I think that they are having a good think about what they are doing, but I believe that, in cutting key agencies that protect consumers from corporations, their personal goals are simply not aligned with the goals that would be helping the country.
> their personal goals are simply not aligned with the goals that would be helping the country.
When people express worry over superhuman-AI alignment on forums like this, I find myself wishing they'd shift focus to the fact that we actually already have a problem with the mis-alignment of super-human entities in the form of large corporations and the billionaires who control them. (And yes, governments too; the whole point of our democratic form of government is that it's supposed to keep that behemoth better aligned with the values and will of "the people".)
To me it seems obvious that keeping a misaligned super-AGI from destroying humanity and keeping billionares and large multinational corporations from destroying humanity with climate change in the long-term or just degrading our quality of life (via pollution, wealth inequality, etc.) in the short term are really just differences of degree and not of kind.
But we actually have the latter problem right now, and, as a bonus, if we can figure out better ways of aligning our carbon-based and economic-legal system "overlords" in the present maybe it helps point us toward a better way of aligning our potential silicon-based "overlords" in the future.
It's like hiring Cookie Monster to make the cookie factory more efficient.
He's just going to plant himself at the end of the conveyor belt of fresh cookies with his mouth open, and get rid of everything else.
Musk is going to try and entrench himself so much, that he'll never be able to countenance his opposition winning and removing him. Unless Trump dislodges him first, he's going to be a permanent problem.
Good example is the CFPB. If they destroy it return all the money to taxpayers as Elon is saying he is doing, it's about 2 dollars to each of us. In return, we have a largely unregulated banking system that can do things like charge structuring for credit cards and checking account to maximize fees or overdrafts in a frankly fraudulent manner. It will cost us billions of dollars as a society to not have those protections anymore. Not to mention things like forced subscriptions that are impossible to cancel that the CFPB has been working against.
I'm pretty sure I would pay 2 dollars to not have to deal with any of those consequences.
The most charitable interpretation is that Musk's doing what he did at Twitter -- wildly cutting back, and then backing off and repairing when he finds that something he threw away was actually necessary.
I'm not convinced that this is a good strategy when dealing with something with higher stakes than "posting dank memes", though. "Oops, that broke for a few days" matters a lot more when the thing that breaks is, say, paying out money for social security.
That is, as you said, sometimes the fence-that-is-inefficient-processes exists for a reason.
EDIT TO BE LESS SUBTLE BASED ON REPLIES: I think this is bad. Even in the most-charitable interpretation, it is bad. Particularly for the government, but even at Twitter it succeeded at making it smaller but approximately-nobody thinks Twitter is better now.
A key difference is that twitter has (had) users, and users can move to e.g. bluesky once twitter's CEO decides to wreck it. The US has citizens instead, not users, not customers, but citizens, and citizens can't move if they don't like what Elon is doing. There is no Bluesky equivalent of the USA, and citizenship is not a free market.
A country is not a private company in a free market. For some this is hard to understand.
The thing about Charleston's fence is you don't know why the fence was erected. But we do. The government created it, and the government can remove it.
A wild and ruthless cut would mean that the US Government would revert to a similar relative size it was in say, 1990. Back then Debt to GDP was about 60%, now it's over 120%, for measurably worse outcomes, wage stagnation, housing costs, healthcare, education, etc. One vocal group seems to think that we could solve it by spending more money and creating more programs. You know what they say about repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting different results.
> "Oops, that broke for a few days" matters a lot more when the thing that breaks is, say, paying out money for social security.
That depends on your perspective. I'm sure there are people out there who think that since social security goes to people who aren't economically productive that it's not a thing that matters. I disagree with those people, but defining what matters is critical, and for Musk & co "what matters" is only anything that enriches Musk & co.
Of course there's a lot of factors, but the people who defend his cutbacks at twitter often ignore just how crappy the platform has gotten under his relatively tenure.
The challenge is that he is following his values and not the values of the country.
The Twitter analogy is that racist and disinformation posts are perfectly fine to Musk so after gutting all of the teams looking after these things, he was perfectly fine with the large increase in both.*
We shouldn't expect a different outcome with his changes to the government. We should expect large increases in abuses by banks (because regulation was gutted), large increases in racism and disparity in Alabama public schools (because the Department of Education was gutted), etc. etc.
Its not really an interpretation- he has literally talked about this as his playbook dozens of times.
One step in the playbook is reduce - “if you dont break things 10% of the time then you are not reducing enough” is almost verbatim what he has said, and done, for all of his companies.
I strongly disagree with my fellow Americans that government systems should be immune to this process or that people will be harmed. This sensitivity to perceived harm is a problem in and of itself.
Why are we giving these people charitable interpretations any more? Elon Musk did a full on nazi salute at the inauguration rally; since then he and his cronies have extralegally tried to insert themselves inside the entire american government to cripple the regulations that prevent him and other techno-fascists doing exactly what they want with their effectively infinite money.
You need to call a spade a spade. Occam's razor is being held to the neck of this country.
Here's another chestertonism:
There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, “You can’t put the clock back.” The simple and obvious answer is “You can.” A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed. There is another proverb, “As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it”; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again.
Chesterton primarily meant that in terms of traditional morality or other things that have largely already been totally rejected, he denied the existence of divorce because it presumes the state can dissolve oaths which is just to reject the existence of oaths.
Artificial institutions that have existed for a matter of decades don't make sense to apply the fence idea to, that's more about things that have been timeless in humanity that we recently started to reject.
> Chesterton primarily meant that in terms of traditional morality or other things that have largely already been totally rejected, he denied the existence of divorce because it presumes the state can dissolve oaths which is just to reject the existence of oaths.
> Artificial institutions that have existed for a matter of decades don't make sense to apply the fence idea to, that's more about things that have been timeless in humanity that we recently started to reject.
It matters a little bit what he originally meant, but not a whole lot. What we mean with the fence is simply that you should do a bit of due diligence before making changes. That applies to all sorts of systems, government or IT, or anything else.
..."can't put the clock back" doesn't literally mean that you can't change the time on a clock. It's referring to not being able to go back and change things that already happened.
This is true. There are things that, once done, cannot be undone. You can try to fix their consequences. You can change what you do going forward, so that the thing would not be done that way again. But you can't, say, un-kill an executed innocent.
No. There are many things that are path dependent and much harder to fix if you do it wrong the first time. People resign and move on, and it can take decades to build up the skills again. For example: if Trump breaks Ukraine, how do you fix that later? Deals are signed. The war stops. China is now emboldened to have a shot at Taiwan.
It's a variation on "never change a winning team". Which is valid. As long as the team is winning. Doing more of the same is not going to fix things if it stops winning.
It's a problem with bureaucracies. They bloat. They grow. They never shrink.
Byzantine bureaucracies refer to the notion that this got out of hand shortly before the collapse of what remained of the Roman empire at that point. Bureaucracies are also sometimes referred to as Kafkaesque to indicate how nonsensical, illogical, and absurdist bureaucracies can become.
Anyway, the US federal bureaucracy is enormous. It employs massive amounts of people. It's complicated, vast, and very change resistant. The task of doing something about that is so intimidating that no recent previous government has had the nerve to do anything significant about that. They all chickened out and instead just added their own layers of more bureaucracy to the mix. It's easier to add stuff to the pile than to take stuff away from it. So, after a few centuries of that, there's probably a lot of stuff there that barely makes sense to anyone.
The department highlighted in the article strikes me like a good example of a product of such a bureaucracy.
The article barely explains why this apparently very large, expensive, and richly staffed department exist, what it does, and why that is so important. It also fails to outline what kind of budget it has and what the intended purpose of that budget is.
I can't really judge based on this article whether taking a sledge hammer to that department is a good thing or not. The article seems to suggest it isn't but I can't say it's very convincing.
That chat bot that they highlight doesn't strike me as "key technology". Quite the opposite actually. The article raises more questions than it answers here. What was that thing supposed to do? Who was it for? Who backed/approved this? Why? How much did that cost? What else do people in that department do? All reasonable questions to ask.
> Anyway, the US federal bureaucracy is enormous. It employs massive amounts of people
At < 3 million people this is substantially under its peak and at about its level in the 1960's, and a smaller fraction of the workforce than pretty much everywhere. Wages are 0.9 per cent of the federal budget.
> I can't really judge based on this article whether taking a sledge hammer to that department is a good thing or not. The article seems to suggest it isn't but I can't say it's very convincing.
Right, exactly. And neither can Musk, really. So at this point, the answer isn't to just go ahead and take a sledge hammer to it. The correct course would be to actually go through the Congress and ask those very reasonable questions you pose. But Musk doesn't even want to work with with the Congressional DOGE Committee he set up. That's highly concerning.
The problem here is people die when those things are removed even for a few weeks or months. You don't get to "put back" security for SSN data when it's already been accessed by foreign governments. He's not doing this in good faith, he's convinced he's the smartest man in the world and should literally be a dictator.
It's usually said in business that you should spend your first 100 days getting the lay of the land before you start making big decisions. It might even be more ideal to give it 12 months before you tear up the playbook and bring your own.
Obviously, for a government staffed with experienced people, you'll be working with people who know how things work, and an incoming administration will have spent plenty of time outlining a plan of action well in advance of coming into office.
Does that apply to a notorious shitposting edgelord like Musk who is storming around like a bull in a china shop and sees the US as his new plaything? I doubt it - I certainly doubt any level of thinking is involved.
This administration (at least) thinks they spent an entire term learning, and now ith a 4-year gap are "hitting the ground running". The people were promised "we will quicky change and fix everything"; this is "we will quickly change everything", declare mission accomplished and hope they get lucky or maybe the dropped words won't be noticed.
> I hope they have a good think about what they're doing.
They probably did, if you look at it from a perspective of deliberately ruining the government. It looks like they are trying to reduce the government to nothing more than the IRS. Everything else will either get permanently trashed (any kind of consumer protection), sold off for parts, or contracted out to a private company started by one of their buddies.
Yeah, it might result in a very chaotic transition period, but these people don't care. They are rich enough that it's not going to personally affect them, and in the end they'll end up even richer. The entire goal right now is to do so much damage that it is going to take decades to restore - if it's even possible at all.
I mean, it's not really a valid case of Chesterton's Fence if you're doing it _maliciously_. I don't _really_ buy the "they are merely terribly incompetent and demolishing a lot of Chesterton's fences", at this point.
The thing that frightens me is that the objective here is the explicit inverse of Chesterton's Fence: In dismantling these agencies, the DOGE team's intent is to cause the exact cascade of dysfunction that Chesterton warned about.
Elon Musk (and the billionaire class he represents) doesn't want a functioning CFPB because it doesn't serve him (or them). It will take a little while for them to fully sabotage the IRS and DOE as well, but they're working their way up to it.
Oh, I'm sure the parts that make sure I pay my taxes will function. But yeah, the parts that make sure Elon and Trump pay their taxes? If they aren't broken today, they will definitely be broken tomorrow.
> It’s unclear how many people are being let go, but multiple sources tell WIRED that list could be upwards of 70 if not more. Prior, there were around 650 TTS employees.
So the worst case scenario that anyone can imagine numbers for is that this department gets hit with 10% layoffs. That's not fun for anyone involved, but it's also not exactly crisis mode yet, and it seems like there are bigger things that this administration is doing to focus our pitchforks on?
There's a very real risk of burning out people's ability to be indignant if we get up in arms about every obscure department that suffers moderate layoffs. Let's save our outrage for the really important things.
To characterize this as a "department [getting] hit with 10% layoffs" is completely disingenuous. This isn't a department cutting staff; it's an unelected body going around and firing people out of the government for reasons spanning malice, cronyism, and corruption.
This executive branch department is cutting staff on the orders of the chief executive who is taking advice from a body he put together to find places to cut. They may have ulterior motives for giving that advice, but what is happening is technically perfectly legal because Trump is (unfortunately) the elected chief executive and is ultimately all of these people's boss.
I don't like Trump any more than you do, but mischaracterizing what is happening isn't helping the situation. The people who are pro-Trump or in the middle see through it, and the people who are already anti-Trump already agree with you.
I mean, it won't be nothing; there will be craters where the government used to be. People will be studying exactly what the hell happened here for decades to come.
If only Elon knew that all he's building is the careers of generations of humanities researchers to come! (That is, assuming we can still afford luxuries like humanities studies once he's finished)
It kind suggests that maybe some of what they do isn't that necessary and a 10% staff cut not so bad?
I looked on their website and it says they do digital.gov, and on that site there is stuff like
>An introduction to digital governance. Understand how and why to implement digital governance
>Case study
At the General Services Administration (GSA), we operate a Digital Experience Executive Board, supported by an agency-wide Digital Council. The Board is composed of senior executives who provide high-level direction, and Council members coordinate implementation of digital initiatives within their business line. We also have an Enterprise Digital Experience team to coordinate enterprise improvements to our agency’s digital experience. Read more about digital governance at GSA.
I think they probably should have given it a sentence or two. Apparently the GSA does operational things like leasing office space for other agencies, purchasing supplies, buying vehicles, etc.
The really scary thing is FedRAMP is part of the TTS (the affected agency).
FedRAMP is the program used to procure Cloud and Cybersecurity services for federal agencies.
With TTS in flux, that means FedRAMP is in flux as well - which means tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in Cloud and Cybersecurity spend is on the line.
I have significant qualms about FedRAMP, but it was at least better than nothing.
FedRAMP was also one of the last tethers for the Cloud and Cybersecurity industry to remain in the US. Otherwise, the entire center of gravity is in Israel, India, and Eastern Europe (as I have mentioned multiple times).
Since not everyone remembers the Great American Recession or the origins of Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB), I link to a Nov. 2008 piece in Harper's magazine by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi "Protect Financial Consumers": http://archive.harpers.org/2008/11/pdf/HarpersMagazine-2008-...
"For most of the country’s history, state and lo-
cal usury laws imposed modest consumer protec-
tions by setting caps on interest rates and fees. But
in 1978, a federal statute was used to bypass these
laws. Creditors quickly rewrote the rules, issuing un-
intelligible contracts that increased fees, penal-
ties, and interest rates. The fragmented financial
regulatory bodies that remain have operated as if
their main goal were lender profitability."
[...]
"The ever-widening information imbalance between
consumers and creditors has only made borrowers
easier marks. In a Federal Trade Commission study
conducted last year, for instance, nine in ten mort-
gage customers examining relatively straightforward
fixed-rate loan agreements could not figure out
the up-front costs on the loan; half could not iden-
tify the loan amount. Of all the borrowers who were
sold subprime mortgages in the past five years,
nearly 60 percent would have qualified for prime
mortgages if brokers had offered them; the sub-
prime mortgages carried so many rate escalators,
prepayment penalties, and other traps that even
would-be prime borrowers defaulted."
The US gov has been worn way at for decades by unscrupulous people seeking power and made so unpleasant to work in that few young people want to go into political leadership - and those that do don’t get far enough to have impact (eg. Buttigieg).. hence, old ass presidents.
Truly impactful movers and shakers have easy access to capital in the US, can keep their companies and lives private, and achieve a very comfortable life. Why would anyone choose politics over that?
Finally, the US gov system of checks and balances was designed assuming it could be perfected incrementally, but long-lived systems also need cycles of renewal - think of a forest. That design flaw is showing up now as key systems are getting cracked open by opportunists.
Other than the very obvious fact that she wasn't an incumbent President with an established political record and bully pulpit, and thus was starting from a position of weakness late in the game, running against someone who managed to maintain a position as frontrunner despite having not been in public view for four years?
She did very little to separate herself from Biden and alienated her base trying too hard to appeal to the right. She wouldn't even take a stance against genocide.
One of the biggest dysfunctions (possibly intentional) in America's two party system is that the "left" isn't really leftist. Both parties are pro police, pro military, pro American imperialism, pro oligarchy and anti labor, and the politics of both drift to the right. The red team just happens to be far more right than the blue team.
And Kamala Harris didn't prove an exception to the rule. Voters didn't want to vote for the status quo, no one really liked Biden, he was just the only option besides Trump. But that's all she represented. Just "not Trump."
Readit News
Not every fence still has a use, but I hope they have a good think about what they're doing.
When people express worry over superhuman-AI alignment on forums like this, I find myself wishing they'd shift focus to the fact that we actually already have a problem with the mis-alignment of super-human entities in the form of large corporations and the billionaires who control them. (And yes, governments too; the whole point of our democratic form of government is that it's supposed to keep that behemoth better aligned with the values and will of "the people".)
To me it seems obvious that keeping a misaligned super-AGI from destroying humanity and keeping billionares and large multinational corporations from destroying humanity with climate change in the long-term or just degrading our quality of life (via pollution, wealth inequality, etc.) in the short term are really just differences of degree and not of kind.
But we actually have the latter problem right now, and, as a bonus, if we can figure out better ways of aligning our carbon-based and economic-legal system "overlords" in the present maybe it helps point us toward a better way of aligning our potential silicon-based "overlords" in the future.
He's just going to plant himself at the end of the conveyor belt of fresh cookies with his mouth open, and get rid of everything else.
Musk is going to try and entrench himself so much, that he'll never be able to countenance his opposition winning and removing him. Unless Trump dislodges him first, he's going to be a permanent problem.
I'm pretty sure I would pay 2 dollars to not have to deal with any of those consequences.
oh wait
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_inspectors_...
Deleted Comment
I'm not convinced that this is a good strategy when dealing with something with higher stakes than "posting dank memes", though. "Oops, that broke for a few days" matters a lot more when the thing that breaks is, say, paying out money for social security.
That is, as you said, sometimes the fence-that-is-inefficient-processes exists for a reason.
EDIT TO BE LESS SUBTLE BASED ON REPLIES: I think this is bad. Even in the most-charitable interpretation, it is bad. Particularly for the government, but even at Twitter it succeeded at making it smaller but approximately-nobody thinks Twitter is better now.
A country is not a private company in a free market. For some this is hard to understand.
A wild and ruthless cut would mean that the US Government would revert to a similar relative size it was in say, 1990. Back then Debt to GDP was about 60%, now it's over 120%, for measurably worse outcomes, wage stagnation, housing costs, healthcare, education, etc. One vocal group seems to think that we could solve it by spending more money and creating more programs. You know what they say about repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting different results.
That depends on your perspective. I'm sure there are people out there who think that since social security goes to people who aren't economically productive that it's not a thing that matters. I disagree with those people, but defining what matters is critical, and for Musk & co "what matters" is only anything that enriches Musk & co.
The Twitter analogy is that racist and disinformation posts are perfectly fine to Musk so after gutting all of the teams looking after these things, he was perfectly fine with the large increase in both.*
We shouldn't expect a different outcome with his changes to the government. We should expect large increases in abuses by banks (because regulation was gutted), large increases in racism and disparity in Alabama public schools (because the Department of Education was gutted), etc. etc.
* https://english.elpais.com/technology/2025-02-13/hate-speech...
One step in the playbook is reduce - “if you dont break things 10% of the time then you are not reducing enough” is almost verbatim what he has said, and done, for all of his companies.
I strongly disagree with my fellow Americans that government systems should be immune to this process or that people will be harmed. This sensitivity to perceived harm is a problem in and of itself.
You need to call a spade a spade. Occam's razor is being held to the neck of this country.
Chesterton primarily meant that in terms of traditional morality or other things that have largely already been totally rejected, he denied the existence of divorce because it presumes the state can dissolve oaths which is just to reject the existence of oaths.
Artificial institutions that have existed for a matter of decades don't make sense to apply the fence idea to, that's more about things that have been timeless in humanity that we recently started to reject.
> Artificial institutions that have existed for a matter of decades don't make sense to apply the fence idea to, that's more about things that have been timeless in humanity that we recently started to reject.
It matters a little bit what he originally meant, but not a whole lot. What we mean with the fence is simply that you should do a bit of due diligence before making changes. That applies to all sorts of systems, government or IT, or anything else.
This is true. There are things that, once done, cannot be undone. You can try to fix their consequences. You can change what you do going forward, so that the thing would not be done that way again. But you can't, say, un-kill an executed innocent.
It's a problem with bureaucracies. They bloat. They grow. They never shrink.
Byzantine bureaucracies refer to the notion that this got out of hand shortly before the collapse of what remained of the Roman empire at that point. Bureaucracies are also sometimes referred to as Kafkaesque to indicate how nonsensical, illogical, and absurdist bureaucracies can become.
Anyway, the US federal bureaucracy is enormous. It employs massive amounts of people. It's complicated, vast, and very change resistant. The task of doing something about that is so intimidating that no recent previous government has had the nerve to do anything significant about that. They all chickened out and instead just added their own layers of more bureaucracy to the mix. It's easier to add stuff to the pile than to take stuff away from it. So, after a few centuries of that, there's probably a lot of stuff there that barely makes sense to anyone.
The department highlighted in the article strikes me like a good example of a product of such a bureaucracy.
The article barely explains why this apparently very large, expensive, and richly staffed department exist, what it does, and why that is so important. It also fails to outline what kind of budget it has and what the intended purpose of that budget is.
I can't really judge based on this article whether taking a sledge hammer to that department is a good thing or not. The article seems to suggest it isn't but I can't say it's very convincing.
That chat bot that they highlight doesn't strike me as "key technology". Quite the opposite actually. The article raises more questions than it answers here. What was that thing supposed to do? Who was it for? Who backed/approved this? Why? How much did that cost? What else do people in that department do? All reasonable questions to ask.
At < 3 million people this is substantially under its peak and at about its level in the 1960's, and a smaller fraction of the workforce than pretty much everywhere. Wages are 0.9 per cent of the federal budget.
Right, exactly. And neither can Musk, really. So at this point, the answer isn't to just go ahead and take a sledge hammer to it. The correct course would be to actually go through the Congress and ask those very reasonable questions you pose. But Musk doesn't even want to work with with the Congressional DOGE Committee he set up. That's highly concerning.
Deleted Comment
Obviously, for a government staffed with experienced people, you'll be working with people who know how things work, and an incoming administration will have spent plenty of time outlining a plan of action well in advance of coming into office.
Does that apply to a notorious shitposting edgelord like Musk who is storming around like a bull in a china shop and sees the US as his new plaything? I doubt it - I certainly doubt any level of thinking is involved.
They probably did, if you look at it from a perspective of deliberately ruining the government. It looks like they are trying to reduce the government to nothing more than the IRS. Everything else will either get permanently trashed (any kind of consumer protection), sold off for parts, or contracted out to a private company started by one of their buddies.
Yeah, it might result in a very chaotic transition period, but these people don't care. They are rich enough that it's not going to personally affect them, and in the end they'll end up even richer. The entire goal right now is to do so much damage that it is going to take decades to restore - if it's even possible at all.
Elon Musk (and the billionaire class he represents) doesn't want a functioning CFPB because it doesn't serve him (or them). It will take a little while for them to fully sabotage the IRS and DOE as well, but they're working their way up to it.
Oh, I'm sure the parts that make sure I pay my taxes will function. But yeah, the parts that make sure Elon and Trump pay their taxes? If they aren't broken today, they will definitely be broken tomorrow.
Seems like a forced meta critique.
So the worst case scenario that anyone can imagine numbers for is that this department gets hit with 10% layoffs. That's not fun for anyone involved, but it's also not exactly crisis mode yet, and it seems like there are bigger things that this administration is doing to focus our pitchforks on?
There's a very real risk of burning out people's ability to be indignant if we get up in arms about every obscure department that suffers moderate layoffs. Let's save our outrage for the really important things.
I don't like Trump any more than you do, but mischaracterizing what is happening isn't helping the situation. The people who are pro-Trump or in the middle see through it, and the people who are already anti-Trump already agree with you.
Dead Comment
So billions are going to be wasted with nothing to show for it in the end.
I looked on their website and it says they do digital.gov, and on that site there is stuff like
>An introduction to digital governance. Understand how and why to implement digital governance
>Case study At the General Services Administration (GSA), we operate a Digital Experience Executive Board, supported by an agency-wide Digital Council. The Board is composed of senior executives who provide high-level direction, and Council members coordinate implementation of digital initiatives within their business line. We also have an Enterprise Digital Experience team to coordinate enterprise improvements to our agency’s digital experience. Read more about digital governance at GSA.
>We also defined the work of a website manager and identified one website manager for each digital property at GSA. Then, we updated their position descriptions... https://digital.gov/resources/an-introduction-to-digital-gov...
It doesn't sound that lean and mean.
The really scary thing is FedRAMP is part of the TTS (the affected agency).
FedRAMP is the program used to procure Cloud and Cybersecurity services for federal agencies.
With TTS in flux, that means FedRAMP is in flux as well - which means tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in Cloud and Cybersecurity spend is on the line.
I have significant qualms about FedRAMP, but it was at least better than nothing.
FedRAMP was also one of the last tethers for the Cloud and Cybersecurity industry to remain in the US. Otherwise, the entire center of gravity is in Israel, India, and Eastern Europe (as I have mentioned multiple times).
"For most of the country’s history, state and lo- cal usury laws imposed modest consumer protec- tions by setting caps on interest rates and fees. But in 1978, a federal statute was used to bypass these laws. Creditors quickly rewrote the rules, issuing un- intelligible contracts that increased fees, penal- ties, and interest rates. The fragmented financial regulatory bodies that remain have operated as if their main goal were lender profitability."
[...]
"The ever-widening information imbalance between consumers and creditors has only made borrowers easier marks. In a Federal Trade Commission study conducted last year, for instance, nine in ten mort- gage customers examining relatively straightforward fixed-rate loan agreements could not figure out the up-front costs on the loan; half could not iden- tify the loan amount. Of all the borrowers who were sold subprime mortgages in the past five years, nearly 60 percent would have qualified for prime mortgages if brokers had offered them; the sub- prime mortgages carried so many rate escalators, prepayment penalties, and other traps that even would-be prime borrowers defaulted."
Elizabeth Warren back in this era was also famous for talking about the twin-income trap, here's a 2004 talk about 'The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVL7QY0S8A&feature=youtu.be
The alternative offered was Kamala Harris. Thanks DNC.
First-past-the-post voting practically guarantees a two party system emerges over time: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo
The US gov has been worn way at for decades by unscrupulous people seeking power and made so unpleasant to work in that few young people want to go into political leadership - and those that do don’t get far enough to have impact (eg. Buttigieg).. hence, old ass presidents.
Truly impactful movers and shakers have easy access to capital in the US, can keep their companies and lives private, and achieve a very comfortable life. Why would anyone choose politics over that?
Finally, the US gov system of checks and balances was designed assuming it could be perfected incrementally, but long-lived systems also need cycles of renewal - think of a forest. That design flaw is showing up now as key systems are getting cracked open by opportunists.
She did very little to separate herself from Biden and alienated her base trying too hard to appeal to the right. She wouldn't even take a stance against genocide.
One of the biggest dysfunctions (possibly intentional) in America's two party system is that the "left" isn't really leftist. Both parties are pro police, pro military, pro American imperialism, pro oligarchy and anti labor, and the politics of both drift to the right. The red team just happens to be far more right than the blue team.
And Kamala Harris didn't prove an exception to the rule. Voters didn't want to vote for the status quo, no one really liked Biden, he was just the only option besides Trump. But that's all she represented. Just "not Trump."