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Comment by cynicalsecurity | Hacker News Reader

People voted for this, didn't they?

> People voted for this

Quite literally, no. Elez (the 25-year old) reports to Musk. There is nobody elected above him.

Bessent, hours before this broke, claimed he "signed off on a plan to give 'read-only' access to the payment system to a team led by Tom Krause" [1]. This kid allegedly had write access. And he doesn't report to Krause. He should be getting arrested on espionage charges.

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/03/bessent-musk-doge-t...

I think the Executive has signed off on it. It's not like Trump would personally do these things. He has partnered with the best and brightest to implement the vision for America that the majority of voters asked for. Like it or not, it's how elections work.

That is not how elections work. Elections do not override existing law. Otherwise you could easily get a dictator who says "I am legitimately elected therefore there it is the will of the people that there are no more elections"

But you said "best and brightest" so I'm assuming you're trolling.

Good chance a lot of the "laws" that prevent the executive from taking actions are probably unconstitutional anyways. The constitution is pretty clear on this and the current executive is within its boundaries, even if various congresses made illegal laws to prevent these types of actions after FDR used them.

lets not forget that Trump created a new department and put Elon in charge, the DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY. With that in mind Musk can hire anyone he wants yes? Trump gave Elon the clearances and powers needed to do this work. It's no different in my opinion than the CIA hiring confidential sources or the FBI hiring contractors.

I mean Elon isn't going to personally do the work as department head...

> Trump gave Elon the clearances and powers needed to do this work

Where? Trump gave Elon SGE status, nothing more.

Also, there are statues that Trump can’t unilaterally void. That isn’t practically relevant for Trump. But it is legally relevant for these kids—they’re illegally accessing government servers.

> no different in my opinion than the CIA hiring confidential sources or the FBI hiring contractors

If the CIA or FBI were breaking into the Treasury, we’d have an analogy.

I don't recall seeing this mentioned in any campaigning, so no, people did not vote for it.

And even if this were understood to have been what voting trump meant, that is only 77M out of 334M people in America.

DOGE did feature prominently in the campaigning and some of us did vote for the full package primarily holding our nose on other parts of the campaign that we were not happy with specifically because we wanted to see this happen.

"that is only 77M out of 334M people in America" What's your point here? Our system is set up to give outsized power to whoever secures a majority of the electors. There may be a better alternative but are you complaining about the system being flawed or complaining that the numbers didn't go your way? The rest of us also had to put up with decisions under previous administrations that we didn't appreciate despite only a similar number of people actually voting for the administration.

> The rest of us also had to put up with decisions under previous administrations that we didn't appreciate despite only a similar number of people actually voting for the administration.

That's actually a little rich in this case, considering how few Republicans accept the results of the 2020 election.

Hospitals still treat people who shoot themselves in the foot, some times people make mistakes, crazy how there is no mechanism to correct this though.

There is. It's Congress and impeachment. That won't happen but the mechanism is there.

He also doesn't fear impeachment, zero impact to him or his position.

I know. I'm just saying, that's the mechanism for this. You could argue there should be other routes and other mechanisms and I agree.

I mean, I would assume that even many people who voted for ol' minihands are at least... somewhat surprised that _this_ is happening. Even as a committed minihands-sceptic, I'm a little surprised; he's really upping the absurdity factor quite a lot in term 2. Whoever's the next president of the US will presumably spend their whole term cleaning up the mess.

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