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This is part of a broader rolling catastrophe. Musk is evidently seizing control of the Office of Personnel Management https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articl

This is part of a broader rolling catastrophe. Musk is evidently seizing control of the Office of Personnel Management https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2025-01-31/exclusive-musk-aides-lock-government-workers-out-of-computer-systems-at-us-agency-sources-say https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2025-01-31/exclus... Nasa took down their applied sciences page and is evidently scrubbing the data https://www.reddit.com/r/gis/comments/1icqchv/why_is_the_nasa_applied_sciences_website_is_down/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gis/comments/1icqchv/why_is_the_nas... (https://appliedsciences.nasa.gov/ https://appliedsciences.nasa.gov/) Lots of other data sets are disappearing too: https://mashable.com/article/government-datasets-disappear-since-trump-inauguration https://mashable.com/article/government-datasets-disappear-s... There is active discussion of this at https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ as well as at https://www.reddit.com/r/fednews/ https://www.reddit.com/r/fednews/

diggan 2y ago
> Musk is evidently seizing control of the Office of Personnel Management Suddenly I feel out of the loop when it comes to US politics, how come Musk is suddenly seemingly seizing control of parts of the US government? I don't recall him being on any ballots or anything?
- CalRobert 2y ago
  As it so happens he did not appear on any ballots. But Musk (his aides more specifically) have locked federal employees out of their own systems https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-aides-lock-government-workers-out-computer-systems-us-agency-sources-say-2025-01-31/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-aides-lock-government-... Evidently set up an on-prem email server at the OPM to send out their emails asking disloyal employees to resign https://gizmodo.com/federal-employees-sue-agency-over-new-email-system-allegedly-linked-to-elon-musk-2000556737 https://gizmodo.com/federal-employees-sue-agency-over-new-em... And is attempting to do the same at the US Treasury (edit: I meant to gain access to/control of, not the email server thing) https://www.finance.senate.gov/chairmans-news/wyden-demands-answers-following-report-of-musk-personnel-seeking-access-to-highly-sensitive-us-treasury-payments-system https://www.finance.senate.gov/chairmans-news/wyden-demands-... The twitzkrieg seems to be working.
  - treis 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
      They didn’t exaggerate with “locked federal employees out of their own systems”. That is accurate even if both sets of “employees” and “systems” are non-exhaustive.
    - albedoa 2y ago
      Buddy, if I told you that I have fostered dogs from shelters, would you take that to mean that I have fostered all dogs from all shelters? Someone is certainly being ridiculous.
      - llamaimperative 2y ago
        We're in for an impressive four years of mental gymnastics from the most pathetic thinkers on the planet.
- Applejinx 2y ago
  The trouble is, to talk about WHY Musk is attempting to seize control of parts of the US government and why the Trump administration is attempting to censor mass quantities of data would be a political conversation. Hacker News isn't designed for this. The point at which it becomes mass censorship that computer hackers (in their capacity as The Internet) might take an active role in routing around, is more or less this point: you're quite correct that this is worrying, but up to this point it's been a deeply political conversation and only as it becomes mass censorship and control by technological means, does it become really on-message for Hacker News.
  - CalRobert 2y ago
    Hacking includes systems, not just code, and what Musk is doing certainly counts as systems hacking I would say. Hell, Captain Crunch didn't even use a computer.
    - Applejinx 2y ago
      Oh, I don't disagree. I'm getting downvotes as if I didn't think this was Hacker News business. I think it became Hacker News business when unelected guys seized offices and computer systems and started doing… what? We don't know, but there's a lot of data deleting, censoring, and grant-freezing going on. I'm leaning very hard into an HN 'tone' with this because this is Hacker News. There's other places where I can be a lot more direct, but the HN tone is perfectly valid as a response: being able to think dispassionately is both tactically and strategically useful as long as it's not purely used to obfuscate. I fear HN folks have been sheltered from a lot of the reality of what's happening and led down the garden path BY intentionally asserting that tone anytime things get too assertive, but the tone still has its uses. edit: woof! Ok ok, this is fully HN business and always was. Right on. Sorry I even suggested it could ever be otherwise. I didn't give my fellow nerds enough credit :)
  - MetaWhirledPeas 2y ago
    > to talk about WHY Musk is attempting to seize control of parts of the US government and why the Trump administration is attempting to censor mass quantities of data would be a political conversation. In an attempt to keep it non-political: perhaps they (DOGE) are trying to put a "freeze" on the records while they consider who to fire. That would imply DOGE does not trust the people who have access to the records not to alter them in their favor. (Irony, since DOGE is demanding trust themselves.) You might not agree with that reason, but it is a reason.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  Musk was appointed as the administrator of DOGE, itself a subordinate "temporary organization" under the United States DOGE Service (formerly the United States Digital Service). All of this is happening within the Executive Office of the President, which is essentially fancyspeak to mean the government employees working the Executive Branch of the federal government. Those government employees serve at the pleasure of the President; Congress only has very limited influence (namely budgetary influences from the House and certain positions that require Senate confirmation). So Musk, being appointed as a part of the Executive Branch, derives authority vested in the President of which Trump has delegated some to Musk for the purposes of implementing and enforcing DOGE policies. Musk for his part also serves at the pleasure of the President, so whatever he does is ostensibly what Trump wants regardless of who actually does it.
  - vharuck 2y ago
    Most federal workers do not serve at the pleasure of the President, ever since the Pendleton Act in 1883: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendleton_Civil_Service_Reform_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendleton_Civil_Service_Refo... So remember, when Trump talks about the "deep state," he means workers hired through a merit system.
    - harshreality 2y ago
      > In January 1981, the Jimmy Carter administration settled the court case Luévano v. Campbell, which alleged the Professional and Administrative Careers Examination (PACE) was racially discriminatory as a result of the lower average scores and pass rates achieved by Black and Hispanic test takers. As a result of this settlement agreement, PACE, the main entry-level test for candidates seeking positions in the federal government’s executive branch, was scrapped.[36] It has not been replaced by a similar general exam, although attempts at replacement exams have been made. The system which replaced the general PACE exam has been criticized... People couldn't agree what merit was, and sued over it. Now it's not only [still] unclear what merit is, but it's also unclear how aligned federal hiring practices are with any platonic ideal of "merit". Trump and Elon taking a blowtorch to a lot of agencies isn't better, or even good. It looks to me like a different kind of bad that can't be quantified at the moment. Some of the worst of this will be temporary, since various resources are offline so that federal agencies can be compliant with Trump's EOs while they figure out how to change the resources and their databases, or wait for lawsuits to clarify before changing much or putting it back online. Hiring through a merit system does not imply that the employees' work is meritful. Congress had over 140 years (1883 to 2024) to carefully balance the rights of civil service workers against the need for top-down executive authority to ensure agencies are effective, in a way that would survive judicial review. Unfortunately, Congress is inept at almost everything. The Pendleton Act, followed by the CSRA, don't seem to have very well addressed the original patronage-based exec-branch staffing issue; as the article describes it, they've only ensured that replacing high-level staff is delayed by a term. Have they also made it too difficult to dismiss lower-level staff if agencies are ever in need of scaling back?
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  The US is undergoing a fascist takeover basically.
  - nehal3m 2y ago
    You’re being downvoted but looking from the outside in, Gitmo being scaled up to house 30k people that the administration expects never to be able to repatriate, an unelected billionaire running around destroying institutions and a president actively starting trade wars and threatening occupation with allies looks an awful lot like it.
    - RIMR 2y ago
      People aren't downvoting because they disagree about what's happening. They are downvoting because they agree with fascism, but don't like it when people say the truth out loud. It's a fundamental reality of fascism that those who support it will also deflect all valid criticism of their movement. A majority of U.S. voters chose this. After all that was already known about this admin, they aren't backing down, he's doing what he promised he would do. It is going to be more catastrophic than I think anyone knows.
      - CalRobert 2y ago
        Nitpick - fewer than fifty percent of votes went to trump
        0xcde4c3db 2y ago
        I was sure this was wrong, but it's true: according to official state counts, Donald Trump won 49.80% of the popular vote to Kamala Harris's 48.32%. The top 5 was rounded out by Jill Stein (0.56%), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (0.49%), and Chase Oliver (0.42%) [1]. [1] https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/2024presgeresults.pdf https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/2024pres... (yes, I'm aware of the irony of linking to federal agency data in this thread)
- dylan604 2y ago
  Not every person in the government is elected. Some positions are appointed. Not one judge from SCOTUS is elected. None of the members of the president's cabinet are elected. They are all Senate confirmed though, which is what's going on now with the current clown show. Somehow, Musk has created a role for himself where he even gets to bypass the Senate confirmation stage. That's the most disconcerting thing to me. Not that I think he wouldn't get confirmed, but the fact that he has this much power totally unchecked.
  - Ajedi32 2y ago
    > the fact that he has this much power totally unchecked. I think this is just a symptom of the amount of power the office of the president has accumulated over the years. Musk has no authority on his own; he's acting on the authority of the president. Due to the number of things Congress has delegated to the executive branch over the years, that's quite a lot of unchecked power indeed. But it's not Musk's power, it's the president's.
- refurb 2y ago
  President add unelected civilians to their cabinet every election. Did anyone elect Anthony Blinken? Janet Yellen? Lloyd Austin? None of these people were elected yet have substantial power delegated through the President. And while these people were approved by Senate vote, plenty of people in the Biden circle weren’t - Chief of Staff, members of the National Security Council, etc.
hypeatei 2y ago
I would just like to point out that Musk is the richest man in the world and is now directing critical areas of the U.S. government. Surely he doesn't have ulterior motives and is looking out for the average person?
- nimbius 2y ago
  If you look back at Germany in the 19th century, nations like Prussia and Austria had this sort of power struggle between the merchant class and the nobility at the advent of steam power. in this case the de-facto US nobility (rank-and-file career politicians) are being usurped by the bourgeouise (billionaires like Musk) at the advent of AI and tech by promising the working class a combination of culture war policy and relief from the very capitalist excess they themselves endorse. by reducing congress and senate to a simple debate team (conversely similar to the German National Asssembly) the tech-elite are able to seize power once reserved for the crown. the question will be, after four years, will they abdicate their power or concentrate it?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - NickC25 2y ago
    >the question will be, after four years, will they abdicate their power or concentrate it? You honestly think that's a question? Power corrupts. You saw Trump, who in 2016 said he'd get everything done so he'd see no need to run again, he'd have Made America Great Again. He then tried to rig the 2020 election so he could stay in power, despite saying "if I lose the election you'll never hear from me again", and 4 years later, here we are. These people are here to entrench themselves permanently.
    - seabass-labrax 2y ago
      I know that Trump was something of a bad loser when Biden was elected, and that he encouraged the riots on Capitol Hill, but I had not heard (from the media media here in Britain) that he attempted to rig the election. Could you provide a source for this please?
bmitc 2y ago
How is this not all illegal? How are cease and resists not being put into place? An illegal immigrant, narcissist, billionaire, and many other things is taking over federal agencies and actively purging them for his own ideologies.
- basscomm 2y ago
  It's only illegal if someone enforces the law
- Maxious 2y ago
  Anything the president does is legal so says the supreme court
  - maeil 2y ago
    I'm surprised that this was not given more attention, despite how much it was given, it should have gotten orders of magnitudes more. In the US, you can fly multiple planes into skyscrapers, rape three whole kindergartens, and lynch an entire race to extermination. As long as you then win the next election before you get convicted, you're in the clear. This is the United States of America. Vulgar examples? The bare minimum necessary to make people remotely feel the severity in their bones. Problem is that no one dares to say them out loud in fear of their reputation, despite it being a good thing to do.
  - hansvm 2y ago
    Absolutely. That begs the question though, if Trump has ordered federal employees to make the government efficient and eliminate the weaponization of government, are those employees not obligated to remove Trump and Musk from their current roles?
- CalRobert 2y ago
  Laws are just words
- mort96 2y ago
  I see these kinds of comments regularly and am curious: what is your thought process? What makes you think that it's not illegal? What makes you think that legality matters here?
Spooky23 2y ago
This is the downside of the web. Fortunately we have depository libraries, so some key stuff won’t be destroyed by these barbarians. https://www.gpo.gov/how-to-work-with-us/agency/services-for-agencies/federal-depository-library-program https://www.gpo.gov/how-to-work-with-us/agency/services-for-...
chinathrow 2y ago
At this point, being a Musk supporter is nothing to be proud of.
- bdcravens 2y ago
  I cancelled a Model 3 order and went with a different EV a few years ago. I was starting to soften my stance, and considering a Tesla for my next, but at this point, I have a hard time accepting the idea that buying one wouldn't send a message of implicit support.
  - beej71 2y ago
    Not just that, but I don't want my reputation tarnished.
    - LastTrain 2y ago
      And they look like shit anyway.
- Xunjin 2y ago
  Indeed it is, but maybe is time that we detach a person from their proposals. I wonder how that would be achieved.
  - eCa 2y ago
    So you are suggesting that all posts on news.ycombinator be anonymous?
    - Xunjin 2y ago
      Ohhhg I think I expressed myself wrongly, I meant for example, the Musk person and his proposals as a public man in politics, should I edit my comment to be more clear?
      - JKCalhoun 2y ago
Xunjin 2y ago
The "defender of free speech" is censoring data? Who ever thought about it? A lot of "woke" people warned it but several ignored as being "political speech" now we pay the consequences.
- watwut 2y ago
  Only paranoid SJWs called Musk a right wing person and here we are, watching Musk fund extreme right clearly proving them wrong. Those SJW were doing this thing whole my life, seems to me. There was always outrage about them accusing an innocent person of bad stuff ... only to turn out they were actually right.
pmarreck 2y ago
I hate to sound like a conventional cis-man, but this is exactly the sort of situation where conventional cis-man energy is needed: Where are the CDC people growing a spine to stand up to this? This is obviously bad. The reason why bullies only understand 1 language (force) is exactly why counter-bullies who also speak that language are needed. And these are (usually) men (and some smaller percentage of women). (I'm seriously not trying to genderize this. I'm speaking of "fighting/disobeying/confronting energy" instead of "nurturing/complying/keeping-copacetic energy". Anyone who's good at that, should exercise it.) If you have to take good science to the darknet, then fucking do so. That's what it's there for. "The [Dark]Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." - John Gilmore. Alternately, move the data hosting to Switzerland, Iceland, or the Netherlands as a data-haven. Hetzner might be OK too, since very-left-wing Germany (while it has an agreement to comply with legal MLAT requests) might savor the opportunity to snub Trumpian requests or stall them indefinitely due to lack of obvious national-security importance.
- IX-103 2y ago
  Sorry, I couldn't get through your third paragraph without hearing the "Team America: World Police" pussies/dicks speech in the background. But your argument is inherently flawed. Part of the point of government is to regulate and direct the use of force. We have mechanisms that are supposed to apply force to "bullies". The problem is that the "bullies" have co-opted that system to use it for their own ends. This happened gradually so it didn't become obvious until the most recent "bully" decided he didn't even want to pretend that he wasn't in control. Individuals who directly stand up to this administration will be hammered down with the full force of the government. The best we can hope for is a passive resistance and malicious compliance. That combined with grassroots efforts to fill the media with protests of objectionable policies is probably the best we can do for now. The only other option is to apply force outside of the system to correct it, but things are not nearly to the point where revolution is the better option.
  - pmarreck 2y ago
    > The problem is that the "bullies" have co-opted that system to use it for their own ends. This happened gradually so it didn't become obvious until the most recent "bully" decided he didn't even want to pretend that he wasn't in control. The funny thing is that people have always said this exact thing except paraphrased in various ways (perhaps the term was less "bully" and something more conventionally a universal term of disparagement like "fascist"). I definitely didn't want Obama going after whistleblowers, increasing domestic surveillance and not closing Guantanamo when I voted him in... and I liked his healthcare plan, until it died... I suspect that everyone says this when the person they didn't want in charge, now is, and starts doing things that their biased media always depicts only the negative side of.

diggan 2y ago

> Musk is evidently seizing control of the Office of Personnel Management Suddenly I feel out of the loop when it comes to US politics, how come Musk is suddenly seemingly seizing control of parts of the US government? I don't recall him being on any ballots or anything?

CalRobert 2y ago
As it so happens he did not appear on any ballots. But Musk (his aides more specifically) have locked federal employees out of their own systems https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-aides-lock-government-workers-out-computer-systems-us-agency-sources-say-2025-01-31/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-aides-lock-government-... Evidently set up an on-prem email server at the OPM to send out their emails asking disloyal employees to resign https://gizmodo.com/federal-employees-sue-agency-over-new-email-system-allegedly-linked-to-elon-musk-2000556737 https://gizmodo.com/federal-employees-sue-agency-over-new-em... And is attempting to do the same at the US Treasury (edit: I meant to gain access to/control of, not the email server thing) https://www.finance.senate.gov/chairmans-news/wyden-demands-answers-following-report-of-musk-personnel-seeking-access-to-highly-sensitive-us-treasury-payments-system https://www.finance.senate.gov/chairmans-news/wyden-demands-... The twitzkrieg seems to be working.
- treis 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
    They didn’t exaggerate with “locked federal employees out of their own systems”. That is accurate even if both sets of “employees” and “systems” are non-exhaustive.
  - albedoa 2y ago
    Buddy, if I told you that I have fostered dogs from shelters, would you take that to mean that I have fostered all dogs from all shelters? Someone is certainly being ridiculous.
    - llamaimperative 2y ago
      We're in for an impressive four years of mental gymnastics from the most pathetic thinkers on the planet.
Applejinx 2y ago
The trouble is, to talk about WHY Musk is attempting to seize control of parts of the US government and why the Trump administration is attempting to censor mass quantities of data would be a political conversation. Hacker News isn't designed for this. The point at which it becomes mass censorship that computer hackers (in their capacity as The Internet) might take an active role in routing around, is more or less this point: you're quite correct that this is worrying, but up to this point it's been a deeply political conversation and only as it becomes mass censorship and control by technological means, does it become really on-message for Hacker News.
- CalRobert 2y ago
  Hacking includes systems, not just code, and what Musk is doing certainly counts as systems hacking I would say. Hell, Captain Crunch didn't even use a computer.
  - Applejinx 2y ago
    Oh, I don't disagree. I'm getting downvotes as if I didn't think this was Hacker News business. I think it became Hacker News business when unelected guys seized offices and computer systems and started doing… what? We don't know, but there's a lot of data deleting, censoring, and grant-freezing going on. I'm leaning very hard into an HN 'tone' with this because this is Hacker News. There's other places where I can be a lot more direct, but the HN tone is perfectly valid as a response: being able to think dispassionately is both tactically and strategically useful as long as it's not purely used to obfuscate. I fear HN folks have been sheltered from a lot of the reality of what's happening and led down the garden path BY intentionally asserting that tone anytime things get too assertive, but the tone still has its uses. edit: woof! Ok ok, this is fully HN business and always was. Right on. Sorry I even suggested it could ever be otherwise. I didn't give my fellow nerds enough credit :)
- MetaWhirledPeas 2y ago
  > to talk about WHY Musk is attempting to seize control of parts of the US government and why the Trump administration is attempting to censor mass quantities of data would be a political conversation. In an attempt to keep it non-political: perhaps they (DOGE) are trying to put a "freeze" on the records while they consider who to fire. That would imply DOGE does not trust the people who have access to the records not to alter them in their favor. (Irony, since DOGE is demanding trust themselves.) You might not agree with that reason, but it is a reason.
Dalewyn 2y ago
Musk was appointed as the administrator of DOGE, itself a subordinate "temporary organization" under the United States DOGE Service (formerly the United States Digital Service). All of this is happening within the Executive Office of the President, which is essentially fancyspeak to mean the government employees working the Executive Branch of the federal government. Those government employees serve at the pleasure of the President; Congress only has very limited influence (namely budgetary influences from the House and certain positions that require Senate confirmation). So Musk, being appointed as a part of the Executive Branch, derives authority vested in the President of which Trump has delegated some to Musk for the purposes of implementing and enforcing DOGE policies. Musk for his part also serves at the pleasure of the President, so whatever he does is ostensibly what Trump wants regardless of who actually does it.
- vharuck 2y ago
  Most federal workers do not serve at the pleasure of the President, ever since the Pendleton Act in 1883: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendleton_Civil_Service_Reform_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendleton_Civil_Service_Refo... So remember, when Trump talks about the "deep state," he means workers hired through a merit system.
  - harshreality 2y ago
    > In January 1981, the Jimmy Carter administration settled the court case Luévano v. Campbell, which alleged the Professional and Administrative Careers Examination (PACE) was racially discriminatory as a result of the lower average scores and pass rates achieved by Black and Hispanic test takers. As a result of this settlement agreement, PACE, the main entry-level test for candidates seeking positions in the federal government’s executive branch, was scrapped.[36] It has not been replaced by a similar general exam, although attempts at replacement exams have been made. The system which replaced the general PACE exam has been criticized... People couldn't agree what merit was, and sued over it. Now it's not only [still] unclear what merit is, but it's also unclear how aligned federal hiring practices are with any platonic ideal of "merit". Trump and Elon taking a blowtorch to a lot of agencies isn't better, or even good. It looks to me like a different kind of bad that can't be quantified at the moment. Some of the worst of this will be temporary, since various resources are offline so that federal agencies can be compliant with Trump's EOs while they figure out how to change the resources and their databases, or wait for lawsuits to clarify before changing much or putting it back online. Hiring through a merit system does not imply that the employees' work is meritful. Congress had over 140 years (1883 to 2024) to carefully balance the rights of civil service workers against the need for top-down executive authority to ensure agencies are effective, in a way that would survive judicial review. Unfortunately, Congress is inept at almost everything. The Pendleton Act, followed by the CSRA, don't seem to have very well addressed the original patronage-based exec-branch staffing issue; as the article describes it, they've only ensured that replacing high-level staff is delayed by a term. Have they also made it too difficult to dismiss lower-level staff if agencies are ever in need of scaling back?
bongodongobob 2y ago
The US is undergoing a fascist takeover basically.
- nehal3m 2y ago
  You’re being downvoted but looking from the outside in, Gitmo being scaled up to house 30k people that the administration expects never to be able to repatriate, an unelected billionaire running around destroying institutions and a president actively starting trade wars and threatening occupation with allies looks an awful lot like it.
  - RIMR 2y ago
    People aren't downvoting because they disagree about what's happening. They are downvoting because they agree with fascism, but don't like it when people say the truth out loud. It's a fundamental reality of fascism that those who support it will also deflect all valid criticism of their movement. A majority of U.S. voters chose this. After all that was already known about this admin, they aren't backing down, he's doing what he promised he would do. It is going to be more catastrophic than I think anyone knows.
    - CalRobert 2y ago
      Nitpick - fewer than fifty percent of votes went to trump
      - 0xcde4c3db 2y ago
        I was sure this was wrong, but it's true: according to official state counts, Donald Trump won 49.80% of the popular vote to Kamala Harris's 48.32%. The top 5 was rounded out by Jill Stein (0.56%), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (0.49%), and Chase Oliver (0.42%) [1]. [1] https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/2024presgeresults.pdf https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/2024pres... (yes, I'm aware of the irony of linking to federal agency data in this thread)
dylan604 2y ago
Not every person in the government is elected. Some positions are appointed. Not one judge from SCOTUS is elected. None of the members of the president's cabinet are elected. They are all Senate confirmed though, which is what's going on now with the current clown show. Somehow, Musk has created a role for himself where he even gets to bypass the Senate confirmation stage. That's the most disconcerting thing to me. Not that I think he wouldn't get confirmed, but the fact that he has this much power totally unchecked.
- Ajedi32 2y ago
  > the fact that he has this much power totally unchecked. I think this is just a symptom of the amount of power the office of the president has accumulated over the years. Musk has no authority on his own; he's acting on the authority of the president. Due to the number of things Congress has delegated to the executive branch over the years, that's quite a lot of unchecked power indeed. But it's not Musk's power, it's the president's.
refurb 2y ago
President add unelected civilians to their cabinet every election. Did anyone elect Anthony Blinken? Janet Yellen? Lloyd Austin? None of these people were elected yet have substantial power delegated through the President. And while these people were approved by Senate vote, plenty of people in the Biden circle weren’t - Chief of Staff, members of the National Security Council, etc.

hypeatei 2y ago

I would just like to point out that Musk is the richest man in the world and is now directing critical areas of the U.S. government. Surely he doesn't have ulterior motives and is looking out for the average person?

nimbius 2y ago
If you look back at Germany in the 19th century, nations like Prussia and Austria had this sort of power struggle between the merchant class and the nobility at the advent of steam power. in this case the de-facto US nobility (rank-and-file career politicians) are being usurped by the bourgeouise (billionaires like Musk) at the advent of AI and tech by promising the working class a combination of culture war policy and relief from the very capitalist excess they themselves endorse. by reducing congress and senate to a simple debate team (conversely similar to the German National Asssembly) the tech-elite are able to seize power once reserved for the crown. the question will be, after four years, will they abdicate their power or concentrate it?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- NickC25 2y ago
  >the question will be, after four years, will they abdicate their power or concentrate it? You honestly think that's a question? Power corrupts. You saw Trump, who in 2016 said he'd get everything done so he'd see no need to run again, he'd have Made America Great Again. He then tried to rig the 2020 election so he could stay in power, despite saying "if I lose the election you'll never hear from me again", and 4 years later, here we are. These people are here to entrench themselves permanently.
  - seabass-labrax 2y ago
    I know that Trump was something of a bad loser when Biden was elected, and that he encouraged the riots on Capitol Hill, but I had not heard (from the media media here in Britain) that he attempted to rig the election. Could you provide a source for this please?

bmitc 2y ago

How is this not all illegal? How are cease and resists not being put into place? An illegal immigrant, narcissist, billionaire, and many other things is taking over federal agencies and actively purging them for his own ideologies.

basscomm 2y ago
It's only illegal if someone enforces the law
Maxious 2y ago
Anything the president does is legal so says the supreme court
- maeil 2y ago
  I'm surprised that this was not given more attention, despite how much it was given, it should have gotten orders of magnitudes more. In the US, you can fly multiple planes into skyscrapers, rape three whole kindergartens, and lynch an entire race to extermination. As long as you then win the next election before you get convicted, you're in the clear. This is the United States of America. Vulgar examples? The bare minimum necessary to make people remotely feel the severity in their bones. Problem is that no one dares to say them out loud in fear of their reputation, despite it being a good thing to do.
- hansvm 2y ago
  Absolutely. That begs the question though, if Trump has ordered federal employees to make the government efficient and eliminate the weaponization of government, are those employees not obligated to remove Trump and Musk from their current roles?
CalRobert 2y ago
Laws are just words
mort96 2y ago
I see these kinds of comments regularly and am curious: what is your thought process? What makes you think that it's not illegal? What makes you think that legality matters here?

Spooky23 2y ago

This is the downside of the web. Fortunately we have depository libraries, so some key stuff won’t be destroyed by these barbarians. https://www.gpo.gov/how-to-work-with-us/agency/services-for-agencies/federal-depository-library-program https://www.gpo.gov/how-to-work-with-us/agency/services-for-...

chinathrow 2y ago

At this point, being a Musk supporter is nothing to be proud of.

bdcravens 2y ago
I cancelled a Model 3 order and went with a different EV a few years ago. I was starting to soften my stance, and considering a Tesla for my next, but at this point, I have a hard time accepting the idea that buying one wouldn't send a message of implicit support.
- beej71 2y ago
  Not just that, but I don't want my reputation tarnished.
  - LastTrain 2y ago
    And they look like shit anyway.
Xunjin 2y ago
Indeed it is, but maybe is time that we detach a person from their proposals. I wonder how that would be achieved.
- eCa 2y ago
  So you are suggesting that all posts on news.ycombinator be anonymous?
  - Xunjin 2y ago
    Ohhhg I think I expressed myself wrongly, I meant for example, the Musk person and his proposals as a public man in politics, should I edit my comment to be more clear?
    - JKCalhoun 2y ago

Xunjin 2y ago

The "defender of free speech" is censoring data? Who ever thought about it? A lot of "woke" people warned it but several ignored as being "political speech" now we pay the consequences.

watwut 2y ago
Only paranoid SJWs called Musk a right wing person and here we are, watching Musk fund extreme right clearly proving them wrong. Those SJW were doing this thing whole my life, seems to me. There was always outrage about them accusing an innocent person of bad stuff ... only to turn out they were actually right.

pmarreck 2y ago

I hate to sound like a conventional cis-man, but this is exactly the sort of situation where conventional cis-man energy is needed: Where are the CDC people growing a spine to stand up to this? This is obviously bad. The reason why bullies only understand 1 language (force) is exactly why counter-bullies who also speak that language are needed. And these are (usually) men (and some smaller percentage of women). (I'm seriously not trying to genderize this. I'm speaking of "fighting/disobeying/confronting energy" instead of "nurturing/complying/keeping-copacetic energy". Anyone who's good at that, should exercise it.) If you have to take good science to the darknet, then fucking do so. That's what it's there for. "The [Dark]Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." - John Gilmore. Alternately, move the data hosting to Switzerland, Iceland, or the Netherlands as a data-haven. Hetzner might be OK too, since very-left-wing Germany (while it has an agreement to comply with legal MLAT requests) might savor the opportunity to snub Trumpian requests or stall them indefinitely due to lack of obvious national-security importance.

IX-103 2y ago
Sorry, I couldn't get through your third paragraph without hearing the "Team America: World Police" pussies/dicks speech in the background. But your argument is inherently flawed. Part of the point of government is to regulate and direct the use of force. We have mechanisms that are supposed to apply force to "bullies". The problem is that the "bullies" have co-opted that system to use it for their own ends. This happened gradually so it didn't become obvious until the most recent "bully" decided he didn't even want to pretend that he wasn't in control. Individuals who directly stand up to this administration will be hammered down with the full force of the government. The best we can hope for is a passive resistance and malicious compliance. That combined with grassroots efforts to fill the media with protests of objectionable policies is probably the best we can do for now. The only other option is to apply force outside of the system to correct it, but things are not nearly to the point where revolution is the better option.
- pmarreck 2y ago
  > The problem is that the "bullies" have co-opted that system to use it for their own ends. This happened gradually so it didn't become obvious until the most recent "bully" decided he didn't even want to pretend that he wasn't in control. The funny thing is that people have always said this exact thing except paraphrased in various ways (perhaps the term was less "bully" and something more conventionally a universal term of disparagement like "fascist"). I definitely didn't want Obama going after whistleblowers, increasing domestic surveillance and not closing Guantanamo when I voted him in... and I liked his healthcare plan, until it died... I suspect that everyone says this when the person they didn't want in charge, now is, and starts doing things that their biased media always depicts only the negative side of.