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.
> ...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).
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..."
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.
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.
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?
> 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
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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)
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.
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.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
Current South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem wants CISA to be “refocused” on critical infrastructure and to no longer address mis- or disinformation efforts online.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Readit News
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.
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).
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2024-09/24_0712_ncfs...
The activities listed are:
Deleted Comment
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.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
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?
Do you have any clues for the "why" ?
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.
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.
"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"
It's like marking read all your emails. The important stuff will pop back up.
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?
Investigations are annoying to people who were behind the President at his inauguration.
So the knee jerk reaction of current administration is burning it to ground. Which could actually change something.
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
It's probably not a specific decision based on what the individual boards have been doing.
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.
Her explanation, moreover, doesn’t make sense. The infrastructure advisory committees are also being disbanded.
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.
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.
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
Basically nearly every person who goes into a new situation thinking only they can fix it.
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.
Do you think it was half? More? Less?
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.
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.
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
Or more specifically, the Amish...almost poetic.
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).
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 preemptively nominate "unexpected knock-on effects" as "periphrase of the year" for 2025 ;)