Payments crisis of 2025: Not “read only” access anymore

Audits can be done 'read only'. Audits don't actually have to impact the behaviour and operation of an organization either. Stopping all activity because of an 'audit' is ... wrong.

You're shocked by how many billions go completely unaudited?

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

Easy fix. You have until the end of the FY + 3mo to provide the audit report. If you do not provide it, your funding is cut to 0 for the next FY.

Ok, let's go hire someone..not...let random billionaires decide what to do

1 billion sent to the fluffer

Based on Musk’s tweets, the depth of this “audit” seems to be entirely surface level, e.g. “Lutheran in the name? DELETE.” (Not that they could do any better even if they wanted to given the blitzkrieg nature of the audit, size of the team, and complete lack of expertise.)

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I wouldn’t trust a 19 year old to do my taxes let alone audit all of federal spending.

How so?

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...

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.

No one needs a standing clearance. Anyone can be read into any program by someone of sufficient authority on an ad hoc basis.

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

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?

And...it's flagged :-))

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I don't think you need clearance for this, so not sure how that is relevant.

The voters don't directly decide what is a crime. At best, they elect congress that can change the laws and constitution that in turn rules out what is or isn't illegal. None of this was done, none of this is democratic. This is nothing else than a coup perpetrated by the richest man on Earth.

>the voters decide (through their elected representatives) what is a crime

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).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

From "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45", an interview with a German about what it was like living during the rise of the Nazis:

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

what is?

Wherever you are, find friends, bring family, go to the closest government building, camp in front of it. Block the main street of your city, block highways, block ports, &c.

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

Call your senator. Republican or Democrat or Independent or whatever. Call them, tell them you expect them to cease all routine business in the senate until accountability is restored. They do listen, it does matter.

> what am I supposed to do about it?

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.

A general strike is a worthwhile outlet. Electoralism is notthe only form of political activity.

And lost with a popular vote.

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

I am moving my money out of the US stock market. Maybe most people don't care, but I want to live and invest in a functional democracy.

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

Protest.

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

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Yeah, what's up with that?

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.

Yeah, because Microsoft is not affected the slightest if someone arbitrarily loses their research funding or stops receiving social security checks.

From all that we know so far these are very far from "the top people in the world"

> I think this whole thing boils down to whether you like elon or not.

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...

Why in the world would you trust Elon and his cadre to do that investigation? The man has no self-control, has the temperament of a spoiled teenager, and by all accounts is a drug addict. He also has a shocking number of conflicts of interest.

I wouldn't trust Elon to water my plants!

> This is the first time the veil of undocumented or secret government payments has been pierced and it's going to shed a lot of light into the corruption behind government spending.

... 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.

Try this assumption on for size: this team just wants to break the government and make it serve the party, not the country.

> unresponsive the bureaucracy has become to political direction from the president & secretaries

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

Bureaucracy is there to protect us from people like Trump and Elon. Congress can pass laws and the president can issue orders. This action threatens the US financial system, which threatens the economic stability of most of the world. In terms of human suffering this could have massive impact. We now have a psychopath (well, at least one) with his fingers around our throats. We're all waiting to see what comes next, but it won't be good.

How can one do that without transparency? Elon seems almost proud of the boorishness of his "wood chipper" and the lack of transparency.

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.

His definition of "people" implicitly excludes the slave classes/races.

The US gets its own MBS!

I think reactionary would be more likely to catch on. Some of them embrace it.

Reactionary?

Political pundits for major outlets (538, New York Times, Washington Post) reference this constantly. It's mentioned all the time in media to the point where when people talk about congressional approval I turn my brain off because I know they'll say some version of "congressional approval is low but people generally approve of their congressman".

>Congressional approval is in the 20% range

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.

Sadly I think both are dealing with mental breakdown of some kind.

The way you word it makes it seem like him being considered a neo nazi is a failure of marketing on his part, rather than a very intentional public display.

The problem is that a company has nothing to do with a country, the goal isn't to have a positive balance at the end of the excel spreadsheet

The way I see it: It often takes him 6+ years to eventually be successful in an endeavor, and he learns by making a whole bunch of mistakes a long the way. That may be ok in a company, but probably not a good way to handle a 4-year federal government term.

Those other domains might be seriously limited in scope and number though!

He's had more failures then successes

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)

I don't think HN wants to be the place for these sorts of stories, however important they might ultimately feel.

People flagged it. Seems like it got moderated and is now unflagged.

It is annoying that the more inflammatory and 'breaking news(?)' articles are what remain. All of the articles from reputable news sources citing their sources this last weekend got flagged in minutes. I think only the Wired article that outed the people involved in the federal payments system takeover managed to get unflagged (again, inflammatory).

FTA

> 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.

the data these SpaceX bros might now have on their drives

He seems to be an economist who writes a lot about central banks etc, so likely suffering from XKCD 2501: https://xkcd.com/2501/

Ha of course.. they never cut the cash cows. Make shit up and create new means of warfare even though there is no need. Just a cash grab and cash funnel. There has to be space involved now because elon.