these 9 justices think about it.
>It is not debateable at all, the President has to ask Congress to rescind appropriated funds if the President doesn’t want to spend the money allocated by Congress. If Congress chooses not to rescind the allocated funds, then the president must spend the money.
What people don't understand is that the President is essentially an Administrator (Executer of the laws passed by Congress), not a Decider.
The problem now is that Congress will not impeach or convict him for breaking the law.
Almost every President until Nixon claimed the constitutional right to impound appropriations, and actually did it. And Congress often objected, but what could they do? Until Nixon did it so much, that Congress passed a law against it. And Nixon decided to sign the law, because he wanted to put the controversy over his own impoundments behind him. And from then until now, even if some Presidents questioned the constitutionality of that law, they decided to abide by it. Until finally, now in the second Trump administration, Trump has listened to conservative legal scholars arguing that the law is unconstitutional, and decided to adopt their argument and ignore it. And likely SCOTUS will decide its constitutionality as a result. But you make a decades-old debate sound like something that has a completely obvious answer. If the answer is as simple and obvious as you think it is, how did almost every President up to and including Nixon get it wrong?
From first principles, congress is given power of the purse. If the president can just ignore congress' direction and refuse to use the money they allocated, do you believe that congress still has power of the purse?
From first principles, the American Founding Fathers were largely copying the design of the British system (as they understood it), but with an elected President replacing the King. In the British system, Parliament could stop the King from spending money – but the power was about stopping the King from spending as he liked, not forcing him to spend when he didn't wish to. The English Civil War was fought over the principle that the King couldn't spend money without Parliament's authorisation; the issue of Parliament trying to force the King to spend money when he didn't want to spend it simply never came up.
Hence, look at the Appropriations Clause of the US Constitution (Article I Section 9 Clause 7): "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law..." That's a negative clause, a prohibition on the Executive spending money without legal authorisation; nowhere does it explicitly say that Congress can force the President to spend money when he doesn't want to spend it.
For most of the term's history, "the power of the purse" was understood as the ability of the legislature to limit government spending; the idea that it also entails the ability of the legislature to compel the executive to spend money which it doesn't wish to spend is much newer.
I mean, there are many political leaders who would put Musk in prison in a heartbeat for the DOGE stuff. It's not paranoia. This is separate from "do you think this is illegal", but it's absolutely reasonable, from their perspective, to think that "everyone is after them".
Zero power? Explain that to USAID, Treasury, OPM, and GSA. Actors working on behalf of digital services (i.e. DOGE) are commandeering IT systems and sending out ultimatums to the workforce about complying with their orders at risk of being punished with administrative leave for insubordination. It is a highly unlawful operation that goes far beyond the consult and advise mission you’re alluding to.
My understanding is that most the actions you listed above were performed as standard Executive Orders or OMB Memos. Each one may or may not be illegal, but are being done through a standard channel despite the marketing around DOGE.
The questionable activity sees to be things like the physical and IT system access being given to DOGE employees.
Is anyone aware of direct action by DOGE employees that constitutes orders (vs just being routed to the whitehouse to ship out orders via the EO/OMB)?
I think it is hard power. and also note they had write access, not just read. so if Musk wanted to he could have just straight up deleted all the data. that is real power.
That’s just somebody at the treasury being a moron.
You defined power as soft power and now you want to say actually it’s hard power. It’s not. They can’t give anyone orders and impose consequences for not following them. That’s what hard power is.
Stupid question but don't the Republicans control all branches of government? Couldn't they just declare whatever DOGE is doing legal (if it's indeed illegal)?
Not familiar with "filibuster". Does it mean that Democrats could effectively prevent a potential "DOGE is legal" bill from passing by endlessly debating it?
Originally, yes. These days a "talking filibuster" like that is almost never used, apart from occasionally when someone wants to be dramatic about it.
There's a thing called a vote for cloture, meaning a vote you take about whether to stop debate and vote on the issue. In the US Senate, a cloture vote requires 60 votes (out of 100) to pass. So there's a "procedural filibuster", whereby one side will announce that they're not going to vote for cloture, but the other side won't force them to actually keep talking so the chamber can move on and do other things.
This used to be quite uncommon, and things would regularly become law with a bare 50%+1 majority, but nowadays -- basically since ~2008 -- there's a de-facto "nothing that can't get 60% support in the Senate can become law" rule in effect. With a specific carve-out for a few things that're not allowed to be filibustered, mostly around passing a budget, that are just barely keeping the government functioning.
Personally, I intensely dislike this, and feel like the shift to default-filibuster-everything is a major cause of the growing dissatisfaction with the system that ultimately gave us Trump.
Oh, that would be nice for a change. My understanding is they no longer debate it, they just send an email to the Senate saying "I filibuster" and the bill is tabled.
Congressional inaction isn't assent. The Constitution clearly and explicitly gives the power of the purse to Congress (and this is also the understanding of I think Madison in the Federalist Papers and the interpretation we've had for now almost the entire history of the US so there's no reasonable dispute of this). Until Congress passes a law allowing this the president is constitutionally obligated to take care of the laws passed.
Though you do have a point of even if it's illegal who will enforce it? The courts have started to some but are necessarily reactive and slow.
In what ways is a president restricted from acting like a king when the other two bodies of government meant to act as a check and balance have capitulated any of those checks and essentially give carte blanche to the president?
I'm skeptical that billionaires will tank the very thing from which all their wealth is derived, at least not long term. We will continue to see tremendous short term volatility.
But this is the very thing. In every single financial crisis, the uber wealthy accumulate even more at the expense of everyone else that is loosing everything.
You and I would like to think that, but he's been given carte blanche by the people who should be his checks and balances and the supreme court has made anything he does in the course of his duties legal.
This is all the Curtis Yarvin influence. There is that period in US history that the president was acting more like a king, Taft to FDR. They were doing much more executive orders then that we have been use to the past 80 years.
It all is quite unsettling. Then the fact it is Trump doing this is just something else all together too.
I am a bit worried how the country is going to deal with this level of change. We aren't even 3 weeks in.
I would say yes, insofar as the text and SCOTUS interpretations of the constitution count as law, so anything that violates, for example, the separation of powers would be illegal.
Are we complaining about the millions the feds pay SpaceX for their starlink terminals? Are we concerned about the government subscriptions to Bloomberg feeds?
I'll get rage-y about this one when someone explains what a Politico premium subscription provides and why it was a corrupt purchase. Maybe it's a valid information data service that provides key information to whatever agency purchased it, purchased using an appropriate bidding contract. Or maybe it wasn't.
But the point is show me why that was an inappropriate purchase while Starlink and Bloomberg feeds aren't.
Unfortunately doing that takes investigation and due-process, and it doesn't score the same propaganda points as just yelling "See?! My political opponent had the government as a customer!!"
I assume you're insinuating a politico pro subscription just lets you read clickbait articles without a paywall, and that's unreasonable?
Is that what a pro subscription is? Or does it provide useful data to a government agency that works on the ground in many different countries?
How about show me the government contract for the purchase that outlines what information they're purchasing? Who else bid on it, and why did Politico win? If they don't provide anything beyond clickbait articles, it should be pretty obvious that they were arbitrary chosen over whatever right-leaning competitor also bid on that sweet sweet government bucks. Every government purchase has mounds of paperwork, lets look into what the contract purchaser was actually trying to get from it before deciding this is a partisan bribe. Or does that take too much work and due-process, and we're just trying to score some quick smear-the-opposition rage points?
I'm all against government corruption, but show me this is corruption rather than a reasonable data purchase.
No I'm insinuating that Starlink and Bloomberg are infrastructure, with clear use cases for DoD, the IC, and many many others. No one had really head of Politico Pro until DOGE cut off the subscriptions, and now suddenly it's some critical thing that this government "agency" can't live without when they "work" on the ground in many different countries, like you're claiming. This is despite the fact that we have, ya know, multiple intelligence agencies whose job it is to tell us interesting and useful things about those countries. I don't even know if Politico Pro does that kind of reporting, foreign intelligence. But it doesn't matter, and it doesn't matter if this is corruption either.
> I don't even know if Politico Pro does that kind of reporting
lol, so you don't know what Politico Pro does, but you know it was worthless, and it doesn't matter because the propaganda points have already been scored and the news cycle has turned over.
This is the world you want to be cheerleading for? Really?
You can easily look up examples of Politico Pro online and even try a free trial.
And yes it does look worthless. It provides things like a policy template and other boilerplate which an LLM model can now come up.
Pro also offers many articles from their "experts" that happen to be fresh out of college with liberal arts degrees. Quite the irony when the Politico proponents are up in arms about the age of the DOGE members.
Not sure how much more clear I can be, you appear to be arguing with a strawman. I think if Politico Pro was some sort of critical infrastructure that the United States Government needed to operate we would've all heard of it before this. Politico would've advertised it as such.
I don't think you understand how much contracting and paperwork goes into any kind of government purchase.
I've flirted with government contracts before, and I've worked with large information-as-a-service providers before. So I understand the value of niche information providers. I'm not a policy guy, so I don't know what kind of information a policy-heavy government group needs, but it sounds like a completely plausible service to me.
Given the Occam's Razor between "government bureaucracy-levels of contracting and oversight required to do any purchase still resulted in a corrupt money-handoff" and "Elon's got a tendancy towards theatrics and smearing the political opposition, so he's using this to tickle people's amygdala and move on before people look too closely at it", I'm going with the latter.
Prove to me that the niche job functions of the people who purchased this didn't actually require any of this information using the mounds of contracting paperwork that surely exist, or just admit that proving it was never the point and it was all about outrage theatrics before people bothered to do the actual work of looking into this.
I've managed Gov contracts before, but I've never used services like this, so fair enough I'm not an "expert" in what exactly it is they provide, if that's what you're asking. But I certainly know what the bureaucratic side of things looks like. For your razor, what makes you think both things are not true? Usually when I construct a razor the two options are, at least partially, mutually exclusive. In yours it's certainly plausible that there was some back-scratching going on, and that Elon is using this opportunity to grind his axe.
have them audited by the Office of the Inspector General.
Which is not very easy right now as Trump illegally fired many of them across 17 different offices.
The illegality and unconsitutionalism of the actions being taken to dismantle agencies and placement private citizens without background checks or proper auditing / security procedures inside of highly critical and often classified systems are the issue, not whether or not USAID should be audited or abolished. There are proper channels for that. they are being bypassed (even though fully available to the President with all three branches of government in Republican control).
Since we are doing whataboutism, let's also bring up the ~$1 trillion PPP program, ripe with fraud, enabled and designed by Donald Trump, which helped kick off the current wave of inflation.
>The cost per job saved for one year was $169,000 to $258,000, which was much higher than the average amount—$58,200—paid in wages and benefits to small-business employees in 2020. [1]
I assume that federal employees are also allowed to disobey "obviously illegal" orders, but I suppose the difference is that they can be retaliated against. Its odd that the president can act out of his authority and make orders that illegal, but still be able to fire the people who won't do those things.
In the case of USAID workers, its entirely possible that the organization will be explicitly NOT under executive authority (my understanding is that they are a legislative branch creation).... but I guess the executive branch can still order them to stop working and return to the US? Its all very murky
Tesla's value gives Elon his money which also gives him his power. For obvious reasons Elon is VERY associated with Tesla. People are viewing purchasing a Tesla as giving Elon money, which isn't totally wrong but isn't as direct as people as saying either.
In the case of Tesla the threat is Elon himself and how he chooses to use his power. The cars (in my opinion) are not a threat IRT surveillance etc. I think its easy enough to cover the cameras etc. Of course I can be wrong, as I often am.
In the case of Starlink.... being able to use communication and internet access during an emergency to make money, or use it for influence is pretty powerful. particularly as the US govt (which Elon is a part of) pivots towards an alliance with Russia, starlink is a massive liability that Ukraine cannot count on AT ALL. Nothing is stopping Elon from pulling access to starlink at the behest of Putin. America is already pausing anti-russian activity IRT cyber attacks etc under the guise of "good faith during active negotiations". Why wouldn't starlink be next? Why can't starlink be used to suppress access to things. Remember the stories about ISPs injecting ads into content that they didn't own? Why can't starlink just start serving propaganda and misinformation instead of actual content?
These are a threat because they are not being used for the good of humanity and civilization. Elon has deluded himself into thinking that he knows what is best for the world and is using his power/money/influence/technology to assert those ideas and opinions onto the world.
Until we have literally any evidence to the contrary, Elon, Trump, and Putin can all be named interchangeably