Jump to content

Recommended Posts

Posted
22 minutes ago, InkaUtexas said:

They will just lock the computers.

Ironically, the aging computer systems may actually be their salvation. Like straight outta Battlestar Galactica lol. The invaders don't know how to use the old systems so they overlook them

  • Hook 'Em 3
  • Haha 3
  • Drool 1
Posted

I took the deferred resignation/retirement offer and my last day was last Thursday so fortunately don't have to deal with this nonsense.  Am hearing from people I worked with that they were told not to respond until further guidance given, but start working on your bullet points.  That's in Dept. of Commerce.

  • Hook 'Em 1
  • Rage+1 5
  • Fuck Around and Find Out 1
Posted
1 minute ago, South Austin said:

I'm looking forward to Musk's response to life-tenured federal judges across the county instructing their staffs to ignore the productivity emails. 

Fire the judges?

Posted
Just now, InkaUtexas said:

Fire the judges?

I mean, it's certainly a real possibility, and all the more reason to hasten a "shit's going down" event sooner rather than later.  But my guess is that this goes into another sheepish announcement of "Whoops, my bad," and Elon goes onto another episode of fuckery.

  • Hook 'Em 1
  • Rage+1 1
Posted
43 minutes ago, Captainant said:

Ironically, the aging computer systems may actually be their salvation. Like straight outta Battlestar Galactica lol. The invaders don't know how to use the old systems so they overlook them

Kinda like the Russians taking to the sewers in defense of Stalingrad.  

  • Drool 1
Posted
10 minutes ago, South Austin said:

I'm looking forward to Musk's response to life-tenured federal judges across the county instructing their staffs to ignore the productivity emails. 

I bet many judges don't look to pick admin/paperwork fights so I could see them telling their staff to reply. Where it gets interesting is when a 19 year old developer decides to tell a judge that his entire staff is being fired for poor results.

Posted
8 minutes ago, South Austin said:

I mean, it's certainly a real possibility, and all the more reason to hasten a "shit's going down" event sooner rather than later.  But my guess is that this goes into another sheepish announcement of "Whoops, my bad," and Elon goes onto another episode of fuckery.

 

Germany 1933

when does the orange dumb ass change his title to 'dear leader' ?

Posted
2 minutes ago, tx 3 putt said:

Germany 1933

when does the orange dumb ass change his title to 'dear leader' ?

Unfortunately, most people in this country have no idea what you're talking about when you say, "Germany 1933."

Posted
16 hours ago, Gravy Train said:

 

Since Congress willfully allows the private sector to market our data for-profilt, I also suggest maintaining the top-level feature set of Optery or DeleteMe, to let their automation keep your E-mail, phone number, and mailing address out of these databrokers.  The least-expensive and hands-off service is EasyOptOuts, as a $20 annual subscription.

Which one of these have you used? I did a little bit of digging through reviews and created an Optery account but I'm a little leery of giving them some of the information they requested.

Posted
13 minutes ago, Nivek said:

First they will start with the SCOTUS, and reduce that to only approved judges.  

McConnell already did that for them.

  • Hook 'Em 1
  • Rage+1 1
Posted

Worth your time.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/02/24/musk-doge-usaid-cuts-dc/

Spoiler

 washingtonpost.com
The blinding contempt of the DOGE bros
Matt Bai
14–17 minutes

More often than not, when conquering armies storm across borders or into rebel strongholds, they set about finding ways to humiliate the people they find there. They are capricious and cruel. They want their enemies to understand their own insignificance.

In Elon Musk’s siege on Washington, the first village taken was the U.S. Agency for International Development, which dispensed roughly $32 billion in foreign aid last year (or less than half a percent of the federal budget). And for four weeks now, his U.S DOGE Service has made a chilling example of the people who served there.

I recently had a series of conversations with a senior USAID staff member who witnessed the agency’s takeover from the inside. (I’d love to have asked DOGE, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency, about these events, but despite Musk’s grand claim of historic transparency, his department has no contact with the media beyond self-serving social media posts.)

A DOGE official first arrived at USAID’s offices on Jan. 27, a week after Donald Trump’s inauguration. Late that night, a group of senior employees was hastily summoned to a teleconference with the two men who were to become their DOGE-era overlords: Luke Farritor and Gavin Kliger.

Farritor, 23, is a former SpaceX intern and University of Nebraska dropout who became famous in the tech world for having been part of a team that decoded an ancient Roman scroll. Kliger, 25, is a deep-state conspiracist on social media who, according to Wired, attended Berkeley and worked for an AI start-up. (He’s also the guy Musk has now installed at the Treasury Department.)

Follow Matt Bai

Farritor and Kliger appeared to USAID staff as remote figures on a computer screen, bringing to mind the “Wizard of Oz.” They wore T-shirts and polos and seemed to be Zooming from their offices in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House. They were unfailingly civil but not much for listening.

The first thing they did, in a series of calls and emails, was to gather information about how the agency’s bills were paid and where the data was stored. They demanded and were given access to the payment system, but only on what you might think of as a “read only” basis; according to the official I talked to, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retribution, they could not, initially, alter any transactions. Trump had decreed a freeze on all USAID spending five days earlier, and the two DOGE bros, as the staff would come to call them, wanted to make sure that order was being followed.

The cordial atmosphere darkened three days later, on Jan. 30, when White House officials learned that some USAID grantees overseas had somehow gotten paid through the Health and Human Services Department after Trump issued his order. The White House team believed USAID had been secretly funneling money through fellow bureaucrats in the labyrinth of deep-state agencies. This is what Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and nominal head of USAID, was talking about when he told reporters traveling with him in Panama that the agency’s staff had been “insubordinate” and needed to be brought to heel.

In fact, the explanation here, like the explanations for most things in government, was pretty mundane. It turns out that most of the government’s humanitarian grants — as opposed to contractor payments — are administered through HHS. (Ironically, this is an efficiency measure, because it creates a central storehouse for multiple agencies’ grants.) USAID staff wasn’t going behind anyone’s back to disburse the grant money; it’s just that no one had told HHS to shut off the spigot.

You can imagine, though, that DOGE didn’t have much use for the boring government realities here. Musk’s team needed a pretext for gutting the agency, and they decided they had one.

The White House immediately decapitated the agency, putting 65 senior staff members on administrative leave. In internal conversations with senior staff, Farritor and Kliger demanded that all senior managers be stripped of their power to authorize payments — and that they alone become the authorizers.

The most public clash at USAID revolved around DOGE officials who showed up at USAID headquarters at the Ronald Reagan Building and demanded access to its sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, where confidential records are stored; three officials who refused to let them in were either fired or resigned. Out of view, though, the agency’s most essential humanitarian programs overseas became the object of a weeks-long standoff between the State Department and DOGE.

Rubio had decreed that certain critical programs — such as aid to Ukraine and Syria and costs related to the PEPFAR program to combat HIV in Africa — would continue to be funded. Several times, USAID managers prepared packages of these payments and got the agency’s interim leaders to sign off on them with support from the White House.

But each time, using their new gatekeeping powers and clearly acting on orders from Musk or one of his lieutenants, Farritor and Kliger would veto the payments — a process that required them to manually check boxes in the payment system one at a time, the same tedious way you probably pay your bills online. Meanwhile, AIDS clinics shuttered and staff found themselves stranded in unstable countries like Congo. A pregnant woman in an undisclosed country has sued the Trump administration because she was denied a Medevac helicopter. In another case, I was told, an employee in southern Africa who needed chemotherapy was also denied a chopper because no one would authorize the money.

One night, as staff tried yet again to assemble a list of necessary payments, the agency’s computer network went down for two hours. When it came back on, members of the IT team whispered to colleagues to be wary; during the outage, they believed, spyware had been installed on the network to monitor communication among employees.

Finally, on the second Saturday in February, the two IT guys from DOGE shut everyone else out of the payment system entirely. They were now the only people who could even see the payments waiting to be approved. Hardly any of the essential funding promised by Rubio had been processed as of last week.

All this rigmarole over paying bills probably seems arcane compared with, say, mass firings or forced resignations at the Justice Department. But if you step back for a moment, what’s happened at USAID over the past couple of weeks is unfathomable. A $50 billion agency — funded by taxpayers, empowered by Congress and employing something like 11,000 people around the world — is now tightly controlled by a handful of 20-something software engineers who have never worked a day in government. They disregard promises from the American secretary of state while agonized policy experts stand by helplessly.

In the coming weeks, courts will have to decide if those engineers and their billionaire boss had the right to fire pretty much everybody who worked at USAID. If I were betting (admittedly, this would have to be one very un-fun gambling site), I would wager that a year from now the agency itself will have disappeared, with much of its programs and staff continuing on at State. All of which probably could have been achieved in a more orderly and humane way had the agency been allowed to wind down more gradually under Rubio’s supervision.

Maybe this unsettles Farritor and Kliger on some level — maybe they toss and turn on leather couches in the Eisenhower Building, troubled by a suspicion that Musk has them doing things they will one day regret. But I doubt it. Like young revolutionaries everywhere, Musk’s former interns are probably swept up in the cause, reveling in the power to torture a bureaucracy they’ve been taught to loathe. Humiliating career public servants isn’t some accidental by-product of the quest for efficiency. It seems to be the point of the exercise.

The swift sacking of USAID shook official Washington and set the tone for how DOGE would attack the rest of the government, starting with the Education Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. For me, it raises a fundamental question about Musk’s work, and I don’t think I’m alone in asking it. Is it what Musk is trying to do that makes me recoil — or is it the way in which he’s doing it? Is it even possible to separate the substance here from the style?

After all, in the abstract, most critics of an ever-expanding federal bureaucracy — and I’m solidly among them — would be open to bold moves like folding USAID into the State Department or padlocking the Education Department. If anything, as I’ve written, I’d like to see Musk take on even more controversial fights, like modernizing the entitlement programs that are the drivers of unsustainable debt or overhauling the corrupt and outdated system by which the Pentagon gets its weapons. You don’t have to work hard to convince me that we have too many agencies and too many low-impact programs.

But does this really need to be done — can it be done effectively at all — by branding lifelong public servants as “criminals” and making them suffer for sport? What’s the perverse joy to be had in making some of the foremost experts in their fields prostrate themselves before a couple of grad-school-level coders who probably couldn’t find Congo on a map?

Here’s a thought exercise: Let’s imagine for the moment that Kamala Harris had won the presidency, and she had immediately gone out and recruited, say, Mark Cuban to reprise Al Gore’s old mission of “reinventing government.” Let’s imagine that Cuban brought with him to Washington a cadre of young, idealistic MBAs, and in the first week they held meetings at some small agency and very respectfully asked for their personnel and payment records, so they could suggest some meaningful reforms. And let’s say the agency told them to go to hell.

Would all of us who believe in the value of government service be jumping up and down and screaming about breaches of protocol and congressional prerogative? Or would we be saying: Who are these bureaucrats to think they can deny the president access to anything?

The problem isn’t that Musk has been given a brief to reassess program and budgets; it’s that he evinces no real intellectual interest in any of these things. Musk — who, according to biographer Walter Isaacson, calls other people “stupid” the way most of us say “please” or “thank you” — seems to have chosen his hires not for any remotely relevant experience but rather to send a message about how little respect he has for public service generally. A couple of my interns can do this better than all of you. Posting on X, Musk said it was time for USAID to die and crowed about feeding it to a wood chipper. It’s impossible to overstate the level of his contempt.

You can ascribe that contempt to right-wing or libertarian political ideology, but I’m guessing it has at least as much to do with the tech industry generally. From the moment Silicon Valley exploded in the 1990s, and probably before that, its leading denizens have subscribed to a kind of techno-chauvinism — a belief that only engineers know how to solve the problems of humankind, and if you work for the government, then you can’t be very smart, so you must be doing everything wrong.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California), whose district includes legendary tech meccas like Cupertino and Sunnyvale, expressed it to me this way: “They have this view that they have more knowledge, more chutzpah, that they are the ones who are moving civilization forward and building new things, that they’re entitled to rule or govern, and that they do a better job of it than democracy.”

No one embodies this idea more fully than Musk and his young adherents. They behave as though the federal government is just some legacy company they acquired for not very much (with Trump as their front man), and now they’re going to shutter it. They marched into USAID as you would march into any newly owned subsidiary on the verge of bankruptcy. They see themselves, I’m sure, as selfless; they could be back west plotting new start-ups and reaping untold billions, but they’ve decided to save their country from mentally challenged bureaucrats instead.

You have to wonder, though, if all that contempt is blinding Musk to the obvious ways in which government agencies aren’t — and shouldn’t be — analogous to bloated companies at all. For one thing, the goal of any company, when you get past all the Messianic blather about changing the world, is to make money for its investors — period. The more efficient you are, the more money everybody makes.

The central goal of government, on the other hand, is to protect its citizens and enforce its laws — and to address the imbalances that a free market can’t. Efficiency is desirable and often lacking for no good reason — but it is not an end in itself.

Why does it take multiple people and several days just to authorize a batch of payments at USAID? Because every agency has a system of checks and balances to make sure the taxpayers aren’t being cheated. Government always trades off some efficiency to safeguard the integrity of the system.

And when you buy a failing company, you own it outright, whereas, in government, Congress is a permanent and coequal board of directors that can’t just be ignored. This is why DOGE’s ransacking of departments has already drawn a raft of legal challenges, some of which will probably be sustained, though that could take months if not longer. Musk’s unelected engineers are unilaterally unmaking decisions that only Congress has the constitutional power to undo.

It would have been easy enough for Trump’s White House to go to its sheep-like caucuses in Congress and ask them to eliminate a bunch of agencies in the next budget. But Trump and Musk wanted the immediate gratification of a blitzkrieg instead, which means they may well end up having to give back some of the territory they so triumphantly seized.

You could argue, and I’m sure Musk would, that such a view is hopelessly naive — that a government that’s been spreading its tentacles slowly for 100-plus years can only be hacked back viciously and all at once, without all the legal niceties that entrenched bureaucracies are adept at exploiting. But my instinct, having been around Washington a lot longer than anyone at DOGE, is that most of what’s done here thoughtlessly and by fiat is generally undone by someone at some point.

Terrorizing an agency really isn’t the same thing as permanently reforming it. Although to Musk and his band of engineers, it might be a lot more fun.
 

 

  • Hook 'Em 5
Posted
13 minutes ago, The Royal We said:

Which one of these have you used? I did a little bit of digging through reviews and created an Optery account but I'm a little leery of giving them some of the information they requested.

I started with EasyOptOuts for a year, then switched to Optery, using their premium service, almost at the one-year mark with them too.  I didn't feel great about it either, but gave them my PII to scrape and also a copy of my Driver's License, assigning them power of attorney for opt-out requests.  Their automations are nice and pulled me out of some of the B2B data brokers as well.  

  • Hook 'Em 2
Posted
3 minutes ago, Gravy Train said:

I started with EasyOptOuts for a year, then switched to Optery, using their premium service, almost at the one-year mark with them too.  I didn't feel great about it either, but gave them my PII to scrape and also a copy of my Driver's License, assigning them power of attorney for opt-out requests.  Their automations are nice and pulled me out of some of the B2B data brokers as well.  

I've been wanting something similar for a while now but never pulled the trigger. My wife got into a car accident 2 weeks ago and someone (body shop, at fault driver's insurance, police?) shared my contact info in a report. I was getting worn out by emails/calls/texts from scammers trying to get me to contact them and give them more information about the accident. Final straw.

Thank you for sharing.

Posted
On 2/21/2025 at 7:23 PM, TwiceHorn said:

DOGE firing people that aren't paid by taxpayers, notably at FDA.  https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-is-firing-federal-workers-who-are-not-funded-by-taxpayers-2025-02-21/

Gonna piss off some big boiz, methinks.  @Murfdogg21

Stryker, Medtronic, Zimmer, Abbott.

 

On 2/22/2025 at 2:12 PM, Murfdogg21 said:

I have been wondering if "annual audits" by FDA that have been 18 months apart since covid will now be more like 2 years. I don't have any new 510k submissions on my immediate horizon. Winning?

 

As best I understand, they are FDA employees but the budget for their salaries are derived from the various fees imposed on device and pharma companies. I don't know if DOGE's plan (lol, like there is a plan) is to reduce the fees, or to cut FDA's budget and the (remaining) fees collected for the employees they kept. Regardless, I hope there is more reasonable and efficient mechanism for FDA approvals and audits when the dust settles.

 

There will be no mechanism for FDA approvals. There will be no approvals necessary. 

Anybody interested in a High Plains Drifter penile implant? Cheap, quick, easy, because no FDA approval process!

 

Posted
2 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

I bet many judges don't look to pick admin/paperwork fights so I could see them telling their staff to reply. Where it gets interesting is when a 19 year old developer decides to tell a judge that his entire staff is being fired for poor results.

Yeah, gonna have to disagree here.  Most federal judges don't tolerate bullshit and all the more so if it comes from a brain damaged idiot like Musk.

  • Hook 'Em 2
  • Haha 1
Posted
3 minutes ago, Valmy77 said:

The concept of shrinking the Federal Government isn't necessarily wrong. Doing it unconstitutionally and at random via corrupt means is not.

The cruelty and humiliation of employees he expresses though just shows the lie that there is any dignity in work anymore. To be a worker is to be shat on and disrespected and just take it like a bitch. The only dignity is in ownership.

Walmart, a job that often requires one to take government benefits to survive on mind you.

 

All work is noble. A job is a job. Blah. Blah. Blah.

  • Hook 'Em 1
Posted
26 minutes ago, Valmy77 said:

The cruelty and humiliation of employees he expresses though just shows the lie that there is any dignity in work anymore. To be a worker is to be shat on and disrespected and just take it like a bitch. The only dignity is in ownership.

Walmart, a job that often requires one to take government benefits to survive on mind you.

 

Class-warfare-C-2011-by-Mike-Luckovich-by-permission-of-Mike-Luckovich-and-Creators.png.e76f893fcfe13e691592f2e1f3f1e5e3.png

  • Hook 'Em 2
  • Like 1
  • Drool 1
Posted
38 minutes ago, David Dennison said:

 

 First, he came for our porn, but i did not speak out because i had a VPN and XNXX, which was not blocked.  Next, they came for our jobs, but I was offered an opportunity to become a batista or a Walmart stocker.

Seriously, fuck this guy.  I really hope Spanberger wipes the floor with this guy this summer.  I'm excited to see what she could do, in that position, and what she could do thereafter. 

  • Hook 'Em 4
  • Like 2
  • Haha 1
  • Fuck Around and Find Out 1
Posted
1 hour ago, Colonel Sanders said:

 First, he came for our porn, but i did not speak out because i had a VPN and XNXX, which was not blocked.  Next, they came for our jobs, but I was offered an opportunity to become a batista or a Walmart stocker.

Seriously, fuck this guy.  I really hope Spanberger wipes the floor with this guy this summer.  I'm excited to see what she could do, in that position, and what she could do thereafter. 

 

Isn't Youngkin term limited?

Posted
45 minutes ago, Macanudo said:

 

Isn't Youngkin term limited?

Yeah Virginia governors can't serve consecutive terms, though I guess he could run again in 2029.

Posted
11 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

My wife's agency was holding their usual 10 am meeting this morning.  A dozen or so managers and other assorted folk.  Was hosted on a Google meet for those who were in other offices.

My wife noticed an odd IP address that was listening in; she pointed it out to everyone in the room, her boss asked who this was to identify themselves, and the connection was immediately terminated by whoever it was.

So, yeah.  

w1U8tgzxlD4h2GSJiTMvgkQcDSq.jpg&f=1&nofb

  • Haha 1
Posted

I wouldn’t exactly call it an unintended consequence, but now that the federal government is no longer following its own laws regarding  advance notice of involuntary separation from employment, it won’t be long before private sector companies will execute immediate layoffs with impunity.

  • Hook 'Em 2
  • Rage+1 1
Posted
3 hours ago, Satchel said:

I wouldn’t exactly call it an unintended consequence, but now that the federal government is no longer following its own laws regarding  advance notice of involuntary separation from employment, it won’t be long before private sector companies will execute immediate layoffs with impunity.

Those protections don’t exist in the private sector in Tx anyhow, how many times in last few months have we heard ppl showing up at Tesla or meta offices and their badge just not working to enter. 

  • Hook 'Em 1
Posted
On 2/23/2025 at 6:39 PM, Horn Dog said:

Since a group of hacker teenagers now have access to all our social security numbers and financial records, Im looking to lock my family members credit access. Anyone doing anything else to protect themselves?

Locked all of that around 2017 and have never unlocked it

Posted

Elon is Schrodinger’s DOGE administrator, both the head of DOGE and not at all related to DOGE depending on who looks in the box.

image.thumb.png.b17d70e57bbc726361f2ea8b71205ec8.png

 

This is a repeated pattern in that all across the agencies there are people in roles who exercise real power beyond their defined titles and boxes.  All administrations do that to some extent, but the scope is unprecedented as is the willingness to not even pretend like there is someone actually correctly exercising authority. 
 

And of course, very dictatorial.  Foreigners will begin playing Kremlinology with this admin although instead of the May Day parade, it’s who is playing golf or sitting at the POTUS table in Mar-a-Largo.

  • Hook 'Em 1
  • Rage+1 5
Posted
2 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Elon is Schrodinger’s DOGE administrator, both the head of DOGE and not at all related to DOGE depending on who looks in the box.

image.thumb.png.b17d70e57bbc726361f2ea8b71205ec8.png

 

 

....it’s who is playing golf or sitting at the POTUS table in Mar-a-Largo.

That was always an issue for 'out' groups (esp in the private sector)--can't join the CC because you're the wrong gender or ethnic group and thus miss the convos & plans that aren't ever 'on the record;' aren't invited to the National Prayer Breakfast (but Russians are); but everyone knows who wields the power and the out groups find out about everything after decisions have been made and damage has been wrought/riches have been gained.

  • Like 2
  • Rage+1 3
Posted
11 hours ago, Bullneck said:

 

 

Cuban can go fuck himself. When your bank account is filled with Miriam Adelson’s cash, you lose all moral high ground.

IMG_2312.thumb.webp.2b57f6c599cfe31048aead6dbc529fe7.webp

  • Hook 'Em 1
  • Like 1
  • Rage+1 1
Posted
17 hours ago, David Dennison said:

 

Lol. Walmart has already warned Tariffs are going to effect their profits, with more to come. What makes you think they're going to be hiring, as opposed to laying off?

  • Hook 'Em 2
  • Fuck Around and Find Out 1
Posted
36 minutes ago, Hagbard Celine said:
Quote

WASHINGTON (AP) — More than 20 civil service employees resigned Tuesday from billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, saying they were refusing to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services.”

“We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations,” the 21 staffers wrote in a joint resignation letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press. “However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments.”

The employees also warned that many of those enlisted by Musk to help him slash the size of the federal government under President Donald Trump’s administration were political ideologues who did not have the necessary skills or experience for the task ahead of them.

The mass resignation of engineers, data scientists and product managers is a temporary setback for Musk and the Republican president’s tech-driven purge of the federal workforce. It comes amid a flurry of court challenges that have sought to stall, stop or unwind their efforts to fire or coerce thousands of government workers out of jobs.

In a statement, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was dismissive of the mass resignation.

“Anyone who thinks protests, lawsuits, and lawfare will deter President Trump must have been sleeping under a rock for the past several years,” Leavitt said. “President Trump will not be deterred from delivering on the promises he made to make our federal government more efficient and more accountable to the hardworking American taxpayers.”


The staffers who resigned worked for what was once known as the United States Digital Service, an office established during President Barack Obama’s administration after the botched rollout of Healthcare.gov, the web portal that millions of Americans use to sign up for insurance plans through the Democrat’s signature health care law.

All had previously held senior roles at such tech companies as Google and Amazon and wrote in their resignation letter that they joined the government out of a sense of duty to public service.

Trump’s empowerment of Musk upended that. The day after Trump’s inauguration, the staffers wrote, they were called into a series of interviews that foreshadowed the secretive and disruptive work of Musk’s’ Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

According to the staffers, people wearing White House visitors’ badges, some of whom would not give their names, grilled the nonpartisan employees about their qualifications and politics. Some made statements that indicated they had a limited technical understanding. Many were young and seemed guided by ideology and fandom of Musk — not improving government technology.

“Several of these interviewers refused to identify themselves, asked questions about political loyalty, attempted to pit colleagues against each other, and demonstrated limited technical ability,” the staffers wrote in their letter. “This process created significant security risks.”

Earlier this month, about 40 staffers in the office were laid off. The firings dealt a devastating blow to the government’s ability to administer and safeguard its own technological footprint, they wrote.

“These highly skilled civil servants were working to modernize Social Security, veterans’ services, tax filing, health care, disaster relief, student aid, and other critical services,” the resignation letter states. “Their removal endangers millions of Americans who rely on these services every day. The sudden loss of their technology expertise makes critical systems and American’s data less safe.”

Those who remained, about 65 staffers, were integrated into DOGE’s government-slashing effort. About a third of them quit Tuesday.

“We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services,” they wrote. “We will not lend our expertise to carry out or legitimize DOGE’s actions.”

The slash-and-burn effort Musk is leading diverges from what was initially outlined by Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign. DOGE, a nod to Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency meme coin, was initially presented as a blue-ribbon commission that would exist outside government.

After the election, however, Musk hinted there was more to come, posting to his social media site, X, “Threat to democracy? Nope, threat to BUREAUCRACY!!!” He has leaned aggressively into the role since.

Last week he stood on stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference gathering outside Washington, where he boasted of his exploits and hoisted a blinged-out, Chinese-made chainsaw above his head that was gifted by Argentinian President Javier Milei.

“This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy,” Musk bellowed from the stage.

Still, Musk has tried to keep technical talent in place, with the bulk of the layoffs in the Digital Service office focused on people in roles like designers, product managers, human resources and contracting staff, according to interviews with current and former staff.

Of the 40 people let go earlier this month, only one was an engineer — an outspoken and politically active staffer name Jonathan Kamens, who said in an interview with the AP that he believes he was fired for publicly endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat, on his personal blog and being critical of Musk in chats with colleagues.

“I believe that Elon Musk is up to no good. And I believe that any data that he gains access to is going to be used for purposes that are inappropriate and harmful to Americans,” Kamens said.

U.S. Digital Service veterans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal, recalled experiencing a similar sort of shock about how government processes worked that Musk and his team are discovering. Over time, many developed an appreciation for why certain things in government had to be treated with more care than in the private sector.

“‘Move fast and break things’ may be acceptable to someone who owns a business and owns the risk. And if things don’t go well, the damage is compartmentalized. But when you break things in government, you’re breaking things that belong to people who didn’t sign up for that,” said Cordell Schachter, who until last month was the chief information officer at the U.S. Department of Transportation.

USDS was established over a decade ago to do things like improving services for veterans, and it helped create a free government-run portal so tax filers did not have to go through third parties like TurboTax. It also devised systems to improve the way the federal government purchased technology.

It has been embroiled in its fair share of bureaucracy fights and agency turf wars with chief information officers across government who resented interlopers treading in their agency’s systems. USDS’ power across government stemmed from the imprimatur of acting on behalf of the White House and its founding mission of improving service for the American people.

___
AP video journalist Rodrique Ngowi contributed from Boston.

___
Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/.

BRIAN SLODYSKO
BRIAN SLODYSKO

 

  • Hook 'Em 1
  • Like 1
Posted
2 hours ago, royiv said:

Cuban can go fuck himself. When your bank account is filled with Miriam Adelson’s cash, you lose all moral high ground.

IMG_2312.thumb.webp.2b57f6c599cfe31048aead6dbc529fe7.webp

Roger Staubach sighting.

  • Rage+1 1
Posted
15 hours ago, Valmy77 said:

Yeah Virginia governors can't serve consecutive terms, though I guess he could run again in 2029.

the Virgnia GOP is going to have a hell of a time defending their policies in November when the 2025 state elections come around. 

  • Hook 'Em 1
  • Fuck Around and Find Out 4
Posted
4 minutes ago, Bateshorn said:

the Virgnia GOP is going to have a hell of a time defending their policies in November when the 2025 state elections come around. 

wayward pines GIF

Posted

https://www.wired.com/story/doge-autorif-mass-firing-government-workers/

 

Quote

Engineers for Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, are working on new software that could assist mass firings of federal workers across government, sources tell WIRED.


The software, called AutoRIF, which stands for Automated Reduction in Force, was first developed by the Department of Defense more than two decades ago. Since then, it’s been updated several times and used by a variety of agencies to expedite reductions in workforce. Screenshots of internal databases reviewed by WIRED show that DOGE operatives have accessed AutoRIF and appear to be editing its code. There is a repository in the Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) enterprise GitHub system titled “autorif” in a space created specifically for the director’s office—where Musk associates have taken charge—soon after Trump took office. Changes were made as recently as this weekend.

 

 

Quote

So far, federal agency firings have been conducted manually, with HR officials combing through employee registries and lists provided by managers, sources tell WIRED. Probationary employees—those who were recently hired, promoted, or otherwise changed roles—have been targeted first, as they lack certain civil service protections that would make them harder to fire. Thousands of workers have been terminated over the last few weeks across multiple agencies. With new software and the use of AI, some government employees fear that large-scale terminations could roll out even more quickly.
 

 

Quote

While DOGE could use AutoRIF as the DOD built it, multiple OPM sources speculated that the Musk-affiliated engineers could be building their own software on top of, or using code from, AutoRIF. In screenshots viewed by WIRED, Riccardo Biasini, a former engineer at Tesla and a director at The Boring Company, has seemingly been tasked with pruning AutoRIF on GitHub, with his name attached to the repository. “Remove obsolete versions of autorif,” one file description authored by a user with Biasini’s username on GitHub says.
Biasini has also been listed as the main point of contact for the government-wide email system created by the Trump administration from within OPM to solicit resignation emails from federal workers.

 

Spoiler

OPM did not immediately respond to requests for comment from WIRED.


In order to conduct RIFs, government HR officials are required to create lists ranking employees who may be subject to firings. AutoRIF does that automatically, a former government HR official tells WIRED. “However, even with the use of any automated system, the OPM guidance says all data has to be confirmed manually and that employees (or their representative) are allowed to examine the registers.” It’s not immediately clear if AutoRIF’s capabilities have been altered either by the Defense Department or DOGE.


The revelation that DOGE is working on AutoRIF comes as it seemingly prepares for its second major round of firings. On Saturday evening, government workers received yet another email purportedly from OPM demanding that they reply detailing what they accomplished in the last week. Some agencies, like the FBI, asked that employees not respond to the message. In a meeting with HR officials on Monday, OPM told agencies they could ignore the email.


In these emails, government workers were asked to lay out five bullet points explaining their top work achievements of the last week. On Monday, NBC News reported that this information would be fed into an unspecified Large Language Model (LLM) that would assess whether an employee was necessary.


Before the first round of probationary firings, Centers for Disease Control managers were tasked with marking workers they deemed as “mission critical” and then sending a list of them up the chain of command ahead of firings, a CDC source tells WIRED.


“CDC went through a very, very deliberate effort to characterize our probationary employees as mission critical or not, and that way we could keep those that would have real impacts to the mission should they get terminated,” they say. “None of that was taken into account. They just sent us a list and said, ‘terminate these employees effective immediately.’”

 



×
×
  • Create New...