5 ms·
Why are high level figures in these departments just letting them walk in and have access? Tell them to kick rocks until they have proper clearances.
by 9283409232 2y ago
Why are high level figures in these departments just letting them walk in and have access? Tell them to kick rocks until they have proper clearances.
- tristan957 2y agoUSAID employees did and were fired for it.
- 9283409232 2y agoRefuse to leave then. It is the entire point of civil disobedience. Make a spectacle of being dragged out.
- tristan957 2y agoI don't mean this negatively toward you in any way, but it is easy to say when you aren't in that situation.
- 9283409232 2y agoYou're right but I also didn't swear an oath to protecting the country.
- threeseed 2y agoBecause Elon has the authority of the President who can override clearances. US government was simply never designed for scenarios like this.
- jdross 2y agoArguably it was designed explicitly for the chief executive having control of the executive branch we just haven’t had executives with this level of interest in making major changes in 40+ years. Was somewhat common to shake up the scope of the federal gov’t when the bureaucracy was much smaller in the 1800’s and early 1900’s
- threeseed 2y agoYou’re right that previous governments did not just recklessly disband entire agencies based on the wishes of an unelected billionaire and a bunch of teenagers. I wonder why.
- nemo44x 2y agoCorrect. It’s hard for people to imagine but the country functioned very differently before FDR and before him Lincoln. We’ve lived in FDRs government for 75 years and it’s served well for a good deal of that time. But nothing lasts for ever and even wine doesn’t continue to get better forever. You could argue there have been 4 Republics - articles of confederation, Washington, Lincoln, FDR marking the turning point. The world has changed a lot. It feels like the time is right to rethink the federal governments scope and function and how it relates to her people and the world.
- 9283409232 2y agoI'd rather a bunch of corrupt oligarchs not be the ones behind the change turning the US into a different "network-states"
- threeseed 2y agoYou are talking about a time before social programs like Medicare and Medicaid. People have higher expectations of what their government should be able to do.
- 2y ago
- ThinkBeat 2y agoSo.... The US government was designed to -deny- the executive branch oversight and answers from the departments and agencies that the exutive branch runs? Or it was designed such that the exutive branch may not appoint or use independent organisations or consultants to perform audits? I dont think that is accurate.
- threeseed 2y agoNot sure what you are talking about. Audits happen all the time in government. What is extraordinary is doing so with (a) no thought to privacy or security, (b) using teenagers with no security clearances, (c) by a billionaire who seems to just be going after his enemies e.g. USAID was investigating SpaceX.
- jandrewrogers 2y ago> with no security clearances Everyone has the necessary clearance. People need to stop treating clearances like a magic totem, the executive can grant access like candy if they wish, and often does when expedient. DC is organized around minimizing the need for a formal clearance/access process because it is slow. Between the executive carte blanche and various title authorities with their well-understood loopholes, you can often just do things.
- threeseed 2y ago> Everyone has the necessary clearance Then why did a Federal Judge just restrain DOGE from their work because of a violation of the Privacy Act: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-york-and-18-states-sue-trump-doge-access-privacy/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-york-and-18-states-sue-trum...
- ModernMech 2y ago> the executive can grant access like candy if they wish That doesn't mean doing so it can't be a problem when they do. This article is exactly why doing so is problematic and justifies the existence of the clearance process. If they hadn't circumvented the process, the FBI would have found this information instead of Wired, and it could have been handled properly instead of in the public by the media. Going around this process opens people up to being blackmailed or extorted -- what if foreign intelligence found leverage over one of these people before our media and used it to extract government secrets? We don't even know if these people have been trained to handle classified and sensitive information. Do they even know their own rights and responsibilities?
- dudinax 2y agoIt was designed for this. The safeguard is supposed to be Congress protecting their own powers out of self interest. They aren't. That's the where the "framers" screwed up.
- fzeroracer 2y agoI think the problem goes deeper than that, for two reasons. The first is the obvious one. Congress is captured by a bunch of ineffectual assholes that either don't care enough to stop this or actively support ceding power to the executive. But the second is that Congress has no actual enforcement mechanism. There are a few Congress members that are trying to stop this, but the executive can just play games with the court and lock out Congress members from any sort of oversight. If the executive refuses to abide by the laws of the country, who has control to stop it?
- zfg 2y ago> If the executive refuses to abide by the laws of the country, who has control to stop it? Three years ago J.D. Vance and others were already thinking about this and anticipating court cases: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right... To quote the article: “I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” [Vance] said. “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” “And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say—” he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.” They've been preparing themselves to ignore judicial rulings and they may well do that.
- zfg 2y agoAnd he's staying true to form: https://www.newsweek.com/jd-vance-comment-questioning-court-authority-sparks-backlash-2028651 https://www.newsweek.com/jd-vance-comment-questioning-court-... https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gx3j5k63xo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gx3j5k63xo
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> Why are high level figures in these departments just letting them walk in The better question is what are all the Congressmen doing cozily on Capitol Hill. Like, not one has walked over to these departments to try and physically stop these kids from gaining the keys to the kingdom? (EDIT: Whoops, they have.)
- mlyle 2y agohttps://www.newsweek.com/democrats-blocked-education-department-doge-elon-musk-2028047 https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-blocked-education-departm...
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoThank you—missed this. I’d still say there is an escalation step missing in trying to stop the DOGE bros from entering the premises, up to and including getting arrested. Look at Seoul. The balls on those lawmakers saved their democracy. I’m not seeing that strength or resolve in the Congress anywhere.
- mlyle 2y agoResistance in democracy needs to be well-timed. Too early, and you don't have a critical mass of force to oppose the ruling regime and appear unreasonable. Too late, and it's too late to do anything. The right moment is only obvious in retrospect.
- Applejinx 2y agoThis, plus you must consider the risks of taking bold action that can be framed as insurrectionary. I don't see a lot of haste to immediately and unequivocally declare the elected President, a usurper. Some would say the trouble is, the man got large numbers of legitimate votes under false pretenses, in a system where such an act is expected to lead to buyers' remorse and midterm losses through the political system. Instead, we have whatever this is. Doesn't look like it's complying with the normal process of the political system, which is designed to punish an electoral bait-and-switch. Looks more like Russian elections and populace-management.
- 93po 2y agoWhy do we care so much about classified information? Why is there a reverence for our government hiding information from its people? Why shouldn't the government operate out in the open in all ways? Something something terrorism, but i don't buy it. terrorism is the scapegoat for which we have massively eroded privacy and rights, in the same way that CSAM is the scapegoat for trying to ban encryption every 5 years.
- 9283409232 2y agoThey don't just have classified information. There is a lot of sensitive personal information on you and me in these databases. Information that can be used for blackmail and other nefarious purposes.
- whamlastxmas 2y agoMaybe the government shouldn’t keep this information on its citizens without probable cause?
- hypothesis 2y agoThey didn’t publish it all for everyone to use, did they? Not much transparency here, since all they did was steal it and use selectively for their purposes.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kzrdude 2y agoThey remove the people who resist, like this: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/31/us/politics/david-lebryk-treasury-resigns-musk.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/31/us/politics/david-lebryk-...
- jandrewrogers 2y agoBecause the DOGE people have the proper clearances and authority. There seems to be a lot of confusion on this point. The executive branch can immediately grant clearance and access to random people at their discretion, and they routinely do in every administration. You don't even need to apply for a security clearance, never mind hold one. If the DNI wants to read in a Starbucks barista on the secret space alien bunker program, they can do that. Voting for the President is in part voting for this. They don't need to ask permission from the bureaucracy nor can they be impeded by process because it is a Constitutional authority. Americans really do seem to know nothing about how the Federal government works. This kind of drama happens every four years, they've just never paid attention before. Every administration change brings in a coterie of poorly vetted people like this and gives them the keys to the kingdom. Dialing up the outrage media this particularly time is manipulative. I've been close enough to this action across several administration changes to be pretty blasé about what has occurred so far.
- Psillisp 2y agoNothing to see here folks. All very normal. Remember aliens? Aren’t they cool. Don’t y’all remember when O’biden gave all those illegals access to the Jade Helm. What a blasé coterie of manipulative lamestream media.