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The question no one asking is why Elon is sending a team of teenage programmers and not a team of financial auditors if he really wanted to cut government spend

The question no one asking is why Elon is sending a team of teenage programmers and not a team of financial auditors if he really wanted to cut government spending?

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> why Elon is sending a team of teenage programmers and not a team of financial auditors if he really wanted to cut government spending? History has one answer for the deployment of reams of young fiery-loyalist men to the front lines: cannon fodder.
- varjag 2y ago
  IMO it's more reminiscent of Red Guards from Cultural Revolution era China.
  - thephyber 2y ago
    And university students during the Iranian Revolution.
  - watwut 2y ago
    [flagged]
- fujinghg 2y ago
  Old enough to do the job, too young to ask the right questions.
amazingamazing 2y ago
Reporting on this is terrible. There are also senior (in age and experience) people, but much of the focus is on the youngins for obvious reasons. Musk also believes (either arrogance, or true belief) that much of this stuff can be figured out from first principals without much need of traditional experts.
- fumar 2y ago
  What do mean by stuff?
  - amazingamazing 2y ago
    > not a team of financial auditors if he really wanted to cut government spending?
- default-kramer 2y ago
  I hope this is true. Can you name any senior people and/or financial auditors who are overseeing "the youngins"?
  - jdross 2y ago
    I know a number of them but they’re rightfully not looking to be especially public about it now on the internet — life is hard enough just doing the job they’re trying to do. Which is frankly a lot of banal accounting and auditing type work. They’re in their 30’s and 40’s with prolific backgrounds in PE, as entrepreneurs managing nine figure budgets and thousands of employees, etc. Politics vs policy, or something like that?
    - apical_dendrite 2y ago
      I'm having trouble reconciling the backgrounds of the people that you're describing with the effects of the work they're doing. When they suddenly closed USAID, vulnerable people around the world instantly lost access to food and medicine with no recourse. There were people enrolled in clinical trials who had devices implanted in their bodies and then suddenly all support was cut off. Even if you believe that America shouldn't fund these things, how can you possibly justify shutting it down in such a way that food for hungry people rots in warehouses and clinicians have to decide if they're going to defy orders to vaccinate a pregnant mother? I can understand how a 23-year-old can get so enamored by all this sudden access to power that he completely loses sight of the effects of what he's doing. I don't understand how someone with decades of experience in positions of responsibility doesn't ask the most basic questions about the consequences of taking drastic action.
kjrfghslkdjfl 2y ago
Answer is obvious. Because teenagers tend to be impressionable and unscrupulous.
- PenguinCoder 2y ago
  And typically cheaper to employ.
  - pkilgore 2y ago
    And gullible enough not to realize how disposable they are to prevent their leaders from getting in trouble.
grandempire 2y ago
When we think about what tasks bright young people can become good at, I think auditing flows of money is one of them. It's a technical task with objective results, and a tight feedback cycle. The places where you need age and experience are like resolving interpersonal conflict, balancing interests from many stakeholders, setting up objectives for others to follow, etc. So to me this argument sounds the same as "how can young kids think they can program like experienced engineers". Another answer is that financial auditors don't have ALL the technical skill for this scope of project. Light SQL skills tend to be the upper end of technical accounting (many workers on a project is good for corporate billing). Reports indicate Doge is employing graph analysis, LLMs, etc. Getting the data looks like a SW problem perfect for young people. I have no evidence that this how the organization functions, but I can imagine them as technical analysts, who simply pass information to higher ups who do have organizational experience.
- UncleEntity 2y ago
  > So to me this argument sounds the same as "how can young kids think they can program like experienced engineers". Which leads me to my favorite quote from TFA: "must have killed all those test pigs with some bugs"
rich_sasha 2y ago
Moving fast and breaking things. Though I note at SpaceX he seems to hire actual rocket scientists.
renewiltord 2y ago
The answer to that question is that Elon Musk does not seem to believe that the government departments can answer data questions. Rather than wait for them to inevitably say it will take weeks to gather the data, he has his war boys extract it from the system. One might as well ask "if you want to stop HIV/AIDS in Africa why pay a bunch of young kids with international relations degrees instead of AIDS researchers". Grunt work takes grunt effort.
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y ago
  << Elon Musk does not seem to believe that the government departments can answer data questions. To be fair, having been part of many an corp at this point ( you would think they would want to have accurate data ), that assumption is not flawed.
Spooky23 2y ago
Auditors take time and are boring. Auditors measure performance against rules and goals — this is about discarding the rules and goals. The point of this is chaos and power. Elon has contempt for rules and laws. Blame the fuckups on the deep state or whatever. He will run wild until the president cuts off his head.
timewizard 2y ago
The question no one is asking is why does the federal government have so much "sensitive data" on it's citizens in the first place? When you build a machine like this you should ask, "would I be comfortable if my political opposites had control of this?" If the answer is no, then you DON'T BUILD IT. Meanwhile someone goes in there to try to break up this 30 year pile of technical debt and it's all lawsuits and handwaving theatrics to try to stop it.
- mvdtnz 2y ago
  How could the US government do things like collect tax or regulate the medical industry without sensitive data?
  - timewizard 2y ago
    Tax data is not particularly sensitive and several nations just publish it. Even in the US many forms of non-individual tax filings are public by default. The results of audits /are/ highly sensitive but there's no reason to hold those on computer systems for longer than 5 years after the audit. I think the medical industry can easily be regulated without the government having access to my actual medical file. They regulate cars without having any idea how I drive mine. They regulate planes without sitting on the flight deck themselves. It's like we know how to build good businesses, good databases, have solid user control practices, but then we give the government a pass because it's imagined to be "really hard." It's laughable.
    - matwood 2y ago
      > Tax data is not particularly sensitive and several nations just publish it. Aren't we still waiting for Trump's tax returns?
      - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
        https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/trumps-tax-returns-released-today-2022-12-30/?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/trumps-tax-returns-rele...
braza 2y ago
> team of teenage Maybe it's a question of wording, but I would agree if the word were "inexperienced" instead of teenage (in reality, they are young adults). I have no horse in this DOGE race and all the discussions, but I find this "reverse ageism" (for lack of a better term) quite sad, 'cause it does not sound condescending but infantilizes youth and hides one of the biggest elephants in the room in the modern world, which is the real lack of representation of youth in politics (and maybe in the public service?) [1][2]. I was a 19-year-old holding an assault weapon in my daily work in the military with the power to terminate the lives of almost 99.99% civilians, friends with 23 starting piloting USD 5 million machines, and it's just sad to see that we as a society do not see young adults as capable as their older counterparts. I speculate that at least in Europe, due to this credibility bias in favor of older politicians, we are facing one of the biggest violations of the intergenerational pact, which is the fact that this same youth will end up without retirement [3]. [1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/congress-age-demographics-house-senate/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/congress-age-de... [2] - https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/both-republicans-and-democrats-have-an-age-problem/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/both-republicans-and-de... [3] - https://www.dw.com/en/pension-fund-crisis-looms-in-germany-as-population https://www.dw.com/en/pension-fund-crisis-looms-in-germany-a...
- DiscourseFan 2y ago
  You were not a 19 year old with access to the personal financial data of hundreds of millions of civilians.
  - brigandish 2y ago
    Financial data that seems to be subject to those running massive fraud or allowing it through negligence, but somehow attempting to tackle that is more dangerous than a 19 year old holding an incredibly efficient weapon. The foxes were already in the hen-house before DOGE turned up, either, as many seem to think here, there are now competing foxes in there, or a clean up is happening. I've yet to see any evidence of actual damage done by DOGE, so why is everyone ignoring the evidence of actual damage that they've found? Can we work that one out?
mvdtnz 2y ago
Everyone is asking that. It's the main thing people are asking.
billfor 2y ago
[flagged]
- jsiepkes 2y ago
  > He cofounded paypal which is payment system. Presumably he knows about things like payment systems, fraud, etc... No, he didn't. He founded x.com as a payment system which was substantially less popular then paypal. Due to a bunch of mergers of parent companies, x.com and paypal had to merge. Musk became CEO and the whole thing was later sold to ebay, he left and cashed out big. That whole timeline unfolded in just a couple of years. So his actual experience is not that long. And besides that all unfolded in 1999. I have no idea what your age is but that was a different time and payment system knowledge from that time isn't worth that much nowadays.
  - StackRanker3000 2y ago
    You’re leaving out that he was ousted by Thiel and the board because they thought he was about to fuck up the whole thing. By the time they sold to eBay, he was the largest shareholder, but no longer involved with the operation of the company.
  - UncleMeat 2y ago
    And famously was given the boot for pursuing dumb technical decisions too.
- mistrial9 2y ago
  Isn't there a tell-all book or three about the founding of PayPal? I think many people here have read those books, and some readers here were involved? Please, enough breathless conjecture, the content is serious enough..
watwut 2y ago
Cause these can get access to things Elon wants access to and will do what Elon wants. Musk does not want audit, he wants someone who will find exactly what Musk wants him to find and wont worry about legality or rules. Musk is not concerned with producing false accusation for example. Obviously he could find corrupt auditors and probably did, but those are slower. They take more time to produce what was asked from them.
adolph 2y ago
> not a team of financial auditors There is a claim that many federal payments do not have information necessary for traditional financial audits. Maybe a team of forensic auditors would be more apt?
- acdha 2y ago
  Given how transparent government spending is and how frequently it’s audited, I think that’s begging the question of how scientific that claim is. The DoD is the only federal agency which hasn’t been able to have a clean audit[1] so it would be reasonable to question them – taking into consideration their unusual size and distribution, of course – but that doesn’t say anything about the rest of the government, or even distinguish between issues with payments vs. things like physical inventory when you have thousands of facilities around the world. 1. https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-24-106890.pdf https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-24-106890.pdf
barkingcat 2y ago
this just exposes the double standard and agism in tech industries. in tech, a lot of companies won't hire you in technical roles or as programmer because you're over 40. a lot of doge/elon's team is from the various tech companies he owns, so of course, they're going to be teenagers and senior people are pretty much laid off. think about the next tech layoff you hear in the news (facebook/meta, etc) and think about what portion of the layoff is younger than 20 and what portion are older than 40.
TacticalCoder 2y ago
> The question no one asking is why Elon is sending a team of teenage programmers and not a team of financial auditors if he really wanted to cut government spending? If it's working, why would it matter? The most curious thing in all these discussions is that the elephant in the room is never addressed: they already found on hundreds of billions of pure fraud and funding for extremely dubious endeavors. But nobody talks about that: everybody attacks the messenger. Everywhere. Are people not happy that the fraud team already uncovered the following: USAID fund diverted to the Clinton family, part of which funded a $3m for Chelsea Clinton's wedding and $10m for Chelsea Clinton's mansion. $41m to study transgender mice $3m to BBC (seriously, what? BBC in the UK? With US taxpayers dollars? Why? To push what kind of narrative?) $8m to the supposedly independent "Politico" $40m+ to EcoHealthAlliance to fund gain-of-function on modified bat viruses (moreover now official report to Congress says the most likely source for the Covid-19 outbreak is a lab-leak: so we have USAID partially responsible for the *death of tens of millions of people* $20m for a "Sesame Street" show in Iraq $110m to find water in Afghanistan funding of a movie in Portugal glorifying incest countless NGOs worldwide who got funded by USAID and who constantly pushed for tens of millions of illegal migrants to make their way both to the US and the EU (now you may believe it's a good thing that countless NGOs do actively work towards migrating tens of millions of people to the US and the EU but *why* is this done with US taxpayers' money?) The examples are endless and yet everybody shoots the messenger. If out of hundreds of dubious endeavour (money to publish trans book for children in Guatemala: I mean, come on guys), if one happens to be justified spending or a wrongly attributed spending, then people will focus on that to attack DOGE. But the elephant in the room is constantly dodged: why? The elephant in the room is there. And it's a gigantic elephant. Why is it that to some, like me, it looks like USAID (and certainly more with more revelations to come) is basically a gigantic money laundering operation combined with the push of a worldwide leftist agenda? And the curious thing: people keep crying "attack on democracy" although DOGE keeps exposing, day after day, actual attacks on democracy, where US taxpayers dollar were used to fund a leftist agenda. To me DOGE is doing something right. Instead of shooting the messenger, discuss the actual findings they already did. Explain to me how you defend $40m+ going to fund gain-of-function bat viruses and how you defend Biden pardoning Fauci who lied about it in Congress? Because that's what DOGE is exposing.
nailer 2y ago
Data scientists are generally better than financial auditors at handling large quantities of data.
hi_hi 2y ago
I don't quite understand how they are gaining the access credentials required? Where I work, it takes days to onboard people, through standard processes. Whats happening in this case. Given the highly volatile, and legally gray, situation; I'd expect the front line people who usually grant access are at least flagging these requests to their boss, who flags to their boss etc. Is everyone up the chain just giving a shrug and saying "seems legit, give them the access". Of course people don't want to loose their jobs, but I would have expected someone in a senior leadership position to take a stand in preventing this (unless their all on board?)
- daveguy 2y ago
  When you're the president, they let you do it. You can do anything. Especially if you're sending someone in to shut down entire departments and freeze communications.
  - SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
    Upvoted for the apt part of the quote that everyone leaves out. They let you do it.
- jungturk 2y ago
  The president appoints new bosses at all the executive branch agencies, and those bosses approve the access. Several recent news stories have described situations where the agency head resisted and was removed.
dools 2y ago
Easy: this is political retribution. USAID: 0.6% of the budget CFPB: 0.011% of the budget It has nothing to do with saving money and is well beyond the executive order than instantiated the agency. If all they do is disrupt things enough for some crypto dorks and Russians to make a play it was all worth it.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  USAID was the most resistant to an audit which is why they’re getting scrutinized early. Trump literally said today on an interview aired before the superbowl that a department of defense audit is coming up and he expects it to turn up billions to hundreds of billions in waste.
  - hypothesis 2y ago
    What does “resistant” mean here? It appears that they passed audit just a few months ago: > Opinion: Williams Adley concluded that USADF’s financial statements as of September 30, 2024, and September 30, 2023, are presented fairly, in all material respects, and in conformity with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles. > The audit firm also found no reportable noncompliance with provisions of applicable laws, regulations, contracts, and grant agreements. > The audit firm found no material weaknesses in internal control over financial reporting but found deficiencies in the internal controls over the Funds Held Outside of Treasury process. We collectively identified these deficiencies as a reportable significant deficiency. https://oig.usaid.gov/node/7291 https://oig.usaid.gov/node/7291 It sure looks like retaliation hit job.
  - filoeleven 2y ago
    There's no way that USAID was more resistant to an audit than DOD.
    - mrguyorama 2y ago
      Why would the DoD be resistant to an audit? They've had un-auditable black budgets for decades and every time someone questions them they pull a new stealth aircraft out of their back pocket
jhp123 2y ago
it all mirrors the Twitter takeover (fetishizing "hardcore coders", micromanagement, randomly breaking or cancelling things), so this might just be how Elon Musk approaches things.
- treis 2y ago
  He did cut Twitter's workforce by 80% and things seem fine absent his deranged heel turn.
  - KingMob 2y ago
    I have no idea what proportion of Twitter's jobs were necessary or not, but it is DEFINITELY not fine. From images routinely failing to load, to the current mess of logins that is the dualistic nature of x.com vs twitter.com (where which accts appear logged in fluctuates constantly), to my favorite bug, where it's always stuck in dark mode in mobile browsers... And that's just technologically. Firing moderators, letting neonazis run rampant, and driving away advertisers and non-nazis... Honestly, they might as well have brought back the Fail Whale.
    - mrmlz 2y ago
      My X-feed is better now than before . I don't use the website but the app so i haven't encountered the bugs you mention. But as always you need to curate the ones you follow to get a "for you" that's interesting.
      - KingMob 2y ago
        > But as always you need to curate the ones you follow to get a "for you" that's interesting. Sure, but letting neo-nazis run rampant is not just a problem of my personal curation, but a society-wide issue.
    - spacebanana7 2y ago
      I’ve not really noticed any significant increase in problems with the mobile app, and there are some new features like the view counter. Overall though I’d expect much worse problems to occur from firing the majority of a workforce. If that had happened at my workplace there’d be lots of data loss, downtime and show stopping bugs. Because the work people do is essential to the product and although we have some level of redundancy to reduce key man risk, that wouldn’t work if 80% of people left.
qaq 2y ago
People mentioned Elon's DOGE team is about 200 people including lawyers and accountants. I am guessing the focus on the 6 youngsters is mainly because here's a bunch of former Deloitte lawyers/accountants is not a newsworthy thing to focus on especially if your angle is to discredit the effort.
- SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
  Just look in this thread for how many posters here are 100% certain that irreparable damage is being done - because they want to feel mad. There is no proof of anything bad. Regardless how many people want that to be false, oddly. So I guess tough to not think that the worldwide media that has been receiving government money would be mad and willing to focus on ”a handful of 20 year olds” as a means to discredit. What I find strange is that it’s working so well. So many people here KNOW so much that hasn’t been reported or happened.
  - alephnan 2y ago
    If there is even a 1% chance irreparable damage is being done to 350 million Americans, chances should not be taken
    - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
      This is the same as saying nothing should ever be done.
    - SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
      So, you don’t care about the waste fraud and abuse that has been happening - but are concerned about something that maybe could happen. You’re being manipulated by the people who are mad their paychecks are being cut.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - 2y ago
drawkward 2y ago
Roughly half of the commenters on relevant HN forums are asking exactly that.
- zo1 2y ago
  Because the media machine is spinning it all about the "teenagers", rather than doing actual investigative journalism and asking the right questions and assuming good-faith. So now instead of going to a DOGE rep and asking sane questions that illuminate the conversation and bring more info to light, they ask spin and hype-inducing ones like "There have been some criticisms from government senators about your alleged hiring of young individuals without security clearance, care to comment on that? What do you say to the concerns 'many' are having over granting such privileged access to un-accountable and non-departmental employees?"
johnnyanmac 2y ago
Younger people are more willing to take bigger risks. No one with a stable life and family would touch this "assignment" with a 49.5 inch pole.

The question no one asking is why Elon is sending a team of teenage programmers and not a team of financial auditors if he really wanted to cut government spending?

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> why Elon is sending a team of teenage programmers and not a team of financial auditors if he really wanted to cut government spending? History has one answer for the deployment of reams of young fiery-loyalist men to the front lines: cannon fodder.

varjag 2y ago
IMO it's more reminiscent of Red Guards from Cultural Revolution era China.
- thephyber 2y ago
  And university students during the Iranian Revolution.
- watwut 2y ago
  [flagged]
fujinghg 2y ago
Old enough to do the job, too young to ask the right questions.

amazingamazing 2y ago

Reporting on this is terrible. There are also senior (in age and experience) people, but much of the focus is on the youngins for obvious reasons. Musk also believes (either arrogance, or true belief) that much of this stuff can be figured out from first principals without much need of traditional experts.

fumar 2y ago
What do mean by stuff?
- amazingamazing 2y ago
  > not a team of financial auditors if he really wanted to cut government spending?
default-kramer 2y ago
I hope this is true. Can you name any senior people and/or financial auditors who are overseeing "the youngins"?
- jdross 2y ago
  I know a number of them but they’re rightfully not looking to be especially public about it now on the internet — life is hard enough just doing the job they’re trying to do. Which is frankly a lot of banal accounting and auditing type work. They’re in their 30’s and 40’s with prolific backgrounds in PE, as entrepreneurs managing nine figure budgets and thousands of employees, etc. Politics vs policy, or something like that?
  - apical_dendrite 2y ago
    I'm having trouble reconciling the backgrounds of the people that you're describing with the effects of the work they're doing. When they suddenly closed USAID, vulnerable people around the world instantly lost access to food and medicine with no recourse. There were people enrolled in clinical trials who had devices implanted in their bodies and then suddenly all support was cut off. Even if you believe that America shouldn't fund these things, how can you possibly justify shutting it down in such a way that food for hungry people rots in warehouses and clinicians have to decide if they're going to defy orders to vaccinate a pregnant mother? I can understand how a 23-year-old can get so enamored by all this sudden access to power that he completely loses sight of the effects of what he's doing. I don't understand how someone with decades of experience in positions of responsibility doesn't ask the most basic questions about the consequences of taking drastic action.

kjrfghslkdjfl 2y ago

Answer is obvious. Because teenagers tend to be impressionable and unscrupulous.

PenguinCoder 2y ago
And typically cheaper to employ.
- pkilgore 2y ago
  And gullible enough not to realize how disposable they are to prevent their leaders from getting in trouble.

grandempire 2y ago

When we think about what tasks bright young people can become good at, I think auditing flows of money is one of them. It's a technical task with objective results, and a tight feedback cycle. The places where you need age and experience are like resolving interpersonal conflict, balancing interests from many stakeholders, setting up objectives for others to follow, etc. So to me this argument sounds the same as "how can young kids think they can program like experienced engineers". Another answer is that financial auditors don't have ALL the technical skill for this scope of project. Light SQL skills tend to be the upper end of technical accounting (many workers on a project is good for corporate billing). Reports indicate Doge is employing graph analysis, LLMs, etc. Getting the data looks like a SW problem perfect for young people. I have no evidence that this how the organization functions, but I can imagine them as technical analysts, who simply pass information to higher ups who do have organizational experience.

UncleEntity 2y ago
> So to me this argument sounds the same as "how can young kids think they can program like experienced engineers". Which leads me to my favorite quote from TFA: "must have killed all those test pigs with some bugs"

rich_sasha 2y ago

Moving fast and breaking things. Though I note at SpaceX he seems to hire actual rocket scientists.

renewiltord 2y ago

The answer to that question is that Elon Musk does not seem to believe that the government departments can answer data questions. Rather than wait for them to inevitably say it will take weeks to gather the data, he has his war boys extract it from the system. One might as well ask "if you want to stop HIV/AIDS in Africa why pay a bunch of young kids with international relations degrees instead of AIDS researchers". Grunt work takes grunt effort.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y ago
<< Elon Musk does not seem to believe that the government departments can answer data questions. To be fair, having been part of many an corp at this point ( you would think they would want to have accurate data ), that assumption is not flawed.

Spooky23 2y ago

Auditors take time and are boring. Auditors measure performance against rules and goals — this is about discarding the rules and goals. The point of this is chaos and power. Elon has contempt for rules and laws. Blame the fuckups on the deep state or whatever. He will run wild until the president cuts off his head.

timewizard 2y ago

The question no one is asking is why does the federal government have so much "sensitive data" on it's citizens in the first place? When you build a machine like this you should ask, "would I be comfortable if my political opposites had control of this?" If the answer is no, then you DON'T BUILD IT. Meanwhile someone goes in there to try to break up this 30 year pile of technical debt and it's all lawsuits and handwaving theatrics to try to stop it.

mvdtnz 2y ago
How could the US government do things like collect tax or regulate the medical industry without sensitive data?
- timewizard 2y ago
  Tax data is not particularly sensitive and several nations just publish it. Even in the US many forms of non-individual tax filings are public by default. The results of audits /are/ highly sensitive but there's no reason to hold those on computer systems for longer than 5 years after the audit. I think the medical industry can easily be regulated without the government having access to my actual medical file. They regulate cars without having any idea how I drive mine. They regulate planes without sitting on the flight deck themselves. It's like we know how to build good businesses, good databases, have solid user control practices, but then we give the government a pass because it's imagined to be "really hard." It's laughable.
  - matwood 2y ago
    > Tax data is not particularly sensitive and several nations just publish it. Aren't we still waiting for Trump's tax returns?
    - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
      https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/trumps-tax-returns-released-today-2022-12-30/?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/trumps-tax-returns-rele...

braza 2y ago

> team of teenage Maybe it's a question of wording, but I would agree if the word were "inexperienced" instead of teenage (in reality, they are young adults). I have no horse in this DOGE race and all the discussions, but I find this "reverse ageism" (for lack of a better term) quite sad, 'cause it does not sound condescending but infantilizes youth and hides one of the biggest elephants in the room in the modern world, which is the real lack of representation of youth in politics (and maybe in the public service?) [1][2]. I was a 19-year-old holding an assault weapon in my daily work in the military with the power to terminate the lives of almost 99.99% civilians, friends with 23 starting piloting USD 5 million machines, and it's just sad to see that we as a society do not see young adults as capable as their older counterparts. I speculate that at least in Europe, due to this credibility bias in favor of older politicians, we are facing one of the biggest violations of the intergenerational pact, which is the fact that this same youth will end up without retirement [3]. [1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/congress-age-demographics-house-senate/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/congress-age-de... [2] - https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/both-republicans-and-democrats-have-an-age-problem/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/both-republicans-and-de... [3] - https://www.dw.com/en/pension-fund-crisis-looms-in-germany-as-population https://www.dw.com/en/pension-fund-crisis-looms-in-germany-a...

DiscourseFan 2y ago
You were not a 19 year old with access to the personal financial data of hundreds of millions of civilians.
- brigandish 2y ago
  Financial data that seems to be subject to those running massive fraud or allowing it through negligence, but somehow attempting to tackle that is more dangerous than a 19 year old holding an incredibly efficient weapon. The foxes were already in the hen-house before DOGE turned up, either, as many seem to think here, there are now competing foxes in there, or a clean up is happening. I've yet to see any evidence of actual damage done by DOGE, so why is everyone ignoring the evidence of actual damage that they've found? Can we work that one out?

mvdtnz 2y ago

Everyone is asking that. It's the main thing people are asking.

billfor 2y ago

[flagged]

jsiepkes 2y ago
> He cofounded paypal which is payment system. Presumably he knows about things like payment systems, fraud, etc... No, he didn't. He founded x.com as a payment system which was substantially less popular then paypal. Due to a bunch of mergers of parent companies, x.com and paypal had to merge. Musk became CEO and the whole thing was later sold to ebay, he left and cashed out big. That whole timeline unfolded in just a couple of years. So his actual experience is not that long. And besides that all unfolded in 1999. I have no idea what your age is but that was a different time and payment system knowledge from that time isn't worth that much nowadays.
- StackRanker3000 2y ago
  You’re leaving out that he was ousted by Thiel and the board because they thought he was about to fuck up the whole thing. By the time they sold to eBay, he was the largest shareholder, but no longer involved with the operation of the company.
- UncleMeat 2y ago
  And famously was given the boot for pursuing dumb technical decisions too.
mistrial9 2y ago
Isn't there a tell-all book or three about the founding of PayPal? I think many people here have read those books, and some readers here were involved? Please, enough breathless conjecture, the content is serious enough..

watwut 2y ago

Cause these can get access to things Elon wants access to and will do what Elon wants. Musk does not want audit, he wants someone who will find exactly what Musk wants him to find and wont worry about legality or rules. Musk is not concerned with producing false accusation for example. Obviously he could find corrupt auditors and probably did, but those are slower. They take more time to produce what was asked from them.

adolph 2y ago

> not a team of financial auditors There is a claim that many federal payments do not have information necessary for traditional financial audits. Maybe a team of forensic auditors would be more apt?

acdha 2y ago
Given how transparent government spending is and how frequently it’s audited, I think that’s begging the question of how scientific that claim is. The DoD is the only federal agency which hasn’t been able to have a clean audit[1] so it would be reasonable to question them – taking into consideration their unusual size and distribution, of course – but that doesn’t say anything about the rest of the government, or even distinguish between issues with payments vs. things like physical inventory when you have thousands of facilities around the world. 1. https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-24-106890.pdf https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-24-106890.pdf

barkingcat 2y ago

this just exposes the double standard and agism in tech industries. in tech, a lot of companies won't hire you in technical roles or as programmer because you're over 40. a lot of doge/elon's team is from the various tech companies he owns, so of course, they're going to be teenagers and senior people are pretty much laid off. think about the next tech layoff you hear in the news (facebook/meta, etc) and think about what portion of the layoff is younger than 20 and what portion are older than 40.

TacticalCoder 2y ago

> The question no one asking is why Elon is sending a team of teenage programmers and not a team of financial auditors if he really wanted to cut government spending? If it's working, why would it matter? The most curious thing in all these discussions is that the elephant in the room is never addressed: they already found on hundreds of billions of pure fraud and funding for extremely dubious endeavors. But nobody talks about that: everybody attacks the messenger. Everywhere. Are people not happy that the fraud team already uncovered the following: USAID fund diverted to the Clinton family, part of which funded a $3m for Chelsea Clinton's wedding and $10m for Chelsea Clinton's mansion. $41m to study transgender mice $3m to BBC (seriously, what? BBC in the UK? With US taxpayers dollars? Why? To push what kind of narrative?) $8m to the supposedly independent "Politico" $40m+ to EcoHealthAlliance to fund gain-of-function on modified bat viruses (moreover now official report to Congress says the most likely source for the Covid-19 outbreak is a lab-leak: so we have USAID partially responsible for the *death of tens of millions of people* $20m for a "Sesame Street" show in Iraq $110m to find water in Afghanistan funding of a movie in Portugal glorifying incest countless NGOs worldwide who got funded by USAID and who constantly pushed for tens of millions of illegal migrants to make their way both to the US and the EU (now you may believe it's a good thing that countless NGOs do actively work towards migrating tens of millions of people to the US and the EU but *why* is this done with US taxpayers' money?) The examples are endless and yet everybody shoots the messenger. If out of hundreds of dubious endeavour (money to publish trans book for children in Guatemala: I mean, come on guys), if one happens to be justified spending or a wrongly attributed spending, then people will focus on that to attack DOGE. But the elephant in the room is constantly dodged: why? The elephant in the room is there. And it's a gigantic elephant. Why is it that to some, like me, it looks like USAID (and certainly more with more revelations to come) is basically a gigantic money laundering operation combined with the push of a worldwide leftist agenda? And the curious thing: people keep crying "attack on democracy" although DOGE keeps exposing, day after day, actual attacks on democracy, where US taxpayers dollar were used to fund a leftist agenda. To me DOGE is doing something right. Instead of shooting the messenger, discuss the actual findings they already did. Explain to me how you defend $40m+ going to fund gain-of-function bat viruses and how you defend Biden pardoning Fauci who lied about it in Congress? Because that's what DOGE is exposing.

nailer 2y ago

Data scientists are generally better than financial auditors at handling large quantities of data.

hi_hi 2y ago

I don't quite understand how they are gaining the access credentials required? Where I work, it takes days to onboard people, through standard processes. Whats happening in this case. Given the highly volatile, and legally gray, situation; I'd expect the front line people who usually grant access are at least flagging these requests to their boss, who flags to their boss etc. Is everyone up the chain just giving a shrug and saying "seems legit, give them the access". Of course people don't want to loose their jobs, but I would have expected someone in a senior leadership position to take a stand in preventing this (unless their all on board?)

daveguy 2y ago
When you're the president, they let you do it. You can do anything. Especially if you're sending someone in to shut down entire departments and freeze communications.
- SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
  Upvoted for the apt part of the quote that everyone leaves out. They let you do it.
jungturk 2y ago
The president appoints new bosses at all the executive branch agencies, and those bosses approve the access. Several recent news stories have described situations where the agency head resisted and was removed.

dools 2y ago

Easy: this is political retribution. USAID: 0.6% of the budget CFPB: 0.011% of the budget It has nothing to do with saving money and is well beyond the executive order than instantiated the agency. If all they do is disrupt things enough for some crypto dorks and Russians to make a play it was all worth it.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
USAID was the most resistant to an audit which is why they’re getting scrutinized early. Trump literally said today on an interview aired before the superbowl that a department of defense audit is coming up and he expects it to turn up billions to hundreds of billions in waste.
- hypothesis 2y ago
  What does “resistant” mean here? It appears that they passed audit just a few months ago: > Opinion: Williams Adley concluded that USADF’s financial statements as of September 30, 2024, and September 30, 2023, are presented fairly, in all material respects, and in conformity with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles. > The audit firm also found no reportable noncompliance with provisions of applicable laws, regulations, contracts, and grant agreements. > The audit firm found no material weaknesses in internal control over financial reporting but found deficiencies in the internal controls over the Funds Held Outside of Treasury process. We collectively identified these deficiencies as a reportable significant deficiency. https://oig.usaid.gov/node/7291 https://oig.usaid.gov/node/7291 It sure looks like retaliation hit job.
- filoeleven 2y ago
  There's no way that USAID was more resistant to an audit than DOD.
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    Why would the DoD be resistant to an audit? They've had un-auditable black budgets for decades and every time someone questions them they pull a new stealth aircraft out of their back pocket

jhp123 2y ago

it all mirrors the Twitter takeover (fetishizing "hardcore coders", micromanagement, randomly breaking or cancelling things), so this might just be how Elon Musk approaches things.

treis 2y ago
He did cut Twitter's workforce by 80% and things seem fine absent his deranged heel turn.
- KingMob 2y ago
  I have no idea what proportion of Twitter's jobs were necessary or not, but it is DEFINITELY not fine. From images routinely failing to load, to the current mess of logins that is the dualistic nature of x.com vs twitter.com (where which accts appear logged in fluctuates constantly), to my favorite bug, where it's always stuck in dark mode in mobile browsers... And that's just technologically. Firing moderators, letting neonazis run rampant, and driving away advertisers and non-nazis... Honestly, they might as well have brought back the Fail Whale.
  - mrmlz 2y ago
    My X-feed is better now than before . I don't use the website but the app so i haven't encountered the bugs you mention. But as always you need to curate the ones you follow to get a "for you" that's interesting.
    - KingMob 2y ago
      > But as always you need to curate the ones you follow to get a "for you" that's interesting. Sure, but letting neo-nazis run rampant is not just a problem of my personal curation, but a society-wide issue.
  - spacebanana7 2y ago
    I’ve not really noticed any significant increase in problems with the mobile app, and there are some new features like the view counter. Overall though I’d expect much worse problems to occur from firing the majority of a workforce. If that had happened at my workplace there’d be lots of data loss, downtime and show stopping bugs. Because the work people do is essential to the product and although we have some level of redundancy to reduce key man risk, that wouldn’t work if 80% of people left.

qaq 2y ago

People mentioned Elon's DOGE team is about 200 people including lawyers and accountants. I am guessing the focus on the 6 youngsters is mainly because here's a bunch of former Deloitte lawyers/accountants is not a newsworthy thing to focus on especially if your angle is to discredit the effort.

SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
Just look in this thread for how many posters here are 100% certain that irreparable damage is being done - because they want to feel mad. There is no proof of anything bad. Regardless how many people want that to be false, oddly. So I guess tough to not think that the worldwide media that has been receiving government money would be mad and willing to focus on ”a handful of 20 year olds” as a means to discredit. What I find strange is that it’s working so well. So many people here KNOW so much that hasn’t been reported or happened.
- alephnan 2y ago
  If there is even a 1% chance irreparable damage is being done to 350 million Americans, chances should not be taken
  - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    This is the same as saying nothing should ever be done.
  - SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
    So, you don’t care about the waste fraud and abuse that has been happening - but are concerned about something that maybe could happen. You’re being manipulated by the people who are mad their paychecks are being cut.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - 2y ago

drawkward 2y ago

Roughly half of the commenters on relevant HN forums are asking exactly that.

zo1 2y ago
Because the media machine is spinning it all about the "teenagers", rather than doing actual investigative journalism and asking the right questions and assuming good-faith. So now instead of going to a DOGE rep and asking sane questions that illuminate the conversation and bring more info to light, they ask spin and hype-inducing ones like "There have been some criticisms from government senators about your alleged hiring of young individuals without security clearance, care to comment on that? What do you say to the concerns 'many' are having over granting such privileged access to un-accountable and non-departmental employees?"

johnnyanmac 2y ago

Younger people are more willing to take bigger risks. No one with a stable life and family would touch this "assignment" with a 49.5 inch pole.