I find it wild that apparently there is no law onto which government workers can cling to refuse these requests. Is it all just based on conventions, goodwill and culture?
There is a principal in democracy that there Should Not Be strong institutions that prevent a majority of the population from harming itself with its choices. We balance that against a Supreme Court in the US, but that court is almost uniquely powerful & active in forming policy relative to its place in the rest of the world, and right now, most of it has been appointed by fascists; Ultimately the population will have its say in the long term.
Do you want an extra-democratic body who is capable of telling the population "No"?
I think such a body (which exists in some system) would obviously be nice right now, but I am a lot less convinced that it would be a net positive in general.
If we want to find our way out of this, I suspect a lot of people are going to need to feel directly harmed by this administration, and are going to need to basically erect a strong protest culture out of whole cloth. Something like 5% of the population in the streets can topple an authoritarian regime in the right circumstances, but not the 0.5% we might expect for a "large" protest.
"Do you want an extra-democratic body who is capable of telling the population "No"?"
There's value in having speedbumps that keep 51%* of the population from shooting 100% (or 99%) of the population in the collective foot... or in this case, head. The institutions aren't anti-democratic - they were put together by democratic processes, and each speedbump is usually there for a reason. Sometimes a long-forgotten or no longer good reason, and it needs to be dismantled, also by the same type of processes that put it there. Yes, I want people who won't be easily and summarily dismissed for following the law and regulations even when they're not popular. I want regulations and guardrails that can't just be swept aside by an administration that rotates out every four to eight years. (I'm generalizing a lot here, of course...)
*Really much less than 51%, given that a large percentage of the population doesn't vote, another percentage of the population's vote is suppressed, and another significant percentage of the population is not yet old enough to vote...
>There's value in having speedbumps that keep 51%* of the population from shooting 100% (or 99%) of the population in the collective foot... or in this case, head.
That metaphor breaks down here and is not really applicable. If two people are chained to each other at the ankles, they can both plausibly argue that the only way to save their own life is to take that of the other person. Whining "but I'm the good guy, I deserve to cut off his foot and let him be the one to bleed to death" is asinine.
The solution here is, of course, to not be chained to the other person irreversibly. But any time that is suggested, we hear a bunch of "We're stronger together, that's crazy talk!" And here we are. 330 million people all chained together, and now people are upset that the other team has the hatchets and is menacingly staring at their ankles.
>and another significant percentage of the population is not yet old enough to vote
Not sensible enough to vote. Don't leave that part out.
This isn't 1861, sectionalism isn't strong enough. One part of what's going on here is cities at odds with the countryside, another part is the internet, smartphones, ubiquitous connectivity, filter bubbles. People are physically present in the same locations but they are not eating the same bread and drinking the same water, metaphorically speaking. I recommend looking at this Wikipedia article for a possible best-case scenario: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_exchange_between_Gr...
In the UK, the Prime Minister has a lot less discretionary power, but much more ability to get legislation changed.
So when a political question arises like "should we have net neutrality?" the elected politicians decide and pass legislation.
That's in contrast to the US, where someone decide the executive was granted discretionary power over net neutrality in 1934, several generations before the net was invented. Then the executive decides there will, then won't, then will, then won't, then will, then won't be net neutrality.
> Then the executive decides there will, then won't, then will, then won't, then will, then won't be net neutrality.
It should be noted that the backdrop here is legislative dysfunction: the congress could have resolved network neutrality at any point but that bogged down for ages. Many of the questions around statutory power look like someone trying to do something under existing rules because they see a problem which isn’t going away but legislative attempts have failed.
> There is a principal in democracy that there Should Not Be strong institutions that prevent a majority of the population from harming itself with its choices.
Wrong. Democracy means only majority rule. What you say is true of republics, which the USA is. However no republic can be perfect in this regard, because it's all just human beings. In this case the president is plenipotent within the executive branch, the Congress is in the hands of the same party, and the SCOTUS is largely on the same page, therefore all the institutions in question are not going to stop him unless he does things that are outrageous to the public, keeping in mind that the HN commentariat is a tiny portion of "the public".
For those who tend to fall for right wing talking points:
“There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.”
I really wanted to believe that it would step up to the occasion, but twice now, it didn't.
I don't say such lightly. I genuinely believe that up until very recently, all portents of doom aside, none of the prior elected presidents truly threatened the Republic. Not Bush, not Obama, none of them.
Trump has been the exception. It the electoral college had been working as intended when it was envisioned by the Founders, it would have said "Yeah, I hear you want Trump, but, no." and voted in someone who might be better suited to implement his (rough) ideas.
I'm not completely onboard with the notion of abolishing said college just yet, as I believe that the electoral system prevents a candidate from say, simply winning all of the urban areas, or exploiting some similar demographic divide that would could exist in a pure popular vote system. We're a union of states, not a single monolithic country. And while I might place my bets on a popular vote providing me the results I'd like a majority of the time, I believe broad representation that at least aids towards unity is better than an outright majority. We strive to avoid "tyranny of the majority".
I don't have any easy or simple answers as to what might fix all of this. It may not even be something our "system" can fix, but rather just a lesson we as a country have to learn. Let's hope it's not as painful as prior instances.
> I believe that the electoral system prevents a candidate from say, simply winning all of the urban areas, or exploiting some similar demographic divide that would could exist in a pure popular vote system.
What about simply winning all of the rural areas? Cause that's literally what happened.
Unless you were in the courtroom and heard the evidence, you don't have enough information to have an opinion. The jury heard the evidence, and made their determination.
My experience is that for anyone sufficiently famous and polarizing, there are widespread false allegations. It's hard work to work from primary sources and sort fact from fiction.
It's impractical to check everything, do I tend to do deep dives spot checking a small number of things.
For readers, I'd suggest the same thing here. Disregard claims on the Internet, or even court rulings, and just look at primary evidence. Pick a small number of issues.
I make this statement generically, without prejudice to the outcome here.
I'm not sure what you mean. I generally agree with you — but I think in the case of Trump you have to disregard at least 26 [1] public allegations of rape if you want to give him a pass, blame his fame, or partisanship, or whatever.
Right.. the credulousness of these people is insane. “I can’t believe the guy who said he liked to sneak backstage at the Miss Teen USA pageant and bragged about grabbing women by the pussy would assault someone!”
It's worth noting that Stormy Daniels' description of her encounter with Trump also amounts to rape. I don't think she ever used the word, but it's clearly what she describes.
Ms Daniels said she "blacked out" despite consuming no drugs or alcohol after Mr Trump prevented her from leaving the room by blocking the door. She said she woke up on the bed with her clothes off.
"I was staring at the ceiling and didn't know how I got there, I was trying to think about anything other than what was happening there," Ms Daniels testified.
Ms Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, said she did not tell Mr Trump to stop. "I didn't say anything at all," she said and that she left the hotel room quickly afterwards.
>you have to disregard at least 26 [1] public allegations of rape if you want to give him a pass,
Allegations mean little, and for celebrities they tend to pile up proportionate to their fame. We live in a society that has absolutely no disincentives for false allegations of rape, and that has only grown more true the last few decades.
Instead of disregarding 26 allegations, one has to wonder why anyone would regard them in the first place. Furthermore, for many people, their regard/disregard is highly selective and comes down to the politics of the accused.
There is no incentive to make up allegations against most of those people. But if you make up a false allegation against a presidential candidate, it could cost him the election and move national politics in the direction you favor. How many allegations did Trump have against him before vs. after running for president?
There is no incentive to make up allegations, period. Lying about sexual assault in court is perjury and jeopardizes victims as much as the defendant.
The simpler correlation is that most of the people on that list respect the law and do not consider themselves beyond reproach. Mind you, Tate was fleeing Interpol on human trafficking charges when he was arrested. These men know what they did wrong which is why they lash out when accused instead of respecting due process.
>There is no incentive to make up allegations, period.
That's obviously not true. For example, this woman confessed to making up an sexual assault allegation for political purposes:
>One of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s accusers admitted this week that she made up her lurid tale of a backseat car rape, saying it “was a tactic” to try to derail the judge’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.
>Lying about sexual assault in court is perjury and jeopardizes victims as much as the defendant.
So what? If I make up an allegation against you, there is little risk to me unless you can PROVE I lied. But if the "evidence" against you is just my word, what can you do with that to establish that I am lying?
I think your argument is spot on, but there is important context which can be revealed by doing the same list for assassination attempts. Trump is qualitatively different from these other people - it just isn't because he is famous and polarising.
And Vladamir Putin (0), seriously? Good luck to anyone who attempts to make a public accusation against him. There will be a fatal fall through a window in their future. He could have raped 200 women and nobody would say a thing.
Trump has explicitly said he is above the law: "He who saves the country cannot break the law" is what he posted.
He pardoned people who stormed the capital, threatened gov officials, and killed police officers. Pardoning DOGE employees is child's play -- but it would never get that far because the DOJ and FBI have been purged of those not fully subservient to Trump.
In that case, can't the next president just illegally imprison Elon or trump or whoever for their entire administration, ignore supreme court rulings or lawsuits or whatever, and then issue themselves a pardon at the end?
Yes, and restrict the 2nd amendment by fiat, etc...
But Democrats "play nice" and respect the law. Biden could have ordered Trump assassinated as soon as the Supreme Court invented the new interpretation that puts president on a piedestal, but he was never going to do it.
That's the problem with the argument that Republicans need to be careful about setting precedents that Democrats will then also abuse: no Republican believes that any Democratic president will actually do this. In fact, a lot of Republicans probably don't believe that there will ever be another Democratic president.
Based on last year's Supreme Court rulings and what Trump/DOGE have gotten away with thus far, it'd seem so. However, democrats insist on wearing kid gloves to a chainsaw massacre, so don't count on anything like that (or, more realistically, within a lesser order of magnitude) ever happening.
What I found significant here is that Trump (yesterday) and/or the Whitehouse stated that Elon Musk does not work for Doge and has no authority over it at all, that Elon Musk has no authority regarding anything and is solely an advisor to the president.
Of course, in practical terms "in the field" this is obviously not the case. But I wouldn't be surprised if it was Elon's ego that triggered this: that at the end of the day needing a pardon would be an insult and would bruise his ego so he wants to prevent any pathway for him to be charged with a crime. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know if the Doge "interns" would need one regardless.
Cynically, Trump and Musk are using each other. They both want huge swaths of the federal government dismantled—Trump found his whims stymied by laws and regulations and the bureaucrats who abide by them in his first administration, while federal regulations are constraining both Tesla (cars should work and be safe) and Space-X (starships blowing up shouldn’t pollute, Starlink shouldn’t clutter space, etc).
Musk is stealing the spotlight. At the appropriate time, Trump can fire him and blame him for overstepping his bounds—I have already seen this talking point privately from GOP operatives. They’ll both have gotten what they wanted, and we’ll all be stuck footing the bill.
And when you have an executive on one hand stating that only the president and the AG can interpret laws for the executive [0] and that you can't break laws if you're "saving the country" [1], that approach also just doesn't seem too promising.
Or, as JD Vance wrote, "Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power." (https://x.com/JDVance/status/1888607143030391287). You really have to read it twice to understand just how far out that phrase is. So now it's the executive itself deciding what's "legitimate" (=conforming to the law), not the courts, whose role it is to interpret and enforce laws?
Yeah, if we (even in other countries) weren't all personally affected by it, I couldn't stop laughing. The way things are, I'd rather go with Max Liebermann, who reportedly commented on the previous wave of fascism with the words "I couldn't eat as much as I would like to throw up" ("Ich kann gar nicht soviel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte" - https://www.aphorismen.de/zitat/93763).
Agencies all have their own lawyers, and it’s frequently useful to have them hash out agreements for the same reason that it’s useful for scientists to get peer review. Beyond the basic efficiency argument, it’s good to have multiple people validate your reasoning.
Perhaps why 'easy for me to say' was the first part.
Would be interesting to know if the poster would financially support a person in an UNSTABLE position, to, you know, Unite the States in opposition to what's an authoritarian and approaching a fascist dictatorship?
> Whoever knowingly and willfully communicates, furnishes, transmits, or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes, or uses in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States or for the benefit of any foreign government to the detriment of the United States any classified information— […]
CIGIE has done similar stuff in the past, it was created under George W Bush
> continually identifies, reviews, and discusses areas of weakness and vulnerability in Federal programs and operations with respect to fraud, waste, and abuse;
> develops plans for coordinated, Government wide activities that address these problems and promote economy and efficiency in Federal programs and operations, including interagency and inter-entity audit, investigation, inspection, and evaluation programs and projects to deal efficiently and effectively with those problems concerning fraud and waste that exceed the capability or jurisdiction of an individual agency or entity;
Clearance does not allow indiscriminate access, it just means you are theoretically trustable. You still need a reason to access the data, usually negotiated with the data owners, who is legally responsible for protecting the data. DOGE has bypassed all of that to just hoover up whatever they can.
Not really, whoever allows access could be prosecuted for failing any of a number of laws and regs for just rolling over so it would come down to a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. The proper way to do it would be to work through both the organization's chain of command and send clearances through the security chain. Maybe that's being followed, but given the stories and timelines, I doubt it- Musk's war boys wouldn't even have time to obtain a clearance from scratch 3 weeks into the administration.
There is no "damned if you do, damned if you don't." The President and agency directory have authorized and ordered it. Career bureaucrats are not legally required to resist their bosses because they disagree with them.
Anyone who has a clearance has signed numerous statements acknowledging their personal responsibility to protect the information in their care. If you want access, follow the procedures, then that responsibility is fulfilled. And if DOGE posts whatever to some unsecured S3 bucket its on them, not the bureaucrat (well, let's be real, contractor) who let them in.
Statutes can't really constrain the president's authority to do this sort of thing (firing appointees, firing employees for cause, laying people off, auditing the executive agencies). Constitutionally the president is just plenipotent within the executive branch.
The enforcement of these laws should be a function of the executive. There are ways for the supreme court or congress to intervene when the executive isn't doing their job. Sadly that requires them to believe a series of checks and balances is necessary.
Given that it is down to the voters, and they thought a racist, rapist, conman should be president giving them the power of the executive - which has been growing increasingly powerful for my adult lifetime.
It seems the only thing the supreme Court can do now days is rule if something is unconstitutional or if a last has been broken. But has no check on the executive according to the regimes arguments. The only check is for Congress to impeach and convict apparently. And there are too many demagogue followers in those changes for that to ever happen.
The real check here is for congress to write laws that are actually specific in their text. That is hard, though, so they instead write laws that empower parts of the executive branch to do some broadly-defined thing, including the power to make the relevant rules. When you get an executive who doesn't play your game, those poorly-written laws come back to bite you.
You're effectively says Congress should mandate every detail of every regulation. Even in areas where knowledge is changing (level of chemicals that are toxic, which medicines are useful and safe, etc).
The whole premise of our system is that the people within the system operate in good faith. And that's worked for most of 200+ years. I would posit that no amount of legislation will be able to stop bad-faith actors from screwing up the system, even more so when they convince ~50% of the voting popular that "burn it to the ground" is a reasonable take.
> You're effectively says Congress should mandate every detail of every regulation. Even in areas where knowledge is changing (level of chemicals that are toxic, which medicines are useful and safe, etc).
The scientific advisors who currently make rules at the EPA (to name one example) probably should have been giving advice to congress to make laws instead. Congress can pass an annual bill of "here's the new science." They already pass laws of unimaginable length and complexity, so I see no reason why Congress can't pass a huge omnibus "these chemicals are bad" bill every year, even if that bill is 5000-10000 pages.
By the way, speaking of the EPA, there's a lot of whiplash in that arm of government based on which party holds the presidency. If the EPA's rules were actual laws, they would need a much stronger mandate from the people to change. IMO this would be better for both environmental protection (since you don't have the party of "drill baby drill" arbitrarily changing things whenever they want) and for business because there is more certainty.
> The whole premise of our system is that the people within the system operate in good faith.
The whole premise of the American system of government is that power corrupts and a functioning government needs a series of working checks and balances. One arm of America's tripartite government has ceded most of its real power to another arm. This mostly works because the people who get into that other branch (presidents) want to play an iterated game, where burning things to the ground doesn't benefit them. We are seeing what happens when you have someone in power who is playing to win this round without regard for the iterated game.
The scientific advisors who currently make rules at the EPA (to name one example) probably should have been giving advice to congress to make laws instead. Congress can pass an annual bill of "here's the new science."
All that would do is transfer power from bureaucrats within the executive to bureaucrats within the legislature. No Congressperson is fully knowledgeable on all the areas on which they pass laws. Maybe it is a better approach than what we have today, but I'm unconvinced. At least with the system we have today, the bureaucrats are generally experts within their areas. Congressional staffers have no such experience and generally rely on lobbyists.
The transfer of where the bureaucrats work is exactly what I am proposing, and has very significant differences in terms of the mechanics of government. A law has much more binding power over the executive branch than a rule made by the executive branch, and if the last month hasn't convinced you of that, I don't know what will. Laws can also establish private causes of action that require no intervention from a bad-faith executive to enforce. Congress today already has no knowledge of the laws they pass, anyway.
Good points. My next concern would be the churn inherent in such a system.
Every two years, the entire House and 1/3 of the Senate is re-elected. That doesn't give much time for a bureaucrat to gain experience before needed to concentrate on the re-election of their benefactor (I use that word purposefully here, because the US did away with patronage for career bureaucrats in the executive in the late 19th century - no such rules exist in the legislative).
The executive branch churns every 4 years, and is forced to churn at least every 8 years. In practice, it's not a concern, and it wouldn't be under congress, either.
Think about this in good faith and try to make it work in your head, and you will see that this proposal is actually not that different from how the executive branch rule-makers work today from a day-to-day perspective, while carrying very different legal implications.
The executive branch churns every 4 years, and is forced to churn at least every 8 years.
That only applies to political appointees. The rank and file are permanent employees (or were until a few weeks ago).
Anyways, not saying your idea couldn't work, only that it's not easily implemented and needs a lot of consideration to do well. It's a wholesale change to how we've governed ourselves for ~150 years. But, the idea of a permanent set of legislative experts has some appeal.
We haven't governed ourselves with an executive-branch-led bureaucracy for 150 years. It's been about 70-80 years total. This model started with FDR and was really expanded in the 60's and 70's. The US existed for most of its lifetime without a permanent bureaucracy. The system you are talking about as the one that has worked forever is much younger and much less stable than you think.
> The whole premise of our system is that the people within the system operate in good faith.
It very much is not.
It is, however, that the people will not simultaneously elect sufficent majorities in both houses of Congress and a President who all fail to do so, such that the systems by which the political branches check eachother continue to function in a way which constrains those actors in either that do act in bad faith.
> I would posit that no amount of legislation will be able to stop bad-faith actors from screwing up the system,
Electoral reforms to the legislative branch that could be done through statute could go a long way to reducing the probability of a sufficient concentration of bad faith actors to overwhelm the system, and electoral and structural reforms to the executive branch to make it less unitary, which would take a Constitutional amendment, could increase the necessary concentration to achieve a total breakdown.
>And that's worked for most of 200+ years. I would posit that no amount of legislation will be able to stop bad-faith actors from screwing up the system,
This doesn't even require bad faith actors for it to become a clusterfuck. It's a scaling issue. Things that used to work at smaller scales accumulate cruft and other issues, until things ultimately fall apart. 200 years is of course a good run, but it wasn't going to last forever. Actually 200 years is such a long run, one doesn't have to bring "bad faith actors" into the equation at all to reach this conclusion, but I guess when things start to fall apart some people need someone to blame. Ask yourself this though... if the system was doing so great, how would it have allowed someone like Trump to ever win in the first place (let alone in the second place, as he did in 2024)? That's not a healthy system. Too many were disillusioned, and that's not their fault.
>~50% of the voting popular that "burn it to the ground" is a reasonable take.
They are disgusted with what they see, and have for a very long time felt powerless to change it. Not really just "felt", but were powerless to change it. Trump ran for office, they saw an opportunity. It's not exactly unreasonable, it's just inconvenient to a class of people who have grown comfortable because they're a little closer to the spigots of graft that pour forth. Being "reasonable" in the way you'd use that word hasn't really ever worked for those people, and they waited quite a long time for it to do the trick.
No, the real check is impeachment of executive officers when they flagrantly violate the law.
The tradgedy of Trump's first term was that the House of Representatives undermined the legitimacy of that check by using it in partisan, ambiguous and non-compelling circumstances, and failing as a result to obtain a conviction. Using the heavy machinery of impeachment ineffectively made it harder to use should the executive take the tremendous steps you're suggesting.
Anyway, Trump just mocked the leader of a foreign ally for refusing to hold elections. Viewed together, his comments sound like an extended troll of the political opposition.
Before 2016, we all thought impeachment was reserved for transgressions that can't be fixed any other way since it is congress overriding the will of the people. It's not a real check on small overreaches. The balance of powers between the branches is a real check (when it works).
>since it is congress overriding the will of the people.
Say what?!
It's Congress keeping the President in check. BTW, the President is not directly elected by the people and doesn't actually [directly] represent them. The President is elected by the state governments (legislatures) and is supposed to be chosen because the States belief the President will faithfully uphold the Constitution and the laws passed by Congress. It may happen the the States use a popular election to choose their electors that elect the President, at least for now, but the President isn't supposed to represent "the mob" (majority or the populace). It's also why the electoral college is used for electing the President rather than straight popular vote.
> Given that it is down to the voters, and they thought a racist, rapist, conman should be president giving them the power of the executive - which has been growing increasingly powerful for my adult lifetime.
It's this kind of contempt that got him elected. You have no empathy or interest in the will of the people. Maybe if you talked with some of them, you'd understand their grievances. But something tells me you'd sooner ironically prejudicially dismiss them all as racist bigots.
Laws come from norms with a few practices to make them seem "legit". It's too hard and expensive for the ruler to oppose the masses. It has a significant political cost. Successful rulers just ride the masses current trend. It's like a tamed down hysteria.
There is no constitutional way the president to not have access to any data in the executive branch. And since doge is reporting to him - it just send the data to the president and he will forward it to whomever he pleases.
Even the concept of independent executive agencies is probably more vulnerable constitutionally than more people think.
Yeah, that's my point. Not even the president should have unrestricted access to that data. He's not a king or the head of a corporation. And government workers aren't his subjects or employees. In most places, at least honest government workers can stand their ground because they're backed by a law governing this access.
Should have made it clear that I'm not American and I'm just finding it wild from afar.
I guess it's a testament to American democratic cultural history that no coup has occurred in American history when the president has such an absolute authority over the executive branch, as informed to me by the other comments. Let's hope for the sake of the whole world it remains like this.
Democracy is held together by people willing to follow the rules.
In Trump's first administration they realized the trick is to just move so fast that you flood the system and can do whatever you want before anyone sees through all the noise or has a chance to stop you. Steve Bannon was interviewed on camera saying as much.
Here's Bannon's quote verbatim -- "I said, all we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang. These guys will never—will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity."
All illegal businesses that had enough capital to burn through lawsuits and keep operations going until they were too big to fail and whipped the snot out of city and state legal counsels.
Indeed, VC culture (esp. for the fabled "unicorn" wannabes) is DOGE culture.
It might rarely be admitted openly, but it sometimes is alluded to... e.g. Eric Schmidt's Stanford talk where he said:
"I want to say that if your product becomes popular, you can hire a bunch of lawyers to sort everything out. If no one uses your product, don’t worry -- no one will care that you stole someone else’s content."
Why do you want them to refuse audit requests? There is no upside to hiding egregious government waste other than paying politicians via kickbacks more than what is legally mandated.
'Audit' is not something where you turn in the keys to your locker unconditionally to some random stranger who just walks in making demands. Audits are based on pre-determined and documented criteria, with the participation and supervision of responsible in-house officials. They just check if everything is in order. Auditors are rarely given unsupervised access to any data - especially to sensitive information. Meanwhile, the auditors themselves have to be held to a high level of integrity - elimination of conflicts of interest being the most important. This is a sham audit if it can be considered to be one at all.
Waste is all things i do not understand? And i dont understand all things, because i fired the experts. Thus all is waste. Its running a state, how hard can it be- my cousin was major of a town once.
I will however gladly send all credentials to my work-related accounts to authorized individuals in my company (with appropriate verification of course).
You should never send your credentials. Granting access to someone who should have access is one thing, but not your credentials that individually identify you. Also, if it isn't coming through standard protocols and procedures you probably shouldn't do it.
You never give your individual credentials to anyone for any purpose - be it personal or official. In fact, leakage of credentials and unauthorized access to privileged information is a failure in many types of audits. That's a very poor data security practice - especially in government organizations handling any sort of private and personal information. In case the auditors absolutely need data, they arrange extra channels outside the normal employee access channels to officially review, authorize and convey the data - just like how bank employees can see your account information without requiring your bank password or pin.
I don't believe that anyone who has worked in any official capacity would make such claims. The distortion of such well-defined practices is an attempt to gloss over the illegality of unprecedented events in progress right now.
They are sincerely following Project 2025, decimating government, and very likely to fire A LOT more federal workers over the summer, then they will install Loyalists throughout.
Billionaire Musk .. aka "The Auditor" .. is "primarying" or threatening to fund opposition candidates for Senators who fight him on this.
The Constitution vest all executive authority on the president. The president can delegate that authority. That's what all is happening here. Within the executive branch the president has practically total power, hardly if at all possible to constrain by statute, and that's by design in the Constitution.
The president needs the Senate's "advice and consent" to hire principal officers, and does not need the Senate's "advice and consent" for certain other officers as specified by statute. The US Digital Service ("DOGE") is an agency where he did not need the Senate's advice and consent.
The president does NOT need the Senate's advice and consent to fire anyone in the executive branch. For principal officers this was established by the failed impeachment of Andrew Johnson for firing a confirmed cabinet secretary nominated by Lincoln. For other officers this was established by judicial precedent fairly recently when Biden terminated two Trump appointees to minor offices and they sued (and lost).
Similarly the president needs the Senate's advice and consent to enter into treaties. The Constitution is silent as to terminating Senate-confirmed executive officers, officers whose appointments did not require Senate confirmation, or treaties (abrogation). It's essentially settled law that the president does not require the Senate's advice and consent for any of those kinds of terminations.
Therefore, under the Constitution and the political and binding judicial precedents, there can be no law "onto which government workers can cling to refuse these requests."
Thanks for the explanation. Like I said, sounds wild that yes, the American Constitution does establish the president as basically a king over the Executive branch.
Copying what I typed elsewhere, I guess it's a testament to American democratic cultural history that no coup has occurred in American history when the president has such an absolute authority over the executive branch. Let's hope for the sake of the whole world it remains like this.
Is it not the same pretty much in all systems with unitary heads of state? Prime ministers surely have similar powers, subject only to votes of no confidence by their parliaments. Kings, where they have power, are also like this.
> I guess it's a testament to American democratic cultural history that no coup has occurred in American history
The various assassinations of presidents were kinds of coups, don't you think? Soon we'll find out if the CIA did or did not kill JFK. Suppose the CIA killed JFK -for argument's sake-, surely that would have been a coup, no?
Not really, based on the little I know from legislation. When it comes to public administration, the principle of "you can do whatever the law doesn't forbid you to do" is reversed: it can only do whatever the law says it can, and there are some general principles, written in the law as well, governing the flexibility in the interpretation as well. And specially they're not at will employees, there are very complicated processes to justify firing them.
For instance, there is no law allowing the president to do a SELECT * in the income tax database. So an honest government worker can just say f-off when he is requested to do so.
They’re wrong. They are advocating for an extremely niche and fascist view of executive power in America. One that goes beyond even strong Unitary executive theories (which themselves are a relatively new idea, stemming from George W. Bush).
Laws are only a suggestion, they are not being enforced and there are no consequences.
The other thing is that in the US, people's lives depend on their jobs, with half of polled people indicating they live paycheck to paycheck. This makes them easy to manipulate into complying, putting their morals aside because standing up for morals or indeed the law will mean they lose their job.
I mean the US president declared yesterday that only he gets to decide on law and called himself king on his social media. There's heaps of 'legal' texts that indicate it means he can be deposed and yote into jail, but if there's nobody enforcing them they're useless.
Advisors with unlimited power and endless conflicts of interests with zero obligation for transparency?
Whether I like Musk or not has very little to do with it.
Apparently they have the power to fire people, ignore access clearance rules, get full read/write (this was already confirmed and documented by multiple sources) access to data, terminate federal programs and agencies. Or at least there's no executive opposition to them trying to, so... in practice they do have the power. So far a few judges are still holding the ground, but we'll see how long that is allowed. Musk announced a few big changes as done before they were officially confirmed by Trump.
> and endless conflicts of interests
Musk practically leads the efforts to cut government spending while receiving government funding in defence and comms spending. And with weird procurement entires appearing https://www.ttnews.com/articles/armored-teslas-government Those are conflicts of interest.
> with zero obligation for transparency?
There are no obligations for transparency. The agencies being reviewed don't get a report of things to implement and we don't see any of the audit reports.
I get you may like how this unfolds, but denying it happens is weird.
Why are there multiple examples of agency heads resigning, in series, until someone agrees to implement Musk’s advise? They report being pressured and bullied into doing so. This isn’t how advising typically works.
It's because this particular advisor has the full backing of the duly-elected President. It's absolutely wild to me that HN refuses to acknowledge this fact. This idea that the civil servants should defy the President (and his advisor) is substantiating the deep state critiques from the right.
As a Canadian I disagree entirely. Our prime minister Stephen Harper years ago muzzled scientists who had time sensitive, extremely pertinent research to act on. After he was replaced, that research was immediately put to use in policy making. Throughout his term, scientists in the public service spoke out about what was happening.
If justice is important to a democracy, these scientists did the right thing. That takes real courage.
I see no difference in what’s happening in the American public service. The processes occurring now are not democratic in nature. Musk’s role is extremely unorthodox and only ostensibly voted for ‘by the people’.
In the weeks since Trump took office, I see no hard evidence to support any kind of deep state corruption. I see inefficiency, and yet, I see that in how DOGE dismantles things as well. I see it in every organization I work in, in every industry, in every home. It’s inevitable.
Yes, but to the degree you believe in "democracy," then you believe the duly-elected President gets to come in and make changes, provided he's acting within the scope of the law. Trump specifically ran on the DOGE/Musk platform/strategy. It was a major component of his closing argument. This is, in fact, the exercise of popular will -- that is, "democracy."
Civil servants ultimately work for the President. That's how it works. There have been many reductions in force prompted by Presidents over time (my own grandfather took one in the seventies). I appreciate there is some disagreement about whether Trump is tripping over any specific laws, but to the degree he's not (the courts will answer that), then he's well within his right to take the direct advice of his advisors, and to act within the scope of his authorities. The President also has the power to get access to even the most confidential information (how could he not?), and to share that with his advisors who have the requisite security clearances (which in many cases he can dictate).
I'm just stunned by all the hand wringing about access to "government data." They're government employees!
> Musk does not have the authority to fire anyone, or terminate any programs. He's only an advisor
Sure, I agree he has no authority. He's only an advisor that seems to have any advice rubber-stamped. And he announces the changes personally before the executive action is announced. And opm employees get an email with basically the same wording as Twitter employees about a leave offer which legally cannot be offered to them.
We can pretend that "actually it's not Musk making those changes" but it's obvious he's telling others what to do. And not in an "advice" way. (He's obviously shielded from legal responsibility in this case.)
> The team aren't accessing data they don't have appropriate security clearances for.
He's an advisor with no lawful power to fire, no lawful security clearance for the DOGE team*, no lawful authority to terminate programs.
De facto, anyone standing in his way gets pushed.
Which is why nuclear weapons teams were let go.
* unless President said so. I think the office of President can do that, but has Trump actually done so, or is this like those classified documents he refused to return?
This is the line the White House told us, but it contradicts what Musk and Trump themselves have said. It's also clear from their actions and social media posts that if Musk is merely advising, then Trump is rubber stamp approving whatever Musk tells him without any independent verification.
"Trump tends to echo the words of whomever last spoke to him, making direct access to him even more valuable" is what people said about him in 2016 [1]. Being his advisor is an incredibly powerful role, much more so than with most other government leaders
He literally declared himself king multiple times yesterday.
He literally campaigned a promise that we wouldn't need future elections.
He literally states he is the one true interpreter of the law with respect to the federal bureaucracy.
This administration's legal theory is that executive power is concentrated entirely in the person of the president, which, to be fair, is because the Constitution says that it is.
That's not conducive to good government and is not the current precedent set by the Supreme Court, but it's been the conservative legal view since the 1980s and to be fair again, is again what the Constitution actually says. It will pretty much certainly be the prevailing view after this returns to the Supreme Court.
If that legal theory is true then Congress cannot create independent executive power and so it is not illegal for the President to fire anyone in the executive branch for any reason, including inspectors general, the chairman of the Fed, etc., regardless of any law to the contrary. Again, to be clear a third time, the effects of this will be bad, but the constitutional language isn't really ambiguous.
I don't like Musk. That's true. The reasoning is irrelevant.
Let's take someone I do like. Linus Torvalds. If Trump (or Harris or ...) appointed Linus, unilaterally, to do what Musk is doing, I'd still have a problem with it.
Now the two responses you might have are:
- I don't believe you.
- Linus wouldn't be bad either.
Both of which completely miss the point. Nobody should have singular, unilateral, unsupervised access to governmental systems like this.
Truly an incident where I couldn't tell how much of that was legitimate insanity, and how much of it was carefully curated fake-controversy-as-distraction. A common question I ask myself about conservatives every single day. Multiple times a day, lately.
It's objectively true no sane person would have cared about that issue.
I'm not a fan of Bill Gates in a lot of ways, but he actually has experience building and running a large, successful, long-lived organization. There's no way he'd come in and make drastic changes to an organization he knows absolutely nothing about in the name of "efficiency".
Yeah 99% is sour grapes from the other team. I like what doge has turned up so far and will give them the benefit of the doubt. My wife is a long time liberal Democrat and even she admits the main problem is Musk is just doing out in the open what is usually done behind closed doors and people don’t like it.
Do you like them turning up a wasteful $8 billion contract that turned out to be $8 million, but they’re a bunch of incompetent ninnies who can’t even verify they have the right number of zeroes in their figures before they tell the world?
Great that all of that information is getting published so we can judge for ourselves the efficacy of both the relevant agency or department, but also effectiveness of the DOGE.
> Are you saying that federal spending should always be done in chunks of less than $8 million?
I'm saying that focusing on an incorrect zero ($8b) distracts from the fact that $8m is easily spent wastefully by people (and systems) whose job it should be to be accurate.
Surely the people doing an audit should be just as accurate no? If they can't keep track of (several) zeros how can you trust them to accurately work through all the documentation involved in figuring out what is waste, what is fraud, and what is legitimate spending?
I'd actually support this effort if there was evidence any care was being taken. Instead I see wild statements like this, 100 million spent on condoms, people in the SSA database being too old with no discussion of if they are actually receiving payments or not (oh look they aren't!)
A real audit take time, discipline and attention to detail. I see none of that.
It reminds me of Tesla removing turn signal stalks from their cars because they're going to be self-driving real soon so why waste money on unnecessary controls? And then we're still years away from full self-driving and a bunch of human drivers are struggling with ridiculous capacitative touch sensors for their turn signals.
This is the sort of thing that happens when you refuse objectivity and spend all your time getting high on your own farts.
They brought back the stalk in the new Model Y, so they seem to agree with my assessment. A product can still be successful even if there’s something bad about it. I don’t like the capacitive turn signal buttons at all but it wouldn’t have stopped me from buying a Tesla.
> Surely the people doing an audit should be just as accurate no?
Yes they should. These are not auditors though. They have an axe to grind with confirmation bias driving the zealotry.
The plus side is that they are publishing information in real time so we can all judge it, which one could argue is an improvement over not publishing.
A counter argument would be that this is just to create the illusion of transparency, but I suspect they are not playing 5D chess.
Can you trust their assessment of wastefulness when you can't trust them to be within 1000x of the actual amount supposedly being wasted?
Beyond that, you're not going to make the Federal government efficient by cutting $8 million at a time. Musk's goal is $2 trillion in cuts. He said he thinks there's a good shot at achieving $1 trillion. The deficit in 2024 was $1.8 trillion. If your top item is $8 million, your task is utterly hopeless. Imagine being a family drowning in debt, with expenses exceeding income by $330,000/year, and a financial planner comes in and says that your top priority is not to buy that hot dog at the Costco food court this weekend. Not even that you should stop buying hot dogs weekly, that you should not buy one. They make you a list of things you should stop spending money on, and "One Costco hot dog combo planned to be purchased sometime in the coming year" is top of the list. Oh, and they also have it listed as saving you $1,500 because they didn't actually check the cost of a hot dog before they gave you the list.
No we can’t because they control the narrative. There should be more transparency in an objective manner without using the qualifiers like “wasteful” so that readers can decide for themselves. Or at the very least express both the arguments for and against, similar to how voter guides often come with a listing of arguments from both sides of the coin.
I think what you mean to say is that you like what doge has claimed to have found so far. Unfortunately it doesn’t hold up to even the slightest scrutiny.
It's like we go out to a twelve course dinner and get home and there is one 10 calories carrot on the table and we are tweeting to no end about our genius and our total transparently and robust diet of throwing away that carrot. "Carrots don't taste good anyways" they screen and people cheer.
Meanwhile we are actually losing vision and dying of obesity.
There is plenty to do to get more healthy for real; but that's not where we are heading with these initiatives so far:
There is no rhyme or reason. That's the problem with it. Not that it's out in the open. Not that it's musk.
There is no rhyme or reason, other than stripping off the parts.
I'll bet you. Once the stripping is complete, Musk and Trump have the brilliant idea of replacing the old, "bloated" government functions that were cut with private for profit contractors (that are obviously "more efficiently" run because they're for profit).
A team of kids without the capacity for discernment and bad morals to get through government agencies data is unprecedented. This is not sour grapes, this is a radical shift to how things have been done. These kids talk about bling bling, pull pump and dumps in the crypto world and are now at Elon Musks command. This is pushing any conversation away completely because you cannot have a normal conversation with trolls. What’s next, uncontrolled violence?
For example, when the NLRB was crippled by trump firing a member and losing quoroum, they forgot an important part of union history.
Prior to a proper process of grievances, the old answer was to basically wage war, guns and all, against the bosses and their families. The companies also hired Pinkerton's and every so often had the national guard also fight for the companies.
Union history is a bloody and murderous affair.
The NLRB was the compromise to "go to the bosses house and shoot it up to leave a message". With the NLRB effective destruction, the next logical devolution for worker rights is violence, and a lot of it.
As for me, I'm looking at what it would take to get out of the USA. Already interviewing with a few places in EU. The USA is basically an invaded country at this point. And I really dont want to be around when the violence picks up.
How I'm reading and interpreting this, is that you dont want workers collectively communicating and joining forces at a negotiating table.
By denouncing this right of peaceably assembling and negotiating at a table of law, means that you're wanting the old solution of mass widespread violence against workers and management. Because this is exactly what happened before. But dont believe me - go read how unions were formed.
Most civilized countries have good worker protections. The USA is speedrunning the elimination of worker protections. And it doesn't take too much history knowledge to figure out how that works out.
I think the zoomer term is "fuck around and find out". We're in the 'fuck around' stage. I dont want to be here during the 'find out' stage.
Unions produce nothing and don't innovate. Yes, they can benefit some people, but they provide no net societal benefit. In fact, they are a net negative because they misallocate resources (such as by keeping factories open producing cars that nobody wants).
They could benefit some people? They benefit the workers who would otherwise be worked literally to death. I wish they were not necessary but they came to existence exactly for this exact reason. If you could come up with an equitable and non exploitative system that works for everyone, suddenly you no longer have a need for unions.
>They could benefit some people? They benefit the workers who would otherwise be worked literally to death.
The problem is that they benefit workers not through productivity increases, but via collective bargaining, i.e. at the expense of society. Consider that when unions go on strike, they reduce economic productivity and disrupt the economy. Likewise, when unions fight to prevent factories from closing to protect the jobs of workers, this causes an inefficient allocation of resources - so now companies must bid up the prices of raw materials to produce things that nobody wants just to keep some people employed. Unions oppose automation for similar reasons, which is why we have the most inefficient ports in the world (worse than Africa!).
So in sum, unions do literally nothing to make society better off. What benefits unionized workers receive come at cost of society (including other unionized workers!)
>If you could come up with an equitable and non exploitative system that works for everyone, suddenly you no longer have a need for unions.
Capitalism is working great, actually. It would work better without unions.
This is braindead capitalist propaganda. Stop filling your head with garbage. At the very least, keep it to yourself so other people don't have to smell it. Gross.
Nothing I'm saying is particularly hard to understand or controversial - and that's with most economists being left-wing! If a field dominated by the left can't even find strong support for unions, then perhaps its actually you who lacks "any sort of understanding of how the world works".
Black flag attack next, like Hitler did, the right wing is obsessed with those. Or will crack down hard on a protest and when they try to fight back he'll declare a state of emergency.
Doubt anything short of a military coup that dismantles maga can stop this. Hopefully neither party survives and the US will have an actual democracy.
Stop being naive. This is an unelected billionaire successfully couping the government and replacing competent people with incompetent lackeys. Musk is fucking you over and you're cheering him on because you've suckled at the teat of propaganda for far too long. Get your head out of your ass and actually think
Denial on what is actually happening is rampant at the moment. When in weeks, months, and years the consequences of these actions maybe, maybe, it will be acknowledged, though the pattern has been so far scapegoating the 'other'.
I concur, but White House staff that are not confirmed by Congress have limits placed on their power when dealing with some agencies (as legislated by Congress) and there are of course many other laws and regulations pertaining to information security (FISMA), security clearances, data privacy, employee protections, and so on that I would expect such a White House functionary to respect.
See I know something of what actually wanting to fix the government's waste fraud and abuse would look like. It would be beefing up the IRS (where every dollar more than pays for itself), it would be banning people in congress from buying individual stocks; it would be a lot of things that deeply nerdy policy wonks have been saying for years.
That's not what I'm seeing happen. I'm not seeing cost benefit analysis, I'm not seeing the use of existing experts.
What I am seeing... well perhaps we'd have different perspectives. To pick an example, look Musk saying that people who are over 200 years old are marked as alive.
If you assume the worst of Elon Musk, you might think he's an idiot who doesn't understand how COBOL represents dates in the SSA system, nor how large government databases deal with missing data.
I've worked, not for the SSA, but with public health data. Real people and historical records and old databases are messy as fuck.
The SSA neither throw out data, nor do they add data they haven't received, except when there is funding appropriated for it.
So these old people are simply actually people they never got death info on.
Could they just add a date? Well you have to consider the data integrity issues around date of death. If you pick a nonsensical date, can you assume that the SSA, department of commerce, and other orgs, not to mention the internal SSA progroms that rely on processing SSA data can handle it? Nope, an engineer can't assume that, there's an implicit API.
But the fact is, this has been looked at. Per this 2023 audit the SSA estimated it would cost 5.5 to 9.7 million to mark people as deceased in the database when they don't have death date information. They didn't do that, probably because no money was appropriated for it.
Does that mean there's massive SSA fraud of dead people? Nope. back in 2015 they decided to automatically stop giving benefits to anyone over 115. The oldest living American is, in fact, Naomi Whitehead, who is 114.
In other word, Musk is acting like saving the government 5.5 million minimum is a "HUGE problem".
Now, I don't think Elon Musk is an idiot who doesn't understand COBOL or how messy data can be from real people. I also don't think he thinks that 200 year old benefits fraud is really an issue.
Which begs the question, why bring this up at all?
My interpretation is perhaps less charitable than yours, but I'd be interested in hearing what you think.
What’s especially frustrating, if you care about governance being more serious than pro wrestling, is that we have a couple organizations in government that’d happily provide all kinds of ways to reduce the deficit: the GAO and the CBO.
But they tend to say reality-based things like “no, your tax cuts won’t pay for themselves, in fact they’ll cost $1.2T over ten years” or “no, this war won’t pay for itself, lol, what the fuck even” or “no, you can’t make meaningful progress on cutting the deficit by attacking benefits fraud, because there’s not very much of that.”
All things Republicans would rather pretend aren’t true, and certainly don’t want to act on. So what do you do when you need to show progress but are constrained by operating based on fiction? You tout tiny wins and hope the numbers seem big to people who don’t know much; you make things up; and you cause harm or even incur long-term costs or cause waste and call that savings by doing bad accounting.
> See I know something of what actually wanting to fix the government's waste fraud and abuse would look like. It would be beefing up the IRS (where every dollar more than pays for itself), it would be banning people in congress from buying individual stocks; it would be a lot of things that deeply nerdy policy wonks have been saying for years.
This is exactly what the dems need. Currently we have two options.
#1 status quo complacency which does things like congressional insider trading, identity politics, is completely ancient, and useless and ineffectual in identifying or implementing any actual changes that would improve people's lives.
#2 is a wing of the party ready to take a wrecking ball to things (bravo), but thinks taxes are the solution to everything.
We need more wrecking ball type options than just #2. We need a diversity of wrecking ball options that are energetic, smart, able to identify the places where the system (both private industry & governmental) isn't functioning properly and have the guts to actually push change through.
That's not exactly true, to pick some examples Bernie quitting the race in 2020 used his connections with biden and got a lot of things into a unity party platform, and I've seen it argued that AOC and the green new deal pushed the overton window for the infrastructure recovery act, and while it definitely wasn't everything they hoped for, it did include elements, including a massive investment in clean energy.
Pelosi is the top grifter. Instead of spending her last years with her kids she stays “employed” in order to keep her and her families crimes under wraps. She will die in office, there will be great fan fair of how amazing she was, followed by countless breaking stories of her and her families corruption of over half a century.
In most rule of law democracies the law is above the president.
The civil servants are beholden to the law as passed by the representatives of the people, the chief executive can only give orders as allowed by the law.
Granted there will be times of murkiness that require interpretation.
But "fuck it I'm the president and everything I say is legal" is not a valid interpretation in any democracy I know of.
Given the context in which you answered, it is wrong. The president carries out the law, but isn't above the law, doesn't decide what is the law, and his actions are to be verified, if necessary, if conform to the law. His authority is not the law, but executing the law.
>> The federal bureaucracy is not a separate branch of government that gets to have its own checks and balances on the president. They are people that he hires to carry out his duties in his stead.
> The civil servants are beholden to the law as passed by the representatives of the people, the chief executive can only give orders as allowed by the law.
And I restated the first point.
This is the context in which I am responding — and that point is true: they are not a fourth entity that is created by law, but an extension of the president carrying out his duty to enact laws.
To the extent the president gives a lawful order, failure to comply by the bureaucracy isn’t lawful — it’s a coup against the elected government of the US.
> the chief executive can only give orders as allowed by the law
The mistake is here: the law does not permit the president to carry out executive functions, but restrains what he can do from the presumption of anything. He does not need permission in law; the absence of restraint is sufficient.
I understand many people (such as yourself) don’t respect that because you favor an autocratic politically aligned bureaucracy — and hence are outraged that the public will is imposing itself on the rogue bureaucrats.
Of course if it isn't lawful then the civil servant should comply.
That's a strawmen.
Trump wants them to comply without considering lawfulness. That would be a betrayel of their position.
Oh but there was a supreme court ruling that said that official presidential actions are in fact above the law, and he signed an executive order that says he gets to decide what the law is, which is not illegal because it's an official presidential action.
That's not what the EO the other day said. The EO claimed and confirmed policy-making power, ie. interpreting the law and pouring it into policy, for the executive branch. It is quite common internationally that the elected executive has this power and it is weird that it has to be spelled out in the US.
What is worrisome is the overreach in claiming that power for institutions that are not in the executive's purview with the argument "everything is in the executive's purview". No, it is not, and there are reasons why institutions are spread over the three basic powers of a state, one is called "checks & balances". Ah, well.
US president has a lot of powers, I’m not aware of any elected official in Europe with the same amount of powers (ignore Russia).
President of France is probably the most comparable, but in France you also have the prime minister, selected by the president but supported by the parliament.
In Sweden we have a separation of powers within the executive branch. Government agencies are independent of the cabinet.
DOGE’s audit wouldn’t be possible in Sweden, that would have required legislation or even constitutional changes.
Sweden has already an independent government agency that audits the rest of the government, but it has support in the constitution for that and it is technically administered by the parliament and not the cabinet.
It seems that many objects to the audit on technicalities and use that as an argument that the audit itself is illegal or unconstitutional. It is a flawed argument.
The audit might be unconstitutional because it's coming from a department which is wielding a great deal of Article II power even though it's not led by a cabinet official who was confirmed by congress. In other words, unconstitutional for organizational reasons that are unlikely to land any one person in criminal trouble. I wouldn't want to argue that point either way, but I bet the question of DOGE's constitutionality will be considered by a federal court in the coming years.
The notion that the audit is illegal because of "technicalities" is a lot more sympathetic. The handling of secure information in the government in unorthodox ways can be deemed to violate the law, or not, in some surprising (or maybe even arbitrary) ways. The last really big time this played out politically in the US was probably Clinton's email server.
As I hinted at above, I don't think anyone here is really conversant with that area of the law. On the other hand, I'm fairly certain even if DOGE has broken the law, the current DoJ will not find that DOGE has done anything requiring legal action, for the obvious political reasons.
I find your answer most interesting yet, especially about Article II.
Apparently the president can appoint temporary advisors that does not need approval from congress. If Mr Musk qualifies for such appointment I guess is that something for the courts to decide. I guess that implies that the audit itself is time framed.
In the Appointments Clause case challenging Musk’s role, the Administration has said Musk is officially an non-decision-making adviser (not a temporary one, just a generic White House staffer not requiring confirmation), and completely unconnected from US DOGE Service.
Oddly, they failed at the time, on direct questioning by the judge, to identify who the Administrator of US DOGE Service currently is.
In the USA, both are true. Civil servants can (and should) refuse to follow an order they think is unconstitutional, illegal, or simply unwise. But this won't stop them from being fired for insubordination. I don't think the courts will attempt to force the president to retain subordinates that are actively opposing him on the job.
If they can still be fired, then what does it even mean to say that they can refuse to follow an unconstitutional order? Refusal to follow any order is not illegal. If the consequences for refusing to follow an illegal order are the same as the consequences for refusing to follow a legal order, then there is no sense in saying civil servants can refuse illegal orders.
The consequences for following an illegal order include being sued, being held in contempt of court, or being criminally prosecuted by a subsequent administration. They don't have the same immunity that presidents do because they don't have a direct vesting of authority under Article II.
Ok? The question is, in what sense are they allowed to refuse an illegal order, given that the consequences are the same as refusing to follow a legal order?
That’s simply not true. Congress has the power to organize the executive branch, not the president. Congress created the agencies and departments and they cannot be closed by the president.
> the Constitution also provides for subordinate officers to assist the President in his executive duties.
> Therefore, in order to improve the administration of the executive branch and to increase regulatory officials’ accountability to the American people, it shall be the policy of the executive branch to ensure Presidential supervision and control of the entire executive branch.
And of course:
> President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch. The President and the Attorney General’s opinions on questions of law are controlling on all employees in the conduct of their official duties.
Got it. I’m talking about this President’s EO and the implications it makes about independent agencies. Which are effectively his officers, so they are exercising his powers.
My understanding is that everyone takes the same oath of office to the constitution, not their boss:
> The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution …
Yes, like the 7 DoJ prosecutors who chose to resign last week rather than sign a dismissal of the charges against Eric Adams, because it was an obvious quid pro quo, and the case against Adams is very strong. There's absolutely no legitimate justification for not prosecuting Adams.
The dismissal was eventually signed and filed by Emil Bove, a very recent Trump appointee, whose former job was as one of Trump's criminal defense lawyers.
The stink of corruption is heavy around Trump and Musk.
Let's suppose for a second you're right - Musk is just trying to do a transparent audit. Why do they feel to need to have DOGE and Musk operate outside of the usual channels for transparency?
It doesn't make you wonder at all? All over this thread are supporters saying anyone fighting an audit is hiding something. Trump and Musk are literally fighting against transparency and your response is they have the discretion to do that. The cognitive dissonance around Musk and Trump is really unbelievable.
We’ve come a long way from “Hillary shouldn’t be President because she has demonstrated a disrespect for national security information protocol” to “its Trump’s right as POTUS to disrespect national security information protocol”
The reason they're now pretending that Musk is an "advisor" is that there are laws against what he proudly says he's doing, and Trump has said Musk is doing.
He can't lead a government department without being confirmed by congress. If he's just an advisor, he and his Musk Youth army can't actually give orders to government employees the way they've been doing, much less fire them.
If someone keeps lying every other breath for years and years, at some point you should stop taking their word at face value.
We've had a lot of these in 3 weeks, but this is an emperor has no clothes on moment. DOGE is running around saying they have access because of Musk. Even Trump has a hard time saying anything else. Now they are saying Musk isn't really in charge and has no power. They also won't say who runs DOGE. Everyone knows it's bullshit, but people accept it. That's the real lesson from 1984, and here we are.
I'm really at a loss how anyone still believes or supports these people.
That's a gross misrepresentation of what's happening here.
We don't have to respect anything, except the law. Trump and Musk's actions are neither legal, ethical nor sensible. If you're of that mind then removing Musk and Trump via any legal or political means is not only acceptable but, if you care about your country, an imperative.
The biggest problem America has is how readily it normalizes incompetence and evil, to its detriment.
No they don't. Do a bit of googling before you post. Trump's actions are in defiance of the conventions of government and the written constitution. It's not even a judgement call, it's bleedingly obvious.
Is respecting the result of an election what Trump did for 3 months after he lost in 2020?
Trump ordered Mike Pence to overturn that election. Is that respecting the result of an election? When Pence refused the order, Trump sent a mob to have the VPOTUS assassinated and to stop Congress from doing its job. Not at all respectful.
This is a political party that went apoplectic about Obama wearing a tan suit, while insisting he was illegitimate, i.e. the racist lie of birtherism.
And then they elected a pussy grabbing rapist, felon, and vile insurrectionist.
I think they're getting all the respect they deserve.
Why would you want a law that says government workers have zero accountability over how they spend the money they extract by threat of violence from the citizenry?
We should all have "root access" to everything but the most national-security sensitive topics.
One side is understandably on edge but nothing DOGE has been doing is unexpected, except in the sense that it's actually happening or seems to be happening. It went through the whole political process's standard change control mechanism, in other words the current Administration literally campaigned on it and received a mandate via both the EC and popular vote.
