Earlier quoted context omitted.
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So, if the president orders a public employee to execute a random person on the street, they have no legal basis to refuse?
Probably not.
DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data
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Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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So, if the president orders a public employee to execute a random person on the street, they have no legal basis to refuse?
This was the specific argument raised in the SC verdict - but this is a question of whether the President is immune.
The question here is just BS. The President created organizations to enact the executives will.
The executive is now saying they want the power to come back to them. Which it always was - they had to work through the structures they created.
Apparently they dont want the institutions.
Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data
#113I find it wild that apparently there is no law onto which government workers can cling to refuse these requests. Is it all just based on conventions, goodwill and culture?
There are laws, but you will get fired if you try to follow them, and lawsuits to remedy that take time. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/usaid-sec...
Which laws? The article describes security clearance.
Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data
#114European here, giving my two cents on how this looks from the other side of the Atlantic. Heh In my country there are laws stopping agencies doing a simple SQL join between two databases, even within the same government agency. There is a separate agency that handles the requests when agencies want to join information. I am not an expert in the matter. But my gut is telling me that our experiences with east Germany a…
Very few countries have as strong executive branch as the USA.
Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data
#115European here, giving my two cents on how this looks from the other side of the Atlantic. Heh In my country there are laws stopping agencies doing a simple SQL join between two databases, even within the same government agency. There is a separate agency that handles the requests when agencies want to join information. I am not an expert in the matter. But my gut is telling me that our experiences with east Germany a…
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Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data
#116Honestly when DOGE was first announced, I thought it will be a tiny department that does almost nothing and produces recommendations and PDFs that nobody reads. I didn't expect this.
Musk isn't a do-things-by-half kind of guy.
But also when you make cuts, you go hard, fast, and recover from there. Any effort of small trimming over a long period achieves no saving while producing the same negative publicity. I doubt such cutting effort will happen for another 30y.
There is a french say I like. If you need to cut a dog’s tail, don’t cut an inch every day, chop the whole thing quick
Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data
#117Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data
#118I find it wild that apparently there is no law onto which government workers can cling to refuse these requests. Is it all just based on conventions, goodwill and culture?
Laws are only a suggestion, they are not being enforced and there are no consequences.
The other thing is that in the US, people's lives depend on their jobs, with half of polled people indicating they live paycheck to paycheck. This makes them easy to manipulate into complying, putting their morals aside because standing up for morals or indeed the law will mean they lose their job.
I mean the US president declared yesterday that only he gets to decide on law and called himself king on his social media. There's heaps of 'legal' texts that indicate it means he can be deposed and yote into jail, but if there's nobody enforcing them they're useless.
Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data
#119So how is this any different from all the random employees who might have access to this data as part of their jobs? I would understand if there was this sort of scrutiny over every federal employee but as it stands I never know who has access to my data and if they can be trusted.
Except in exceptionally poorly run or small organisations, random employees do not have access to everything; generally they need a reason to look at stuff, and there’s a paper trail indicating that they looked at it.
Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data
#120They will have had to impose this too. The systems were built as separate systems to avoid (in a systems designers most fevered nightmares) a scenario like this.
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> It's just the default nature of systems that were created by different agencies, under different projects with different teams.
... Yes, because those teams by default do not simply get to share access, because of various very well understood security and privacy issues by doing so.
> Trump only granted DOGE a 12 month window to eliminate waste, and there's 400 federal agencies, so parallelism is crucial.
That's what he says, at least. Also, if their current blatant lying[0] about the """waste""" continues then I don't really see a point. It seems clear Musk and the Breakfast Club boys who are unilaterally changing government finances have no idea how a government contract works (or it's willful ignorance).
[0] https://x.com/electricfutures/status/1891898336208105676