Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by adastra22 499 days ago
Have you worked in government? I have. I helped manage a program that was an actual line item on the national budget. I'm quite familiar with how it works.

There is a lot of executive leeway in interpreting how to spend money allocated in congressional authorizations. As I said, I was managing a program that was in the 10's of millions of dollars and a line item on my agency's budget. The actual wording of the authorization was quite short, and there was a lot of executive agency in deciding how to structure it.

But most of your comment doesn't seem to be addressing what my comment was saying, and is politically charged enough that I don't think it would be fruitful for us to continue this conversation. I wish you the best.
1 comments
ModernMech 499 days ago
As an employee of the government responsible for these items, you are beholden to follow the law. If you break the law you are prosecuted. You have to go through background checks, get training on what you're legally allowed to do, receive training for security clearances and how to handle sensitive data, go through that whole vetting process. You must preserve documents, be free of conflicts of interest, your work is auditable, and your department must respond to FOIA requests. The bar is high for you because the public puts our trust in you to spend our money.

None of this is true for Musk. He's not treating any of this with care, and we can see this in real time as USAID food/medicine is held up and rotting at borders. How is that not wasteful?

If you were to make those kind of capricious decisions as a government employee leading to people going hungry and staying sick or worse dying... Congress would rightfully be demanding answers and your resignation.

I think it should be obvious to everyone we are not dealing with an instance of a regular employee exercising routine and precedented discretion here, when Congress is up in arms, agency employees are up in arms, class action lawsuits are being filed. How often does a response of this scale happen when you make a decision?

link