The USDS wasn't established by Congress, it was established by Obama via Presidential memoranda and OMB budget request.

And a curious question: I was seeking the truth on the qualifier "obvious" and the legality of the EO in general, and I presented my case with references to the actual EO. My reasoning could be very wrong but at least I tried to stick with the discussion of the actual legality of the EO.

What's your reason to flag it and downvote it without counter arguments? Anything that does not agree with your rage is automatically morally bad bad bad?

They are also tweeting 'findings' to create a narrative.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1885964969335808217

Of course there is “unseeing.” They can be tried for rather obvious crimes and thrown in prison.

I was assured right here on HN that the data was public to begin with, and downvoted for suggesting it was possible unseen corruption. Hopefully if that is true they find it just matches what has released publicly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ty6853&next=42914628...

I think the one they're going for is that being a senior officer with material authority requires confirmation per the appointments clause, constitutional law instead of a federal statute.

Whether musk is operating as such seems dubious but possible.

Is DOGE an advisory body or real government audit agency. It is acting like the later but is solely creation of Musk.

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/federal-unions-s...

https://www.hrdive.com/news/federal-workers-unions-challenge...

US' Privacy Act of 1974

state based information privacy laws would be my first go to.

DOGE is not illegal. However the legality of some of the things they do is under question. The current government, including DOGE is being operated like “Just do as many things as possible, so that the lawsuits can’t keep up”. While lawyers are busy trying to stop big things, many small but important items will slip through the cracks and will take decades to undo.

Edit: BTW this strategy has always been available, it’s just that career politicians aren’t incentivized to do this for “good” because they want long political careers.

> Both realities reveal something urgently broken with the United States.

Our government operations expect people to conduct themselves as adults.

Clearly, if we survive Elon's coup, we need to encode these norms into law.

The broken part is the idea that the legislative and judicial branches can act as checks and balances for the executive branch. In the end, the executive branch is the only branch with the ability to do something. The other two are just a bunch of talking heads.

Many other republics have split the executive branch into multiple semi-independent centers of power. The head of state and the head of government can be separate roles. A directly elected president may be responsible for signing laws and appointing senior officials, while a prime minister subordinate to the parliament may be in charge of running the executive branch. And government departments may have dual leadership with a politically appointed minister setting the directions and a career director appointed by the president running the department. Because the director's term is independent from the political appointees, they can refuse to comply if the minister asks something illegal.

Republics have all kinds of failure modes. For example, Hungary was supposed to be a robust parliamentary republic. But due to non-proportional elections, slightly over 50% of votes were enough for a sufficient supermajority to rewrite the constitution.

DW covered this today with a professor who seems to generally know what he's talking about and from what I could tell is not spinning anything in particular: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpKhyL9PEPQ

He does a good job of explaining the facts of the legalities etc.

I'm not really sure if you can call it a "coup" if all parties involved admit he was legitimately elected. Furthermore, this isn't exactly a bait-and-switch. He told us what exactly what he wanted to do. We already knew he would try to do illegal stuff. If you break the law and nobody who voted for you complains (unrealistic I realize, but bear with me), is the rule of law really that secure? If we only criticize Trump when he breaks the law, but not the democrats when they send arms to Israel in blatant violation of the Leahy Laws, how can we get upset when people push the boundaries further?

It's been more than 20 years (or might be about that?) that we passed the law that said "if you prosecute Bush for warcrimes we will invade the Hague". Granted, we were never a treaty cosigner (sharing the lovely company of Russia, North Korea, and Iran), but it's very convenient we have a "laws for thee but not for me" attitude.

Look I'm just saying we've been headed in this direction for a while and I don't expect the institutions we're supposed to care about preserving doing much to stop it. Americans need to get a lot more mad if they want politicians to represent them well. I'd hazard a guess most americans have never contacted their representatives, vote in their non-swing state (effectively making their vote worthless), and pat themselves on the back for a civic duty well done. I think we've gotten ourselves into a position where politicians who have spent most of their careers failing to pass legislation now need to pull political ability from who the hell knows where to actually follow through on their promise to fight facism. Very grim times.

They seem to be still be deciding what the EO actually is, and they also didn’t create a non-governmental entity like trump promised.

In American democracy winning a single election doesn't change the constitution or even the laws at all. There are separate processes for those things that haven't happened. The monetary decisions the executive branch is making right now are explicitly reserved for Congress, which notably hasn't passed a law for it.

Voting for someone doesn't imply they aren't bound by existing rules.

Edit: There's also more to be said here about restrictions on American democracy (e.g. gerrymandering, first past the post, disenfranchisement, financial barriers to entry for candidates, lack of choice for political parties, etc) that make the US not some bastion for democratic governance. I'm not an expert but the current chaos is at least partially enabled by the flaws in American democracy (rigid 2 party control is a good example of a generally undemocratic force, many Americans would prefer more parties but aren't being represented, that is enabling executive overreach).

People have to vote for one party or the other. Voting for a party doesn't mean they want every single thing promised by that candidate, it just means they think the sum of all things from that candidate is better than the sum of all things from the other candidate. If this whole DOGE thing was hypothetically not directly connected with any party, I would guess that most americans would have voted against it.

I do not get why electing a leader with anti democratic tendencies should be viewed as the pinnacle of democracy

He didn't even get a majority of the 60% of voter aged Americans who voted.

> The people voted for this: a majority of the American people. Democracy, no?

Does this mean it was wrong of Republicans to have tried to stop anything Obama or Biden was trying to do? Or question it's legality?

I keep hearing this "the people voted for it argument", but unless your prepared to condemn things like limiting the scope of the ACA and refusing to confirm justices, it's hard to take the argument seriously.

Trump also said he could shoot someone in broad daylight on fifth avenue. I think that might be against some rules though. Idk maybe it can be a campaign promise!

Elon shit posting on twitter and donating hundreds of millions of dollars to a candidate who was elected doesn’t make elons shit posts legal precedent

The US believes in the rule of law. That means those in power cannot ignore rules and operational procedures put in place to prevent abuse of power.

What you are saying is Trump won so he can effectively shut down agencies and create new ones by fiat. And if those new agencies break laws that is fine.

As a hypothetical, suppose DOGE amasses a large dataset of every resident in the US and it then identifies “illegals” and instructs the deputized military to deport this group of people to prison in El Salvador via secret messaging beyond FOIA reach. This is not OK. Especially if the deported were not given due process to defend themselves in court. What if a few of the deported were actual citizens and had their identities mixed up with someone else.

I don't know? To this day people still fuss about concentration camps here, while the leader clearly had given authority to do so. People are just too political these days.

By the way, I heard the Palestinian Problem is going to be solved for good?

DOGE does not have the authority to shut down independent agencies of the US Government such as USAID.

They could†, but they haven't.

†: They actually couldn't, without stripping the filibuster from the Senate.

That’s like asking if Darth Vader would release a report on whether the destruction of Alderaan was legal.

Congressional inaction isn't assent. The Constitution clearly and explicitly gives the power of the purse to Congress (and this is also the understanding of I think Madison in the Federalist Papers and the interpretation we've had for now almost the entire history of the US so there's no reasonable dispute of this). Until Congress passes a law allowing this the president is constitutionally obligated to take care of the laws passed.

Though you do have a point of even if it's illegal who will enforce it? The courts have started to some but are necessarily reactive and slow.

The president isn’t a king.

I would say yes, insofar as the text and SCOTUS interpretations of the constitution count as law, so anything that violates, for example, the separation of powers would be illegal.

Are we complaining about the millions the feds pay SpaceX for their starlink terminals? Are we concerned about the government subscriptions to Bloomberg feeds?

I'll get rage-y about this one when someone explains what a Politico premium subscription provides and why it was a corrupt purchase. Maybe it's a valid information data service that provides key information to whatever agency purchased it, purchased using an appropriate bidding contract. Or maybe it wasn't.

But the point is show me why that was an inappropriate purchase while Starlink and Bloomberg feeds aren't.

Unfortunately doing that takes investigation and due-process, and it doesn't score the same propaganda points as just yelling "See?! My political opponent had the government as a customer!!"

have them audited by the Office of the Inspector General.

Which is not very easy right now as Trump illegally fired many of them across 17 different offices.

The illegality and unconsitutionalism of the actions being taken to dismantle agencies and placement private citizens without background checks or proper auditing / security procedures inside of highly critical and often classified systems are the issue, not whether or not USAID should be audited or abolished. There are proper channels for that. they are being bypassed (even though fully available to the President with all three branches of government in Republican control).

Since we are doing whataboutism, let's also bring up the ~$1 trillion PPP program, ripe with fraud, enabled and designed by Donald Trump, which helped kick off the current wave of inflation.

>The cost per job saved for one year was $169,000 to $258,000, which was much higher than the average amount—$58,200—paid in wages and benefits to small-business employees in 2020. [1]

[1] https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/2...

Slack can't just willy-nilly hand over US government data to the public. There's a process that needs to be followed for FOIA requests as some classes of information are just not public. In fact, most of the data on a government Slack server would probably fall under those FOIA exemptions.

FOIA requests go to the information owner, not to anyone hosting it. It's not even specific to IT. Paper notes/documents are also covered.

That remains to be seen. From the same article:

> "Just changing the name alone under the Executive Order doesn't affect DOGE's recordkeeping status,” Jason R. Baron, professor at the University of Maryland and former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration told 404 Media in a phone call. “The administration apparently has made a determination that DOGE will be a presidential component subject to the Presidential Records Act. However, that will surely be challenged in the courts in connection with FOIA lawsuits. Under FOIA, it will be for the courts to decide whether under existing DOGE is acting more like a federal oversight agency or as a presidential component that solely advises the President.”

The article is fairly sloppy and uses lots of scare-quotes, but basically it's saying that communications for the DOGE team will report in to the Chief of Staff making them subject to the Presidential Records Act instead of the general reporting conditions for the OMB.

The article also states that 'DOGE is gutting...' when that's not true. They're advising the President, and the President is cleaning house. They investigate, recommend, the President decides, and those decisions get acted on. This is how a task force like this is supposed to work.

Perhaps revisit your premise prior to asserting malicious intent.