reuters.com
www.reuters.com

Three federal judges will consider on Friday whether Elon Musk’s government cost-cutting team known as DOGE will have access to Treasury Department payment systems and potentially sensitive data at U.S. health, consumer protection, labor and education agencies.

The Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency has swept through federal agencies since Republican Donald Trump became president last month and put the chief executive of carmaker Tesla in charge of rooting out wasteful spending as part of Trump’s dramatic overhaul of government.

In Manhattan, U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas will consider a request by Democratic state attorneys general to extend a temporary block on DOGE that was put in place on Saturday, which prevented Musk’s team from accessing Treasury systems responsible for trillions of dollars of payments.

  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    331·
    21 hours ago

    Musk and Trump were correct that these courts move way too fucking slow. The damage to the Treasury is done.

    You can’t unopen this Pandora’s Box. They’re in the fucking systems and they’ve exposed tons of systems to the wider internet. So much national security has already been compromised and so many of these systems will now have what are known as “persistent threats” even after they’ve legally been denied access.

    They’re doing damage daily while these judges are fucking dithering.

    In a way, Musk is correct that working late or over the weekend is a superpower, because despite us being in the middle of a fucking coup none of these people are willing to change their schedules to accommodate that.

    If I were in a position of authority, I would think it would be in my best interest to buckle down and not leave my office during such desperate times. I mean, why would a coup mean you still get the weekend off. This is a fight for survival. You don’t get a break during a fight for survival

    Because the system was already a slow dinsosaur as it is, but when they’re up against people who are literally sleeping in the offices so they can do things at all hours of the night, these courts are gonna be a hundred steps behind.

    • floofloofEnglish
      9·
      19 hours ago

      Even if the judges decide to bar Musk and his cronies from government systems, I don’t expect they would simply comply. They know that if they just keep going, the judges have to be the ones scrambling to catch up. It’s a deliberate tactic of moving so fast that the mechanisms of checks and balances become de facto irrelevant. It reminds me of what the Israeli military always did, creating “facts on the ground” while the international community discussed how things should be arranged. By the time the discussions concluded, the conclusion would be irrelevant to the reality. By the time the law catches up, Musk will have done what he set out to do. And he knows as well as anyone how difficult it is to enforce any law against the richest man in the world.

      • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        5·
        19 hours ago

        It honestly reminds me a bit of how the Israeli military co-opted Deleuze & Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus as a philosophical work backing their war machine.

        I asked Naveh why Deleuze and Guattari were so popular with the Israeli military. He replied that ‘several of the concepts in A Thousand Plateaux became instrumental for us […] allowing us to explain contemporary situations in a way that we could not have otherwise. It problematized our own paradigms. Most important was the distinction they have pointed out between the concepts of “smooth” and “striated” space [which accordingly reflect] the organizational concepts of the “war machine” and the “state apparatus”. In the IDF we now often use the term “to smooth out space” when we want to refer to operation in a space as if it had no borders. […] Palestinian areas could indeed be thought of as “striated” in the sense that they are enclosed by fences, walls, ditches, roads blocks and so on.’5 When I asked him if moving through walls was part of it, he explained that, ‘In Nablus the IDF understood urban fighting as a spatial problem. […] Travelling through walls is a simple mechanical solution that connects theory and practice.

        However, I don’t think Musk et. al. are in any way as philosophically rigorous as the Israeli military has been.