[cromwellian]

The issue isn't just Musk's clearances, it's the clearances of the employees he's giving access to. With stuff like Salt Typhoon out there, and reports of Musk's college age hackers hooking arbitrary hard disks up to government computers, can you imagine the potential for potential Russian or Chinese infiltration given how careless Musk has shown his management to have been in the past?

Remember how Israel destroyed Iranian centrifuges with a worm on a USB stick that they just waited for someone to be dumb enough to plug into a government connected intranet?

C'mon man, the people defending Musk's brazen behavior here really need to think long and hard about what they're justifying because the like the guy's cars or rockets, or MAGA politics. This is CRAZY.

[derangedHorse]

If you can find one, I’d like to see a news story showing that the people accessing the data don’t have the proper security clearances to. It seems most people are getting swept up in media narratives rather than the reported facts.

[cromwellian]

What do you consider a proper security clearance? One emergency approved by the President on a whim, or one that is the result of careful vetting over a 6 month process which seems to be the standard for renewals or new clearances? One of them is 19 years old, the other 5 are 24 and younger. You want 6 kids in charge of a 6 trillion dollar system, and one of them with hedge fund connections? Yeah, nothing that could go wrong there.

And what was so urgent about axing USAID that required this weird process of bypassing all of the normal ways people audit a six trillion dollar payment system? Seriously, what was the hurry?

You don’t think they’re being sloppy and reckless? We literally have critical websites going off line, we have airports like San Carlos losing all their ATCs, we have republicans in Congress confused whe their own constituents lose access to services because of misworded EOs, this is not normal.

We couldn’t have had a report prepared over six months, have Musk go to Congress and testify and show all the waste, and a plan to prioritize the cuts, have an orderly wind down, etc?

The US government isn’t X where you fly in in the middle of the night and are so incompetent you start randomly unplugging servers and have to be frantically rescued by heroic sysadmins.

This is the people’s property, not his. We have three branches of government, due process, checks and balances, we don’t have a dictatorship and frankly everyday this is looking more and more like a soft coup.

[derangedHorse]

Property security clearance is one that is legally given, regardless of circumstance. The idea of having laws doesn't involve picking and choosing what's considered proper. There's also no "emergency approved" security clearances happening here. In addition to that, Katie Wells has already posted that "No classified material was accessed without proper security clearances."

The strategy for this administration is to do as much as possible as quickly as possible because they know they'll be challenged and they only have 4 years. The Medicaid site was up the very same day (01/28/25) with no payments missed. And the previous contracting company for San Antonio has been given an extension. Nothing they're doing has been shown to be illegal and what you're describing are pretty minor blips considering the changes they're making.

[rayiner]

> This is the people’s property, not his. We have three branches of government, due process, checks and balances, we don’t have a dictatorship and frankly everyday this is looking more and more like a soft coup.

Yes, it’s the people’s property, being granted to private third parties by the executive branch under block grants from Congress. And the people elected Trump as the President in part based on his promise to scrutinize how unelected civil servants were managing all this. This is the elected leader of the executive branch delegating authority to his agent to regulate performing discretionary functions of the executive branch. That’s responsive government, not dictatorship.

We just had an election where both parties ran on an anti-immigration platform, and the more extreme guy won. If that didn’t result in canceling discretionary grants to refugee resettlement programs that would have meant democracy doesn’t work.

Demanding that someone write a report and have some committee is absurd. You can never change an organization that way. What you’re really demanding is that unelected civil servants be allowed to prioritize what they want instead of what the voters want.

I encourage you to listen to this NYT podcast about immigration: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi.... It details how for decades immigration policy has departed from what Congress actually enacted and what voters wanted. A lot of that was due to state department just doing whatever it wanted—e.g. turning the H1B from a temporary worker program into a vehicle for permanent immigration. That’s a profound failure of democracy.

[selimthegrim]

> And the people elected Trump as the President in part based on his promise to scrutinize how unelected civil servants were managing all this.

By having a bunch of unelected non civil servants run rampant? Having a guy who registered as a foreign agent of Turkey (Flynn) tweeting out details in a manner that could put people under threat? What line is there that they would cross that would concern you? If they ordered Muslims to swear loyalty oaths or leave that would be fine with you? Keep in mind in this discussion there is precisely one party that’s been threatened with death by Muslims and it’s not you.

[rayiner]

> By having a bunch of unelected non civil servants run rampant?

This is where you’re going off the rails. Civil servant is a constitutionally meaningless label. There’s the President, Principal and Inferior Officers, then employees and volunteers with ministerial authority. Civil servant isn’t a special category. It’s not a constitutionally recognized authority that somehow must be protected from the President and his agents.

And to be clear I don’t dislike civil servants. I worked with great civil servants at FCC. But their job is to do what the elected President and confirmed appointees say. There’s great civil servants, and there’s crappy ones. A genius from SpaceX is probably substantially smarter and more diligent than the average.

> What line is there that they would cross that would concern you?

The only “line” that’s been crossed is an imaginary one between different categories of unelected employees whose authority derives entirely from the elected president and senate confirmed political appointees.

> If they ordered Muslims to swear loyalty oaths or leave that would be fine with you?

Elon is the good guy. He tweeted about NED, which I didn’t know about. Their web page crows about helping to overthrow democracy the government in Bangladesh. When I told my dad about it—who has been a USAID contractor his whole career—he was like “yeah, NED is a CIA front.” He also pointed out that USAID under Samantha Powers has become enormously political and has been turned into a vehicle for destabilizing foreign governments. I hate that’s true—our thanksgivings are literally a USAID reunion. But it’s not surprising that the state department has been using the goodwill of an agency that builds hospitals in Bangladesh to export their crazy ideas around the world.

Muslims should be supporting what Trump and Elon are doing. This is the first break in the bipartisan consensus in favor of American Empire. I grew up listening to complaints about the state department meddling in other countries’ internal affairs. And this is the first chance I’ve seen in my lifetime to fix that.

[selimthegrim]

I do agree about NED (what did they do in BD?) My parents voted for Trump. To say the least this is causing friction. I have a little trouble believing people like Mike Flynn have their safety and best interests in mind.

> A genius from SpaceX is probably substantially smarter and more diligent than the average.

This hardly strikes me as a democratic sentiment or one that has anything to do with Constitutional governance. I went to school with a lot of geniuses, people certainly smarter than your SpaceX employees. I don’t know that then or now I would give them untrammeled run of the government.

> Muslims should be supporting what Trump and Elon are doing. This is the first break in the bipartisan consensus in favor of American Empire.

I seem to remember an anecdote from partition of Bengal about a goat getting its head stuck in a pot and the village headman’s preferred solution being to decapitate the goat.