okay then...how many billions are completely unaudited?

It is an administrative step. It might undergo review but access does not need to be prevent until the review happens. It is all about who is granting the access.

The commander in chief has considerable authority to provide access.

There seem to be a lot of misconceptions flying around about what "government access" entails.

In the long term yes, in the short term, no. That's the check and balance of the Judicial branch. In theory they should be insulated from the politics of the world and properly interpret laws based on various cases.

So you can't just, say, repeal the first amendment just because all your voters suddenly became anti-1A. They need to work to make a represenative base that can eventually vote in that new amendment. And that all takes time (in terms of culture and the bill proposal).

Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk alone; you don’t want to “go out of your way to make trouble.” Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, “everyone” is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.”

And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions, would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all of the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jewish swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.

But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early morning meetings of your department when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

And I'll never understand why. There's a lot of partisan issues but I thought "not fucking around with our money" was as bipartisan as a plutocracy could get?

[1] https://breakingdefense.com/2024/11/pentagon-fails-7th-audit...

https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106767

It would be stupendous if, for example, everyone knew when I receive an interest payment on a savings bond, and for how much? Or some schmuck gets his social security payment?

> The Wall Street Journal reported citing people familiar with the matter that SpaceX lawyers recommended that the company's leadership not pursue a higher security clearance for Musk because he would have been asked about contacts with foreign officials as well as his prior drug use.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/why-elon-musk-doesnt-ha...

(Didn't link WSJ article due to paywall.)

It really isn't rocket science, German hardcore ecologists put more efforts on a random Tuesday morning than Americans during a coup, it's mind boggling.

They gave you an online "public square" so that you can all scream in its void, get the fuck out and protect what's yours

Watching from Europe, I think you are getting close to the point where 75 million people need to hit the streets (preferably in DC).

It appears they are trying to beat the 53 days record.

We can't convince the other half that wants this...

If enough people do it, maybe MAGA 401ks going down will make people care.

Or how do you think your ancestors got democracy and kept it in the first place?

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/

Organize into a political party. Spread pro worker information and convince the working class to join. Democratic Party is not it, in my opinion.

Does this treasury department payment system not also cover the payments made to bondholders?

Every time Congress delays raising the debt ceiling until the last minute, people get anxious and worry about a default and the full faith and credit of the US, etc. Are we now saying that the US could default even when funds are available if an un-elected guy and some junior programmers decide that would be a good idea or just mess up when dealing with a complex and arcane legacy system, and that's not scary to markets?

I would think every financial model that references a "risk-free rate" now has to be revisited while people consider whether any information visible to the Treasury Department might link their account to someone who has said something disparaging about Musk on twitter.

I think this whole thing boils down to you being an anti-abortion zealot who is so anti-abortion (you've expressed opposition to abortion on Hacker News, a tech forum, not just once, but multiple times![1]) that you see no issue with Trump cutting government spending in certain areas while he is simultaneously expressing support for the US occupying Gaza, funding a goddamn Christian task force[2], etc.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?type=comment&query=abortion+author:T...

[2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/erad...

I wouldn't trust Elon to water my plants!

... is there somewhere that DOGE people with access are publishing the stuff they see? If this were about transparency, that could be good, but that purpose could be served with read only access.

I'm not saying there isn't serious corruption in government spending, but this administration and Musk aren't in a credible position to fight it, especially not this way. The Treasury Department should refer stuff to Justice who should convene a grand jury, present some evidence, and prosecute corrupt contractors etc. We're supposed to be a country of laws.

You call it unresponsive, the founding fathers called it "checks and balances"

He declares entire programs to be fraud and declares them cancelled, seemingly taking only minutes to unilaterally make that declaration.

If he respected the people and the democratic process he'd create transparency and (if he's right) have massive public support behind his efforts.

But he's offered ZERO transparency, only name calling.

You should actually look into this. Approval of congress as a whole is low, but most actual senators and house reps have high approval ratings and get re-elected.

Democracy is working just fine, it's congress who isn't. If you want to understand why, just ask Republicans what their platform and policy towards cooperation has been for decades.

Go watch CSPAN from the 80s and 90s. Republicans and Democrats used to build coalitions to get things done. You would have "pro" and "anti" sides that crossed state borders, political parties, ideologies, generations.

If there is a problem with the legislature it's pretty much directly attributable to Republican voters continuing to elect Republican congresspeople who take it as a rule to never ever ever compromise for anything.

Multiple times, Republican senators have voted down a bill that they provided support for explicitly because "doing something" to fix the relevant problem would make the Democrat admin look good and functional.

Mitch McConnel voted against a bill he sponsored to prevent it passing and making the democrats look good.

Fired from PayPal, Twitter, neurolink, the tunnel thing

He bought his way into Tesla, and SpaceX, though suppsedly he's not actually the one running it (believable I think there's not enough time)

> Wired beat me to the punch of reporting that a top DOGE employee, 25 year old former SpaceX employee Marko Elez, has not only read but write access to BFS servers.

In other words, empires in the day of monarchy were expansive monarchies, and empires in the day of republicanism are expansive republics.

I love how I'm still freaking out but will jump at the chance to argue about pedantics online. It's nice to feel normal, I guess!

It's really quite an odd power; very few developed democracies have a _personal_ pardon power today (some kind of vaguely pretend to; in the UK pardons are done by the monarch _at the direction of the government_, say). I think the US just stuck it on the presidency because at the time of independence the president was kind of a stand-in for the monarch, and the British monarchy had it at the time. The US then failed to get rid of it when everyone else did, instead relying on norms and basically on everyone behaving themselves to regulate it.

If the current legal framework were software, I would say that this is an exploit chain that gives root access to the government / country.

If there is not legal way to stop it, what is the alternative?

Also, don't wait for an election, start protesting now. There may never be a free election again

You should be allowed to hate on a political party, it's weird to think that's inherently an issue (especially in the current climate). I think a big part of the problem is in the US we're only allowed 2 parties so if one doesn't stuff you find unacceptable you sorta just need to support the other. Gotta love the "land of the free".

In truth, though, I don't think much of this is organic. Right-wing TV and radio (Gingrich, Limbaugh, Carlson, etc.) have been rotting brains around the country for decades. Our current situation is the result of a concerted propaganda campaign by the powerful and wealthy going all the way back to the Nixon impeachment, not some day-to-day disagreements about taxes or culture war issues.

Every single time an extreme right-wing populist runs against any opponent who is _not_ extreme right-wing, the media portrays the election as a "sad reminder of our polarized world". That is absolute bullshit.

Anywhere in the world, the histrionics, the deranged conspiracy theories, the chtonic racialism always come from one side alone, while the other side - which is more often than not garden variety right-wing, mind you - mumbles "let's not do that". But somehow mainstream media successfully portrays this dynamic as "polarization" and "a fight between two extremes".

(I mean, no, they are not the Single Root Cause - clearly not. They're a part of the causal chain, though. If they had run a solid candidate in any of the last three elections, we wouldn't be here.)

You're free to be a Trump supporter of course, but if you're not and you're still enabling Trump to win because you don't like the Democrats "enough", your actions aren't aligning with your best interests

I get, to some extent, why they're gun shy on this; centrism feels like it should be compelling with a crazy person on the other end... but I think the party needs to run an AOC style firebrand soon. Time to at least attempt being a bit leftist for once.

It is absurd that all the bad stuff conservatives do ends up being blamed on left and center. But somehow, when left do something bad, conservatives are never blamed.

> the democrats need to take this as an objective lesson about how badly they failed to represent their constituencies

The elections were quite close. They failed to represent moderate republicans who prefer fascists anyway. They lost in elections. But the constituency voting for Trump was not theirs.

It would be cool if anti-Trump right would stop blaming everyone but themeselves. Especially when those anti-Trump people voted for Trump second time.

Also, apparently there are redundant "red buttons" mirroring the succession plan.[1]

So a more appropriate analogy would be a dead-man trigger in a bureaucrat's hand, programmed in obsolete technology, that if handled other than by expert hands at all times would result in immediate "Armageddon."

[1] https://apnews.com/article/nuclear-football-presidential-sat...

Sure, let's break down the key witnesses and their claims:

David Lebryk: Former acting Deputy Secretary of the Treasury. He resigned after resisting granting DOGE access to the Treasury data1. His claim is based on his direct experience and position within the Treasury Department, making him a first party witness.

Ron Wyden: The highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee. He expressed concerns about the potential misuse of the data by DOGE1. Wyden is a second party witness, as he is commenting on the situation based on his oversight role but not direct involvement.

Anonymous AP Sources: Two people familiar with the situation spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. They claim that DOGE has gained access to sensitive Treasury data1. These sources are second party witnesses, as they have indirect knowledge of the situation.

X User (@rayinsideout): Revealed names of alleged DOGE employees who accessed the Treasury payment system. Musk accused this user of committing a crime by sharing private information2. This user is a third party witness, as they are relaying information they claim to have obtained from other sources.

NOTE: The rawstory article DID NOT mention Scott Bessent, but CoPilot 'thoughtfully' added this for context:

Scott Bessent: Treasury Secretary who granted DOGE access to the data. His actions are central to the claims, but he hasn't made public statements about the specifics of the access3. Bessent is a first party witness due to his direct involvement in the decision.

[1]: https://youtu.be/CgV2KzyWKx0?t=794

He often talks about the most ironic outcome being the most likely so this could fit lol.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0jn5291p52o

I don't know how to reply to a statement this naive. What about the past 8 years makes you think these people are not above the law?

> I don't know what checks and balances are available for that case though.

SCOTUS declared the president immune to prosecution. The only check on a rogue president is a 60+ seat majority of the opposite party in the Senate, which hasn't happened since the 1980s.

What will happen when I pay federal taxes?

My concern level is quite low.

Or code reviews. Or audit trails. Or anything other basic safety guarantees that even 6-people startups have.