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Yes. Even if DOGE is operating without any ill intent, and I don't think they have ill intent, the possibility of errors alone is massive and they need to slow

Yes. Even if DOGE is operating without any ill intent, and I don't think they have ill intent, the possibility of errors alone is massive and they need to slow down. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/02/17/trump-musk-nuclear-weapons-workers-nnsa/78968238007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/02/17/trum...

lucasyvas 2y ago
I thank you for highlighting that the intent isn’t actually the problem. I do feel the opposite to you but I’m happy you can see the practice itself is not acceptable / is a bad practice.
- exabrial 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - watwut 2y ago
    There is nothing transparent about DOGE. They are also not doing an audit. Can you share why are you opening offtopic content?
    - exabrial 2y ago
      [flagged]
  - lucasyvas 2y ago
    I don’t believe they actually think that transparency and auditing are bad. I think that many people are either excited for possible benefit or horrified by what they are watching and have understandably been unable to detach themselves enough from what is happening to recall their own expertise to guide them. We all should know the way this is being done is wrong and it will either have to be removed or redone, which is equivalently costly and might as well be the same thing at the end of the day. I would expect the same practices from all of you in your own day to day work. We expect it from each other. The lack of transparency is enough for anyone here to worry. It bucks every best practice and is a red flag in itself. We do not accept this in our work - it is what we all value and that has to be the north star.
  - Spooky23 2y ago
    Have you ever participated in an audit? You literally have no idea what the words you quack mean.
  - swatcoder 2y ago
    So far, there's no evidence they're delivering either transparency or auditing in any sense that anybody is familiar with. In fact, their operations -- in as little as they've been made public -- have been pretty opaque and sweeping (i.e. not detailed, as in transparency), and what little we have seen of their analysis techniques seem to be shallow and unconventional (i.e. not formal and measured, as in auditing). I'd warn you not just take what public figures say at face value. Transparency and auditing are indeed virtues to strive for in governance (and we have many running systems for those already), and maybe they'll someday reveal that they're actually contributing to those virtues themselves. To date, they have not done so.
  - superultra 2y ago
    It’s an issue of who watches the watchers. If their intent is transparency and auditing, why are they not reflecting that intent? This is why I do suspect their intent. They are not walking the talk.
  - cg5280 2y ago
    I'm all for cutting government waste, I think there is probably quite a lot. Here is why I do not like Doge: Doge is using a sledgehammer when they need to be using a scalpel. There's already been so much chaos with things like federal disbursements being frozen then unfrozen, firing and rehiring employees, moves being blocked by courts due to being unlawful, etc. You can't "move fast and break things" with a trillion dollar bureaucracy, people's lives are at stake and something might break catastrophically. I also don't trust Musk with so much power because (1) he's an ideologue and (2) there are numerous conflicts of interest. I am skeptical he would be held accountable for any potential wrongdoing in this political environment.
  - KittenInABox 2y ago
    How can they be described as transparent when they fired people who administer FOIA requests?
  - financetechbro 2y ago
    I don’t think you know what an auditor is
  - flir 2y ago
    I don't believe you believe this is about transparency and auditing. You're sealioning. Where are the forensic accountants? Who uses CompSci-track college kids to audit billion-dollar orgs?
dmix 2y ago
You mean misunderstanding the data, coming to the wrong conclusions, etc? Data science always has an issue with bullshit KPIs, shallow depth of statistics, and mostly mangling stuff keeping the manager happy. Still it's much better than not having any data analysis. Whether it benefits from being in a single datalake idk. We really don't know how the operations are being done, we're mostly just reacting to news reports and outside guessing. I'm assuming it will be basically how Palantir works in government health care and intelligence agencies where they aggregate multiple data sources from a bunch of old and new databases and have complex analytical tools on top.
- amarcheschi 2y ago
  This time you're not dealing with a data scientist, you're dealing with someone who willingly spews lies, those situations aren't comparable Furthermore, another comment went in depth about how boosting the irs and following other agencies guidelines would have had a positive return, but none of this happened. On the contrary, we're seeing agencies such as the irs being infiltrated by this thing that resembles a metastasis
  - CyrsBel 2y ago
    In the abundance of precaution, DOGE should indeed be quarantined and all its work reviewed. CAT should be operating alongside DOGE to review everything.
watwut 2y ago
There is no reason to think they don't have ill intent.
- mandmandam 2y ago
  And many, many reasons to think that in fact they do. See my favorites for flagged stories about the DOGE staff. Even their stated reason - to fund trillions in tax cuts for the .1% [0] - is heinous. Inequality is already breaking the economy. 4.5 trillion dollars ($13k for each and every American) being transferred to the yacht class will inflict generational harm. 0 - https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2025-01-10/trump-tax-cuts-if-made-permanent-stand-to-benefit-highest-income-earners-treasury-analysis-shows https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2025-01-10/trump-tax...
  - nprateem 2y ago
    The Mump playbook relies on wild exaggeration. In this case Musk reckons he can save $2tn which some (better informed) analysts are saying is bollocks. In fact, it's cover to let him destroy/neuter agencies they don't like and get endless material to pressurise any opponents. One positive though: if there is any alien tech, Musky will find it. You can bet that's high on his list, as improbable as it may be.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      > In this case Musk reckons he can save $2tn which some (better informed) analysts are saying is bollocks. A lot of this depends on how you measure. For example, there are a lot of social assistance programs that provide in-kind benefits (e.g. you get subsidized housing) and those programs both require a bureaucracy to administer them and are less efficient than cash transfer payments, so they could be converted into refundable tax credits. Then the program costs somewhat less (you eliminate the administrative bureaucracy) and is more efficient and with better outcomes, but you can count the entire cost of the program as a reduction because it's now a tax credit (i.e. a tax cut) instead of a government budget item. Do that with the entire social assistance system and you could get a sizable budget reduction before you even get into overpriced government contracts etc.
gigatexal 2y ago
Elon wants to build the X everything app and nuked the CFPB to do it and now has access to the fed system… I think he’s just biding his time. Aaaaand now that he has every American’s info he can dox anyone on Twitter. Makes you think twice about telling Elonia to go fuck himself on X … which is why I do it on Mastodon and BlueSky ;-)
- ethagnawl 2y ago
  Yes, exactly this. The chilling effect caused by this is real and terrifying.
- CyrsBel 2y ago
  I have definitely contradicted Elon Musk on my X profile (@cyrsbel) quite a lot. I have never once lost my blue checkmark, though, so I believe he is well-intentioned and a good person who is trying to do the right thing. (I am also subscribed to him and having that sub and the blue checkmark means he has payment details already so I'm not worried about doxxing via CFPB data.) However, you raise a legitimate security risk and concern. It is not feasible to trust a single person with this much power and access. Furthermore, regardless of how much I or anyone else love Elon Musk...he has said things that didn't happen multiple times and too much is riding on his claims about what can or will happen. So yeah, I don't trust him. Ever since he reneged on interns, I noticed that...he has a tendency to think about things as if they're entirely meat and to worship the false god Scarcity. He's been gargling Ron Paul's gold coins so much that he completely fails to comprehend basic nation state financing and why deficits are manageable and our debt is also manageable given our $160T+ net worth and climbing...
  - bugtodiffer 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - tobr 2y ago
    Are you talking about the man who does Nazi salutes from the bottom of his heart? A good person?
hnthrow90348765 2y ago
Intent to drop in, make major changes, and pretend like they won't break anything is ill intent We criticize engineers who drop into a code base and try to make changes without understanding. You can be forgiven for doing it a few times, but after that you're doing it intentionally. And if they hired engineers that didn't know this, that's incompetence at both levels. Not only is this different code bases and IT products, it's across organizations and done very rapidly. I am also not convinced that they don't simply have malicious intent most of the time.
- CyrsBel 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - barbazoo 2y ago
    Did they mention which tax payers those 20% will be going back to?
    - CyrsBel 2y ago
      Not yet as far as I've seen.
      - lesuorac 2y ago
        Here you got then - https://docs.house.gov/meetings/BU/BU00/20250213/117894/BILLS-119HConRes14ih.pdf https://docs.house.gov/meetings/BU/BU00/20250213/117894/BILL... Spoiler: Nobody is _directly_ getting a refund. That money will be less than the planned increase in the deficit. (This is the house's budget bill which is the supported version of the president unlike the senate's version).
        SrslyJosh 2y ago
        Yep, and even if they weren't planning on just ignoring the deficit (as republicans always do when they're the ones doing the spending), any money "saved" by these assholes was going to go straight into the pockets of Musk, Trump, and their assorted superrich cronies.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bugtodiffer 2y ago
> I don't think they have ill intent ...
excalibur 2y ago
Their intentions are irrelevant. They are actively attacking the United States. They are enemy combatants and should be treated as such.
Spooky23 2y ago
Irrelevant. Even if they did nothing, the amount of exposure to the foreign intelligence services will devastate whatever we don’t footgun for a generation.
- CyrsBel 2y ago
  They should absolutely be regulated as to not expose data to foreign intel.
  - dTal 2y ago
    Regulated?? The entire point of DOGE is to be unregulated. They are ignoring existing regulations (read: laws), and specifically targeting regulatory and oversight bodies for destruction. Wake up!
    - CyrsBel 2y ago
      Different contexts. Regulated in my comment meaning observed, reviewed, audited in kind. They should not be operating on any site and in any system without someone watching over their shoulder, figuratively and literally too. Whereas the regulation in your context pertains to regulations that are codified as laws or rules to follow.
      - entropicdrifter 2y ago
        Yeah, if only we had independent regulators in our government who could oversee and regulate it in order to prevent and reduce corruption. Oh wait, Trump fired them all like 3 weeks ago. On purpose. Because they are not operating in good faith, my dude.
      - Spooky23 2y ago
        Like many Elon fans, you quack “audit” and don’t know what the word means. Audits measure compliance to an process or objective. They require that you have written down the process or objective, and retain sufficient information to measure whether you achieved it or not. In this case, the DOGE boys do whatever Elon says. What is said isn’t recorded or written. People who attempt to do their duty who are seen as obstructive of the whim of the DOGE “agent” are fired.
amelius 2y ago
> Even if DOGE is operating without any ill intent, and I don't think they have ill intent Eh, they are going in like a bunch of bloodhounds smelling blood. Musk killed USAID because he had a personal axe to grind.
anon2549 2y ago
I think they have nothing but ill intent. Everything they've said and done so far just screams it.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
ushiroda80 2y ago
He is being criminally reckless
whymeogod 2y ago
> I don't think they have ill intent Perhaps you could read their statements? DOGE communications are filled with ill intent, and their publicly stated goal, and the goal for which their supports seem to support them, is the destruction of the bureaucracy. That's ill intent. That's before we look at their actions.
JBSay 2y ago
Most of government agencies are errors themselves
mcmcmc 2y ago
You don’t think they have ill intent? Really? They have made it abundantly clear how much joy they get out of slashing services for everyday citizens, cutting jobs, and outright harassing federal workers. They are full of malicious intent for the people they view as the enemy.
oglop 2y ago
[flagged]
pacomerh 2y ago
Well when you have a white supremacist on the dodge team (confirmed by his comments on social media) working in this team, and you know white supremacists are very hateful... then I would assume there's obviously risk.
alsoforgotmypwd 2y ago
The intent is completely ill. DOGE is RAGE. Move fast and break everything before the courts can step in.
pstuart 2y ago
The intent is to dismantle the federal government.
UltraSane 2y ago
"and I don't think they have ill intent" Elon Musk absolutely has ill intent or else DOGE wouldn't have all this access that they absolutely DO NOT NEED!

lucasyvas 2y ago

I thank you for highlighting that the intent isn’t actually the problem. I do feel the opposite to you but I’m happy you can see the practice itself is not acceptable / is a bad practice.

exabrial 2y ago
[flagged]
- watwut 2y ago
  There is nothing transparent about DOGE. They are also not doing an audit. Can you share why are you opening offtopic content?
  - exabrial 2y ago
    [flagged]
- lucasyvas 2y ago
  I don’t believe they actually think that transparency and auditing are bad. I think that many people are either excited for possible benefit or horrified by what they are watching and have understandably been unable to detach themselves enough from what is happening to recall their own expertise to guide them. We all should know the way this is being done is wrong and it will either have to be removed or redone, which is equivalently costly and might as well be the same thing at the end of the day. I would expect the same practices from all of you in your own day to day work. We expect it from each other. The lack of transparency is enough for anyone here to worry. It bucks every best practice and is a red flag in itself. We do not accept this in our work - it is what we all value and that has to be the north star.
- Spooky23 2y ago
  Have you ever participated in an audit? You literally have no idea what the words you quack mean.
- swatcoder 2y ago
  So far, there's no evidence they're delivering either transparency or auditing in any sense that anybody is familiar with. In fact, their operations -- in as little as they've been made public -- have been pretty opaque and sweeping (i.e. not detailed, as in transparency), and what little we have seen of their analysis techniques seem to be shallow and unconventional (i.e. not formal and measured, as in auditing). I'd warn you not just take what public figures say at face value. Transparency and auditing are indeed virtues to strive for in governance (and we have many running systems for those already), and maybe they'll someday reveal that they're actually contributing to those virtues themselves. To date, they have not done so.
- superultra 2y ago
  It’s an issue of who watches the watchers. If their intent is transparency and auditing, why are they not reflecting that intent? This is why I do suspect their intent. They are not walking the talk.
- cg5280 2y ago
  I'm all for cutting government waste, I think there is probably quite a lot. Here is why I do not like Doge: Doge is using a sledgehammer when they need to be using a scalpel. There's already been so much chaos with things like federal disbursements being frozen then unfrozen, firing and rehiring employees, moves being blocked by courts due to being unlawful, etc. You can't "move fast and break things" with a trillion dollar bureaucracy, people's lives are at stake and something might break catastrophically. I also don't trust Musk with so much power because (1) he's an ideologue and (2) there are numerous conflicts of interest. I am skeptical he would be held accountable for any potential wrongdoing in this political environment.
- KittenInABox 2y ago
  How can they be described as transparent when they fired people who administer FOIA requests?
- financetechbro 2y ago
  I don’t think you know what an auditor is
- flir 2y ago
  I don't believe you believe this is about transparency and auditing. You're sealioning. Where are the forensic accountants? Who uses CompSci-track college kids to audit billion-dollar orgs?

dmix 2y ago

You mean misunderstanding the data, coming to the wrong conclusions, etc? Data science always has an issue with bullshit KPIs, shallow depth of statistics, and mostly mangling stuff keeping the manager happy. Still it's much better than not having any data analysis. Whether it benefits from being in a single datalake idk. We really don't know how the operations are being done, we're mostly just reacting to news reports and outside guessing. I'm assuming it will be basically how Palantir works in government health care and intelligence agencies where they aggregate multiple data sources from a bunch of old and new databases and have complex analytical tools on top.

amarcheschi 2y ago
This time you're not dealing with a data scientist, you're dealing with someone who willingly spews lies, those situations aren't comparable Furthermore, another comment went in depth about how boosting the irs and following other agencies guidelines would have had a positive return, but none of this happened. On the contrary, we're seeing agencies such as the irs being infiltrated by this thing that resembles a metastasis
- CyrsBel 2y ago
  In the abundance of precaution, DOGE should indeed be quarantined and all its work reviewed. CAT should be operating alongside DOGE to review everything.

watwut 2y ago

There is no reason to think they don't have ill intent.

mandmandam 2y ago
And many, many reasons to think that in fact they do. See my favorites for flagged stories about the DOGE staff. Even their stated reason - to fund trillions in tax cuts for the .1% [0] - is heinous. Inequality is already breaking the economy. 4.5 trillion dollars ($13k for each and every American) being transferred to the yacht class will inflict generational harm. 0 - https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2025-01-10/trump-tax-cuts-if-made-permanent-stand-to-benefit-highest-income-earners-treasury-analysis-shows https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2025-01-10/trump-tax...
- nprateem 2y ago
  The Mump playbook relies on wild exaggeration. In this case Musk reckons he can save $2tn which some (better informed) analysts are saying is bollocks. In fact, it's cover to let him destroy/neuter agencies they don't like and get endless material to pressurise any opponents. One positive though: if there is any alien tech, Musky will find it. You can bet that's high on his list, as improbable as it may be.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    > In this case Musk reckons he can save $2tn which some (better informed) analysts are saying is bollocks. A lot of this depends on how you measure. For example, there are a lot of social assistance programs that provide in-kind benefits (e.g. you get subsidized housing) and those programs both require a bureaucracy to administer them and are less efficient than cash transfer payments, so they could be converted into refundable tax credits. Then the program costs somewhat less (you eliminate the administrative bureaucracy) and is more efficient and with better outcomes, but you can count the entire cost of the program as a reduction because it's now a tax credit (i.e. a tax cut) instead of a government budget item. Do that with the entire social assistance system and you could get a sizable budget reduction before you even get into overpriced government contracts etc.

gigatexal 2y ago

Elon wants to build the X everything app and nuked the CFPB to do it and now has access to the fed system… I think he’s just biding his time. Aaaaand now that he has every American’s info he can dox anyone on Twitter. Makes you think twice about telling Elonia to go fuck himself on X … which is why I do it on Mastodon and BlueSky ;-)

ethagnawl 2y ago
Yes, exactly this. The chilling effect caused by this is real and terrifying.
CyrsBel 2y ago
I have definitely contradicted Elon Musk on my X profile (@cyrsbel) quite a lot. I have never once lost my blue checkmark, though, so I believe he is well-intentioned and a good person who is trying to do the right thing. (I am also subscribed to him and having that sub and the blue checkmark means he has payment details already so I'm not worried about doxxing via CFPB data.) However, you raise a legitimate security risk and concern. It is not feasible to trust a single person with this much power and access. Furthermore, regardless of how much I or anyone else love Elon Musk...he has said things that didn't happen multiple times and too much is riding on his claims about what can or will happen. So yeah, I don't trust him. Ever since he reneged on interns, I noticed that...he has a tendency to think about things as if they're entirely meat and to worship the false god Scarcity. He's been gargling Ron Paul's gold coins so much that he completely fails to comprehend basic nation state financing and why deficits are manageable and our debt is also manageable given our $160T+ net worth and climbing...
- bugtodiffer 2y ago
  [flagged]
- tobr 2y ago
  Are you talking about the man who does Nazi salutes from the bottom of his heart? A good person?

hnthrow90348765 2y ago

Intent to drop in, make major changes, and pretend like they won't break anything is ill intent We criticize engineers who drop into a code base and try to make changes without understanding. You can be forgiven for doing it a few times, but after that you're doing it intentionally. And if they hired engineers that didn't know this, that's incompetence at both levels. Not only is this different code bases and IT products, it's across organizations and done very rapidly. I am also not convinced that they don't simply have malicious intent most of the time.

CyrsBel 2y ago
[flagged]
- barbazoo 2y ago
  Did they mention which tax payers those 20% will be going back to?
  - CyrsBel 2y ago
    Not yet as far as I've seen.
    - lesuorac 2y ago
      Here you got then - https://docs.house.gov/meetings/BU/BU00/20250213/117894/BILLS-119HConRes14ih.pdf https://docs.house.gov/meetings/BU/BU00/20250213/117894/BILL... Spoiler: Nobody is _directly_ getting a refund. That money will be less than the planned increase in the deficit. (This is the house's budget bill which is the supported version of the president unlike the senate's version).
      - SrslyJosh 2y ago
        Yep, and even if they weren't planning on just ignoring the deficit (as republicans always do when they're the ones doing the spending), any money "saved" by these assholes was going to go straight into the pockets of Musk, Trump, and their assorted superrich cronies.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

bugtodiffer 2y ago

> I don't think they have ill intent ...

excalibur 2y ago

Their intentions are irrelevant. They are actively attacking the United States. They are enemy combatants and should be treated as such.

Spooky23 2y ago

Irrelevant. Even if they did nothing, the amount of exposure to the foreign intelligence services will devastate whatever we don’t footgun for a generation.

CyrsBel 2y ago
They should absolutely be regulated as to not expose data to foreign intel.
- dTal 2y ago
  Regulated?? The entire point of DOGE is to be unregulated. They are ignoring existing regulations (read: laws), and specifically targeting regulatory and oversight bodies for destruction. Wake up!
  - CyrsBel 2y ago
    Different contexts. Regulated in my comment meaning observed, reviewed, audited in kind. They should not be operating on any site and in any system without someone watching over their shoulder, figuratively and literally too. Whereas the regulation in your context pertains to regulations that are codified as laws or rules to follow.
    - entropicdrifter 2y ago
      Yeah, if only we had independent regulators in our government who could oversee and regulate it in order to prevent and reduce corruption. Oh wait, Trump fired them all like 3 weeks ago. On purpose. Because they are not operating in good faith, my dude.
    - Spooky23 2y ago
      Like many Elon fans, you quack “audit” and don’t know what the word means. Audits measure compliance to an process or objective. They require that you have written down the process or objective, and retain sufficient information to measure whether you achieved it or not. In this case, the DOGE boys do whatever Elon says. What is said isn’t recorded or written. People who attempt to do their duty who are seen as obstructive of the whim of the DOGE “agent” are fired.

amelius 2y ago

> Even if DOGE is operating without any ill intent, and I don't think they have ill intent Eh, they are going in like a bunch of bloodhounds smelling blood. Musk killed USAID because he had a personal axe to grind.

anon2549 2y ago

I think they have nothing but ill intent. Everything they've said and done so far just screams it.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

ushiroda80 2y ago

He is being criminally reckless

whymeogod 2y ago

> I don't think they have ill intent Perhaps you could read their statements? DOGE communications are filled with ill intent, and their publicly stated goal, and the goal for which their supports seem to support them, is the destruction of the bureaucracy. That's ill intent. That's before we look at their actions.

JBSay 2y ago

Most of government agencies are errors themselves

mcmcmc 2y ago

You don’t think they have ill intent? Really? They have made it abundantly clear how much joy they get out of slashing services for everyday citizens, cutting jobs, and outright harassing federal workers. They are full of malicious intent for the people they view as the enemy.

oglop 2y ago

[flagged]

pacomerh 2y ago

Well when you have a white supremacist on the dodge team (confirmed by his comments on social media) working in this team, and you know white supremacists are very hateful... then I would assume there's obviously risk.

alsoforgotmypwd 2y ago

The intent is completely ill. DOGE is RAGE. Move fast and break everything before the courts can step in.

pstuart 2y ago

The intent is to dismantle the federal government.

UltraSane 2y ago

"and I don't think they have ill intent" Elon Musk absolutely has ill intent or else DOGE wouldn't have all this access that they absolutely DO NOT NEED!