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Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

DOGE makes recommendations to the president, who has the final decision making authority.

The rest is pure speculation. “It is very reasonable to believe this thing that confirms all my biases so therefore it must be true”

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I would argue that developing those recommendations is a "safety critical" task. Especially given that just in the past few days they accidentally fired, then re-hired, a bunch of nuclear weapons safety workers.

That is the MO. Elon has stated publicly that if you don’t have to put something back, you haven’t cut enough. That is the idea. You cut things and see what was necessary.

That might work if you're slashing headcount at a social media company (though I would argue that it doesn't), but the stakes are a bit higher when you're responsible for things like feeding hungry people, curing disease, or keeping planes in the sky.

Worth noticing that it _doesn't even work at a social media company_. Twitter is a husk of its former self, with all the problems that were if not solved, at least mitigated, back in full force (child porn, bots, impersonators). It's just kept alive because it's a honeypot for right wing nutjobs now (which I'm sure can't read an SEC filing and will claim it's "operating better than before").

It'll be a disaster for the soon-to-be-previous most powerful country on earth...

you can't do that in government and services people rely on to you know, live. people will die (and i wouldn't be surprised if some already have)

shows a total disregard for the wellbeing of others

> DOGE makes recommendations to the president, who has the final decision making authority.

It's clearly being run by Elon Musk, but he has not been nominated or confirmed for any official position.

DOGE appears to have unprecedented access to systems that usually have safeguards in place. What do you think people should do in this situation if they are concerned about abuse of power?

DOGE is a rebranding of USDS which was established under Obama. All their authority to access systems derives from that.

They have read-only access to systems and the “abuses” seem to be publicly posting what the government is spending money on.

Why do you think it’s a problem for the public to know where the government spends money?

Government spending is mostly already public information. Ironically, it's DOGE itself which is trying it's best to act in secrecy.

The details of said spending is very much not public, and even if it was (it’s not) - it’s not accessible. If it's not true, would love to see links where I can see everything easily.

If they are cloaked in secrecy how do you know what you’re even mad about? The people who are tweeting everything they do are acting in secret?

If all they are doing is posting information that was already public then what exactly is your problem?

> If they are cloaked in secrecy how do you know what you’re even mad about?

Do you hear yourself?

Name a specific thing you would like to know about DOGE that is not publicly disclosed.

I could go into details (What are they doing to ensure data privacy? Can/do they exfiltrate data and run it through external AI models? What kind of security clearances do the children of DOGE have?).

But just on the surface, Elon has accused a journalist who published the name of DOGE employees of breaking the law. If it were up to them, even that would be kept secret. This is not a transparent organization.

>Name a specific thing you would like to know about DOGE that is not publicly disclosed.

Why one of the guys working for it was running a dodgy image sharing website and has links to cycbercrime and CSAM?

and why Elon called the journos that revealed these links criminals?

> DOGE is a rebranding of USDS which was established under Obama. All their authority to access systems derives from that.

OK I actually know what this is and no, it's absolutely nothing like the USDS, which builds tools to support government processes. What has DOGE built?

> Why do you think it’s a problem for the public to know where the government spends money?

I would very much like to see transparency, and if that were what DOGE was doing it would be great. But it looks to me like they're operating in secrecy and firing huge numbers of people before publishing any kind of analysis or study, without even providing reasoning for what they're doing.

> What has DOGE built?

They built a portal to look at government spending, which is both worse than the existing visualizations, and did not put authentication in front of it's database. https://www.theverge.com/news/612865/doge-government-website...

> DOGE makes recommendations to the president

Trump is so far gone in his dementia, he can't even make eye contact anymore. You see this in all the videos. He's basically King Théoden at this point. Not even Musk's kid respects him.

He's so disabled, he's sending his VP to do the job, and we all know how much of a paranoid child he is, from the past term (when he went into a Colonoscopy without anesthesia just to not have to give the nuclear codes to the VP).

>DOGE makes recommendations to the president,

Yeah but Elon is your president now.

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