This is running here as a story about cybersecurity, but it's apparently every advisory committee at DHS; there were a bunch of them, mostly not about technology; for instance, the National Commercial Fishing Safety Advisory Committee.
Maybe I've been burned lately and my faith in humanity is ebbing but I'm hoping the reference to that specific committee isn't about "government sounds stupid if you take it out of context, so it's good that we burn it all down"
The Coast Guard having a plan for when large fishing vessels get into trouble, and indeed a plan to stop them getting into trouble, seems like a good thing to me even if it's grouped somewhat incongruously under Department of Homeland Security.
edit: your other comment on this makes me think we are at the "letting commercial fisherman, and the coastguards trying to rescue them, drown to own the libs" stage, and my faith in humanity drops another notch.
The "U.S. Coast Guard was formed by a merger of the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service and the U.S. Life-Saving Service on 28 January 1915" (wiki).
The US Department of Homeland Security "began operations on March 1, 2003, after being formed as a result of the Homeland Security Act of 2002, enacted in response to the September 11 attacks" (wiki).
So are you saying that for 78 years of its existence, the USCG had no "plan for when large fishing vessels get into trouble, and indeed a plan to stop them getting into trouble" until the DHS assembled a (assuming this is a thing) "National Commercial Fishing Safety Advisory Committee"? You dont think theres any redundancy? That just maybe bureaucracy cant help but to expand forever every time someone with a title has a question that cant be answered immediately by someone standing in the room, they have to create a committee so they can have someone on speed dial? If the coast guard doesnt have plans for this, one wonders what the coast guard does all day.
It’s common for organizations to reorganize. It’s quite possible that the committee was formed for purposes of centralization and efficacy. It’s also possible it was government overreach. What are the justifications for axing a committee or regulations and are those justifications correct?
Especially given the genesis of DHS, it would not be surprising if that agency vacuumed up a great deal of prior teams, groups, etc., in the name of national anti terrorism. Cabinet level agencies tend to expand over time as DC turf wars ebb and flow.
It could just as easily have been, for example, that back in 2002 someone realized USCG was involved in drug and weapons interdiction in the waters off Florida, swept them up into DHS under anti terror laws, and got the fishing boat thing as a freebie. It does not mean that USCG were not doing anything on the latter until DHS showed up.
What you say might be true. But what do you actually know about this committee and their work? Chesterton's Fence is a good rule of thumb here. As an outsider, you might look at this and assume it's a superfluous service. But until you've figured out why it exists, it seems premature to assume it shouldn't exist.
1. "...advise and provide recommendations in writing to the Secretary of Homeland Security...on matters relating to the safe operation of commercial fishing industry vessels"
2. "review regulations..."
3. "review marine casualties and investigations of vessels..."
Or maybe dozens of K-street hotshots carefully scrutizined every possible department that could include such committees.
Or more likely, somewhere inbetween, thousands of teams, mediated by a few hundred of the most influential, struggling to get the attention of this or that decision maker. Most of them just throwing random things at a wall and seeing what sticks.
The truth is HN readers won’t know and can’t ever know, barring a tiny handful who can read the tea leaves successfully year after year.
Again I can't tell if you've quoted three vaguely regulation-y phrases in an attempt to justify generic contempt for government regulation or if you're backing me up with documentary proof that this is a boring sensible thing.
As your document says, it is literally the commercial fishing industry, shipbuilders, shipowners, equipment manufacturers, insurers etc. getting together to swap notes on safety because shipwrecks and deaths are not good for business.
"members serve as representatives of their
respective interests, associations, or organizations"
I found a job posting from 2020. I didn't know much about this agency so I looked them up. Turns out I didn't know much about them because this was established in 2018.
One of the interesting bits about the job posting is that, not too surprisingly, there are no salaries:
> All members will serve at their own expense and receive no salary or other compensation from the Federal Government, with the exception that members may be reimbursed for travel and per diem in accordance with Federal Travel Regulations.
Which, to me, can read two ways: altruistic people trying to make the industry better
OR
You won't even be selected to this committee unless you're already wealthy enough to foot the bill yourself and shape policy in a way that advantages ones self.
I don't know which way to read it, but if it wasn't costing anything, cutting it "for cost savings" can't be completely true. Maybe there were other overhead costs, but even saying that those costs are $1M/yr is a rounding error for the national budget.
This sounds to me like industry bodies such as WG21, TC39, JSR expert groups, etc. A way to get people with full-time jobs in relevant industries together to plan their shared future. I doubt the members of this board are wealthy people joining it in their own capacity. As such, i don't think it makes sense to consider them as either altruistic or self-serving; it's just part of their job.
A very small nitpick but the discretionary budget of the US is far smaller than most realize - in 2024 it was only 1.75 trillion.
And notably, most military spending is discretionary, so the remaining funds for basically all the neat dynamic things government can do is less than a trillion.
A million is of course still a rounding error at e.g. $900 billion, but it adds up really fast, especially when you consider that these are ongoing costs.
I'm having a hard time taking this seriously: "only 1.75 trillion"
What a ludicrous statement. I mean, I know inflation has been bad but not THAT bad. One or two trillion dollars is an absolutely enormous amount of money.
Haha, yeah I should have put quotes around "only" but you have to keep in mind that this ~900billion that remains is the entire government budget for everything besides stuff like medicare, social security, and so on.
When people think about government spending they tend to handwave away billions and, as per this thread, millions are seen as a rounding error.
But I think thats because most people are thinking about the entire budget - which is around was 6.7 trillion on total revenue of 4.9 trillion.
But when "only" 900 billion of that is left for all the neat things government could do it really nails home the impact of things like a trillion dollars per year spent in interest on the debt.
It really also makes clear why starting to slim things down is essentially becoming necessary. The current system is not sustainable.
An advisory counsel may not get paid but they submit findings to the Secretary. There's a long tail where the government becomes more aware of long standing and emergent issues.
Industry associations have no such reach unless individual members make it so, and unofficially at that.
I mean this in the nicest way possible, but both your comments in this thread really, really scream that you need to step away from the internet and go interact with real humans in the real world.
Nobody except you is talking about woke communism. Nobody except you is talking about "owning the libs". You're making paranoid, nonsensical arguments against people on your side by imagining they're some sort of alt-right strawman.
It's obviously the "you're backing me up with documentary proof that this is a boring sensible thing" interpretation. The original comment had similar intent.
The NTSB, through its Office of Marine Safety (OMS), investigates major marine accidents across all sectors, determines probable causes, and issues safety recommendations. It operates independently.
In contrast, NCFSAC is an advisory body focused solely on commercial fishing safety, providing recommendations but not conducting investigations.
That's a terrible idea for a group which is trying to prevent ships getting into trouble to begin with. Measuring the rescues would be a here incentive that would get more people in dangerous situations.
You see... Recently powerful people present such stupid ideas, and have large approval, that I honestly can't tell. Poe's law is going to be more popular than ever now.
I mean, the FBI's been doing this with grooming their own "terrorists" (embededded agents prodding people to say Anti-American things, and then prodding them to perform a terrorist attack by supplying them with the plan and bomb supplies...).
> ...even if it's grouped somewhat incongruously under Department of Homeland Security.
DHS is arguably a much more appropriate home for the Coast Guard than its previous department, Transportation, given all of the facets of their actual mission (source: father and grandfather both in the Coast Guard for 30+ years).
I imagine there is a big gap between the things they deal with the most and the things they need to plan for the most.
I send more emails than anything, but if you tried to get me to spend time being trained on sending email they wouldn’t find your body.
Conversely I design new courses rarely, but when I do it matters immensely that it’s done well. Resources and support and structure to help me do that well when I need to is most welcome.
If the relevant Coast Guard officials need advisory committees for the things you mention, core parts of their mission for who-knows-how-long, they ought to be fired too. My point is that advisory commissions are not a core part of any government agency, and should not be.
Seems the Cybersecurity Executive Orders that dealt with Memory Safe Languages and the ONCD Report (which mentioned Rust, if I remember correctly) are all gone from whitehouse.gov as well.
The CISA report that dealt with memory safety is still on the CISA site. What do these recent developments mean for CISA? Is it an independent organization that will continue to exist without DHS support or is it essentially dead and its site and reports will vanish as well?
I am mostly ignorant but from hearsay CISA is part of DHS (the chief of CISA is a DHS official). doubt Trump loves it because he literally fired Krebs directly for not supporting misinformation and overthrow attempt in 2020 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Krebs#2020_dismissal)
CISA has an important job to do, but their mission was put at risk when it's leadership under Krebs chose to repeatedly violate the first amendment. Elections and Covid-19 are topics they've been documented in influencing, but with the capability there, what other narratives was it influencing that we don't know about?
The legal fight against CISA to stop their censorship was lost not on the basis of it being constitutional, but because the plaintiffs powerful enough to bring it to court couldn't show they had been directly harmed by it. A common stumbling block for many court cases for legitimate issues. CISA has publicly stated they will be changing their approach as a result of these controversies.
> Seems the Cybersecurity Executive Orders that dealt with Memory Safe Languages and the ONCD Report (which mentioned Rust, if I remember correctly) are all gone from whitehouse.gov as well.
It's a brand new website and old URLs won't work (this has been somewhat routine since Obama's first term). I wouldn't take that as a sign that a specific executive order is rescinded. However it may have been grouped in with other Biden tech executive orders (such as AI safety) which are being rescinded as excessive regulation
Can somebody give me a rational take on why? It feels immensely reactive. Salt Typhoon would seem to represent an active threat. Didn't DHS act quite.. conservatively?
A comment on the blusky thread went to "five eyes should stop sharing information" which I suspect won't happen, but I could see people thinking it should.
AWS and starlink have exposure of risk. You would think DHS work here went to net beneficial outcomes for both of them, and the wider telco sector. (Assuming you meant the tech sector)
What risk? There isn’t a consumer liability, and they can control the cybersecurity risk-reward balance they’re exposed to. From their perspective, oversight is the liability.
A good rule of thumb, at least for the next couple of months, is that any rules and regulations that have been criticised by the billionaires, banks or oil & gas industry are likely to be shredded. (The “deep state” stuff is mostly whoever has the king’s ear sort of politics. It’s unclear that had any influence here.)
I get what youre saying but Im not sure absolute liability is quite right. Im thinking of SBOM directives, or industry network security requirements for bgp announcements, for example. Amazon and, I assume, some of the other mega corps are AGES ahead of industry at large. Like huge multi year investments so that theyre plausibly close to complying with secure provenance, review, build tracking, and artifact integrity reporting from initial CR to request processing for everything that touches customer or business data. My impression is that the industry generally isnt any further than tracking some package names and version strings and calling it SBOM. If the new directives can preclude a large number of contract competitors that seems like a huge win.
Or, maybe Im thinking more of advantageous requirements/regulations than oversight per se.
Arent they differentiating only _if_ they required to get federal and dod money? The coordination definitely seems to be more of amzn (and similar) employees providing technical expertise to congress and regulators. They certainly take deployments and internal security seriously, but it doesnt seem to be monetizable outside of the contract requirements. Or maybe im missing your point?
What OP is saying is instead of having some sort of legal liability attached or outside directives being handed to them, they would rather implement on their own or push their own standards.
A notable example is SEC mandates on breach disclosures, which will most likely be dead now. Those were a major forcing function to make companies realize security is important. Otherwise, paying a ransom and doing the bare minimum to not get cut by Chubbs or AXA is the norm.
I agree with JumpCriscross on his read of this situation. It ain't great. At least I'm well off enough to weather the negative impacted by a lot of the chaos. Sucks for everyone else.
> The coordination definitely seems to be more of amzn (and similar) employees providing technical expertise to congress and regulators
It's bidirectional. CISA, FBI, and others often get intel or actively take down a botnet or offensive actor, and will percolate this information to security teams at larger organizations before percolating en masse.
For example, when this one APM/data collection tool that almost every DevOps team ik was using was pwned early last year, CISA notified CISOs days before they officially announced it in the news.
It is, though. The word "people" here refers in aggregate to the citizens who voted in November. It would be equally accurate for me to say "This is what we voted for" even though it's not what I voted for.
Not voting, practically, is empowering the status quo. Particularly in America, where almost every election features intense down-ballot competition.
Someone who didn’t vote is more in concordance with the current government than someone who voted against it. Actions speak louder than words, and not voting is an action.
I don't have a dog in this race - I am not even from the US.
But, by definition, not voting is an action rather than absence of one. What you are doing by not voting is giving out a tacit agreement that the people who went and vote get to decide who will be elected.
Following that line of thought, by not voting, you actively chose the current government, no matter what the current government is.
I agree, but there are many who say that not voting is the only way to show contempt for a system rigged against them. Voting would be a tacit endorsement and recognition of the legitimacy of that system.
Those that don't care to vote are doomed to be ruled by those who care.
You still have to pay taxes, and perhaps see a government you truly despise making all sorts of decisions that will get the system even more rigged against you.
Not voting out of spite is similar to stabbing your own head to show contempt for your brain when you have a migraine.
Voting blocks are just simplifications of reality. Following that line of thought too far leads to bad arguments. The full truth is that any individual voter has a negligible effect on the outcome of an election.
I examined my 2024 November general election ballot carefully. Ever since 2020's election denial, I've had a heightened awareness of election procedure, going so far as to read the Colorado Secretary of State's web pages on risk limiting audits, and making some attempt to understand the math behind them.
My Colorado general election ballot contained nothing I could see that would associate me as a registered voter to the ballot itself. Colorado ballots are hand marked, machine readable, and human readable as has been the best and obvious practice since 2000's "hanging chad" debacle. There are certainly "index marks" on the ballots so that the tallying machines can get squared up, but they don't appear different per ballot. I compared to my wife's ballot, just in case.
Because your comment does nothing against the original "I'm mostly seeing people who voted against this continue to grumble." comment.
People that vote are not always hush hush about who they voted for, and has nothing to do with can you pick their particular ballot out of the pile. If I tell you I voted for A but B won and now I'm grumbling about the things B is doing, there's no need for discussions about ballots at all.
Just like you don't need to find someone's secret ballot when they're wearing a red MAGA hat.
Probably not, but the effects of the next 4 years could last a very long time. Look at climate change alone - run the model of 4 more years of pumping as much as we can instead of scaling back as much as we can - and see where that gets us in 50 years.
Our children will pay the price for today's votes. But hey, at least we'll have cheap gas (maybe).
I don't think any backlash will dissuade Trump from anything.
He's not up for re-election for one, and I'm pretty sure he doesn't give 2F whether Vance gets elected after him or not.
The time for the backlash would have been to refuse to accept the election results and storm the Capitol since that's apparently totally cool to do now.
When someone comes in to slash everything, they generally don't bother understanding what they are slashing. This is the same as when a company hires someone to come in and cut costs, generally everything, good or bad, gets cut. That's what's happening on the US federal level right now. Eventually some things will be picked back up when someone realizes that it wasn't a good idea to stop it, but most things are just going to be wasted effort.
"There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it"
I’ll say this as someone who’s moderately wealthy: this administration is a massive wealth transfer to those with either capital or connections to it. Taking apart these committees means less-regulated telecoms, infrastructure and financial services. If you’re in those spaces, this is great for you.
The size of each of those industries entirely dwarfs the military-industrial bogeyman, which is largely just being transferred from one set of owners (Boeing, Lockheed, et cetera) to another (Musk, Bezos, Lucky, et cetera)
Sure, but DHS long predates this admin. The list of giants suckling at the public teat is huge (Rapiscan, anyone?) and spans many different administrations.
One possible upside of the current situation is that the very obvious corporate ownership of the federal government is dropping the “emperor has clothes” pretense. We are ever closer to simply paying taxes to Buy-N-Large.
If people don’t like it, at least now they can have a practical conversation about it (Luigi notwithstanding). It’s sort of like when Snowden showed us how fucked we were/are.
The 9/11 terrorist attacks might have been the triggering event but bringing a bunch of related federal departments and agencies under a single umbrella in DHS was probably a net positive. The previous structure was tremendously inefficient with a lot of duplication of effort and time wasted on interdepartmental coordination. Obviously graft should be addressed but it's unlikely the total graft was any lower before 2002.
However, DHS was almost entirely formed from existing departments and agencies that were merely rehoused under a new structure, so Chesterton's Fence definitely applies to all of those. Even CISA, which is one of the newest elements, is now almost a decade old with a lot of accumulated expertise and experience.
Does the metaphor actually include the age of the fence? I always thought the idea is just to understand why the fence is there before removing it, regardless of its age.
In theory, it should be easier to understand the reasoning behind the existence of newer fences, but the idea is still to do that step first...
I mean, clearly some people just reject this entire idea as creating too much friction, and I can often see their point!, but I think we can at least avoid saying "it's a good concept, but it just doesn't apply in this case", and be honest about just rejecting the concept.
You seem to have Chesterton’s fence completely backwards.
Chesterton’s fence can never be an argument against creating something new.
The whole point of it is that if you come across a fence then that was the result of a conscious human decision and subsequent effort, which strongly implies there was a reason it was created, and until you understand what that reason was, you’re taking a risk by destroying the fence.
But if there is “nothing” and you’re creating something new, Chesterton’s fence doesn’t apply because the lack of existence of anything was not the result of intentional human design and effort, therefore there’s no evidence that the lack of existence of something “had a reason for it”.
Read The Drift From Domesticity, where this whole "fence" thing comes from. It's an appeal to (small-c) conservatism, to respect and understand traditions and norms. It is not a logical rule about it being improper to alter absolutely anything without a clear understanding of its origins. You can disagree with me about its applicability to the newest cabinet branch, but our disagreement isn't rooted in me not knowing the metaphor.
If said fence was across a road that a school bus was hurtling towards at 60 mph… you’d stop asking these questions and remove it (and maybe put it back after you’ve solved the other emergency).
Several (of the new government) have expressed belief that the government is headed towards a catastrophic debt overload. In their view, emergency relief is necessary.
Not arguing for or against this view, but that seems to be what people voted for.
I am a big fan of Chestertons fence but it doesn’t always apply.
Republican strategy since the 1980s had been 'starve the beast'. That strategy is the deny actual funding and instead create debt load in order to kill the government, support for government programs, and destroy trust in government.
I'll counter that it does, allowing that it's perfectly fine to adjust the threshold of certainty about a particular thing's purpose to suit the circumstances.
If that fence is stopping the school bus from driving off the edge of a cliff, for example, I would absolutely not want to remove it - and you can bet I'll spare a modicum of thought to make sure that's not the case before I yank it out of the way.
I liked his story about the street lamp that a mob of people wanted to take down. A monk started to suggest debating the merits of Light, which seemed like an annoying and esoteric point until the mob knocked down the street lamp and everyone was left to argue in the dark. That may be an analogy to where we are now.
A related point is, it’s pretty easy to find people unhappy with current systems. But if you ask them what to replace those systems with, you’ll often find that coalition dissolves.
It's like the twitter thing. You start shutting off servers until someone says, "ouch it hurts". Then you turn it back on if you care. You then end up with less servers than you started.
and Twitter is bleeding money like anything, unable to retain users and advertisers. You may end up with less servers but not necessarily a stable and functional system.
Twitter is bleeding money in part because the owner refused to play ball with advertisers moderation demands, and the majority who don't see any downtime on twitter consider it more than "stable and functional".
And for the owner, who probably thinks he's co-piloting the strongest government in the world right now and attributes part of that success to the platform he controls, it is functioning magnificently.
It makes sense when you see Twitter less like a traditional business like Apple (whose goal is to turn a profit) and more like a means to other political ends. Twitter punched way above its weight in cultural influence given its relatively small user base. Being profitable is a perk, but not the goal.
Except we're not dealing with software here. The "ouch it hurts" once a government initiative has been "turned off" could be medical services, or social services, or food, or ensuring safe and clean products, or poisoned air or water, etc.
The one wrinkle in this, to me, is that Trump spent four years as President already. Full disclosure: I despise the guy and wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire, BUT ... what if he saw a bunch of waste in his first run and therefore does understand what he's slashing?
Personally I don't believe that or want to believe that and would rather chalk it up to neo-toddlerism, but there's a chance right?
I heard there's going to be those teams of hr+legal+engineer doing the cutting - the only reason I can guess there'd be an engineer in the mix is if they do intend to understand what they're cutting.
Yes. I don't want to assume an adversarial posture on this, I'm mostly an outsider, observer. I probably can't understand nuances in US domestic politics (although i am opposed to this kind of semi random behaviour by institutions, I did not see this signalled in NOG lists and the like as coming down the pipe)
So I'm wondering if this is as simple as cost/benefit? Did somebody do the sums and decide the delivery was sub par for spend?
The alternatives are mostly very sad: they're fools. Replacing a process can be beneficial. There's usually overlap.
> Did somebody do the sums and decide the delivery was sub par for spend?
That would be a very interesting analysis and something to learn from. It would also help prevent similar mistakes in the future. It's really unlikely someone would go to such effort and just keep the results to themselves.
Slash and burn policies from a reactionary administration that doesn't and in fact refuses to think about the second and third order consequences of their decisions.
One of the reasons a lot of people are worried about this administration is the vibes based policy decisions they seem intent on making. Everything is haphazard, arbitrary and contradictory. Some of it comes down to personal grievance and some of it comes down to favors for people in the business sphere who chose to kowtow to this administration.
Current South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem wants CISA to be “refocused” on critical infrastructure and to no longer address mis- or disinformation efforts online.
There is two ways for efficiency, either wipe everything clean or well setup a committee to evaluate which committees can be eliminate. And usual joke in bureaucracy is that later one will discover that even more committees are actually needed.
So the knee jerk reaction of current administration is burning it to ground. Which could actually change something.
Seems like a false dichotomy, between authoritarianism and Kafkaesque bureaucracy.
An effective administration would be thoughtful about things and reorganize rather than simply cut. So they're either being thoughtful and decided something like state sponsored infiltration isn't good to investigate or are being thoughtless.
The "rational" explanation is that Trump's staff are trying to clear house of anyone they don't trust will give in to any demands they make, and put everyone else who works for the government directly or indirectly in a state of fear and confusion.
I see you're making a joke about conservatism, but Trump isn't a conservative: he's a radical. His goal is to blow up the system, not conserve it. Getting rid of protections is part of that.
It's probably as simple as Trump not wanting agencies to consult advisory boards consisting of outside experts since they might get in the way of his agenda.
It's probably not a specific decision based on what the individual boards have been doing.
It's because of the misinformation/disinformation mission that CISA took on during the Biden admin, it was a boondoggle that really pissed off Republicans.
The current techbro CEO squad is a small group of people who got extraordinarily lucky and made a bunch of money.
The techbro CEO squad takes their luck to be ability, and they think the fact that they have more money than other people means that they're smarter than everyone else. Some members of the techbro CEO squad think of themselves as prophets or messiahs.
In addition to this, the techbro CEO squad is addicted to money and its accumulation. This isn't a "I need more money to live a more comfortable retirement" thing, it is a "my sole purpose for being is the accumulation of wealth" thing. They are more akin to machines whose purpose it is to grab onto as much money as possible than they are actual human beings.
The techbro CEO squad's vast wealth has enabled them to surround themselves with an army of staff whose only job it is to make their dreams a reality and execute their orders. There is a vast, impenetrable field of personnel and money that insulates them from the reality of the world.
So, they think that they're better than anyone else to the point of being god-like, they are sociopaths who only care about money, they are surrounded by an army of yes men, and they have lost (or never had) any connection to the average human being and his or her existence.
They believe that any restriction on their ability to accumulate wealth is an assault on their freedom, an enemy to be defeated, an injustice to be made right by any means possible.
Limits on their ability to pollute, protections for employees operating in the heat or cold or around hazardous materials, regulations designed to prevent market manipulation or money laundering, it is all evil and must be destroyed.
They are willing to dismantle any system to get what they want.
Because they think that they are better than everyone else, the techbro CEO squad does not value consensus or institutional knowledge that has led to regulation slowly building up over centuries in response to events and emergencies: if they don't like it, it must go.
So, the slow infiltration of government by the Peter Theil, Andreessen and Horowitz, Musk, (but mainly their servants) and the rest started a couple of years ago and continues to this day.
tl;dr: Billionaires will rape your grandmother's corpse for lower taxes, harvest and sell her organs for a laugh, then label you a woke communist and kick you off twitter for criticizing them.
Shut up TREASONer! To bring efficiency we must burn everything to the ground and rehire whomever will work unpaid overtime and very low wage. They all happen to be of chinese, russian, and north korean descent, but that just means we are winning at the deal... ART .. OF ..THE .. DEAL
/s
Really though, competence would create the new "efficient" thing, hire best of the best and get it running before tearing down important security, this is business-leader level incompetence being attempted at global super power scale, we are going to need a new word for businessjerks breaking things they should have never been able to touch
It can be a convenient claim for Musk to make but don't forget, China is his biggest friend (Xi can single-handedly bankrupt Tesla and slash his net worth) and the people fired were in the middle of the Salt Typhoon investigation (which came guess where from!)
Whatever problems or limitations the existing approach had dropping everything on the floor is one of the least helpful ways of trying to fix it (assuming good intent).
You have to assume competence too. You may have good intent but that doesn't help if you don't really know what you are doing or are blinded by ideology or some wayward belief.
Burning everything to the ground is a way of demolishing something though.
And if your intent is to just destroy it, it’s a far more effective one than bringing in experts to slowly try to disassemble the giant jenga tower without it falling over.
Is this explainable in any way by the cost of running these boards? By the sound of it the cost-benefit of thwarting Salt Typhoon is probably not optimal at zero investment.
Replacing government run and funded cyber security and threat assessment roles with privately owned contracters will be quite profitable for a few of the Brolliegarks.
No. The cost of running these is so small as not to be worth top officials' time in worrying about them. If they are looking to save lots of money, there are far more efficient ways to do that. This is just clearing house, establishing a tone, and making it clear that expert opinion is not valued.
It really is despairingly sad how many of these comments (assumedly by U.S. citizens) seem to not realize or believe these actions will have an effect on them.
Are some of these things normal SOP for a regime change? Sure. But to normalize everything under that blanket assumption is just foolish.
Unless you are an exceedingly (liquid) wealthy white male, you are entirely disposable to the incoming administration. You are less than nothing. If anything, you are an inconvenience buried deep in the calculations that needs to be factored out of the equation because your existence hinders the "progress" being sought.
All these pragmatic or, worse, so-called "libertarian" views demonstrate a supremely naïve, if not outright harmful (to yourself and countless others), understanding of what is going to be aggressively pursued these next few years.
The efforts will inherently destabilize the US which, for some, will be a really massive gift and this administration will be praised both externally and internally. That will close the feedback loop since that’s primarily what motivates this administration.
The core tenet of Muskism, as described at length in Isaacson's bio is around those lines:
* question all the rules
* when in doubt, slash the rule, and see what happens
* if it's really bad without it, bring back the rule
* if you don't have to bring back 10% of the rules that you slashed, you haven't slashed enough yet
USA is now entering the phase where everything is getting slashed - following the will of the majority of -Pennsylvania- the people.
At the level of a company, this can bring great efficiencies, and make reusable self-driving cancer-free nuclear-fusion based rockets. Or crypto scams.
Unfortunately, at the level of a Federal Government, it will bring lower taxes, but some of the 10% will end with coffins. And crypto scams.
We'll watch from the other side of the Atlantic how the great libertarianism experiment goes for the USA.
I expect both impressive improvements, and dramatic karmic irony.
> At the level of a company, this can bring great efficiencies, and make reusable self-driving cancer-free nuclear-fusion based rockets. Or crypto scams.
This is questionable. There are many times when bureaucracy exists for bureaucracy sake. But many, many times they exist for a reason.
Get any sufficiently large company and try to understand its complexity. Simply slashing it is a recipe for disaster.
> Unfortunately, at the level of a Federal Government, it will bring lower taxes, but some of the 10% will end with coffins. And crypto scams.
This is highly questionable, especially the "lower taxes" part. Governments are not very keen on reducing revenue, more likely they will only direct the surplus by cutting off services to other things - in the case of US, I wouldn't be surprised if they just increase spending in military, for example. Those sleasy and juicy defence contracts need funding, you know.
Regardless, I think the primary costs created by regulation aren't directly to the government budget, but rather knock-on effects of compliance incurred by the entire nation's economy.
Maybe, but it’s not like it hasn’t happened before… Clinton (yes, a democrat!) campaigned on balancing the budget, and iirc it actually was for a few years. In his case I don’t think taxes changed much either direction.
Which seems to show a different story. But looks like there is a lot of analysis on the numbers which can be done? (Eg I saw something in your article about ‘Biden will contribute 1.9T to the debt by 2031’.. even if he hadn’t gotten reelected, he wouldn’t be in office in 2031, so this includes the long-term effects of policies?)
By cutting, they're centralizing authority at the top. More and different rules will come - some written, many not - but not by the people that were in place before the change.
Not really. Authoritarianism is more about centralization of power and getting rid of layers that could interfere with the central authority's ability to project power.
Lots of rules tend to constrain an authoritarian ruler's ability to act at whim.
No, bureaucratic authoritarianism (our current system) does not encompass all authoritarianism. The flavor that has just been set into motion is autocratic authoritarianism, which is actually closer to what most people mean when they just say "authoritarianism" (hence this gutting of bureaucratic that would otherwise slow it down). That perspectives have been able to become so warped as to blissfully ignore the horrors of autocratic authoritarianism really just shows how out of touch voters have become.
Most of the commenters here seem to be taking it on faith that these government organizations are necessary and serving a crucial function. But the entire thrust of this election is that the majority of the country doesn't share that level of faith in the federal government.
"When in doubt, slash and see what happens" seems like a highly effective, albeit a bit reckless, approach to finding out which agencies are truly needed and which are not.
Not that I know of, but they did this time - IIRC, the Biden administration feds raided one of their dairy farms & that was their motivation to vote en masse for Trump.
We'll watch from the other side of the Atlantic how the great libertarianism experiment goes for the USA.
Public service announcement: libertarians aren't the ones who want to shrink government enough to fit through your bedroom door. Those would be the Republicans, who are now in power. They are classified in the opposite camp (authoritarians).
I think I understand the pullback from renewables now.
With this, along with all of the other recent events we have had the privilege of witnessing, we should be able to tap into the resonant frequency from the “energetic whirring phenomenon” occurring at Arlington National Cemetery to provide all of the energy that the country needs for the next century at least.
The problem with gutting these departments is that the repercussions aren't immediate.
It's like firing your ATC training team and then, the following week, claiming, see! we just saved a bunch of money and no airplanes crashed -- we didn't need them after all. Until one day ...
Then when some day a crisis situation occurs, there isn't an appropriate response because "oops, that dept no longer exists, or doesn't have the staff to respond". But who knows if Trump's lucky he might even be out of office by then and someone else has to deal with it. But in the mean time, VP Musk gets to claim "look at all the money we saved!"
Maybe some of the positions are redundant, but gutting across the board on day 1 definitely comes off as unwise and not thought through.
Firing an "ATC training team" and replacing them with advisory commissions is not a good thing. Advisory commissions are not, and should not be, functional units of government.
I know it's so easy to jump on the hate train, but you're confusing different aspects of government, and what has happened.
Good. From day 1 DHS has been the most Orwellian department of the US government, which casually violates our freedom on a regular basis. The entire department should be abolished.
The list goes on. There's 24 years of history you can comb through. The DHS' security theater exists solely to compromise the constitutional rights of American citizens. To this day there's no evidence they're even that successful at their job. The fact the impeachment of Mayorkas failed was quite mind-boggling but characteristic of a government that doesn't truly believe anyone, even citizens, have certain inalienable rights.
The DHS was and still is bipartisan. It's America's Staatspolizei.
You know that things you posted about border and airport searches are absolutely not gonna go away with this move. Under this gov ingress control can only intensify, DHS or not.
What did stop is some pretty important recent cyber attack reviews and that seems to touch China's interests.
Probably because of Jewish people like me who had their computers hacked and told I wasn't welcome by security cameras near where I live.
I live next to former president's and being efficetively made into a holocaust victim with no proper recourse by the people ment to protect the president's makes me feel like they never should have had the job in the first place.
You would only need to wonder if you had been paying no attention to the clarion call about Project 2025 and what the incoming admin was directly planning to do wholesale.
At this point I believe those kinds of people are much like Joe Rogan. Hiding behind the old “just asking questions”-style guises. I’m not sure what they get from that, but they are either intentionally not paying attention at this point, or simply do not care about anything that doesn’t affect them directly and negatively.
At this point we might as well print out Project 2025 bingo cards. Perhaps that will be the only way we “win” something in all this mess.
I'd argue this government has not just experienced no consequences, they've experienced the opposite of no consequences. Somehow the American people saw everything they'd done and were saying they'd do and then the people emphatically voted for it. I'm still gobsmacked.
Hitler apparently had solid 15-20% support even up to a decade after defeat and Nazism generally had 50% support (before and after, as a good idea executed badly) so both your high and low are off.
This has been a definite problem with the rhetoric starting at an intensity of 10/10 and having nowhere to go. The other problem is that everything that's happened has had people actively diminishing it, to make the reaction seem more outrageous, so we're all numb to so much of it. I've thought of it as The Boy Who Cried Wolf, but that's incorrect, because there's always been a wolf.
Have you heard stories about women (and men) who believe ‘they love me, they’d never cheat on me’ while their spouse is not only clearly cheating on them, but bragging to friends that they are cheating on them?
That’s what is happening.
And the more in-your-face it is, the more they’ll double down or even attack the people
trying to tell them.
Congress writes the tax laws and allocates the budgets to agencies for specific purposes. People can go to jail if they spend that money on something which Congress didn’t authorize.
So don’t blame the agency for doing what they’re required to do, blame the people who make the rules. If your cable company does something you don’t like, do you blame the clerk in front of you or the CEO who sets policy?
What other headlines are there? Though it's quite sad, I suspect that demeanor would match the rest of the stories in your feeds. I strongly suspect the anger has nothing do to with these committees, and would be reflected across the board.
It's just the beginning. There's a good breakdown of what it would take to reduce the government by Musk's "at least 2 trillion" and it doesn't look very good (for US citizens). I mean he what, is going to cut SpaceX contracts? Please...
> people outside of the government tasked with reducing the government
My point is we have seen zero evidence of this influence in Trump’s executive actions thus far. DOGE is analogous to the Federalist Society or NRA. Influential. But not policy prescriptive.
2 trillion is not prescriptive, but is there any unambiguous number published officially? Otherwise 2 tril is the only figure publicly advertised and I guess TFA is a sign they are starting to chip at this campaign promise
'Musk told political strategist Mark Penn in an interview broadcast on X that the $2 trillion figure was a “best-case outcome” and that he thought there was only a “good shot” at cutting half that.'
'That figure was quickly dismissed as implausible by budget experts, who said the entire discretionary budget was only $1.7 trillion. Musk hadn’t waved people off the number until Wednesday, and it has been widely cited in reports about DOGE’s plans. '
Blame it on Musk, replace the humans with computers. It could be an chronological digitalisation step and since the US is leading in the AI field they just start replacing the government with artificial intelligence.
Ah so you're saying he not only will not cut his existing gov contracts but actually add some more now for "AI government"? Sounds great and totally no conflict of interest
Perhaps someone came in and realized that this advisory board had 0 benefit and just a waste of tax payer money? If so, I’m all for getting rid of wasteful spending
The number of “believe them when they say they will do…” articles over the past year contrasted with what happened in November and now, is a sobering picture of the state of things.
Not a single person has any license to be surprised at anything that’s happening.
At best we can say “this will be variously slowed down at points due to legal battles,” and hopefully even infighting with the broligarchs. But none of this is a shock.
CISA is the organization that declared that the 2020 election was the most secure election ever. So it is expected that CISA would get "liquidated" by this new administration.
Fortunately, there are plenty of private sector companies investigating Salt Typhoon.
I can speak for the firm I work for. Our clients are effectively invulnerable to Salt Typhoon. Yes, I know that sounds like a "big claim" but it's really not. We enable our customers to run endpoints that aren't based on Windows or macOS. So...
This is running here as a story about cybersecurity, but it's apparently every advisory committee at DHS; there were a bunch of them, mostly not about technology; for instance, the National Commercial Fishing Safety Advisory Committee.
Maybe I've been burned lately and my faith in humanity is ebbing but I'm hoping the reference to that specific committee isn't about "government sounds stupid if you take it out of context, so it's good that we burn it all down"
The Coast Guard having a plan for when large fishing vessels get into trouble, and indeed a plan to stop them getting into trouble, seems like a good thing to me even if it's grouped somewhat incongruously under Department of Homeland Security.
edit: your other comment on this makes me think we are at the "letting commercial fisherman, and the coastguards trying to rescue them, drown to own the libs" stage, and my faith in humanity drops another notch.
The "U.S. Coast Guard was formed by a merger of the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service and the U.S. Life-Saving Service on 28 January 1915" (wiki).
The US Department of Homeland Security "began operations on March 1, 2003, after being formed as a result of the Homeland Security Act of 2002, enacted in response to the September 11 attacks" (wiki).
So are you saying that for 78 years of its existence, the USCG had no "plan for when large fishing vessels get into trouble, and indeed a plan to stop them getting into trouble" until the DHS assembled a (assuming this is a thing) "National Commercial Fishing Safety Advisory Committee"? You dont think theres any redundancy? That just maybe bureaucracy cant help but to expand forever every time someone with a title has a question that cant be answered immediately by someone standing in the room, they have to create a committee so they can have someone on speed dial? If the coast guard doesnt have plans for this, one wonders what the coast guard does all day.
It’s common for organizations to reorganize. It’s quite possible that the committee was formed for purposes of centralization and efficacy. It’s also possible it was government overreach. What are the justifications for axing a committee or regulations and are those justifications correct?
Especially given the genesis of DHS, it would not be surprising if that agency vacuumed up a great deal of prior teams, groups, etc., in the name of national anti terrorism. Cabinet level agencies tend to expand over time as DC turf wars ebb and flow.
It could just as easily have been, for example, that back in 2002 someone realized USCG was involved in drug and weapons interdiction in the waters off Florida, swept them up into DHS under anti terror laws, and got the fishing boat thing as a freebie. It does not mean that USCG were not doing anything on the latter until DHS showed up.
What you say might be true. But what do you actually know about this committee and their work? Chesterton's Fence is a good rule of thumb here. As an outsider, you might look at this and assume it's a superfluous service. But until you've figured out why it exists, it seems premature to assume it shouldn't exist.
Here is the National Commercial Fishing Safety Advisory Council charter:
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2024-09/24_0712_ncfs...
The activities listed are:
So, maybe the new administration did a global "ctrl-f regulation, uncheck".
Or maybe dozens of K-street hotshots carefully scrutizined every possible department that could include such committees.
Or more likely, somewhere inbetween, thousands of teams, mediated by a few hundred of the most influential, struggling to get the attention of this or that decision maker. Most of them just throwing random things at a wall and seeing what sticks.
The truth is HN readers won’t know and can’t ever know, barring a tiny handful who can read the tea leaves successfully year after year.
What's a "K-street hotshot"? K-street is new to me.
Edit: Thanks to @lelandfe for pointing to
* n.b. HN can't handle the period at the end of the link, see the jump page link for convenience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Street
I'll leave this comment up in case there are others this term is also new to.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Street_(Washington,_D.C.)>
Again I can't tell if you've quoted three vaguely regulation-y phrases in an attempt to justify generic contempt for government regulation or if you're backing me up with documentary proof that this is a boring sensible thing.
As your document says, it is literally the commercial fishing industry, shipbuilders, shipowners, equipment manufacturers, insurers etc. getting together to swap notes on safety because shipwrecks and deaths are not good for business.
"members serve as representatives of their respective interests, associations, or organizations"
This is not woke communism.
I found a job posting from 2020. I didn't know much about this agency so I looked them up. Turns out I didn't know much about them because this was established in 2018.
One of the interesting bits about the job posting is that, not too surprisingly, there are no salaries:
> All members will serve at their own expense and receive no salary or other compensation from the Federal Government, with the exception that members may be reimbursed for travel and per diem in accordance with Federal Travel Regulations.
Which, to me, can read two ways: altruistic people trying to make the industry better
OR
You won't even be selected to this committee unless you're already wealthy enough to foot the bill yourself and shape policy in a way that advantages ones self.
I don't know which way to read it, but if it wasn't costing anything, cutting it "for cost savings" can't be completely true. Maybe there were other overhead costs, but even saying that those costs are $1M/yr is a rounding error for the national budget.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/10/13/2020-22...
This sounds to me like industry bodies such as WG21, TC39, JSR expert groups, etc. A way to get people with full-time jobs in relevant industries together to plan their shared future. I doubt the members of this board are wealthy people joining it in their own capacity. As such, i don't think it makes sense to consider them as either altruistic or self-serving; it's just part of their job.
A very small nitpick but the discretionary budget of the US is far smaller than most realize - in 2024 it was only 1.75 trillion.
And notably, most military spending is discretionary, so the remaining funds for basically all the neat dynamic things government can do is less than a trillion.
A million is of course still a rounding error at e.g. $900 billion, but it adds up really fast, especially when you consider that these are ongoing costs.
I'm having a hard time taking this seriously: "only 1.75 trillion"
What a ludicrous statement. I mean, I know inflation has been bad but not THAT bad. One or two trillion dollars is an absolutely enormous amount of money.
It is only what a few thousand per citizen? That is pocket money for FAANG engineers so not a big deal...
We're not all FAANG engineers.
Seems like sarcasm and possibly a comment on so-called luxury beliefs.
Haha, yeah I should have put quotes around "only" but you have to keep in mind that this ~900billion that remains is the entire government budget for everything besides stuff like medicare, social security, and so on.
When people think about government spending they tend to handwave away billions and, as per this thread, millions are seen as a rounding error.
But I think thats because most people are thinking about the entire budget - which is around was 6.7 trillion on total revenue of 4.9 trillion.
But when "only" 900 billion of that is left for all the neat things government could do it really nails home the impact of things like a trillion dollars per year spent in interest on the debt.
It really also makes clear why starting to slim things down is essentially becoming necessary. The current system is not sustainable.
What’s the advantage of having this as a government agency vs. just an industry association?
An advisory counsel may not get paid but they submit findings to the Secretary. There's a long tail where the government becomes more aware of long standing and emergent issues.
Industry associations have no such reach unless individual members make it so, and unofficially at that.
Direct line to the head of the agency, who is in a position to help advance the goals of the members?
Without the direct line, the association has to rely on lobbying/bribing politicians for access.
I mean this in the nicest way possible, but both your comments in this thread really, really scream that you need to step away from the internet and go interact with real humans in the real world.
Nobody except you is talking about woke communism. Nobody except you is talking about "owning the libs". You're making paranoid, nonsensical arguments against people on your side by imagining they're some sort of alt-right strawman.
It's obviously the "you're backing me up with documentary proof that this is a boring sensible thing" interpretation. The original comment had similar intent.
Based on just that text, they're the water version of the NTSB and thus one of the most important groups in the country.
NCFSAC isn’t the water version of the NTSB.
The NTSB, through its Office of Marine Safety (OMS), investigates major marine accidents across all sectors, determines probable causes, and issues safety recommendations. It operates independently.
In contrast, NCFSAC is an advisory body focused solely on commercial fishing safety, providing recommendations but not conducting investigations.
It's probably about mission creep, I'd guess.
We need to see YoY growth on ship rescues to justify their existence. Otherwise they're just a parasitic cost center.
That's a terrible idea for a group which is trying to prevent ships getting into trouble to begin with. Measuring the rescues would be a here incentive that would get more people in dangerous situations.
'twas surely a joke.
You see... Recently powerful people present such stupid ideas, and have large approval, that I honestly can't tell. Poe's law is going to be more popular than ever now.
I sympathize completely.
I mean, the FBI's been doing this with grooming their own "terrorists" (embededded agents prodding people to say Anti-American things, and then prodding them to perform a terrorist attack by supplying them with the plan and bomb supplies...).
> ...even if it's grouped somewhat incongruously under Department of Homeland Security.
DHS is arguably a much more appropriate home for the Coast Guard than its previous department, Transportation, given all of the facets of their actual mission (source: father and grandfather both in the Coast Guard for 30+ years).
By the numbers though I wouldn’t be surprised if the number one issue coast guard deals with is drunken recreational boaters.
I imagine there is a big gap between the things they deal with the most and the things they need to plan for the most.
I send more emails than anything, but if you tried to get me to spend time being trained on sending email they wouldn’t find your body.
Conversely I design new courses rarely, but when I do it matters immensely that it’s done well. Resources and support and structure to help me do that well when I need to is most welcome.
If the relevant Coast Guard officials need advisory committees for the things you mention, core parts of their mission for who-knows-how-long, they ought to be fired too. My point is that advisory commissions are not a core part of any government agency, and should not be.
Came to say exactly this. Headline is extremely disingenuous and meant to provoke a reaction.
Seems the Cybersecurity Executive Orders that dealt with Memory Safe Languages and the ONCD Report (which mentioned Rust, if I remember correctly) are all gone from whitehouse.gov as well.
The CISA report that dealt with memory safety is still on the CISA site. What do these recent developments mean for CISA? Is it an independent organization that will continue to exist without DHS support or is it essentially dead and its site and reports will vanish as well?
I am mostly ignorant but from hearsay CISA is part of DHS (the chief of CISA is a DHS official). doubt Trump loves it because he literally fired Krebs directly for not supporting misinformation and overthrow attempt in 2020 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Krebs#2020_dismissal)
CISA has an important job to do, but their mission was put at risk when it's leadership under Krebs chose to repeatedly violate the first amendment. Elections and Covid-19 are topics they've been documented in influencing, but with the capability there, what other narratives was it influencing that we don't know about?
The legal fight against CISA to stop their censorship was lost not on the basis of it being constitutional, but because the plaintiffs powerful enough to bring it to court couldn't show they had been directly harmed by it. A common stumbling block for many court cases for legitimate issues. CISA has publicly stated they will be changing their approach as a result of these controversies.
It is not hearsay that CISA is part of DHS. This is an easily verified fact.
> Seems the Cybersecurity Executive Orders that dealt with Memory Safe Languages and the ONCD Report (which mentioned Rust, if I remember correctly) are all gone from whitehouse.gov as well.
Do you have any clues for the "why" ?
It's baffling, traditionally his highest support has come from the Rust belt.
Thank you for this comment. Gold. :D
It's a brand new website and old URLs won't work (this has been somewhat routine since Obama's first term). I wouldn't take that as a sign that a specific executive order is rescinded. However it may have been grouped in with other Biden tech executive orders (such as AI safety) which are being rescinded as excessive regulation
AFAIK it's typical for whitehouse.gov to be completely replaced with every new president
Big C Plus Plus must be in play here
Big Stroustrup?
Can somebody give me a rational take on why? It feels immensely reactive. Salt Typhoon would seem to represent an active threat. Didn't DHS act quite.. conservatively?
A comment on the blusky thread went to "five eyes should stop sharing information" which I suspect won't happen, but I could see people thinking it should.
> Can somebody give me a rational take on why?
Investigations are annoying to people who were behind the President at his inauguration.
AWS and starlink have exposure of risk. You would think DHS work here went to net beneficial outcomes for both of them, and the wider telco sector. (Assuming you meant the tech sector)
> AWS and starlink have exposure of risk
What risk? There isn’t a consumer liability, and they can control the cybersecurity risk-reward balance they’re exposed to. From their perspective, oversight is the liability.
A good rule of thumb, at least for the next couple of months, is that any rules and regulations that have been criticised by the billionaires, banks or oil & gas industry are likely to be shredded. (The “deep state” stuff is mostly whoever has the king’s ear sort of politics. It’s unclear that had any influence here.)
I get what youre saying but Im not sure absolute liability is quite right. Im thinking of SBOM directives, or industry network security requirements for bgp announcements, for example. Amazon and, I assume, some of the other mega corps are AGES ahead of industry at large. Like huge multi year investments so that theyre plausibly close to complying with secure provenance, review, build tracking, and artifact integrity reporting from initial CR to request processing for everything that touches customer or business data. My impression is that the industry generally isnt any further than tracking some package names and version strings and calling it SBOM. If the new directives can preclude a large number of contract competitors that seems like a huge win.
Or, maybe Im thinking more of advantageous requirements/regulations than oversight per se.
Amazon et al would much prefer to do that on their own terms than have to coördinate with government (or their competitors).
Arent they differentiating only _if_ they required to get federal and dod money? The coordination definitely seems to be more of amzn (and similar) employees providing technical expertise to congress and regulators. They certainly take deployments and internal security seriously, but it doesnt seem to be monetizable outside of the contract requirements. Or maybe im missing your point?
What OP is saying is instead of having some sort of legal liability attached or outside directives being handed to them, they would rather implement on their own or push their own standards.
A notable example is SEC mandates on breach disclosures, which will most likely be dead now. Those were a major forcing function to make companies realize security is important. Otherwise, paying a ransom and doing the bare minimum to not get cut by Chubbs or AXA is the norm.
I agree with JumpCriscross on his read of this situation. It ain't great. At least I'm well off enough to weather the negative impacted by a lot of the chaos. Sucks for everyone else.
> The coordination definitely seems to be more of amzn (and similar) employees providing technical expertise to congress and regulators
It's bidirectional. CISA, FBI, and others often get intel or actively take down a botnet or offensive actor, and will percolate this information to security teams at larger organizations before percolating en masse.
For example, when this one APM/data collection tool that almost every DevOps team ik was using was pwned early last year, CISA notified CISOs days before they officially announced it in the news.
People voted for this and now act surprised.
I'm not sure it's the same people.
It is, though. The word "people" here refers in aggregate to the citizens who voted in November. It would be equally accurate for me to say "This is what we voted for" even though it's not what I voted for.
Not voting was the most popular choice among Americans eligible to vote in 2024, so "it's what we didn't vote for".
Not voting, practically, is empowering the status quo. Particularly in America, where almost every election features intense down-ballot competition.
Someone who didn’t vote is more in concordance with the current government than someone who voted against it. Actions speak louder than words, and not voting is an action.
I don't have a dog in this race - I am not even from the US.
But, by definition, not voting is an action rather than absence of one. What you are doing by not voting is giving out a tacit agreement that the people who went and vote get to decide who will be elected.
Following that line of thought, by not voting, you actively chose the current government, no matter what the current government is.
I agree, but there are many who say that not voting is the only way to show contempt for a system rigged against them. Voting would be a tacit endorsement and recognition of the legitimacy of that system.
> show contempt for a system rigged against them
Those that don't care to vote are doomed to be ruled by those who care.
You still have to pay taxes, and perhaps see a government you truly despise making all sorts of decisions that will get the system even more rigged against you.
Not voting out of spite is similar to stabbing your own head to show contempt for your brain when you have a migraine.
I just realized, this is how Trump will reform the 2028 elections. Every non-vote will count as a vote for the status quo.
"You won't have to vote again" – Trump 2024
I remembered you comment when I saw this:
https://ogles.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-ogles-propo...
Voting blocks are just simplifications of reality. Following that line of thought too far leads to bad arguments. The full truth is that any individual voter has a negligible effect on the outcome of an election.
> The full truth is that any individual voter has a negligible effect on the outcome of an election.
A negligible effect is, mathematically speaking, incalculably higher than no effect.
We all have a dog in the race. Empires do not fall quietly.
how so? voter turnout was 64%, so voting was more popular than not voting
I think the math would be: ~32% Harris, ~32% Trump, ~36% didn't show up.
I see a big market for “Don’t blame me, I didn’t bother voting” bumper stickers.
People voted for unrealistic pipe dreams. They often do, but happens in particular with reactionary and populist votes.
I'm mostly seeing people who voted against this continue to grumble.
How do you know this? The USA still has secret (Australian) ballots last time I checked.
You checked with what/who?
I examined my 2024 November general election ballot carefully. Ever since 2020's election denial, I've had a heightened awareness of election procedure, going so far as to read the Colorado Secretary of State's web pages on risk limiting audits, and making some attempt to understand the math behind them.
My Colorado general election ballot contained nothing I could see that would associate me as a registered voter to the ballot itself. Colorado ballots are hand marked, machine readable, and human readable as has been the best and obvious practice since 2000's "hanging chad" debacle. There are certainly "index marks" on the ballots so that the tallying machines can get squared up, but they don't appear different per ballot. I compared to my wife's ballot, just in case.
Why do you ask?
Because your comment does nothing against the original "I'm mostly seeing people who voted against this continue to grumble." comment.
People that vote are not always hush hush about who they voted for, and has nothing to do with can you pick their particular ballot out of the pile. If I tell you I voted for A but B won and now I'm grumbling about the things B is doing, there's no need for discussions about ballots at all.
Just like you don't need to find someone's secret ballot when they're wearing a red MAGA hat.
and, unfortunately, grumbling is all that they will do
You mean the same way as with Brexit? We can only hope that the people who voted for him will have the same capacity for regret.
> the same way as with Brexit?
We haven't done anything quite that irreversible yet.
We voted for an authoritarian. We're really damn close to irreversible.
Probably not, but the effects of the next 4 years could last a very long time. Look at climate change alone - run the model of 4 more years of pumping as much as we can instead of scaling back as much as we can - and see where that gets us in 50 years.
Our children will pay the price for today's votes. But hey, at least we'll have cheap gas (maybe).
I'm guessing the people who voted for this are not surprised. They either expected it, want it, or don't care.
It shouldn't be surprising to anyone here with a functioning brain and is roughly aware of what is going on. Expect more of this.
The question is whether "don't care" will remain true.
I think what we're seeing in this moment is the overreach that precedes the backlash, like clockwork.
It's too late for backlash. If we survive the next four years, we'll be lucky.
No it isn't. Backlashes tend to be obvious two years after presidential elections when the midterm elections happen.
I don't think any backlash will dissuade Trump from anything.
He's not up for re-election for one, and I'm pretty sure he doesn't give 2F whether Vance gets elected after him or not.
The time for the backlash would have been to refuse to accept the election results and storm the Capitol since that's apparently totally cool to do now.
I agree with you that he won't care or be dissuaded, but that doesn't mean that backlash doesn't matter.
When someone comes in to slash everything, they generally don't bother understanding what they are slashing. This is the same as when a company hires someone to come in and cut costs, generally everything, good or bad, gets cut. That's what's happening on the US federal level right now. Eventually some things will be picked back up when someone realizes that it wasn't a good idea to stop it, but most things are just going to be wasted effort.
Chesterton's Fence
"There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it"
I don't think Chesterton has much to say about DHS, which is relatively new.
…and entirely a kneejerk reaction to 9/11, enabling a massive public-private wealth transfer graft under the false pretense of national security.
> a massive public-private wealth transfer
I’ll say this as someone who’s moderately wealthy: this administration is a massive wealth transfer to those with either capital or connections to it. Taking apart these committees means less-regulated telecoms, infrastructure and financial services. If you’re in those spaces, this is great for you.
The size of each of those industries entirely dwarfs the military-industrial bogeyman, which is largely just being transferred from one set of owners (Boeing, Lockheed, et cetera) to another (Musk, Bezos, Lucky, et cetera)
Sure, but DHS long predates this admin. The list of giants suckling at the public teat is huge (Rapiscan, anyone?) and spans many different administrations.
One possible upside of the current situation is that the very obvious corporate ownership of the federal government is dropping the “emperor has clothes” pretense. We are ever closer to simply paying taxes to Buy-N-Large.
If people don’t like it, at least now they can have a practical conversation about it (Luigi notwithstanding). It’s sort of like when Snowden showed us how fucked we were/are.
The 9/11 terrorist attacks might have been the triggering event but bringing a bunch of related federal departments and agencies under a single umbrella in DHS was probably a net positive. The previous structure was tremendously inefficient with a lot of duplication of effort and time wasted on interdepartmental coordination. Obviously graft should be addressed but it's unlikely the total graft was any lower before 2002.
However, DHS was almost entirely formed from existing departments and agencies that were merely rehoused under a new structure, so Chesterton's Fence definitely applies to all of those. Even CISA, which is one of the newest elements, is now almost a decade old with a lot of accumulated expertise and experience.
The newness of DHS has nothing to do with whether or not Chesterton’s Fence applies.
Does the metaphor actually include the age of the fence? I always thought the idea is just to understand why the fence is there before removing it, regardless of its age.
In theory, it should be easier to understand the reasoning behind the existence of newer fences, but the idea is still to do that step first...
I mean, clearly some people just reject this entire idea as creating too much friction, and I can often see their point!, but I think we can at least avoid saying "it's a good concept, but it just doesn't apply in this case", and be honest about just rejecting the concept.
You seem to have Chesterton’s fence completely backwards.
Chesterton’s fence can never be an argument against creating something new.
The whole point of it is that if you come across a fence then that was the result of a conscious human decision and subsequent effort, which strongly implies there was a reason it was created, and until you understand what that reason was, you’re taking a risk by destroying the fence.
But if there is “nothing” and you’re creating something new, Chesterton’s fence doesn’t apply because the lack of existence of anything was not the result of intentional human design and effort, therefore there’s no evidence that the lack of existence of something “had a reason for it”.
Read The Drift From Domesticity, where this whole "fence" thing comes from. It's an appeal to (small-c) conservatism, to respect and understand traditions and norms. It is not a logical rule about it being improper to alter absolutely anything without a clear understanding of its origins. You can disagree with me about its applicability to the newest cabinet branch, but our disagreement isn't rooted in me not knowing the metaphor.
There is no creation without destruction, so yes Chesterton's fence almost certainly applies to an act of creation.
In other words, there is no "nothing". We will always be playing in a sandbox someone else played in before us.
If said fence was across a road that a school bus was hurtling towards at 60 mph… you’d stop asking these questions and remove it (and maybe put it back after you’ve solved the other emergency).
Several (of the new government) have expressed belief that the government is headed towards a catastrophic debt overload. In their view, emergency relief is necessary.
Not arguing for or against this view, but that seems to be what people voted for.
I am a big fan of Chestertons fence but it doesn’t always apply.
Republican strategy since the 1980s had been 'starve the beast'. That strategy is the deny actual funding and instead create debt load in order to kill the government, support for government programs, and destroy trust in government.
I'll counter that it does, allowing that it's perfectly fine to adjust the threshold of certainty about a particular thing's purpose to suit the circumstances.
If that fence is stopping the school bus from driving off the edge of a cliff, for example, I would absolutely not want to remove it - and you can bet I'll spare a modicum of thought to make sure that's not the case before I yank it out of the way.
I liked his story about the street lamp that a mob of people wanted to take down. A monk started to suggest debating the merits of Light, which seemed like an annoying and esoteric point until the mob knocked down the street lamp and everyone was left to argue in the dark. That may be an analogy to where we are now.
A related point is, it’s pretty easy to find people unhappy with current systems. But if you ask them what to replace those systems with, you’ll often find that coalition dissolves.
The goal of these people isn't to understand. They don't care. They know they're slashing important stuff. It's a numbers game to them.
It's like marking read all your emails. The important stuff will pop back up.
It's like the twitter thing. You start shutting off servers until someone says, "ouch it hurts". Then you turn it back on if you care. You then end up with less servers than you started.
and Twitter is bleeding money like anything, unable to retain users and advertisers. You may end up with less servers but not necessarily a stable and functional system.
Twitter is bleeding money in part because the owner refused to play ball with advertisers moderation demands, and the majority who don't see any downtime on twitter consider it more than "stable and functional".
And for the owner, who probably thinks he's co-piloting the strongest government in the world right now and attributes part of that success to the platform he controls, it is functioning magnificently.
..and that is all that matters to him.
It makes sense when you see Twitter less like a traditional business like Apple (whose goal is to turn a profit) and more like a means to other political ends. Twitter punched way above its weight in cultural influence given its relatively small user base. Being profitable is a perk, but not the goal.
Exactly right. Twitter is a 2x kingmaker (2016 and 2024). The current owner likely thinks that the bleed is worthwhile.
Except we're not dealing with software here. The "ouch it hurts" once a government initiative has been "turned off" could be medical services, or social services, or food, or ensuring safe and clean products, or poisoned air or water, etc.
This is the result of hiring people that will "run the country like a business". The human element is removed from consideration
>Except we're not dealing with software here.
You're not, sure. The people who are in charge view the whole apparatus as a machine, and the people doing the work as cogs in that machine.
I didn't write > Except we're not dealing with software here
Maybe you're replying to someone else?
The majority of voters voted for this. I think it was pretty clear they are just going to cut things.
Unfortunate for some people who may be affected by this.
And if you turn it back on you are now at the point with no safety margin.
Chesterton's fence is always lost on populists.
The one wrinkle in this, to me, is that Trump spent four years as President already. Full disclosure: I despise the guy and wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire, BUT ... what if he saw a bunch of waste in his first run and therefore does understand what he's slashing?
Personally I don't believe that or want to believe that and would rather chalk it up to neo-toddlerism, but there's a chance right?
Considering the surprise he showed on video when being told what he's signing, I don't believe he knows what he's slashing, let alone understands it.
Haha I almost wish I'd seen it.
I heard there's going to be those teams of hr+legal+engineer doing the cutting - the only reason I can guess there'd be an engineer in the mix is if they do intend to understand what they're cutting.
Rational != principled.
Yes. I don't want to assume an adversarial posture on this, I'm mostly an outsider, observer. I probably can't understand nuances in US domestic politics (although i am opposed to this kind of semi random behaviour by institutions, I did not see this signalled in NOG lists and the like as coming down the pipe)
So I'm wondering if this is as simple as cost/benefit? Did somebody do the sums and decide the delivery was sub par for spend?
The alternatives are mostly very sad: they're fools. Replacing a process can be beneficial. There's usually overlap.
> Did somebody do the sums and decide the delivery was sub par for spend?
That would be a very interesting analysis and something to learn from. It would also help prevent similar mistakes in the future. It's really unlikely someone would go to such effort and just keep the results to themselves.
Slash and burn policies from a reactionary administration that doesn't and in fact refuses to think about the second and third order consequences of their decisions.
One of the reasons a lot of people are worried about this administration is the vibes based policy decisions they seem intent on making. Everything is haphazard, arbitrary and contradictory. Some of it comes down to personal grievance and some of it comes down to favors for people in the business sphere who chose to kowtow to this administration.
https://www.nextgov.com/people/2025/01/trumps-dhs-pick-says-...
Current South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem wants CISA to be “refocused” on critical infrastructure and to no longer address mis- or disinformation efforts online.
So less/no fact checking, including Trump claims.
Noem has practically zero influence over anything right now.
Her explanation, moreover, doesn’t make sense. The infrastructure advisory committees are also being disbanded.
There is two ways for efficiency, either wipe everything clean or well setup a committee to evaluate which committees can be eliminate. And usual joke in bureaucracy is that later one will discover that even more committees are actually needed.
So the knee jerk reaction of current administration is burning it to ground. Which could actually change something.
Especially wrt things setup, created, mandated during thr prior admin.
Seems like a false dichotomy, between authoritarianism and Kafkaesque bureaucracy.
An effective administration would be thoughtful about things and reorganize rather than simply cut. So they're either being thoughtful and decided something like state sponsored infiltration isn't good to investigate or are being thoughtless.
Changing something is easy, any fool can do that. Changing something for the better is hard.
If you stop assuming good intent, I think the answer is fairly obvious.
And that obvious answer is?
That it is not a good faith attempt to make better or more effective investigations, and rather to stop publicly ‘seeing’ high profile problems.
If we don’t test or investigate, there are no problems and no crimes eh?
They were elected on a mandate to burn it all down, in their view, and this is what that looks like.
I've never understood how 49.8% of the vote is a mandate.
It isn't, people who mindlessly repeat that this administration has a "mandate" are incapable of critical thinking.
The "rational" explanation is that Trump's staff are trying to clear house of anyone they don't trust will give in to any demands they make, and put everyone else who works for the government directly or indirectly in a state of fear and confusion.
I see you're making a joke about conservatism, but Trump isn't a conservative: he's a radical. His goal is to blow up the system, not conserve it. Getting rid of protections is part of that.
It's probably as simple as Trump not wanting agencies to consult advisory boards consisting of outside experts since they might get in the way of his agenda.
It's probably not a specific decision based on what the individual boards have been doing.
It's because of the misinformation/disinformation mission that CISA took on during the Biden admin, it was a boondoggle that really pissed off Republicans.
>Can somebody give me a rational take on why?
The current techbro CEO squad is a small group of people who got extraordinarily lucky and made a bunch of money.
The techbro CEO squad takes their luck to be ability, and they think the fact that they have more money than other people means that they're smarter than everyone else. Some members of the techbro CEO squad think of themselves as prophets or messiahs.
In addition to this, the techbro CEO squad is addicted to money and its accumulation. This isn't a "I need more money to live a more comfortable retirement" thing, it is a "my sole purpose for being is the accumulation of wealth" thing. They are more akin to machines whose purpose it is to grab onto as much money as possible than they are actual human beings.
The techbro CEO squad's vast wealth has enabled them to surround themselves with an army of staff whose only job it is to make their dreams a reality and execute their orders. There is a vast, impenetrable field of personnel and money that insulates them from the reality of the world.
So, they think that they're better than anyone else to the point of being god-like, they are sociopaths who only care about money, they are surrounded by an army of yes men, and they have lost (or never had) any connection to the average human being and his or her existence.
They believe that any restriction on their ability to accumulate wealth is an assault on their freedom, an enemy to be defeated, an injustice to be made right by any means possible.
Limits on their ability to pollute, protections for employees operating in the heat or cold or around hazardous materials, regulations designed to prevent market manipulation or money laundering, it is all evil and must be destroyed.
They are willing to dismantle any system to get what they want.
Because they think that they are better than everyone else, the techbro CEO squad does not value consensus or institutional knowledge that has led to regulation slowly building up over centuries in response to events and emergencies: if they don't like it, it must go.
So, the slow infiltration of government by the Peter Theil, Andreessen and Horowitz, Musk, (but mainly their servants) and the rest started a couple of years ago and continues to this day.
tl;dr: Billionaires will rape your grandmother's corpse for lower taxes, harvest and sell her organs for a laugh, then label you a woke communist and kick you off twitter for criticizing them.
Shut up TREASONer! To bring efficiency we must burn everything to the ground and rehire whomever will work unpaid overtime and very low wage. They all happen to be of chinese, russian, and north korean descent, but that just means we are winning at the deal... ART .. OF ..THE .. DEAL /s
Really though, competence would create the new "efficient" thing, hire best of the best and get it running before tearing down important security, this is business-leader level incompetence being attempted at global super power scale, we are going to need a new word for businessjerks breaking things they should have never been able to touch
I'm guessing this is part of VP Musk's "grand plan to cut government waste", with his Twitter-style "shoot first, ask questions later" approach.
It can be a convenient claim for Musk to make but don't forget, China is his biggest friend (Xi can single-handedly bankrupt Tesla and slash his net worth) and the people fired were in the middle of the Salt Typhoon investigation (which came guess where from!)
Whatever problems or limitations the existing approach had dropping everything on the floor is one of the least helpful ways of trying to fix it (assuming good intent).
You have to assume competence too. You may have good intent but that doesn't help if you don't really know what you are doing or are blinded by ideology or some wayward belief.
Which of the advisory boards do you think were run by incompetents or blind adherents to generally unpopular opinions?
Do you think it was half? More? Less?
I'm talking about the administration that dropped the boards, as per the post I was replying to.
Got it, sorry that I misunderstood. I firmly agree.
“They are never as dumb as I hoped they were, and I am never as smart as I thought I was.”
Basically nearly every person who goes into a new situation thinking only they can fix it.
"The same level of awareness that created a problem, cannot be used to fix it"
Especially if they're very wealthy and already have a savior complex.
Burning everything to the ground is a way of demolishing something though.
And if your intent is to just destroy it, it’s a far more effective one than bringing in experts to slowly try to disassemble the giant jenga tower without it falling over.
Why would you assume good intent at this point? Their motives and plans have been clear for years.
Is this explainable in any way by the cost of running these boards? By the sound of it the cost-benefit of thwarting Salt Typhoon is probably not optimal at zero investment.
This seems entirely ideologically motivated to me.
with a dash of business motivation.
Replacing government run and funded cyber security and threat assessment roles with privately owned contracters will be quite profitable for a few of the Brolliegarks.
No. The cost of running these is so small as not to be worth top officials' time in worrying about them. If they are looking to save lots of money, there are far more efficient ways to do that. This is just clearing house, establishing a tone, and making it clear that expert opinion is not valued.
It seems that the Salt Typhoon investigation would be better handled by the NSA anyways..
Yeah those guys are so good at security. You can tell because the tools and plans of theirs that keep leaking sound great!
You don’t need advisory panels if you don’t want advice
It really is despairingly sad how many of these comments (assumedly by U.S. citizens) seem to not realize or believe these actions will have an effect on them.
Are some of these things normal SOP for a regime change? Sure. But to normalize everything under that blanket assumption is just foolish.
Unless you are an exceedingly (liquid) wealthy white male, you are entirely disposable to the incoming administration. You are less than nothing. If anything, you are an inconvenience buried deep in the calculations that needs to be factored out of the equation because your existence hinders the "progress" being sought.
All these pragmatic or, worse, so-called "libertarian" views demonstrate a supremely naïve, if not outright harmful (to yourself and countless others), understanding of what is going to be aggressively pursued these next few years.
The efforts will inherently destabilize the US which, for some, will be a really massive gift and this administration will be praised both externally and internally. That will close the feedback loop since that’s primarily what motivates this administration.
The core tenet of Muskism, as described at length in Isaacson's bio is around those lines:
* question all the rules
* when in doubt, slash the rule, and see what happens
* if it's really bad without it, bring back the rule
* if you don't have to bring back 10% of the rules that you slashed, you haven't slashed enough yet
USA is now entering the phase where everything is getting slashed - following the will of the majority of -Pennsylvania- the people.
At the level of a company, this can bring great efficiencies, and make reusable self-driving cancer-free nuclear-fusion based rockets. Or crypto scams.
Unfortunately, at the level of a Federal Government, it will bring lower taxes, but some of the 10% will end with coffins. And crypto scams.
We'll watch from the other side of the Atlantic how the great libertarianism experiment goes for the USA.
I expect both impressive improvements, and dramatic karmic irony.
> At the level of a company, this can bring great efficiencies, and make reusable self-driving cancer-free nuclear-fusion based rockets. Or crypto scams.
This is questionable. There are many times when bureaucracy exists for bureaucracy sake. But many, many times they exist for a reason.
Get any sufficiently large company and try to understand its complexity. Simply slashing it is a recipe for disaster.
> Unfortunately, at the level of a Federal Government, it will bring lower taxes, but some of the 10% will end with coffins. And crypto scams.
This is highly questionable, especially the "lower taxes" part. Governments are not very keen on reducing revenue, more likely they will only direct the surplus by cutting off services to other things - in the case of US, I wouldn't be surprised if they just increase spending in military, for example. Those sleasy and juicy defence contracts need funding, you know.
There is essentially no relation to taxes. Everything they are cutting falls into the “Other” category in this chart:
https://www.crews.bank/charts/taxes-and-spending
Even if they cut 100% of government functions other than entitlements, healthcare, and defense, it would not solve the deficit.
Is DHS "other", or "defense"?
Regardless, I think the primary costs created by regulation aren't directly to the government budget, but rather knock-on effects of compliance incurred by the entire nation's economy.
DHS would fall under “other”.
At least officially, the stated goal is to eliminate the deficit, which at least Elon has been warning about lately.
If that holds up (and who knows if it will) I wouldn’t expect any taxes to be cut until the budget is close to balanced.
I wonder if I would be happier if I was as naive as a this.
Maybe, but it’s not like it hasn’t happened before… Clinton (yes, a democrat!) campaigned on balancing the budget, and iirc it actually was for a few years. In his case I don’t think taxes changed much either direction.
Oh I was talking specifically about tax cuts because of a more efficient government.
Budgets can be balanced, of course. In some contexts it may be harder to do.
Clinton made tax increase in 1993 with 39.3% top tax rate. It was a big part of the budget balancing that resulted in surplus.
I expect a lot of noise about it, then an expansion of the deficit for tax cuts, followed by more noise about how evil the deficit is.
If we look historically since Nixon, Biden had the smallest deficit growth of 17%. Trump had 34%.
https://www.investopedia.com/us-debt-by-president-dollar-and...
Republicans do not bring up deficit when they are in power.
Interesting… I had looked here: https://www.thebalancemoney.com/us-deficit-by-year-3306306
(quick google search, first result)
Which seems to show a different story. But looks like there is a lot of analysis on the numbers which can be done? (Eg I saw something in your article about ‘Biden will contribute 1.9T to the debt by 2031’.. even if he hadn’t gotten reelected, he wouldn’t be in office in 2031, so this includes the long-term effects of policies?)
On the contrary. Republicans universally "bring up" the deficit when in power. They only ever talk about it during Democratic administrations though.
Many republican candidates talked about deficit, including Trump. Then in power introduced budget cuts.
So the opposite of conservatism in the traditional sense which is do not change things?
Maybe more like radical libertarianism?
More like basic authoritarianism.
I think authoritarianism would be adding rules and bureaucrats, not cutting them.
By cutting, they're centralizing authority at the top. More and different rules will come - some written, many not - but not by the people that were in place before the change.
Not really. Authoritarianism is more about centralization of power and getting rid of layers that could interfere with the central authority's ability to project power.
Lots of rules tend to constrain an authoritarian ruler's ability to act at whim.
No, bureaucratic authoritarianism (our current system) does not encompass all authoritarianism. The flavor that has just been set into motion is autocratic authoritarianism, which is actually closer to what most people mean when they just say "authoritarianism" (hence this gutting of bureaucratic that would otherwise slow it down). That perspectives have been able to become so warped as to blissfully ignore the horrors of autocratic authoritarianism really just shows how out of touch voters have become.
Basically this.
Most of the commenters here seem to be taking it on faith that these government organizations are necessary and serving a crucial function. But the entire thrust of this election is that the majority of the country doesn't share that level of faith in the federal government.
"When in doubt, slash and see what happens" seems like a highly effective, albeit a bit reckless, approach to finding out which agencies are truly needed and which are not.
I (sincerely) wish you and your family to not be on the path of one of the people who will rush to profit from the lack of regulation.
I preemptively nominate "unexpected knock-on effects" as "periphrase of the year" for 2025 ;)
> following the will of the majority of -Pennsylvania- the people.
Or more specifically, the Amish...almost poetic.
Kidding aside, and sorry if it sounds silly, but... do Amish people usually vote a lot ?
Not that I know of, but they did this time - IIRC, the Biden administration feds raided one of their dairy farms & that was their motivation to vote en masse for Trump.
did we mention crypto scams?
We'll watch from the other side of the Atlantic how the great libertarianism experiment goes for the USA.
Public service announcement: libertarians aren't the ones who want to shrink government enough to fit through your bedroom door. Those would be the Republicans, who are now in power. They are classified in the opposite camp (authoritarians).
How is a small government authoritarian? By nature, it is the opposite... You have freedoms to do as you please without government interference.
I think I understand the pullback from renewables now.
With this, along with all of the other recent events we have had the privilege of witnessing, we should be able to tap into the resonant frequency from the “energetic whirring phenomenon” occurring at Arlington National Cemetery to provide all of the energy that the country needs for the next century at least.
The problem with gutting these departments is that the repercussions aren't immediate.
It's like firing your ATC training team and then, the following week, claiming, see! we just saved a bunch of money and no airplanes crashed -- we didn't need them after all. Until one day ...
Then when some day a crisis situation occurs, there isn't an appropriate response because "oops, that dept no longer exists, or doesn't have the staff to respond". But who knows if Trump's lucky he might even be out of office by then and someone else has to deal with it. But in the mean time, VP Musk gets to claim "look at all the money we saved!"
Maybe some of the positions are redundant, but gutting across the board on day 1 definitely comes off as unwise and not thought through.
No, it is not.
Firing an "ATC training team" and replacing them with advisory commissions is not a good thing. Advisory commissions are not, and should not be, functional units of government.
I know it's so easy to jump on the hate train, but you're confusing different aspects of government, and what has happened.
Good. From day 1 DHS has been the most Orwellian department of the US government, which casually violates our freedom on a regular basis. The entire department should be abolished.
Which party created the DHS again?
Pretty sure it was a solid bipartisan achievement.
Maybe you can share some of the examples of such infringements on our rights.
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/court-rules-warrantless-...
https://epic.org/dhs-disregards-internal-policies-and-avoids...
https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone
https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/breaking-dhs-will-begin-...
https://www.theverge.com/c/23311333/tsa-history-airport-secu...
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/us/tsa-screeners-win-i...
The list goes on. There's 24 years of history you can comb through. The DHS' security theater exists solely to compromise the constitutional rights of American citizens. To this day there's no evidence they're even that successful at their job. The fact the impeachment of Mayorkas failed was quite mind-boggling but characteristic of a government that doesn't truly believe anyone, even citizens, have certain inalienable rights.
The DHS was and still is bipartisan. It's America's Staatspolizei.
You know that things you posted about border and airport searches are absolutely not gonna go away with this move. Under this gov ingress control can only intensify, DHS or not.
What did stop is some pretty important recent cyber attack reviews and that seems to touch China's interests.
I would not be opposed to abolishing the DHS, but that is _not_ what is happening here.
Instead, it's creating a DHS that is less accountable and less sensitive to outside advice. In other words, a more dangerous DHS.
So really the opposite of what you're hoping for.
Hello.
Probably because of Jewish people like me who had their computers hacked and told I wasn't welcome by security cameras near where I live.
I live next to former president's and being efficetively made into a holocaust victim with no proper recourse by the people ment to protect the president's makes me feel like they never should have had the job in the first place.
The swiftness here really cements the notion of a useful idiot. Makes you wonder who crafted the details then the execution.
You would only need to wonder if you had been paying no attention to the clarion call about Project 2025 and what the incoming admin was directly planning to do wholesale.
Literally, for months.
There was doubt by many if Project 2025 was actually going to be executed.
I have nothing polite to say about someone either so gullible or so obviously a liar.
At this point I believe those kinds of people are much like Joe Rogan. Hiding behind the old “just asking questions”-style guises. I’m not sure what they get from that, but they are either intentionally not paying attention at this point, or simply do not care about anything that doesn’t affect them directly and negatively.
At this point we might as well print out Project 2025 bingo cards. Perhaps that will be the only way we “win” something in all this mess.
As OP said, “useful idiots.” (And/or malicious actors.)
The already highly compromised ideologues who seized control of the federal government are dismantling it because they said they would.
Every comment on this post is frighteningly uninformed about current events.
I'm inclined to write a Firefox addon that just replaces every headline out of the US with "Leopards Eating Faces official caught eating faces"
“Then makes weird noises, nothing bad happens, and continues eating faces”.
If there are no consequences, it just reinforces their power.
I'd argue this government has not just experienced no consequences, they've experienced the opposite of no consequences. Somehow the American people saw everything they'd done and were saying they'd do and then the people emphatically voted for it. I'm still gobsmacked.
Just wait. Hitler was very popular too. Until he unequivocally lost, at least.
By then, the country was destroyed along with most of it’s citizens, but boy howdy was it a ride eh?
Hitler apparently had solid 15-20% support even up to a decade after defeat and Nazism generally had 50% support (before and after, as a good idea executed badly) so both your high and low are off.
I was going to write something pithy about "Sure, we screwed up, but we'll get right the next time!", but that really doesn't feel funny right now.
I’m not sure you’re saying what you think you’re saying.
hE's HiTlEr!!
Every time. I lived in Austin in the early 2000s and have no idea how many "BUSH=HITLER" bumper stickers I saw. It was stupid then, it's stupid now.
Uh huh. How about we check in in about 5 years eh?
And don’t worry, I don’t think he’s literally Hitler. Hitler actually went to jail when he got convicted, after all.
This has been a definite problem with the rhetoric starting at an intensity of 10/10 and having nowhere to go. The other problem is that everything that's happened has had people actively diminishing it, to make the reaction seem more outrageous, so we're all numb to so much of it. I've thought of it as The Boy Who Cried Wolf, but that's incorrect, because there's always been a wolf.
The problem has been - what happens when the truth is so obvious, bad, and direct that many are unable to see it?
Yeah. How do you point out the truth when people will believe obvious and blatant lies?
Eh, it’s even worse frankly.
Have you heard stories about women (and men) who believe ‘they love me, they’d never cheat on me’ while their spouse is not only clearly cheating on them, but bragging to friends that they are cheating on them?
That’s what is happening. And the more in-your-face it is, the more they’ll double down or even attack the people trying to tell them.
It works both ways.
"Department of Mission Creep, Pork-Barrel, Tax and Spend, continues to tax and spend as it endeavors to expand pork-barrel mission."
Congress writes the tax laws and allocates the budgets to agencies for specific purposes. People can go to jail if they spend that money on something which Congress didn’t authorize.
Yes, it has been authorized. This hasn't been effective in limiting the scope of bureaucracy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qByWF30jKiw
So don’t blame the agency for doing what they’re required to do, blame the people who make the rules. If your cable company does something you don’t like, do you blame the clerk in front of you or the CEO who sets policy?
What other headlines are there? Though it's quite sad, I suspect that demeanor would match the rest of the stories in your feeds. I strongly suspect the anger has nothing do to with these committees, and would be reflected across the board.
It's just the beginning. There's a good breakdown of what it would take to reduce the government by Musk's "at least 2 trillion" and it doesn't look very good (for US citizens). I mean he what, is going to cut SpaceX contracts? Please...
https://youtu.be/5fvDfDDZ4Ms
> Musk's 2 trillion
There is no evidence this is an actual target for anyone in government.
Not for the government. For people outside of the government tasked with reducing the government. Musk is one of them
> people outside of the government tasked with reducing the government
My point is we have seen zero evidence of this influence in Trump’s executive actions thus far. DOGE is analogous to the Federalist Society or NRA. Influential. But not policy prescriptive.
2 trillion is not prescriptive, but is there any unambiguous number published officially? Otherwise 2 tril is the only figure publicly advertised and I guess TFA is a sign they are starting to chip at this campaign promise
> 2 tril is the only figure publicly advertised and I guess TFA is a sign they are starting to chip at this campaign promise
Not a campaign promise if it didn’t come from the campaign!
This isn’t cost cutting. The DHS budget hasn’t been slashed. This is deregulation. (Which was a campaign promise.)
Wasn't one of campaign promises to reduce the government? And this is the only figure made public so far
> The DHS budget hasn’t been slashed.
Rome wasn't built (or destroyed) in a day. Once there are no members or investigations then what are the money spent on?;)
Musk did backtrack on the $2 trillion goal.
'Musk told political strategist Mark Penn in an interview broadcast on X that the $2 trillion figure was a “best-case outcome” and that he thought there was only a “good shot” at cutting half that.'
'That figure was quickly dismissed as implausible by budget experts, who said the entire discretionary budget was only $1.7 trillion. Musk hadn’t waved people off the number until Wednesday, and it has been widely cited in reports about DOGE’s plans. '
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/elon-musk-say...
"Half that" is still a massive problem. He's digging himself deeper.
Blame it on Musk, replace the humans with computers. It could be an chronological digitalisation step and since the US is leading in the AI field they just start replacing the government with artificial intelligence.
Ah so you're saying he not only will not cut his existing gov contracts but actually add some more now for "AI government"? Sounds great and totally no conflict of interest
Perhaps someone came in and realized that this advisory board had 0 benefit and just a waste of tax payer money? If so, I’m all for getting rid of wasteful spending
The number of “believe them when they say they will do…” articles over the past year contrasted with what happened in November and now, is a sobering picture of the state of things.
Not a single person has any license to be surprised at anything that’s happening.
At best we can say “this will be variously slowed down at points due to legal battles,” and hopefully even infighting with the broligarchs. But none of this is a shock.
CISA is the organization that declared that the 2020 election was the most secure election ever. So it is expected that CISA would get "liquidated" by this new administration.
Well to say that without doing investigations or audits is partisan to say the least
Fortunately, there are plenty of private sector companies investigating Salt Typhoon.
I can speak for the firm I work for. Our clients are effectively invulnerable to Salt Typhoon. Yes, I know that sounds like a "big claim" but it's really not. We enable our customers to run endpoints that aren't based on Windows or macOS. So...