Report: IT officials who fought DOGE access put on leave and under investigation.
See full article...
See full article...
DOGE accesses federal payroll system and punishes employees who objected
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
I think it’s especially telling that the CIO & CISO don't appear to have said no but attempted to get Secretary Burgum to officially accept the risk. If he was convinced that DOGE was acting responsibly in good faith, why hesitate to sign off on their work?
Upvote
31
(31
/
0)
They haven't proved there's any fraud or waste in government except the fraud of lobbyists and special interests, and the waste of tax cuts to the rich.
Upvote
22
(22
/
0)
In 2016, Trump got away with everything by claiming "Fake News". Now, in 2024, it's "Waste, Fraud, and Abuse"...despite the fact that those two stains are the epitome of waste, fraud, and abuse. Every day I see Tesla stock in the red gives me a brief moment of joy.
Upvote
42
(42
/
0)
In some future movie timeline, an anti-fascist engineer will easily hack the poorly secured DOGE employee database and download all of the records and PII, which they would then share with a network of vengeful, broke-ass senior citizen bounty hunters with one thing and one thing only on their "bucket" list.
Upvote
34
(34
/
0)
I'm impressed how nobody does anything to prevent this. That much about "land of the brave" and "American exceptionalism".
Upvote
48
(48
/
0)
This is why you pretend to comply but sabotage their work. And nobody will believe it’s not incompetence.
Upvote
14
(14
/
0)
I've said it a hundred times, I'll say it again:
Government isn't supposed to be efficient; it's supposed to be accountable.
Not that this exercise has anything to with "efficiency". That is a bald-faced lie and everyone with the IQ of a turnip knows it. It's about control. Fuck accountability, fuck security, fuck efficiency, fuck you, we have a Treasury to loot and sissy liberals to take on one-way helicopter rides.
And nobody can stop it.
Courts can issue injunctions, but who's going to enforce them? Congress can impeach, but who's going to physically remove him from office if he won't leave? Who is going to physically stop them from taking a chainsaw to everything? Anyone who tries will be imprisoned.
Yay us.
Government isn't supposed to be efficient; it's supposed to be accountable.
Not that this exercise has anything to with "efficiency". That is a bald-faced lie and everyone with the IQ of a turnip knows it. It's about control. Fuck accountability, fuck security, fuck efficiency, fuck you, we have a Treasury to loot and sissy liberals to take on one-way helicopter rides.
And nobody can stop it.
Courts can issue injunctions, but who's going to enforce them? Congress can impeach, but who's going to physically remove him from office if he won't leave? Who is going to physically stop them from taking a chainsaw to everything? Anyone who tries will be imprisoned.
Yay us.
Upvote
88
(88
/
0)
I am fairly certain it would be not very hard to install a RAT on their laptops, not that the Russians haven’t already. But that would be very very illegal.
Upvote
7
(7
/
0)
I'm currently waiting on some tiktok influencer with 14 followers to accidentally start a culture war by reviewing an overly expensive vest, followed by Facebook AI scraping Google search trends and noticing "suicide" as a key word in a growing # of searches and publish an article about the growing popularity of deepfaking celebrities with suicide vests. Then Amazon algorithm will scrape that article, notice it doesn't have very many sales of suicide bomber vests this quarter, and correct this oversight by auto-creating a website called "HireSuicideBombers" so the AI can out-price itself and all the fuckin' idiots that sign up and actually try to hire suicide bombers from a random fuckin' website will quickly be arrested and/or gainfully employed as temporary truck drivers.
That's what I believe nowadays. I also pray that I'm proven wrong by Xenomorph Ninjas dropping a stealthed space rock on us hard enough to scramble the solar system like a cosmic(ly hilarious) break in a billards game.
Now, if you'll excuse me, Ima go buy rum, walk to the park, and hurl stale bread at the suburban yoga moms and flirty dad jokes at the geese and squirrels.
Upvote
27
(27
/
0)
Yeah, Mao also used the resulting famine as a tool of terror like Stalin had before in Ukraine. Each province had to report that it had met certain grain quotas and send in a certain percentage to the central government in Beijing.
Since the officials were rewarded by the central government based on reported harvest levels, they reported on paper that harvests were much larger than they were in reality. As a result, they sent nearly all the grain from the countryside to the cities, based on those estimates.
Just like with the Holodomor in Ukraine in the 30s, the resulting famine was the worst in the countryside, which is the opposite of what you would normally see in preindustrial "normal" (ie nonpolitical) famines.
The Great Leap Forward was stupidity piled on top of more stupidity. I was lucky that one of my poli sci professors was a China expert*, and he gave us a very deep lesson surrounding the Great Leap Forward to impress upon all of us: Do Not Be That Guy
*to the point of cancelling class for a week to fly to China for an East Asia security summit
Upvote
33
(33
/
0)
They haven't finished building the Star Chamber below Mar-a-Lago. Once it's completed, I guarantee that heads will roll!
Upvote
14
(14
/
0)
Upvote
22
(22
/
0)
Is your SSN public record? Your address? Date of birth? Bank account and routing number if you do direct deposit?
Are you sure you want random zampolits out to impress the boss to have access to that information?
Upvote
65
(65
/
0)
Pretty sure you meant "incompetence", but your point stands. This is the inevitable outcome of their "Lord Of The Flies" approach to government. Let's hope the downfall is swift and severe so we can at least try to mitigate some of the permanent damage that's being done.
Upvote
20
(20
/
0)
If only somewhere, someone had written a phrase like:
And since you're apparently a low information poster, Federal salaries ARE published. The GS scale is a well documented thing. The social security numbers that go with those salaries? Not so much.
Upvote
56
(56
/
0)
Hopefully they can get out with just being fired & not thrown in prison. But with this bunch, who knows.
Upvote
10
(10
/
0)
What if say you had control over the SSN database and you could ensure you had a bunch of legal citizens ready to vote in the next election?
Upvote
11
(11
/
0)
Oh boy, even if we recover from all of this,. it'll take decades to figure out that oh your pension was altered or ooh oops you only have 10 years of service you can't retire.
Upvote
18
(18
/
0)
hey if you don't know something it's okay to just not enter a comment.
Upvote
47
(47
/
0)
Almost! Musk is linking all the systems together because he IS a foreign threat actor and this will just make his work that much easier.
Upvote
25
(25
/
0)
Musk cosplays as a real software engineer. So in his mind he can't think of the reasons why the DBs were separate in the first place.
Upvote
37
(37
/
0)
We will know this is occurring when sales of kilts skyrocket. What makes these young Scotsmen so keen to kill themselves?
There's no time tolouse!
Upvote
8
(8
/
0)
That information has been public for years. There are multiple websites where you can search for people by name, department, job title, etc.
What’s different here is that they demanded access to the private data like home addresses, banking accounts, social security numbers, etc. AND access to change any of those values unilaterally. Now one DOGE person can hire or fire anyone they want without following any legal process. They could simply cross-reference names and addresses against the public FEC donation records and fired anyone who donated to a Democrat, or someone purged from the party like Cheney, and those people wouldn’t know about it until they were locked out and unpaid, and they’d have to sue simply to learn what happened.
Upvote
57
(57
/
0)
On the one hand I’m glad I’m in a blue district in a blue state with a good representative. On the other, I’m sad that I can’t go to a town hall and hand my local rep’s ass to him/her in public and then announce that I’m going after him/her as a candidate.
Upvote
15
(15
/
0)
Probably not too long for everyone's social to show up on X
Upvote
4
(4
/
0)
I wonder how long this country will sit back and watch, doing nothing? Is there a point the NPC's start to play the game? Is there a level of economic distress, or a huge data leak that bolloxes up financial markets, or widespread personal misery where it becomes inevitable that in a country with more guns than population, that things go off script?
Or is the country so fat, dumb and inured to this, that we do, in fact, become Hungary (Article in The Atlantic on this last possibility).
Me, I'm starting to get very nervous about either possibility.
Someone smarter than me please explain why I shouldn't be.
Upvote
21
(22
/
-1)
Or masculine facial features in general. Well, pre-op, he lacked them.
Upvote
5
(5
/
0)
It's estimated about 1/3 of the population everywhere are authoritarian followers, without a whole lot of consideration of what the authoritarians's philosophy is. They want to move up in the world and don't want to do the thinking or work to figure that out on their own, so they hook their wagon to the fastest moving horse.
There are places that train to look out for that sort of thing, and places that don't. Generally political parties would seek to root out those elements, and to a large degree the GOP did do that early on, but voters overwhelmed those efforts.
Upvote
13
(13
/
0)
Just wait until they start comparing employee records to voter registration lists. Cut the wages of all registered Democrates by 50% maybe, for being disloyal?
Upvote
9
(9
/
0)
Their idea of “the right thing” doesn’t include respect for the constitution, democracy, or other people. They apparently believe in “the meritocracy“, where they have the merit and others don’t, and they’re also probably looking to see what they personally can get out of it. Don’t ascribe any nobility (even misplaced nobility) to them - they have none.
Upvote
24
(24
/
0)
Relax. Germany recovered, so did Japan. Russia, I admit, not so much ... but then they didn't lose a war.
(No, that was not a hint.)
Upvote
5
(9
/
-4)
There is a very large difference between being able to see what people are being paid, and being able to write to the sources of truth relating to pay, expenses, and such matters.
If I were in charge of managing access to a payroll system, I guarantee you that I would push back, and push back hard, on giving unfettered administrative level access to that system. I'd ask for appropriate approvals on read only access (because that stuff is sensitive), but wouldn't fight hard as long as those approvals came through - but I'd not simply roll over and allow some random schmuck to modify the data in those systems. That way lies chaos and destruction.
Which, yes, is the whole point of DOGE - but basic ethics and professionalism requires people to push back on excessive grants of authority. "What do you need this for? How can this be achieved without giving you this level of access?" are just two of the basic questions that should have been asked in the first instance. (Yes, I understand that this is not normal, and that such questions are grounds for being sent to the gulag. I'm not talking about the expected response from Trump et al; I'm talking about what would happen in a sane world with appropriate checks and balances.)
Upvote
44
(44
/
0)
My question is at what point do some of the states start thinking “bugger this lets go it alone!”. What would happen in this case? Would there be another civil war between quitting states and the federal government?
Upvote
8
(9
/
-1)
You understand that CIA undercover assets are on the federal payroll. Should those be public?
I'll add, these systems also have everyone's social security number, their direct deposit bank routing data, the names, ages, SS# of everyone's kids, they usually contain some kinds of medical conditions, and so on. Should all that be public?
Federal salaries are already public, btw.
Upvote
37
(37
/
0)