DHS removes all members of cyber security advisory boards, halts investigations
394 comments
·January 22, 2025tptacek
ZeroGravitas
Maybe I've been burned lately and my faith in humanity is ebbing but I'm hoping the reference to that specific committee isn't about "government sounds stupid if you take it out of context, so it's good that we burn it all down"
The Coast Guard having a plan for when large fishing vessels get into trouble, and indeed a plan to stop them getting into trouble, seems like a good thing to me even if it's grouped somewhat incongruously under Department of Homeland Security.
edit: your other comment on this makes me think we are at the "letting commercial fisherman, and the coastguards trying to rescue them, drown to own the libs" stage, and my faith in humanity drops another notch.
derf_
> ...even if it's grouped somewhat incongruously under Department of Homeland Security.
DHS is arguably a much more appropriate home for the Coast Guard than its previous department, Transportation, given all of the facets of their actual mission (source: father and grandfather both in the Coast Guard for 30+ years).
kjkjadksj
By the numbers though I wouldn’t be surprised if the number one issue coast guard deals with is drunken recreational boaters.
djoldman
Here is the National Commercial Fishing Safety Advisory Council charter:
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2024-09/24_0712_ncfs...
The activities listed are:
1. "...advise and provide recommendations in writing to the Secretary of Homeland Security...on matters relating to the safe operation of commercial fishing industry vessels"
2. "review regulations..."
3. "review marine casualties and investigations of vessels..."nilamo
Based on just that text, they're the water version of the NTSB and thus one of the most important groups in the country.
wyldfire
So, maybe the new administration did a global "ctrl-f regulation, uncheck".
ZeroGravitas
Again I can't tell if you've quoted three vaguely regulation-y phrases in an attempt to justify generic contempt for government regulation or if you're backing me up with documentary proof that this is a boring sensible thing.
As your document says, it is literally the commercial fishing industry, shipbuilders, shipowners, equipment manufacturers, insurers etc. getting together to swap notes on safety because shipwrecks and deaths are not good for business.
"members serve as representatives of their respective interests, associations, or organizations"
This is not woke communism.
kevin_thibedeau
We need to see YoY growth on ship rescues to justify their existence. Otherwise they're just a parasitic cost center.
viraptor
That's a terrible idea for a group which is trying to prevent ships getting into trouble to begin with. Measuring the rescues would be a here incentive that would get more people in dangerous situations.
esbranson
If the relevant Coast Guard officials need advisory committees for the things you mention, core parts of their mission for who-knows-how-long, they ought to be fired too. My point is that advisory commissions are not a core part of any government agency, and should not be.
null
Grum9
The "U.S. Coast Guard was formed by a merger of the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service and the U.S. Life-Saving Service on 28 January 1915" (wiki).
The US Department of Homeland Security "began operations on March 1, 2003, after being formed as a result of the Homeland Security Act of 2002, enacted in response to the September 11 attacks" (wiki).
So are you saying that for 78 years of its existence, the USCG had no "plan for when large fishing vessels get into trouble, and indeed a plan to stop them getting into trouble" until the DHS assembled a (assuming this is a thing) "National Commercial Fishing Safety Advisory Committee"? You dont think theres any redundancy? That just maybe bureaucracy cant help but to expand forever every time someone with a title has a question that cant be answered immediately by someone standing in the room, they have to create a committee so they can have someone on speed dial? If the coast guard doesnt have plans for this, one wonders what the coast guard does all day.
sympil
It’s common for organizations to reorganize. It’s quite possible that the committee was formed for purposes of centralization and efficacy. It’s also possible it was government overreach. What are the justifications for axing a committee or regulations and are those justifications correct?
atombender
What you say might be true. But what do you actually know about this committee and their work? Chesterton's Fence is a good rule of thumb here. As an outsider, you might look at this and assume it's a superfluous service. But until you've figured out why it exists, it seems premature to assume it shouldn't exist.
absolutelastone
It's probably about mission creep, I'd guess.
mcphage
[flagged]
aprilthird2021
[flagged]
theultdev
I think fisherman know how to be safe without bureaucrats in DC that have never been in a fishing boat butting in.
You just need coast guard for emergencies.
They got along just fine before 2018 when this committee was created.
mcculley
I grew up in the commercial fishing industry and then worked in the tug boat industry. Many USCG regulations that were vehemently opposed by the old men save lives every day.
This is a classic Chesterton's Fence. Those who don't understand the origin of the regulations will continue to have strong, uninformed opinions about them.
Many crew working on boats have safety gear only because USCG requires it. The owners of those boats would not expend the money without the regulation.
Kon-Peki
“This is unsafe! I quit!”
“No problem, as a non-employee you are hereby confined to your cabin except to use the head, and you can eat in the galley but you have to pay for your meals, they cost $100 and will be deducted from your final paycheck. If you have a negative balance when we dock at a port in around 3 months, you must pay immediately or we will send the debt to collections. Have a nice day”
Maybe you want to read up on how things work at sea?
thinkingtoilet
Did they? What were the accident rates before and after? Why was the committee created? Do you think the people who axed these committees have an answer to the above questions? Or is it simply "government is bad"?
twic
DHS merely inherited the Coast Guard's responsibility for the fishing industry. It wasn't just unregulated before 2003!
dboreham
> I think fisherman know how to be safe without bureaucrats in DC that have never been in a fishing boat butting in.
There's 1000 years of people killing themselves needlessly that says they don't.
georgeplusplus
Came to say exactly this. Headline is extremely disingenuous and meant to provoke a reaction.
weinzierl
Seems the Cybersecurity Executive Orders that dealt with Memory Safe Languages and the ONCD Report (which mentioned Rust, if I remember correctly) are all gone from whitehouse.gov as well.
The CISA report that dealt with memory safety is still on the CISA site. What do these recent developments mean for CISA? Is it an independent organization that will continue to exist without DHS support or is it essentially dead and its site and reports will vanish as well?
begueradj
> Seems the Cybersecurity Executive Orders that dealt with Memory Safe Languages and the ONCD Report (which mentioned Rust, if I remember correctly) are all gone from whitehouse.gov as well.
Do you have any clues for the "why" ?
anotherhue
It's baffling, traditionally his highest support has come from the Rust belt.
ARandomerDude
Thank you for this comment. Gold. :D
mapmeld
It's a brand new website and old URLs won't work (this has been somewhat routine since Obama's first term). I wouldn't take that as a sign that a specific executive order is rescinded. However it may have been grouped in with other Biden tech executive orders (such as AI safety) which are being rescinded as excessive regulation
taejo
AFAIK it's typical for whitehouse.gov to be completely replaced with every new president
throwaway290
I am mostly ignorant but from hearsay CISA is part of DHS (the chief of CISA is a DHS official). doubt Trump loves it because he literally fired Krebs directly for not supporting misinformation and overthrow attempt in 2020 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Krebs#2020_dismissal)
jonstewart
It is not hearsay that CISA is part of DHS. This is an easily verified fact.
evanjrowley
CISA has an important job to do, but their mission was put at risk when it's leadership under Krebs chose to repeatedly violate the first amendment. Elections and Covid-19 are topics they've been documented in influencing, but with the capability there, what other narratives was it influencing that we don't know about?
The legal fight against CISA to stop their censorship was lost not on the basis of it being constitutional, but because the plaintiffs powerful enough to bring it to court couldn't show they had been directly harmed by it. A common stumbling block for many court cases for legitimate issues. CISA has publicly stated they will be changing their approach as a result of these controversies.
ggm
Can somebody give me a rational take on why? It feels immensely reactive. Salt Typhoon would seem to represent an active threat. Didn't DHS act quite.. conservatively?
A comment on the blusky thread went to "five eyes should stop sharing information" which I suspect won't happen, but I could see people thinking it should.
unsnap_biceps
When someone comes in to slash everything, they generally don't bother understanding what they are slashing. This is the same as when a company hires someone to come in and cut costs, generally everything, good or bad, gets cut. That's what's happening on the US federal level right now. Eventually some things will be picked back up when someone realizes that it wasn't a good idea to stop it, but most things are just going to be wasted effort.
beardyw
Chesterton's Fence
"There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it"
janalsncm
I liked his story about the street lamp that a mob of people wanted to take down. A monk started to suggest debating the merits of Light, which seemed like an annoying and esoteric point until the mob knocked down the street lamp and everyone was left to argue in the dark. That may be an analogy to where we are now.
A related point is, it’s pretty easy to find people unhappy with current systems. But if you ask them what to replace those systems with, you’ll often find that coalition dissolves.
tptacek
I don't think Chesterton has much to say about DHS, which is relatively new.
kristianbrigman
If said fence was across a road that a school bus was hurtling towards at 60 mph… you’d stop asking these questions and remove it (and maybe put it back after you’ve solved the other emergency).
Several (of the new government) have expressed belief that the government is headed towards a catastrophic debt overload. In their view, emergency relief is necessary.
Not arguing for or against this view, but that seems to be what people voted for.
I am a big fan of Chestertons fence but it doesn’t always apply.
potato3732842
The goal of these people isn't to understand. They don't care. They know they're slashing important stuff. It's a numbers game to them.
It's like marking read all your emails. The important stuff will pop back up.
sillyfluke
It's like the twitter thing. You start shutting off servers until someone says, "ouch it hurts". Then you turn it back on if you care. You then end up with less servers than you started.
sanderjd
Chesterton's fence is always lost on populists.
generalizations
I heard there's going to be those teams of hr+legal+engineer doing the cutting - the only reason I can guess there'd be an engineer in the mix is if they do intend to understand what they're cutting.
troyvit
The one wrinkle in this, to me, is that Trump spent four years as President already. Full disclosure: I despise the guy and wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire, BUT ... what if he saw a bunch of waste in his first run and therefore does understand what he's slashing?
Personally I don't believe that or want to believe that and would rather chalk it up to neo-toddlerism, but there's a chance right?
rideontime
Considering the surprise he showed on video when being told what he's signing, I don't believe he knows what he's slashing, let alone understands it.
JumpCrisscross
> Can somebody give me a rational take on why?
Investigations are annoying to people who were behind the President at his inauguration.
matwood
People voted for this and now act surprised.
voidfunc
I'm guessing the people who voted for this are not surprised. They either expected it, want it, or don't care.
It shouldn't be surprising to anyone here with a functioning brain and is roughly aware of what is going on. Expect more of this.
sph
People voted for unrealistic pipe dreams. They often do, but happens in particular with reactionary and populist votes.
philipov
You mean the same way as with Brexit? We can only hope that the people who voted for him will have the same capacity for regret.
anthonygd
I'm mostly seeing people who voted against this continue to grumble.
computerfriend
I'm not sure it's the same people.
ggm
AWS and starlink have exposure of risk. You would think DHS work here went to net beneficial outcomes for both of them, and the wider telco sector. (Assuming you meant the tech sector)
JumpCrisscross
> AWS and starlink have exposure of risk
What risk? There isn’t a consumer liability, and they can control the cybersecurity risk-reward balance they’re exposed to. From their perspective, oversight is the liability.
A good rule of thumb, at least for the next couple of months, is that any rules and regulations that have been criticised by the billionaires, banks or oil & gas industry are likely to be shredded. (The “deep state” stuff is mostly whoever has the king’s ear sort of politics. It’s unclear that had any influence here.)
Ekaros
There is two ways for efficiency, either wipe everything clean or well setup a committee to evaluate which committees can be eliminate. And usual joke in bureaucracy is that later one will discover that even more committees are actually needed.
So the knee jerk reaction of current administration is burning it to ground. Which could actually change something.
insane_dreamer
Changing something is easy, any fool can do that. Changing something for the better is hard.
derbOac
Seems like a false dichotomy, between authoritarianism and Kafkaesque bureaucracy.
An effective administration would be thoughtful about things and reorganize rather than simply cut. So they're either being thoughtful and decided something like state sponsored infiltration isn't good to investigate or are being thoughtless.
declan_roberts
Especially wrt things setup, created, mandated during thr prior admin.
__loam
Slash and burn policies from a reactionary administration that doesn't and in fact refuses to think about the second and third order consequences of their decisions.
One of the reasons a lot of people are worried about this administration is the vibes based policy decisions they seem intent on making. Everything is haphazard, arbitrary and contradictory. Some of it comes down to personal grievance and some of it comes down to favors for people in the business sphere who chose to kowtow to this administration.
null
D13Fd
They were elected on a mandate to burn it all down, in their view, and this is what that looks like.
tzs
I've never understood how 49.8% of the vote is a mandate.
mostlysimilar
It isn't, people who mindlessly repeat that this administration has a "mandate" are incapable of critical thinking.
lazide
If you stop assuming good intent, I think the answer is fairly obvious.
ARandomerDude
And that obvious answer is?
lazide
That it is not a good faith attempt to make better or more effective investigations, and rather to stop publicly ‘seeing’ high profile problems.
If we don’t test or investigate, there are no problems and no crimes eh?
insane_dreamer
I'm guessing this is part of VP Musk's "grand plan to cut government waste", with his Twitter-style "shoot first, ask questions later" approach.
throwaway290
It can be a convenient claim for Musk to make but don't forget, China is his biggest friend (Xi can single-handedly bankrupt Tesla and slash his net worth) and the people fired were in the middle of the Salt Typhoon investigation (which came guess where from!)
skywhopper
The "rational" explanation is that Trump's staff are trying to clear house of anyone they don't trust will give in to any demands they make, and put everyone else who works for the government directly or indirectly in a state of fear and confusion.
duke_sam
Whatever problems or limitations the existing approach had dropping everything on the floor is one of the least helpful ways of trying to fix it (assuming good intent).
matwood
“They are never as dumb as I hoped they were, and I am never as smart as I thought I was.”
Basically nearly every person who goes into a new situation thinking only they can fix it.
insane_dreamer
Especially if they're very wealthy and already have a savior complex.
lazide
Burning everything to the ground is a way of demolishing something though.
And if your intent is to just destroy it, it’s a far more effective one than bringing in experts to slowly try to disassemble the giant jenga tower without it falling over.
dkjaudyeqooe
You have to assume competence too. You may have good intent but that doesn't help if you don't really know what you are doing or are blinded by ideology or some wayward belief.
stouset
Which of the advisory boards do you think were run by incompetents or blind adherents to generally unpopular opinions?
Do you think it was half? More? Less?
dkjaudyeqooe
I'm talking about the administration that dropped the boards, as per the post I was replying to.
skywhopper
Why would you assume good intent at this point? Their motives and plans have been clear for years.
polotics
Is this explainable in any way by the cost of running these boards? By the sound of it the cost-benefit of thwarting Salt Typhoon is probably not optimal at zero investment.
perlgeek
This seems entirely ideologically motivated to me.
defrost
with a dash of business motivation.
Replacing government run and funded cyber security and threat assessment roles with privately owned contracters will be quite profitable for a few of the Brolliegarks.
skywhopper
No. The cost of running these is so small as not to be worth top officials' time in worrying about them. If they are looking to save lots of money, there are far more efficient ways to do that. This is just clearing house, establishing a tone, and making it clear that expert opinion is not valued.
qgin
You don’t need advisory panels if you don’t want advice
settsu
It really is despairingly sad how many of these comments (assumedly by U.S. citizens) seem to not realize or believe these actions will have an effect on them.
Are some of these things normal SOP for a regime change? Sure. But to normalize everything under that blanket assumption is just foolish.
Unless you are an exceedingly (liquid) wealthy white male, you are entirely disposable to the incoming administration. You are less than nothing. If anything, you are an inconvenience buried deep in the calculations that needs to be factored out of the equation because your existence hinders the "progress" being sought.
All these pragmatic or, worse, so-called "libertarian" views demonstrate a supremely naïve, if not outright harmful (to yourself and countless others), understanding of what is going to be aggressively pursued these next few years.
SlightlyLeftPad
The efforts will inherently destabilize the US which, for some, will be a really massive gift and this administration will be praised both externally and internally. That will close the feedback loop since that’s primarily what motivates this administration.
phtrivier
The core tenet of Muskism, as described at length in Isaacson's bio is around those lines:
* question all the rules
* when in doubt, slash the rule, and see what happens
* if it's really bad without it, bring back the rule
* if you don't have to bring back 10% of the rules that you slashed, you haven't slashed enough yet
USA is now entering the phase where everything is getting slashed - following the will of the majority of -Pennsylvania- the people.
At the level of a company, this can bring great efficiencies, and make reusable self-driving cancer-free nuclear-fusion based rockets. Or crypto scams.
Unfortunately, at the level of a Federal Government, it will bring lower taxes, but some of the 10% will end with coffins. And crypto scams.
We'll watch from the other side of the Atlantic how the great libertarianism experiment goes for the USA.
I expect both impressive improvements, and dramatic karmic irony.
surgical_fire
> At the level of a company, this can bring great efficiencies, and make reusable self-driving cancer-free nuclear-fusion based rockets. Or crypto scams.
This is questionable. There are many times when bureaucracy exists for bureaucracy sake. But many, many times they exist for a reason.
Get any sufficiently large company and try to understand its complexity. Simply slashing it is a recipe for disaster.
> Unfortunately, at the level of a Federal Government, it will bring lower taxes, but some of the 10% will end with coffins. And crypto scams.
This is highly questionable, especially the "lower taxes" part. Governments are not very keen on reducing revenue, more likely they will only direct the surplus by cutting off services to other things - in the case of US, I wouldn't be surprised if they just increase spending in military, for example. Those sleasy and juicy defence contracts need funding, you know.
D13Fd
There is essentially no relation to taxes. Everything they are cutting falls into the “Other” category in this chart:
https://www.crews.bank/charts/taxes-and-spending
Even if they cut 100% of government functions other than entitlements, healthcare, and defense, it would not solve the deficit.
Ajedi32
Is DHS "other", or "defense"?
Regardless, I think the primary costs created by regulation aren't directly to the government budget, but rather knock-on effects of compliance incurred by the entire nation's economy.
kristianbrigman
At least officially, the stated goal is to eliminate the deficit, which at least Elon has been warning about lately.
If that holds up (and who knows if it will) I wouldn’t expect any taxes to be cut until the budget is close to balanced.
pjc50
I expect a lot of noise about it, then an expansion of the deficit for tax cuts, followed by more noise about how evil the deficit is.
surgical_fire
I wonder if I would be happier if I was as naive as a this.
graemep
So the opposite of conservatism in the traditional sense which is do not change things?
generalizations
> following the will of the majority of -Pennsylvania- the people.
Or more specifically, the Amish...almost poetic.
phtrivier
Kidding aside, and sorry if it sounds silly, but... do Amish people usually vote a lot ?
generalizations
Not that I know of, but they did this time - IIRC, the Biden administration feds raided one of their dairy farms & that was their motivation to vote en masse for Trump.
CamperBob2
We'll watch from the other side of the Atlantic how the great libertarianism experiment goes for the USA.
Public service announcement: libertarians aren't the ones who want to shrink government enough to fit through your bedroom door. Those would be the Republicans, who are now in power. They are classified in the opposite camp (authoritarians).
silexia
How is a small government authoritarian? By nature, it is the opposite... You have freedoms to do as you please without government interference.
red-iron-pine
did we mention crypto scams?
Ajedi32
Basically this.
Most of the commenters here seem to be taking it on faith that these government organizations are necessary and serving a crucial function. But the entire thrust of this election is that the majority of the country doesn't share that level of faith in the federal government.
"When in doubt, slash and see what happens" seems like a highly effective, albeit a bit reckless, approach to finding out which agencies are truly needed and which are not.
phtrivier
I (sincerely) wish you and your family to not be on the path of one of the people who will rush to profit from the lack of regulation.
I preemptively nominate "unexpected knock-on effects" as "periphrase of the year" for 2025 ;)
K0balt
I think I understand the pullback from renewables now.
With this, along with all of the other recent events we have had the privilege of witnessing, we should be able to tap into the resonant frequency from the “energetic whirring phenomenon” occurring at Arlington National Cemetery to provide all of the energy that the country needs for the next century at least.
insane_dreamer
The problem with gutting these departments is that the repercussions aren't immediate.
It's like firing your ATC training team and then, the following week, claiming, see! we just saved a bunch of money and no airplanes crashed -- we didn't need them after all. Until one day ...
Then when some day a crisis situation occurs, there isn't an appropriate response because "oops, that dept no longer exists, or doesn't have the staff to respond". But who knows if Trump's lucky he might even be out of office by then and someone else has to deal with it. But in the mean time, VP Musk gets to claim "look at all the money we saved!"
Maybe some of the positions are redundant, but gutting across the board on day 1 definitely comes off as unwise and not thought through.
esbranson
No, it is not.
Firing an "ATC training team" and replacing them with advisory commissions is not a good thing. Advisory commissions are not, and should not be, functional units of government.
I know it's so easy to jump on the hate train, but you're confusing different aspects of government, and what has happened.
bigstrat2003
Good. From day 1 DHS has been the most Orwellian department of the US government, which casually violates our freedom on a regular basis. The entire department should be abolished.
insane_dreamer
I would not be opposed to abolishing the DHS, but that is _not_ what is happening here.
Instead, it's creating a DHS that is less accountable and less sensitive to outside advice. In other words, a more dangerous DHS.
So really the opposite of what you're hoping for.
_DeadFred_
Which party created the DHS again?
hk1337
Pretty sure it was a solid bipartisan achievement.
avgDev
Maybe you can share some of the examples of such infringements on our rights.
zer8k
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/court-rules-warrantless-...
https://epic.org/dhs-disregards-internal-policies-and-avoids...
https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone
https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/breaking-dhs-will-begin-...
https://www.theverge.com/c/23311333/tsa-history-airport-secu...
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/us/tsa-screeners-win-i...
The list goes on. There's 24 years of history you can comb through. The DHS' security theater exists solely to compromise the constitutional rights of American citizens. To this day there's no evidence they're even that successful at their job. The fact the impeachment of Mayorkas failed was quite mind-boggling but characteristic of a government that doesn't truly believe anyone, even citizens, have certain inalienable rights.
The DHS was and still is bipartisan. It's America's Staatspolizei.
throwaway290
You know that things you posted about border and airport searches are absolutely not gonna go away with this move. Under this gov ingress control can only intensify, DHS or not.
What did stop is some pretty important recent cyber attack reviews and that seems to touch China's interests.
mguido
Hello.
This is running here as a story about cybersecurity, but it's apparently every advisory committee at DHS; there were a bunch of them, mostly not about technology; for instance, the National Commercial Fishing Safety Advisory Committee.