How ignoring the law not fascism? Mandates do not supercede law, nor allow the executive branch to operate outside branches of government that are not under it's control, and yet Congress does nothing, that's is actually how fascism really does start, when what "dear leader" says is acted upon even though it is clearly illegal
I do not have to wait 4 years, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it is most likely a duck.
The fact that he is "governing" through EOs, - many of those will be challenged in court, I guess, but in the meantime they still stand valid - is not being done in a respectful way. An example, regular citizens working for Trump having access to not only read but also write on the federal payment system https://www.crisesnotes.com/day-five-of-the-trump-musk-treas...
Another example - denying multiple times actual science, since the scientist are amongst one of the groups he blames
He's definitely on the way for being a good mussolini 2
One of the president's main jobs is to direct how the executive branch is run. That's an authority vested on him by the constitution. So writing EOs directing various executive branches in particular ways (and in ways that aren't contradicting federal law) is entirely within his mandate as the elected president.
What we're witnessing is the weakening (and potential removal) of an effective 4th branch of government (what some call the "deep state"). I don't see that as a bad thing, as structurally speaking, this 4th branch does not govern according to the will of the people, since they are not accountable to the people.
What boggles my mind is this -- Democrats complained for decades about how Congress was ceding its authority to these unelected officials. I grew up in a Democrat family and cheered as Bill Clinton was elected. And now Democrats, who call themselves the "party that defends democracy", are acting as the primary proponents of these unaccountable officials and agencies. Make it make sense.
Probably the other times they didn't appoint someone so connected with the dark enlightenment ideologies and that spews lies continuously on a media channel he owns. It is important the who, but it is important also the what (as in, what's he/she if appointed for).
Not being American, I can't really comment on what the democrats appointed before musk. However, I do not believe it has happened before to have someone access with write permission the payment system, to access personal sensitive data of federal workers[1], and so many other things I wouldn't even know where to start complaining about
1. Musk wasn't elected.
2. Musk's merry band of misfit incels wasn't elected.
3. Government offices are created by statute, and they're terminated by statute.
As I've said elsewhere, Musk and the Doge employees only have audit power - not executive. There's a very big difference between those types of powers.
Musk is not terminating any executive departments or agencies. Neither is Trump (except perhaps some that are not statutory).
USAID still exists. It clearly wasn't obeying its statutory mandate -- that's what gives Trump the authority to bring its current activities to an end and fire a lot of its employees. It will likely be ended by Congress after what's been revealed, but we'll have to wait and see.
> Musk and the Doge employees only have audit power - not executive.
You've said this, but it's obvious that's not what they're doing, and no one is attempting to stop them. Literally unchecked corruption. Musk should be in prison for this - it's very close to treason.
This doesn't appear to be strictly what is happening. Musk posted on Twitter yesterday that he "deleted" the group 18F. That is neither an examination, a report or a recommendation.
Any examples? Just based on what he and @DOGE have reported, they're basically doing a systematic financial audit. (And Trump is firing those who don't allow the audit to occur.)
LMAO. You clearly need to read more about Hitler's rise to power and how he was actually elected. You people really do not understand politics nor democracy.
Hitler and Mussolini weren't fascist dictators at first. They became that gradually (though in retrospect, biographers have identified such ambitions early on).
Comparing Trump to those guys 2 weeks in, when Congress and the Supreme Court are very much alive and able to pounce on him, is rather early, no?
"Failure to Prosecute Senior U.S. Government Officials for Torture Violates International Law" (2014)
>In preparation for the UN Committee Against Torture’s review of the United States, the International Human Rights Clinic has joined fellow members of the group Advocates for U.S. Torture Prosecutions in submitting a shadow report to the UN Committee. The report documents how the Obama administration is in clear violation of the law by shielding from criminal liability the senior government officials responsible for the post-9/11 US torture program.
The article refers to things being offered and to that being a deal that was struck, and makes no effort to clarify if the offer is the deal, is part of the deal, or is outside of the deal.
The first two paragraphs are “X was offered; the deal was reached.” The rest of the article throws a lot of additional stuff back and forth but does very little to clarify things.
From the US state department readout on their own website it appears that the headline offer is not part of the deal, but everything else describes is part of the deal, but the article works pretty hard to obscure that.
Yes, the impression is that the article is attempting to spin the issue by making it deliberately vague. The implication fits with an on-going manufactured narrative about immigration enforcement.
There is a possibility that El Salvadorians who are in the US illegally could be deported back to El Salvador. If they fit the profile of the MS13 gangsters, they may be imprisoned in El Salvador based upon their profile alone. This could be as simple as having gang affiliated tattoos or tattoos that are perceived as such. As I understand, due process has been suspended in these cases.
None of that fits with the article's implications by omission. A nasty bit of propaganda.
Even your aligned partisan, who was recently spotted comparing immigration enforcement to "concentration camps" has conceded. The entire story is meant to make you believe that this will be happening, without evidence.
Your bias allows you to dismiss the need for evidence. You are the target audience for this propaganda.
To be fair, no 19 year old in the world concerns himself with audits or proper regulatory procedure, including law students. There is a reason proper structure exists
As far as worrying about who has write access to these systems, I think the article makes it fairly clear that even if you're a COBOL programmer with years of experience, that doesn't mean you know these specific COBOL systems and their logic.
Age aside, I feel uncomfortable about anyone new (even experienced COBOL programmers) being able to make changes in these systems, especially given their approach has been portrayed as broadly antagonistic to existing engineers and staff.
I agree with that and write access is concerning but there is no evidence or information about doge employees modifying cobol code.
From the article, the closest thing they have to an evidence is a search query. Rest of it is pure speculation since none of the people who reached out to author has any kind of visibility into what is going on.
At the rate things are going: give it a day. Maybe two. DOGE hasn't even tried to honor it's "transparency" pledges and all the info we get are pretty much from people inside these systems... who speak out less because Musk is also firing anyone he can.
>Experience in what? Do you know their roles and responsibilities?
> How do you judge competence of someone whose job and responsibilities are not known?
It's actually very easy to judge, based on the fact that someone who has never done an audit before is now trusted to do one.
I mean, I wouldn't trust Einstein himself at age 24 to audit a small business, no way am I going to think that some rando, maybe brighter than average, will know what they are doing when performing an audit at age 24.
I also think that, if the story is true, the fact that they started at the wrong end of the financials is a dead giveaway that they do not know what they are doing.
IOW, if I saw someone tasked with designing a new car, and they started by opening up MS Paint and drawing tread patterns for the spare wheel, I'd certainly consider them unable to design a new car.
Even if we err on the side of benefit of doubt, even the smartest 24yo in the world is not going to be competent at doing even a basic audit when:
1. This is the first audit that they are doing, and
2. They have never before had any accounting background.
So, yeah, it's quite reasonable to consider them incompetent that the chosen task in the circumstances.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
No we don't. They get small arms. Fighter jets, aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and the like are commanded by much older and experienced people. An M16 is not "billions in military hardware."
Exactly — this isn’t good will. The only subsidies he cares about are his own. Though all involved don’t seem bright enough to realize that destabilizing the government, its finances and the perception of the dollar will have consequences for their own wealth.
It’s hard to pass an audit when unfettered access has been granted to a billionaire without access and cronies installing unauthorized software and strong arming everyone they encounter.
TWTR -- the publicly traded company -- dipped so badly that Musk needed to make it private. It's effectively less of a public commons now than it is Musk's investment on manipulating information.
Afaik, open nazi were actually silenced on twitter prior Musk. But, you could talking in euphemisms and it would be mostly fine. Also, when you went really really far with harassment.
I guess I know why you're getting downvoted. Saying Twitter is at death's door is like saying that sanctions are going to crush Russia any day now. People really really want to believe it despite all the evidence. Twitter is very much alive, and it's doing exactly what Musk wants it to do.
Exactly. When he fired 90% of the employees everyone here and on Reddit said it would fall apart within days due to the complexity of the systems that Elon’s employees and the remaining traitor engineers had no hope of maintaining.
When it didn’t fall apart in days, the goalposts were moved to “technical issues won’t become obvious right away, give it a few months”.
It’s been over 2 years and on a technical level running better than ever. You can disagree with the content and users all you wish, but pretending it’s dying because you hate the bad orange and mars man is delusional.
>"It’s been over 2 years and on a technical level running better than ever"
Isn't it also simply doing less? Weren't some APIs shut off or reduced? My limited memory is having me think they reduced or shut down some functionality altogether, which would also help something run smoother. Fewer things running means fewer things can break.
They just closed a single API which was also abused by botfarms. Closing the API immediately improved the site from a spam perspective and was welcome by most actual users, likely all users who understood the impact.
This is pure cope - the site is doing a TON more than it used to, and more stable than ever.
Also arguing that a site that is designed to scrape and re-represent a website without ads or other stuff 'was likely a huge load' is a very weird argument to try and claim the site is no longer being used.
I can say anecdotally I used to use nitter, and while it didn't work for a few days I switched to the regular site. Now I would never go back. The actual site works better now, I have no need. On old twitter 1.0, nitter worked better.
Thats a black eye on Dorsey twitter, not the new twitter (or X or whatever you prefer)
>It’s been over 2 years and on a technical level running better than ever.
Ask the worker's how they are doing, and then maybe I'll be convinced that it's "running better". When you grind 10x the users into the dirt, you can make up for cutting 90% of your staff. For a while. Especially in a crap economy like this where job hopping is harder.
I also agree that most of the cuts may have been managerial and logistics. It's probably a clown circus trying to do anything more than maintain.
I agree only on a surface level that it looks better. But old tech dies very hard. Digg is technically still up today. Myspace is technically still up today. hell, 4chan is still arguably bustling.
“Move fast and break things” seems like a horrible approach when things like Social Security and Medicare payments are on the line. If a few thousand random tweets get lost in a refactor, nobody cares. If somebody stops receiving their checks because Whiz Kid #3 doesn’t know how to work with an enterprise database system, what does that person do? Who do they escalate to?
Clearance could be granted on a whim by POTUS, as far as I can tell, so that has no leg to stand on. The biggest threat would be that one of the DOGE employees is a foreign actor. Hope they did some vetting...
He can' (but shouldn't). But there's no word that was granted to Musk. Since, he didn't name them. He probably doesn't though, because he should not have been stopped at USAID with the right credentials. Unless...
>Hope they did some vetting...
we both know he didn't. If he does have clearance, his interns definitely don't. Hence the kerfluffle at USAID.
He's an illegal immigrant from South Africa. I don't know the diplomatic status of the USA with South Africa, but the current party in power would certainly not agree to the idea that illegal immigrants should be given total control of the Treasury.
It remains a matter of import. It is both true that they don't have clearance and true that in a more functional environment that they would not have earned it.
You misunderstand how clearance works. Any one can get "read-on" to anything with the proper authorities giving them access.
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.
This was not the case when I worked in the Federal government. There were different levels and kinds of clearances and while it was true that you could work with less sensitive stuff while the background check process worked its way through, you couldn't go into and view anything elevated w/o the right clearance, or even be in the room pretty much.
This has always been the case, though you generally need to be a US citizen as a practical matter. Whether or not you are exposed to it likely depends on which part of the government and who you are. The common case is when they need the help of outside subject matter experts.
For the sake of timeliness and being able to move quickly, some people in government are authorized to make a judgment about the risk/benefit tradeoff when someone doesn't have an active clearance. It isn't a case of waiting for a background check process, you don't even need to apply. Some organizations will do an informal check of their own in the background if they don't already know who you are. Sure, they would prefer if you already had formal clearance, but it isn't strictly necessary.
I could see many people with this abstract concept of a system that governs itself with it's own rules and policies, not quite understanding that it's all customary.
It's like people thinking that the President can't declassify a document or make foreign policy decisions without the NSC's advice or consent.
If they don't have clearance aren't they committing a number of offences under various acts of national security and computer misuse and thus liable for arrest?
>If they don't have clearance aren't they committing a number of offences under various acts of national security and computer misuse and thus liable for arrest?
Arrested by who? The executive branch who ordered his actions? Americans voted for this, and now we have to live with it.
The judicial branch can't prosecute, that's what the executive branch does, and it's the executive branch that's doing these things. The legislative branch has the power to keep the executive branch in check, but they're not exercising that power - which I'm saying is bordering on criminal. Obviously, the executive branch is unlikely to prosecute the legislative branch for not taking action against the executive branch. Our constitution has the implicit assumption that all three branches wouldn't be in cahoots with one another, and should they be, the electorate was expected to have enough sense to vote out the legislators and replace them with ones that would keep the executive in check. The million dollar question is how much pain and destruction will be endured until that happens?
Two years - Congress is replaced every two years. 1/3 of the Senate is replaced every two years. Given that they've only been in office for two weeks, two years seems like a long way off.
Arrests need warrants. And if you're thinking about the police, that's also part of the executive, mostly. Judges can't do anything unless some other branch of the government asks them to.
Arrests need probable cause. They can either be done on a warrant or without a warrant (in the latter case, in the federal system, a complaint must be filed and the arrested person must be brought before a magistrate for a hearing on probable cause within 72 hours after arrest.)
>No, the judicial branch which is supposed to enforce the law regardless of who was voted for…
The judiciary has zero enforcement power. They make the laws which the executive is meant to enforce. If the executive fails to enforce a law, congress can impeach. That's not happening.
The legislative branch makes the laws. The Judicial branch judges whether laws were broken. The executive branch has the power to enforce laws (or to not enforce them, as they see fit).
The current executive branch will not enforce laws against itself, and nobody else is legally allowed to enforce the laws, so all the courts & congress can do is write strongly worded letters.
You're almost right. The thing is that Congress absolutely has the power to impeach the president and strip them of all legal office. Of course, most of Congress is perfectly happy with what's going on, so this won't happen.
No, we did not vote for this. Show me the campaign ad that said Trump was going to give Musk and his gang of losers complete control over the treasury.
It’s all spelled out in the project 2025 doc that was widely publicized as the game plan.
Also, trump was impeached last time because he tried to shut down funding approved by congress. So, if you’re surprised it’s happening again, I suppose you can’t be helped
Oh, the one that Trump heavily distanced himself from? Project 2025 was something skeptics pointed out as being the game plan, but Trump denied (or agreed, then denied).
I think a quick view of my comment history would show that I am not a fan of Trump. In fact, I would go so far as to characterize him as "if a wet dog turd were a person". I had zero doubt that 2025 would be a blueprint, just another of his lies.
I'm over across the pond - it was pretty obvious to me that Elon was going to take a wrecking ball to the ship of government. if it wasn't clear to you, I'm afraid you can only blame yourself and possibly your diet of information.
Trump said Elon would get to run a new department called "department of government efficiency". if you know what he did at Twitter, you can easily join the dots.
If you think that a politicians advertisements are the full picture of what they will do, I have a bridge you may be interested in buying.
That said, DOGE was well announced and widely publicized prior to the election, by Musk and the media. Musk was up on the stage with Trump quite a bit.
Those who did not know this was going to happen are either easily fooled or were paying no attention.
If we are going to discuss this, we should be clear about the details. "Americans voted for this" is a hot take. Some did. Many did not vote at all. Of those who voted, Trump barely won those votes. It was just enough to get the electoral college votes. Even those who did vote for him did not vote for his current Project 2025-based plan. On the contrary, his campaign denied he was going to do all this.
If you don't vote, you effectively vote for the winner.
When the 49ers lost the 2024 Super Bowl, the second and third string players didn't go around saying they didn't really lose because they never hit the field. No, they lost.
Trump has been the dominant figure in American politics for almost a decade now. It's quite obvious who he is and what he stands for. And he's more popular now than ever before. That's the reality. Accepting that and planning around it is the first step to countering it. Burying your head in the sand and saying "people don't actually want this!" is unactionable talk.
While they are absolutely committing crimes, the complicit Trump administration justice department and Republican congress are happy to let it go, at least thus far.
If there is some credible reason to believe this might be the case, then an audit should be done. Carefully, not recklessly. With oversight, especially if the auditor gets write access to anything. That oversight should include, at an absolute minimum, a system, not controlled by the auditor, that logs every interaction with the system being audited.
Here's the thing, I'm very happy with uncovering fraudulent spending. I strongly doubt that's actually happening. If it was we'd be seeing careful audits and lawsuits against those submitting fraudulent invoices, not this fly by night takeover of systems.
Angry? Why are you coming off so strongly? There's nothing wrong in questioning an unethical approach. If a kid is good in AI/ML to spot a pattern in an image, maybe they should work in healthcare and, not forcefully and illegally poke into someone's financial records. You are the one who needs some serious soul searching.
I've read in multiple articles that people were placed on leave for trying to require proper clearances from him and his team as obligated to by law, and this article also references how clearances impact the fact that nobody knows what they're actually doing.
As someone who has had to clear an SF86 for a USDS hiring cycle (IRS and DHS systems), I would be shocked if you can get this access without a clearance.
