DOGE employees ordered to stop using Slack

Of course there is “unseeing.” They can be tried for rather obvious crimes and thrown in prison.

I was assured right here on HN that the data was public to begin with, and downvoted for suggesting it was possible unseen corruption. Hopefully if that is true they find it just matches what has released publicly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ty6853&next=42914628...

I don't know? To this day people still fuss about concentration camps here, while the leader clearly had given authority to do so. People are just too political these days.

By the way, I heard the Palestinian Problem is going to be solved for good?

DOGE does not have the authority to shut down independent agencies of the US Government such as USAID.

Because it goes after the institutions beloved by the liberal consensus (on both "right" and "left").

I mean, there are many political leaders who would put Musk in prison in a heartbeat for the DOGE stuff. It's not paranoia. This is separate from "do you think this is illegal", but it's absolutely reasonable, from their perspective, to think that "everyone is after them".

I'm surprised he has not tit-for-tatted with pre-emptive pardons for all of his minions.

I think the one they're going for is that being a senior officer with material authority requires confirmation per the appointments clause, constitutional law instead of a federal statute.

Whether musk is operating as such seems dubious but possible.

Is DOGE an advisory body or real government audit agency. It is acting like the later but is solely creation of Musk.

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/federal-unions-s...

https://www.hrdive.com/news/federal-workers-unions-challenge...

US' Privacy Act of 1974

DOGE is not illegal. However the legality of some of the things they do is under question. The current government, including DOGE is being operated like “Just do as many things as possible, so that the lawsuits can’t keep up”. While lawyers are busy trying to stop big things, many small but important items will slip through the cracks and will take decades to undo.

Edit: BTW this strategy has always been available, it’s just that career politicians aren’t incentivized to do this for “good” because they want long political careers.

> Both realities reveal something urgently broken with the United States.

Our government operations expect people to conduct themselves as adults.

Clearly, if we survive Elon's coup, we need to encode these norms into law.

The broken part is the idea that the legislative and judicial branches can act as checks and balances for the executive branch. In the end, the executive branch is the only branch with the ability to do something. The other two are just a bunch of talking heads.

Many other republics have split the executive branch into multiple semi-independent centers of power. The head of state and the head of government can be separate roles. A directly elected president may be responsible for signing laws and appointing senior officials, while a prime minister subordinate to the parliament may be in charge of running the executive branch. And government departments may have dual leadership with a politically appointed minister setting the directions and a career director appointed by the president running the department. Because the director's term is independent from the political appointees, they can refuse to comply if the minister asks something illegal.

Republics have all kinds of failure modes. For example, Hungary was supposed to be a robust parliamentary republic. But due to non-proportional elections, slightly over 50% of votes were enough for a sufficient supermajority to rewrite the constitution.

DW covered this today with a professor who seems to generally know what he's talking about and from what I could tell is not spinning anything in particular: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpKhyL9PEPQ

He does a good job of explaining the facts of the legalities etc.

I'm not really sure if you can call it a "coup" if all parties involved admit he was legitimately elected. Furthermore, this isn't exactly a bait-and-switch. He told us what exactly what he wanted to do. We already knew he would try to do illegal stuff. If you break the law and nobody who voted for you complains (unrealistic I realize, but bear with me), is the rule of law really that secure? If we only criticize Trump when he breaks the law, but not the democrats when they send arms to Israel in blatant violation of the Leahy Laws, how can we get upset when people push the boundaries further?

It's been more than 20 years (or might be about that?) that we passed the law that said "if you prosecute Bush for warcrimes we will invade the Hague". Granted, we were never a treaty cosigner (sharing the lovely company of Russia, North Korea, and Iran), but it's very convenient we have a "laws for thee but not for me" attitude.

Look I'm just saying we've been headed in this direction for a while and I don't expect the institutions we're supposed to care about preserving doing much to stop it. Americans need to get a lot more mad if they want politicians to represent them well. I'd hazard a guess most americans have never contacted their representatives, vote in their non-swing state (effectively making their vote worthless), and pat themselves on the back for a civic duty well done. I think we've gotten ourselves into a position where politicians who have spent most of their careers failing to pass legislation now need to pull political ability from who the hell knows where to actually follow through on their promise to fight facism. Very grim times.

In American democracy winning a single election doesn't change the constitution or even the laws at all. There are separate processes for those things that haven't happened. The monetary decisions the executive branch is making right now are explicitly reserved for Congress, which notably hasn't passed a law for it.

Voting for someone doesn't imply they aren't bound by existing rules.

Edit: There's also more to be said here about restrictions on American democracy (e.g. gerrymandering, first past the post, disenfranchisement, financial barriers to entry for candidates, lack of choice for political parties, etc) that make the US not some bastion for democratic governance. I'm not an expert but the current chaos is at least partially enabled by the flaws in American democracy (rigid 2 party control is a good example of a generally undemocratic force, many Americans would prefer more parties but aren't being represented, that is enabling executive overreach).

> The people voted for this: a majority of the American people. Democracy, no?

Does this mean it was wrong of Republicans to have tried to stop anything Obama or Biden was trying to do? Or question it's legality?

I keep hearing this "the people voted for it argument", but unless your prepared to condemn things like limiting the scope of the ACA and refusing to confirm justices, it's hard to take the argument seriously.

He didn't even get a majority of the 60% of voter aged Americans who voted.

I do not get why electing a leader with anti democratic tendencies should be viewed as the pinnacle of democracy

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Slack can't just willy-nilly hand over US government data to the public. There's a process that needs to be followed for FOIA requests as some classes of information are just not public. In fact, most of the data on a government Slack server would probably fall under those FOIA exemptions.

That remains to be seen. From the same article:

> "Just changing the name alone under the Executive Order doesn't affect DOGE's recordkeeping status,” Jason R. Baron, professor at the University of Maryland and former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration told 404 Media in a phone call. “The administration apparently has made a determination that DOGE will be a presidential component subject to the Presidential Records Act. However, that will surely be challenged in the courts in connection with FOIA lawsuits. Under FOIA, it will be for the courts to decide whether under existing DOGE is acting more like a federal oversight agency or as a presidential component that solely advises the President.”

The article is fairly sloppy and uses lots of scare-quotes, but basically it's saying that communications for the DOGE team will report in to the Chief of Staff making them subject to the Presidential Records Act instead of the general reporting conditions for the OMB.

The article also states that 'DOGE is gutting...' when that's not true. They're advising the President, and the President is cleaning house. They investigate, recommend, the President decides, and those decisions get acted on. This is how a task force like this is supposed to work.

Perhaps revisit your premise prior to asserting malicious intent.

> Did you forge[t] to add /s or were you actually expecting Musk to be transparent and truthful?

Do you remember all his promises about full self driving Teslas? He's one of the most honest and truthful people in the world, and has been for years.

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Wouldn't it be the AGs who recently got 'let go'?

And why did you go straight to whataboutism? Just because one person does bad things it doesn't excuse other people from doing the same bad things. You don't see serial killers lawyers arguing, "I know my client killed 17 people, but what about that Jeffrey Dahmer, eh?"

Probably not, but there would definitely be some sort of resistance, strikes, refusal to comply, etc.

In France public service employees have a very high level of protection (they're very hard to fire), and are legally allowed to disobey "obviously illegal" orders, I suppose this case would qualify?

All of this was implemented immediately after WW2 as a way to prevent a potential authoritarian ruler from using public administrations for nefarious things. So it seems quite fitting.

The elite there must have a fear that this could happen to them though.