Well I hope in the (very near) future we decide we want the executive branch to have less power, so as to protect ourselves from a unitary executive who goes rogue. Yes it may be less efficient, but more resilient.<p>This drive for uber efficiency can 1) make government more fragile (see toilet paper supply issues during the pandemic) and 2) be a slippery slope to dehumanization (see paper clip maximizing problem).
They have interesting pedigrees: Meta, Palantir, Neuralink, xAI, SpaceX, Databricks, Energize AI.<p>It seems clear where this is going. Data mining and algorithmic (claimed!) efficiency improvements while working on an essential and critical production system.<p>Since these people claim that "AI" does not need to respect privacy and copyright, perhaps they'll also train a model on this.<p>Where are the Democrats on all this? There is hardly any opposition. Are they not interrupting their enemy while he is making mistakes? That would be the only explanation.
Are such drastic action appropriate given the current state of the US? The US probably hasn't been this economically dominant since after WWII.<p>Feels like Chesterton fences are getting torn up left and right by people too young and incurious to possibly understand why those fences might be there.
Elon is also now claiming to have "deleted" 18F (<a href="https://18f.gsa.gov/" rel="nofollow">https://18f.gsa.gov/</a>): <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1886498750052327520" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1886498750052327520</a>
Posts here talk about the legality of this, that what they are doing is not allowed, or that they're doing something naively without understanding.<p>But what is the goal? Maybe what goal to they think they're pursuing? This is hacker news, so I'm asking for an answer without political rhetoric.
<a href="https://doge.gov" rel="nofollow">https://doge.gov</a> does not say anything about what the DOGE plan is, and <a href="https://www.usds.gov/" rel="nofollow">https://www.usds.gov/</a> is not apparently up to date wrt DOGE. Is there something other than the Executive Order [0] that lays out concretely what DOGE intends to do? This group of engineers is doubtless skilled, but I don't seem them as the decision makers and planners here.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/establishing-and-implementing-the-presidents-department-of-government-efficiency/" rel="nofollow">https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/esta...</a>
If DOGE wants to be effective it really should be going after the big ticket items like medicare or defense, some estimates have medicare at 40% fraud and waste and the DoD can't even pass an audit so no one really knows what %. And that is just getting what we've paid for, not even evaluating if what we've paid for is effective.<p>Of course to do that would require actual coalition building, hard choices that upset voters, and congressional approval. Instead they'll going to disrupt some of the highest ROI small-money grants like food or medicine to impoverished countries because they don't have any representation.<p>It won't meaningfully reduce the deficit and means we we're signing up for warlords and global instability in the near future.
Most Scandinavian countries are required to make any communication in public departments (including all coworkers emails) public on request by journalists or anyone interested.<p>This is to make any doubts regarding e.g USAID public instead of making such drastic measures necessary.<p><i>But</i> also make work of an entity such as Doge transparent. They are after all funded by my money (as a taxpayer).<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_public_access_to_official_records" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_public_access_to_...</a>
I hate that in this country, everything is political and everything has only 2 sides. Is there waste and inefficiency in government spending? Yes, I think so. Should we do our best to cut and trim this? Absolutely. Is DOGE's ham-fisted, half-assed version of this "doing our best"? Of course not.<p>But apparently in this country, you have to be either pro government waste or pro DOGE. No middle ground or common sense allowed.
Well, Cultural Revolutions are almost always done by young and inexperienced.<p>Btw, i wonder how many of those raiding the government offices are really DOGE people and not say Russian or Chinese agents pretending to be DOGE - if one to believe the news the security let them into the building once they threatened to call Marshals Service (social engineering DOGE style. That clearly shows couple things - 1. DOGE themselves didn't bother to get proper paperwork, clearances, etc., a "promising" start so to speak and 2. that at least the building security part of the government there got totally rotten as it failed to perform their basic duties. And the agencies' (Treasury(!), USAID,...) employees just giving their laptops and access to internal systems to the first schmuck supposedly from some DOGE - and that all after years of trainings of "don't leave your screen unlocked", "don't give sensitive info to the strangers pretending to be your higher-up or a colleague" . Really shows the effectiveness of all those trainings :)
how is someone’s age relevant? Is a 55 y.o. Software engineer who spent 20 years in a bureaucratic wheel any better than a bright 20yo mind? They both suck in a different way! Writing an entire article with ageism as a center piece is truly pinnacle of American journalism
Experienced enough to win this though: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39261861">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39261861</a>
In pondering the mindset of these people, I was reminded of a very different submission on hn yesterday [1]. Quote:<p><i>"Avoid, at all costs, arriving at a scenario where the ground-up rewrite starts to look attractive"</i><p>Seems to me that in their narrow, reckless arrogance they're doing something similar to the mechanisms of government. <i>This is all broken and people who built it were idiots. Lets just scrap it and built it again with a modern stack.</i><p>Chesterton's fence, metacognitive ability, overconfidence effect, those who do not learn from history, etc.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42920285">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42920285</a>
If I was a foreign adversary of the US I would be salivating at the idea of several unvetted 19-25 year olds with unlimited access to classified government computer systems. The security implications are apocalyptic.
> Congress has no ability to really intervene and monitor what's happening because these aren't really accountable public officials.<p>Congress gets to make laws. They can intervene by making a law that allows them to intervene, which is the job we elected them to do. Apparently they prefer getting bossed around instead.
Re that scroll<p><a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-21-year-old-used-ai-to-decipher-text-from-a-scroll-that-hasnt-been-read-in-2000-years-180983084/" rel="nofollow">https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-21-year-old-u...</a><p>It seems to me like it really appropriate background...
Amazed at the pushback against an effort to cut waste out of government. There is a ton of it. It's your tax dollars being wasted... let's instead discuss whether things they've identified are keep, toss, or reform and if the wrong call has been made.
Average age of engineers and scientists in the Manhattan Project was 25.<p>Our current gerontocracy is ahistorical.<p>Perhaps one reason startups work so well is they are one of the few places that still let young people exert agency.<p>The average age of NASA’s mission control team during the Apollo era was 27— they put humans on the moon. Young people bring a force of curiosity and creativity that can disrupt the status quo. If we’re serious about cutting waste in gov spending, let’s not turn away new minds.<p>The guys featured in this gross and irresponsible hit piece by Wired, by all accounts, are brilliant engineers. Top 1%.<p>- one decoded the Herculaneum Papyrii at the age of 20, winning the Vesuvius Challenge<p>- another built a startup funded by OpenAI<p>- one interned at SpaceX and got a Thiel Fellowship<p>- another was a top engineer at a major AI firm<p>This is who they are bullying and putting a target on. The best of us nerds. <a href="https://x.com/anothercohen/status/1886480470185001025" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/anothercohen/status/1886480470185001025</a>
Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s In the Shadow of the Shadow State, which discusses the concept of the anti-state state.<p><a href="https://sfonline.barnard.edu/ruth-wilson-gilmore-in-the-shadow-of-the-shadow-state/" rel="nofollow">https://sfonline.barnard.edu/ruth-wilson-gilmore-in-the-shad...</a>
To the people talking about how "Zelenskyy said that he only got $75 billion of the $175 billion in foreign aid we sent them, where'd that $100 billion go??? That's right, it went into the pockets of the Deep State!" and then deleting their comments:<p>According to <a href="https://www.cfr.org/article/how-much-us-aid-going-ukraine" rel="nofollow">https://www.cfr.org/article/how-much-us-aid-going-ukraine</a>, "It’s important to note that of the $175 billion total, only $106 billion directly aids the government of Ukraine. Most of the remainder is funding various U.S. activities associated with the war in Ukraine, and a small portion supports other affected countries in the region." Of that $106, about $70 billion is weapons, $33 is budget support. So it makes sense that lawmakers would claim that "We sent Ukraine $175 billion!" and Zelenskyy would directly see less than $175.<p>The the line from Zelenskyy is an attempt to clarify to the world that $X billion in a bill somewhere doesn't equate to $X billion on the ground in Ukraine directly; he's not saying there was some kind of corruption involved and that the money mysteriously disappeared.
Let's open their repos and see their PRs. Then nobody will need to make assertions about their brilliance or irresponsibility.<p>D.O.G.E.: Make your repos public. Let's see what you are doing. And if you don't have repos, write a script to mirror the codebase and your diffs.
And here I thought they'd actually consider my resume. They didn't even bother looking. When DOGE first called for people to apply, they did it on X and said we can send a message to their account on X.<p>So I actually got excited about tackling waste, and wrote this cover letter:<p><a href="https://magarshak.com/resume-cover-letter.php" rel="nofollow">https://magarshak.com/resume-cover-letter.php</a><p>Little did I know this admin was going to be shutting down datasets from data.gov and other crap. I really tried to bring something positive into it, but it's just more of the same. They sidelined Vivek too.
What evidence do people have that anything damaging is happening? Because these people are assumed to be conservative and not progressive? How is this any different than an internal audit whose work would be kept confidential? Or even a third party vendor who presumably would be covered by confidentiality agreements? The allegations in these comments are completely without evidence and are outright politically biased. All the wired article can say is there are a handful of young presumably conservative engineers doing their job. That about sums up the scandal.
I don't understand why the editors allowed the engineers' names to be made public. What did they hope to gain by doing this other than making them magnets for harassment and possibly threats?
History doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes.
Komsomol/Soviet, Red guards/China.
Ideology fan the flame of youth into fanatic.
Who/what is providing the necessary guardrail?
God speed America. Future belong to the young.
Make good/long term decision.
There's probably going to be a flood of lawsuits, complaints, etc. following this. Cleaning up inefficient gov processes and waste <i>would</i> be good, but this is the completely wrong way to go about it. A single team, made up of extremely young people, some of which haven't even finished college yet, is not qualified in the slightest to do so. This is on top of them having no gov experience, and experience with how things work on the individual teams they're trying to clean out.<p>Not to mention they've probably already accessed Secret and up levels of classified data without a clearance, which would get any normal gov employee fired and potentially thrown in jail depending on the offense.<p>I also want to highlight that OPM is the backbone of workers rights for the government. Most skilled positions working directly for the gov are already underpaid. OPM was one of the few pros they had to offer; robust worker rights that are required across the fed.
"Bringing in young talent with new skills is literally 'what can be unburdened by what has been' if that's a thing anyone on the left still wants" -- Lulu Cheng Meservey
Is anyone surprised? It's not like it was a secret, and a majority of voters still voted this government in.
Maybe most thought it'll be better for inflation and chose to ignore or belittle the crazy. It seems we're getting the crazy now - and not, yet anyway, a single action of inflation.
Say what you want, but if we don't drastically cut spending, our way of life will collapse. It would be nice if Congress itself would reign in spending and downsize the government, but everyone knows that has a 0% chance of happening.<p>This is better hyperinflation or a violent revolution, at least, which is what it avoids for us. Anyone who doesn't see that hasn't done the thought experiment of extrapolating out our spending for a few more decades. It can't continue, period. Period. Our only choice is how to change it and our democracy (congresspuppets controlled by lobbies) fundamentally cannot fix this. Does anyone have a better idea that will actually work?
Interesting inversion of priorities?
In the age of huge increase of abuse of power by secrecy over-classification and already unearthed arguably up to criminal abuse of power and waste of our money (with all crimes that it caused here and in the world), invasion of the country and countless other hybrid attacks how does secret clearance of few efficient engineers look compared to all of the results already shown and more to come?
Is it ideal, no but there was not other known way or all would be open to hear it and cutting the power of executive branch is bureaucratic dream where they could grow like cancer up to killing the host, which they were arguably close.
><a href="https://archive.ph/QYBhK" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/QYBhK</a><p>why is this redirecting to lifetips.it ? did archive.today get hacked?
This seems broadly good. If you told me a democratic admin had recruited these people, I would think "wow! what a positive signal for the current admin!"
I found Bukele's comments to be eye opening, <a href="https://x.com/nayibbukele/status/1886059275174506850" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/nayibbukele/status/1886059275174506850</a><p>> Most governments don’t want USAID funds flowing into their countries because they understand where much of that money actually ends up.<p>> While marketed as support for development, democracy, and human rights, the majority of these funds are funneled into opposition groups, NGOs with political agendas, and destabilizing movements.<p>> At best, maybe 10% of the money reaches real projects that help people in need (there are such cases), but the rest is used to fuel dissent, finance protests, and undermine administrations that refuse to align with the globalist agenda.<p>> Cutting this so-called aid isn’t just beneficial for the United States; it’s also a big win for the rest of the world.<p>Their funding has been hard for Congress to vet, and it seems like they do some shady things. Kudos to Elon and his team for cutting us more than $1b/day so far!
If they're engaged in doing illegal stuff, at the federal level, I fully expect Trump to just pardon everyone involved.<p>Maybe they're too deep in the Yarvin / Thield / Musk (Kool-Aid) sauce, but they should know better. This stuff will follow them for life.
Musk could not get US Security Clearance<p>He cannot enter certain facilities or meetings at SpaceX because of that.<p>Yet now he is bypassing that requirement.<p>None of these people are elected or confirmed by the Senate and they are doing extremely sensitive things to the government<p>That's not how any of this is supposed to work by law.
One thing CCP did masterfully is sending very young grads, who are newly admitted to the party, to go to different local communities and evaluate the outcome government project like poverty reduction there (because obviously Xi don’t trust local officials and party members). These young people have a lot of energy to make some impact, also too young to lie or corrupt. The result turned out to be actually effective.<p>There are quite some admiration for CCP from the american new right like moldbug and musk, It seems either they took a page from CCP, or happen to think alike.
I don’t know how this will shake out, but I do worry that these 19-24 year olds, some of whom are known to HN for other achievements, are putting themselves in real legal jeopardy.<p>Edit: by the way, this post isn’t off-topic. It is about the activities of the US Digital Service (now known as Doge), and the exploits of young hackers who came up through top tech companies. It has implications for information systems security, especially as it relates to Silicon Valley culture.
I have never seen a thread on this site so full of vitriol, hatred, threats of blacklisting for life, threats of violence and general hysteria. And that kind of rhetoric is entirely coming from one side. (or at least the not dead comments of that nature are coming from one side)<p>Regardless of where you stand, I think a lot of people who have been commenting on here about blacklisting or worse about the named individuals need to check themselves, these are young men who have lives and families.
Good. These guys, in addition to obviously being very smart, are young and don't have a lot of baggage in government or industry.<p>I think they are perfect for tracing down what has been going on and finding where inefficiencies and/or corruption has been occurring. Anyone who has issue with rooting out corruption and inefficiency isn't in the right.<p>Of course what is done with what they find will not be in their hands.
There are people in this thread claiming that Wired "doxxed" these engineers working for Musk dismantling things they don't understand; however didn't Musk publicly mock individual federal employees on his twitter account, drawing the eyes of millions onto random government functionaries for no other reason than to capriciously taunt them about being fired?<p>I hope people condemning the former also condemn the latter.
Would be fucking terrified knowing that my personal employment records were in reach of these children. Who's the responsible adult in the room stopping them from "losing" a backup they've made or maintaining the non-compliant equipment they'll have brought in.
The next four years are going to be a test of the US Constitution. But when they are up -- and they will be, and people are more angry at Trump than the last time around the pendulum swings wildly back again, as it always does, what is going to happen to Musk and the rest of them?
The reason trump won is that is he authentic. He is following through on his promises. He doesn't have 20 speech writers corralling his every word to be completely neutral and say nothing at all.<p>It's insane to me that the so called left are going to bat to defend the status quo, when the status quo is multi-national corporations lobbying gov for their own goals of super globalist trade. Isn't "buy local" a left position? Obviously trump is a flawed character, even the most ardent supporters will admit that. But he is not a cookie cutter straight of the factory line politician.<p>The same goes for Elon, he is an idiot a lot of time, but he is not a lobbyist just sitting in the shadows, he is public about being an idiot for better and worse.<p>These are all left wing ideas, f the corruption, that's what doge is supposed to be doing, it supposed to be cutting out inefficient spending, which lets be honest, will go to friends of friends, but the left are losing their shit because they got their funding for dressing up as the opposite sex cut off.
<a href="https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/02/03/elon-musk-is-shredding-americas-government-like-he-did-twitter" rel="nofollow">https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/02/03/elon-musk...</a><p>"They have apparently installed sofa beds in the office of the OPM."<p>"Government employeees in various agencies report that staffers from DOGE are turning up at this offices, plugging in servers and running "code reviews"."<p>"What the DOGE people seem most keen on is access to personnel records and as much information as possible about what employees actually do. According to one civil servant interviewed by DOGE personnel, the questions include, "Which of your colleagues are most expendable?""<p>Sounds like a scene from Office Space.
Some context for USAID<p><a href="https://youtu.be/qe47hTyUh5g?feature=shared" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/qe47hTyUh5g?feature=shared</a>
> <i>So this feels like a hostile takeover of the machinery of governments by the richest man in the world.</i><p>... and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Checks and balances have been neutralized.
The moral arguments against what the left or right do are exactly the same.<p>Suddenly the left is all concerned about doxxing or unelected bureaucrats in government.<p>Truthfully politics in America is not about any moral compass - it’s about individual preference to see certain political ideas win or lose.<p>Instead of pretending politics is based on a set of moral issues, just accept that it’s a set of opinions. Some simply like certain causes, people, or businesses more than others do.
I see things done by DOGE are getting noticed. I vaguely remember that DOGE will be decommissioned around 2026 independence day I believe? I have no confidence in judging what the outcome might be at this point, so I will wait till the last day of DOGE.
I'm concerned about my US bonds, as the way to access them is through a government website. Are these people going to block my access and steal my money?<p>>> “We really have very little eyes on what's going on. Congress has no ability to really intervene and monitor what's happening because these aren't really accountable public officials. So this feels like a hostile takeover of the machinery of governments by the richest man in the world.”
"move fast and break things"<p>just imagine how insecure and fucked up their solutions will be? waiting for the S3 bucket that has global read permissions on a literal "select * from usa_citizens" dump of data.
This article appears to be a fictional piece that imagines a scenario where Elon Musk has gained control over certain federal government agencies through a project called the "Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)." (c) Claude :)
of course Musk recruits young ambitious kiddos - they work hard, for not much money, and don't question authority (because they're blinded by their ambition)<p>it's only when you get older that you see how rife this is for abuse. as a simple example, if DOGE knows influential Treasury recipients, then they could find ways to extort them. help us and you'll get your money on time. oppose us, and...<p>heck, I'm a treasury recipient (albeit a very small one), so if I take to X and start criticizing Trump or Musk, is my money at risk? Maybe not today but maybe within his term. Scary times.
How high are the chances of these young engineers getting highly lucrative offers from China and Russia just to tell them what they saw? They are set for life, and Elon Musk does not recognize that he enabled this.
I wonder how much of this is "I don't want to sell this Tesla I couldn't afford, so instead I'll change my whole political ideology"
Naming these people this way is a blatant invitation for harassment by signal-boosting their identities, even if technically their names are already known. This is one step away from doxing and we should not support it.
Have Elon Musk and all these engineers sworn oaths as required to be a federal employee? <a href="https://federalnewsnetwork.com/commentary/2019/10/the-oath-of-office-and-what-it-means/" rel="nofollow">https://federalnewsnetwork.com/commentary/2019/10/the-oath-o...</a> If Elon is "just advising", under what statute or directive does he have specific authority?<p>If they are accessing TS/SCI information and places like SCIFs have they filled out their SF-86? Are any of them dual nationals and do they have any ties or vulnerabilities to hostile foreign states?<p>Basic questions given the enormous access they are being given, far beyond frankly any handful of people have generally had in US government history.<p>Also, they have apparently plugged in their own private server at OPM. Has this already been compromised by Chinese/ Russian agents? Has the NSA had a look?
Man, these are some seriously impressive motherfuckers—my resume looks absolutely shameful compared to any one of them, and I'm over a decade older than they are.
I find the whole discussion around power of government branches and what different events mean and how will this or that branch react a bit surreal.<p>The guy has been impeached twice, exposing it as laughable, which it is. He has then been convicted as a felon, which hasn't slowed him down a bit in becoming a president again. He has then installed people of ridiculous backgrounds as some of the highest ranking officials in the country. He has then let Elon run amock within the government, accessing confidential data and doing things with absolutely no scrutiny or oversight. He has then already started nibbling at FBI, CIA and dozen other government agencies. It's been THREE. WEEKS.<p>I'm just not sure what mechanisms, checks and balances, and measures some people expect will be employed or will have any effect to control this. The government as was known up till now is no more. As long as people STILL try to frame Trump within traditional accountability mechanisms of the government, they will be floundering around the scandal or crime no. 3232, while he's committing no. 12768.<p>Once this slows down, there will be maybe 5% of tools and power left to revert things (and it would take decades), control the rich to any extent, and have any semblance of democracy, if they even bother to maintain it.
Curious european here. Do you think we will see some serious mass protests in big USA cities if this continues? By this I mean "reckless" action by Musk and Trump.
Elon Musk and all of these DOGE employees should be arrested and charged with multiple violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. They have no need or right to access the federal payments system and no authority whatsoever to stop payments congress has approved.
There doesn't seem to be anything interesting in this article, it's simply a Red Channels style blacklist against young people who are auditing a government program. The only reason this was published is because Wired is an intelligence outlet (and has always been.) Otherwise, the publishing of random government auditors' uninteresting resumes would obviously be considered harassment (if not doxxing, like Musk barked.)<p>Really, all this article says is that if you are an auditor for the commission appointed by the president, we will make sure that this comes up in an aggressively negative way when somebody who you want to work for googles you. It's pure intimidation, masquerading as journalism. It's somehow worse than Bill Ackman hiring trucks with the names of college students protesting a genocide being blasted as antisemites. At least Bill Ackman isn't pretending to be a journalist.<p>edit: every single article by this "disinformation expert" has been an anti-Trump or anti-Musk article. She has no other beat.
Interesting note:<p>> <i>On Sunday, CNN reported that DOGE personnel attempted to improperly access classified information and security systems at the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and that top USAID security officials who thwarted the attempt were subsequently put on leave. The AP reported that DOGE personnel had indeed accessed classified material.</i><p>It's attracted a lot of attention that killing USAID has been such a high priority for these guys despite only being 1% of the budget and having a seemingly innocent humanitarian mission. But what's USAID doing that involves classified data? Distributing humanitarian aid shouldn't require any information whose disclosure would seriously disclose national security, should it? Presumably this means USAID has been used as cover for covert operations around the globe.<p>Paranoid conspiracy theory? Maybe, but it's also a well-known fact; see <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agency_for_International_Development#Political_operations_abroad" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agency_for_Int...</a>:<p>> <i>William Blum has said that in the 1960s and early 1970s USAID has maintained "a close working relationship with the CIA, and Agency officers often operated abroad under USAID cover. (...) From 2010 to 2012, the agency operated ZunZuneo,[199] a social media site similar to Twitter in an attempt to instigate uprisings against the Cuban government. Its involvement was concealed in order to ensure mission success. The plan was to draw in users with non-controversial content until a critical mass is reached, after which more political messaging would be introduced. At its peak, more than 40,000 unsuspecting Cubans interacted on the platform.[199]</i><p>(There's a lot more there. Check it out if you haven't heard of this.)<p>So, if it's been a key part of the US's overseas covert operations for decades, why did it go into the wood chipper in a weekend? Did Elon Musk just fail to realize its importance to the US's worldwide influence?<p>With no evidence beyond the above, I think USAID was targeted because it's been a nucleus of the Intelligence Community's resistance to Trump consolidating his power.
“Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control.<p>I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe. The entire government, just like that. How did they get in, how did it happen?<p>That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on…”<p>- The Handmaid's Tale
My experience working for Tyler Technologies in the Courts and Justice division opened my eyes to the absolutely arrogant and basically consequence-free mismanagement of public data in the hands of private enterprise. The fiasco with JudyRecords.com is absolutely important to keep in mind. If anything, I find stressing "efficiency" in government is simply a cover for "gutting functionality" because anytime something doesn't fit in "the model" of services then it simply gets dismissed.<p>Is this a technology equivalent to burning the libraries of old? Once the data is gone, come on, do you think any reasonable efforts will be made to restore it? Frankly speaking, is the course DOGE taking a mandate by the people to be enacted by representatives in the government or is it vice-versa, that "we are changing your society whether you like it or not" is the fundamental principle.<p>Then again, I just got out of jail after a year on a made-up Terroristic Threat charge politically motivated, so my perspective is likely skewed regarding motives and actions of those who have unchecked power at their disposal.
disappointing to see so many “hacker” news comments complaining about lack of credentials or system-specific expertise.<p>yes, existing government systems are insanely complex - that’s part of the problem! the essential complexity is not higher than that of a brain-computer interface, or an interplanetary rocket.<p>we don’t even know what these kids’ mandate is (also disappointing). but if your general premise is “smart outsiders who are good at engineering are always the wrong people to rework complex, inefficient systems,” i’d like to think you’re on the wrong site.
Oh this sounds like it'll be a balanced, well researched article based on merits.<p>I'll then leave a comment here about a guy that knew a guy that heard from another guy that Elon almost ruined a company his aunt worked at.
Young people should be happy to see more representation in the federal govt. Among roles of authority it's probably 65+ . They're spending your & your grandkid's prosperity every minute.<p>People under 55 should be happy about this situation.
I applaud these guys and the work they're doing. Any bureaucracy, public or private, with access to a guaranteed income stream will grow like a tumor. The entire federal govt needs to be audited and gutted. The time for committees, reports and similar half measures is over.
I fully support young folks being put in those high pressure situations. Lets them learn and showcase what young people can do.<p>I think there are huge benefits when you put together a team of people that usually don't have distractions like kids, intimate relationships, health problems etc that can hinder productivity.<p>Even more beneficial to a team when you combine the wisdom and experience of older folks with the passion and energy of the youth.
This is where we are, we need to stop complaining and deal with things as the actually exist. I am doing this in my own way, my fear is Elon and Co. hitting Medicare/Medicaid so I am making my own: <a href="https://medicare.dev" rel="nofollow">https://medicare.dev</a>. I think this is going to become more and more common as fed become less and less stable/reliable.