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A new week dawns and depending on your point of view, DOGE has hit another roadblock in its efforts to trim government spending or the privacy rights of Americans and democracy itself have been saved – at least temporarily.
U. S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer issued an emergency order early Saturday morning blocking DOGE from gaining entrance to government systems that process trillions of dollars in payments and contain private information on American citizens.
The ruling is temporary and will be reviewed in another hearing this Friday.
The lawsuit was filed last Friday by a coalition of 19 state attorneys general. They argued that DOGE has no authority to access U. S. Treasury systems.
“The ruling was made, because of the risk that the new policy presents of the disclosure of sensitive and confidential information and the heightened risk that the systems in question will be more vulnerable than before to hacking,” wrote Judge Engelmayer.
Treasure’s payment system moves $6 trillion through the government to pay salaries and fund Social Security and Medicare as well as other programs.
What Is DOGE
DOGE stands for the Department of Government Efficiency, according to President Trump who created it, and Elon Musk who Trump appointed to run it. However, the bull in a china shop approach of Musk and his minions has suggested other meanings. For instance:
Destruction Of Government Efficiency
Destructive Oligarchs Grandstanding Efforts
Department Of Garbled Ethics
Dysfunctional Operations Goofing-up Everything
Diabolical Oligarch Grifting Efficiently
The idea for DOGE came from Musk during a livestream event on his social media platform X. During the same broadcast, Musk came up with the notion that he was the right person to run the program. Trump was on board immediately.
The executive order establishing DOGE designates it: “the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization.” That means it is not a cabinet department. Congress must approve new cabinet departments.
As a temporary organization, Dodge avoids the hearings and reviews that are part of gaining Congressional approval. Musk also avoids Congressional screening, because he is a special government employee (SGE). As such, he “works, or is expected to work, for the government for 130 days or less in a 365-day period,” according to the Justice Department. Further, as an SGE, Musk does not have to file a financial statement that might reveal potential conflicts of interest. Cabinet appointees are required to file financial statements.
Temporary – Not Temperate
Musk has staffed DOGE with other SGEs – many of them 20-somethings and even at least one teenager. While their ages have not been questioned, their judgment has.
One example is a DOGE staffer who resigned after racist remarks on an X account linked to him resurfaced. Another is a 19-year-old who was reportedly fired from a cyber security firm for leaking company secrets to competitors.
Racism Forgiven
One staffer resigned Thursday when a racist statement he posted on Musk’s X surfaced. The Wall Street Journal uncovered deleted posts from Marko Elez, a 25-year-old who worked for Musk at SpaceX and X.
In a post from June, Elez’s account reportedly read, “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.”
In September Elez’s account carried this comment: “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.”
By last month his account posted: “Normalize Indian hate.”
All of that was forgivable, according to Musk, who has vowed to reinstate Elez. Trump gave a rubber stamp to reinstatement after being informed that Elez had the backing of Vice President J. D. Vance.
“Here’s my view: I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” Vance posted Friday on X. “We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever. So I say bring him back. If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that.”
Obviously, Vance does not feel being a racist makes someone working in government “a bad dude or a terrible member of the team.”
Leaky Past
Another Dodge staffer with background issues is 19-year-old Edward Coristine. He was reportedly fired from cyber security firm Path Network for giving proprietary information to the firm’s competitors.
“Edward has been terminated for leaking internal information to the competitors,” said a June 2022 message from an executive of the firm, Path Network, according to Bloomberg News. “This is unacceptable and there is zero tolerance for this.”
Someone with such a blemish on their record would not survive the government’s screening process before being given access to sensitive information. However, these are not normal times.
“Giving Elon Musk’s goon squad access to systems that control payments to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other key federal programs is a national security nightmare,” Senator Ron Wyden, (D-OR) member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told Bloomberg News. “Every hour new disturbing details emerge to prove that these guys have no business anywhere close to sensitive information or critical networks.”
A member of the House Judiciary and Homeland Security committees was even more emphatic.
“Your data has been breached. Donald Trump gave unvetted teenagers access to your most private information,” Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA) wrote on X. “We are fighting now in the courts. And, shortly, Democrats will use our votes—in government funding bill—to stop this madness and secure your data.”
Unaccountable
Unlike civil servants, Doge staff operate without government oversight.
“One of the reasons we can’t tell what’s going on and what power they have is because they haven’t really made what they’re doing public at all,” Deborah Pearlstein, a constitutional scholar at Princeton University, told NPR.
However, some light on the information DOGE targets comes from former government employees.
“They apparently just sort of walked past security and said: ‘Get out of my way,’ and they’re looking for access for the IT systems, as they have in other agencies,” Andrew Rosenberg, a former National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) official reported to The Guardian. “They will have access to the entire computer system, a lot of which is confidential information.”
Along with some personal background issues and their youthful lack of experience, DOGE staff are apparently only accountable to Musk.
“What we’re seeing is unprecedented in that you have these actors who are not really public officials gaining access to the most sensitive data in government,” Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan told Wired. “We really have very little eyes on what’s going on. Congress has no ability to really intervene and monitor what’s happening because these aren’t really accountable public officials. So this feels like a hostile takeover of the machinery of governments by the richest man in the world.”
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