US Securities and Exchange Commission beginning to bring on DOGE staff
140 comments
·March 28, 2025mkolodny
jimkleiber
By using the word "efficient" without any reference point to what they want to make more efficient. It's similar to Make America Great Again. Great at what? Just GREAT!
It appeals to people who think government is inefficient and wasteful. Government doesn't HAVE TO BE inefficient and wasteful, just people need to believe it. And if media channels are hammering people over the head with the message that government is inefficient, then the official-sounding Department of Government Efficiency will save the day and rid the government of these evil inefficiency.
What these people may not realize is that the US government was intentionally designed to be inefficient. The checks and balances of three branches of government are constitutionally imposed inefficiency to make sure that one individual or group of individuals doesn't take the country in an efficiently harmful direction.
So if people want a hyper-efficient government, then be honest about rewriting the Constitution.
pr337h4m
>cost the taxpayer nothing
>transaction fees imposed on the financial sector
This is literally a tax.
giantg2
I have no idea how anyone is disagreeing with you. Looking it up in the dictionary, government imposed fees are absolutely taxes.
mixologic
Sure its a tax, but its not paid from "general funds that every taxpayer contributes.
We could call postage for the usps a tax too, but nobody thinks of it that way.
maxerickson
Are you ignoring context for some pretense, or do you not understand that statements have contextual meanings?
rasz
Its a Tarif!
nostrademons
...although, by this logic, so is the entire financial system.
giantg2
How so? Not everything is a government imposed fee. If it was, then there would be no way to transfer money if the entire system was a tax as all the value would go towards the tax leaving none to transfer for goods or services.
glimshe
By reducing the transaction fees.
mkolodny
Is that what DOGE is doing? Helping decide the SEC’s policies?
ysofunny
which are already measured in electron volts????
belter
You fool. Musk paid 300 million to kill the SEC.
"Exclusive: Interim SEC chief cast sole vote against suing Musk" - https://www.reuters.com/world/us/interim-sec-chief-cast-sole...
nine_zeros
> How do you make something that costs nothing more efficient?
By fraudulently weakening the regulatory body, it makes scamming investors easy. This is more efficient for scammers. Not for investors.
sega_sai
Somebody will get insanely rich on this. Unless people believe that these DOGErs are principled honest state servants.
voxadam
I don't doubt they're servants of the state (at least partially), I just question exactly which state it is that they're in service to.
eftychis
Not even they believe that.
readthenotes1
Richer than Pelosi of Crenshaw? That'd be something!
BLKNSLVR
Separate problem, but yes that's a problem. Both sides are equally derelict in their duties in addressing that one.
techpineapple
Pelosi is hardly worth more than $100 million. Someone with skillz could do way better.
Also I love this argument that’s like “this bad person did bad things, let’s follow their lead and have other people do bad things.
If all the Democrats jumped off a cliff, would you jump off too?
justanotheratom
I do believe these these DOGErs are principled honest state servants, until proven otherwise.
xenocratus
Chill, this isn't a court of law, people can have opinions
justanotheratom
Well, if you want to give your opinion in public, maybe you can give some explanation for your cynicism too.
brazzy
Literally everything they have been doing proves that they are not.
justanotheratom
Give one example.
y-c-o-m-b
It has been proven otherwise: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/doge-staffer-big-balls-prov...
What about these people says to you that they are "principled" or "honest" when they've already been outed doing exactly the opposite of those traits?
null
mschoch
[dead]
fleek
How is the entire country just passively accepting this...
This the most tepid, pathetic generation there has ever been.
wrs
Passively? Actively. A majority of voters handed over all the keys to these guys in full knowledge of the kind of people they are and what they wanted to do.
deathanatos
> A majority of voters handed over all the keys
Due to the weird way our nation works, it was a minority of voters. (A plurality in this case, though our electoral system also doesn't require that.)
But yeah, the keys were handed over by the populace as much as was required by how our elections occur.
I keep wondering where the line is, for those on the right. It seems like wherever you would draw a line in the sand … we're past that point.
saturn8601
>I keep wondering where the line is, for those on the right. It seems like wherever you would draw a line in the sand … we're past that point.
Been thinking about this for years. I've come to the conclusion that there might be two seperate groups.
1. People that have nothing left to lose. Their life is ruined due to their community falling on hard times and if they see the people they perceive at fault suffering then they are satisfied.
2. People who love to watch the other side suffer but have themselves not felt enough pain yet. It has to really hurt for them to stop. I think the economy crashing in 08 was a moment where many of them quieted down for a tiny bit until the pain stopped.
lotsofpulp
Eligible voters that did not vote due to apathy/laziness/politics are complicit.
miohtama
Every democratic country gets the government they deserve.
rickydroll
not a majority. as I wrote in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42963075 [edit fixed table formatting and labels]
Assuming I did my sums right, DT won by approximately 1.5%. Hardly a ringing endorsement. He got 31.59% of the voter-eligible (VE) population. I count active yes votes as for a candidate and non-voter passive no votes. Some non-voters support a candidate, but since they didn't vote, their non-votes count against each candidate.
EC %EC pop vote %of ballots %of VE population
Democratic Kamala Harris Tim Walz 226 42% 75,019,230 48.34% 30.66%
Republican Donald J. Trump J.D. Vance 312 58% 77,303,568 49.81% 31.59%
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/elections/2024 https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2024-11-1...
wrs
OK, 0.2% off a majority of voters. Still plenty of people actively calling for this.
palmotea
> Passively? Actively. A majority of voters handed over all the keys to these guys in full knowledge of the kind of people they are and what they wanted to do.
I wouldn't say "full knowledge," but it's not like the other guys were any good either. There was a huge spike in inflation and right before the election it became clear they were lying about their leader's obvious incapacity. All the options voters had were bad.
Personally, I blame the Democrats for this. Winning against Trump should've been easy, but they managed to fuck it up in all kinds of ways. They knew the stakes (and said so, loudly), but for some unfathomable reason they thought that meant they could coast. They also don't appear to know what the fuck they should be doing now, and seem to want to keep coasting.
wrs
We had a full four-year trial period for this administration, plus four years of additional public shenanigans, plus a published detailed action plan (Project 2025). I don’t know what else they could have done to make it obvious what you were voting for.
The Democrats put up an alternative that wasn’t very exciting, but it’s ridiculous to claim the choices were somehow equally bad. One of them was boring, the other was an unprecedented level of bad, like literally historically bad.
miohtama
From all good Democrats out there, they managed to come up with a mummy as a candidate so it is kind of self dug grave
Freedom2
> Personally, I blame the Democrats for this.
Is there any reason in particular people should not be blaming Republican voters for "this"? The US had four full years of Trump and it was plain as day what he'd get up to from his campaign, and voters still think he was a good choice. At what point does the US stop coddling Republican voters and blaming Democrats, even if they ran a bad campaign?
The idea that a voter is ignorant and stupid to realize the consequences of their actions that they need a "campaign" telling them is frankly absurd.
saturn8601
The bad leadership is still there so they will try to continue this nonsense next cycle. Whats worse is they are beginning to groom the next generation of grifters. We saw this with the start of Gen-Z Democratic 'influencers' this cycle.
minimaxir
Because the checks and balances system of government doesn't work if the people who would enforce said system are also complicit.
voxadam
Agreed, it seems like we've moved on from comparatively focused examples of regulatory capture to full on governmental capture.
techpineapple
If it makes you feel any better, the rich are about to get a whole lot richer.
justanotheratom
[flagged]
kristjansson
Did something happen in 2020? Something big??
techpineapple
Woah, great gotcha! Did you really come to Hacker News to denegarte people you thought didn’t have a basic understanding of Economics? Right now I have a problem with both. Maybe deregulating the SEC helps poor people? I don’t hear anyone making that argument right now though.
immibis
The rich don't get richer by sitting in their labs and tinkering until they invent something that nobody had before. That's so last two centuries. The way they get rich now is by making us pay more for the same stuff we already had.
sershe
Well, I for once dislike what they are doing, but mostly because what they are doing is both ineffective and loud. Instead of carefully, efficiently dismantling the federal regulatory state into nothing, they are not only failing to actually achieve much but giving the whole project a bad name.
Which protest do I join? "Handsaws, not chainsaws! But do cut the trunk, and as close to the ground as you can!"
linguae
Honestly, our legal remedies are quite limited:
1. All three branches of government are controlled by the MAGA Party. I call it the MAGA Party, not the Republican Party, since the Republican Party has long been purged of serious Never Trumper opposition.
2. There are not enough Democrats in Congress to impeach and convict Trump of any unconstitutional acts.
3. There is no mechanism available to recall congresspeople or to trigger a special election, and the next election of congresspeople isn’t until November 2026, a year and a half away.
4. I live in a blue state (California) with blue representatives (San Francisco Bay Area) at the federal level. What good would it do me to write senators Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla or congressman Mark DeSaulnier?
5. The people who have the most power to change things are people who have red representatives, since they have the 2026 midterm elections to worry about. However, many of the people living in such districts voted for Trump and are largely on board with the MAGA agenda. Why would they write their representatives?
6. We could protest through demonstrations and boycotts, but the protests need to be effective in order for them to not simply be demonstrative. Moreover, protests run the risk of getting hijacked by extremists and saboteurs, and authoritarians love exploiting crises to crack down on dissent. Protesting could be a potential trap.
It’s a very bleak situation right now due to MAGA’s control over all three branches of government. The best we could hope for is:
1. Start planning for the 2026 elections NOW! Elections cost a lot of money and require a lot of planning. If MAGA loses control of Congress in January 2027, this could add a much-needed check to MAGA and could help with the 2028 election season.
2. With the way Trump, Elon, and others in power are carrying on, eventually segments of the MAGA voter base will be harmed by MAGA policies. I particularly see Trump’s tariffs to be quite painful. If enough Republican voters start openly expressing their discontent for MAGA policies, then this is a chance for MAGA to lose absolute control of power in January 2027.
sitkack
Chuck "Vichy Democrat" Schumer really removed the only lever that the opposition party had, at all.
https://www.reddit.com/r/50501/comments/1jatnk4/chuck_schume...
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/13/nx-s1-5327600/house-democrats...
This is the worse thing to happen to the US since Trump got back into office.
telotortium
Schumer had no leverage. If the budget had not passed, Musk and DOGE would have used that as a excuse to purge even more government employees.
yieldcrv
Oh you missed that we hate the SEC lol
It is a creature of the New Deal where many of its programs exist on shaky constitutional ground, existing primarily because standing with the courts is difficult to achieve
Although the New Deal is heralded in the history books, most programs of the new deal were declared unconstitutional within 10 years, and everything that remains should be heavily scrutinized with that knowledge
The SEC stands out like a sore thumb when you really look at it
When its not blatantly separating classes, it is the state arm of FINRA and openly captured.
Just keep EDGAR for financial reports and thats it. They can’t even explicitly define what insider trading is and isn’t.
Trasmatta
What do you expect the average person to do about it? Protests are happening on a weekly basis. What are YOU doing about it?
It's easy to accuse others of being "tepid and pathetic" from the comfort of your own home.
MegaButts
The current protests are tame and quite frankly pathetic. If your protests aren't strong enough that the government fears you, there's no reason to believe an apathetic government will even acknowledge you.
Until the citizens of the US are willing to shut things down, expect nothing to change. Look to other countries for examples of effective protest and understand that effective protest requires sacrifice, not just an afternoon walking around with a sign.
giantg2
The government isn't going to fear anything that's a protest unless it affects their reelection. It would be helpful if you give examples of the other protests you reference, as I think you might be lacking verbosity and other words may be more accurate to use.
immibis
Protests have never caused political change. Not once in history. Protests cannot cause political change.
They do a few things, but actually causing change is not one of them. They show how many people support something; they group those people together enabling the spread of ideas; they group those people together enabling the state apparatus to take them all down in one go.
Trasmatta
I see a lot of comments like this from people not even willing to take the step of going to a protest in the first place. Expecting someone else to generate the critical mass needed to effect the change you're talking about, without lifting a finger themselves.
The people "spending an afternoon walking around with a sign" are doing a lot more than the people shitting on them for it. Mass movements have to start somewhere, they don't come out of thin air.
Why not criticize all the people sitting at home, rather than calling the ones actually trying "pathetic"?
ModernMech
Musk is out there calling Tesla protestors terrorists. If what you're doing is enough to get you labelled a terrorist by the opposition, then you're doing something they fear.
BLKNSLVR
Not entirely an answer, but the judiciary is being somewhat existentially threatened by the effective.
"They" are referring to Tesla vandalism as domestic terrorism (it's criminal vandalism and seriously generous, yes, but if setting a car on fire is domestic terrorism then lots of countries have more terrorists than they thought).
"They" are black-bagging students who dare to suggest that maybe Israel shouldn't bomb Gaza so much.
"They" refer to any difference of opinion as activism from radical lefty loonies.
Fear is being sown in the general populace. But the rowdy Town Halls around the country are great signs of hope and resistance.
The tepid ones are the spineless Republican representatives being actively derelict in their duty to their country, still attempting to defend Trump and Elon despite their legitimately worried and angry constituencies.
Izkata
> "They" are referring to Tesla vandalism as domestic terrorism (it's criminal vandalism and seriously generous, yes, but if setting a car on fire is domestic terrorism then lots of countries have more terrorists than they thought).
The intent behind the vandalism is what makes it terrorism instead of just vandalism.
Smeevy
What's the intent that makes it terrorism?
yieldcrv
> The SEC has its budget set by Congress, but the actual funding comes from transaction fees imposed on the financial sector, meaning its operations ultimately cost the taxpayer nothing
sounds like another 'budget-neutral' funding source for the bitcoin stockpile. moon
danielodievich
I can't wait for the Big Balls to do something at SEC that seriously affects SERIOUS money in the financial markets and see what kind of Big Guns come out at them from the Real Business. I am certain they won't know what hit them.
shermantanktop
This theory has not yet worked out. Military-industrial complex? Folded like a cheap suit. Top-ranked universities? Same. Blue-chip law firms? Not sure, some capitulation, maybe some signs of life.
mullingitover
It'll be when the mess with the Scientologists. Those people don't play games, they'll sue DOGE, every person in the Trump Organization, their family members, and everyone in a five mile radius of them. All while they infiltrate them and steal all their files. Wouldn't be the first time[1].
ttyprintk
Interlaced within the DOGE troopers are guys lil swatters like Big Balls fear to reveal. Maybe not Scientology but certainly guys slotting into Deep State corner offices.
dmsayer
thats the thing, "Big Guns", and "SERIOUS money" are the ones pulling the strings to ensure that they make even more profit.
hmmokidk
Yeah exactly. He is getting robbed and believes the robbers when they simply use the word “efficient”. His brain translates that to “in my interests”.
What any words mean don’t truly matter. Just what gets signaled to his brain. These people are effectively brainwashed. Or it isn’t a person, and is a bot. Who knows.
ohgr
They’re really not. Instability is bad for growth. You make more money with hands in a thousand pots not one hand in a big one.
The big guns you see and hear about are complete amateurs.
ohgr
Yeah I suspect people might start falling off yachts soon. I’ve worked for people who have real money not just valuations and borrowing and you don’t fuck around there.
null
jmclnx
And yet Congress is letting this happen, this needs to stop. The dumb billionaires have no idea how the SEC keeps our stock markets stable.
I wonder when companies will start stock manipulations ?
9283409232
They already are. People still don't see to understand that this is not to make government efficient. It is sabotage.
> The SEC has its budget set by Congress, but the actual funding comes from transaction fees imposed on the financial sector, meaning its operations ultimately cost the taxpayer nothing, according to the agency.
How do you make something that costs nothing more efficient?