[abernard1]

Your comment is quite extraordinary as Orwell's work dealt with an unthinking bureaucracy resembling the Soviet Union. He also had the foresight to see the U.K. could be a totalitarian state.

An honest assessment of the revelations of USAID spending and its funding of literally thousands of media companies via direct grants or voluntary purchases would suggest the information environment surrounding this is not entirely benign. And it would suggest that reasonable people can also dispute the pure intentions of a system that makes it almost entirely impossible to fire people, and was started as a soft power system for US foreign policy.

[kzs0]

But how does any of that relate to banning signal links regardless? This is an effort to reduce self-organization and solidarity between affected normal people. It isn’t just USAID, 100,000+ people are being illegally terminated across the government (probationary employees who are only allowed to be fired for “performance,” but many/most have fine reviews and/or just started).

If a bunch of new people are being fired after having just moved or started new positions, why wouldn’t people try self organizing to support their coworkers who just had their lives upended?

[abernard1]

My comment was simply in direct relation to the poster's comment about trustworthiness of government.

But as to your assertion of "illegally terminated," let me provide some context.

Not a single lawsuit has provided evidence of damages under law. One of the TROs has been shot down outright. This is key, as the judiciary requires law to be violated to intervene. They are not an HR department, and there are existing remedies for this in the administration. No such violations warranting legal action outside of the existing system have been shown.

Not only this, they went district "judge shopping" on a Friday night, two hours prior to close. Many of these judges are now being shown with extremely inflammatory political rhetoric showing bias, and one will have articles of impeachment drawn.

The circumstances surrounding this judicial action are so unprecedented, that when the Administration appealed showing evidence of fraud and illegal behavior, they "asked" the judge if they should allow it. The point of this is to show the frivolity of the suit: not only does the judiciary not determine Executive Power under Article II, they're asking the judge if the judge should take executive action to break the law.

While law is subject to interpretation, it is not clear (and I do not believe) these employees are being terminated illegally, the least of which is they have yet to describe the legal circumstances under which their termination is unlawful. Unlike common wisdom, the federal judiciary is not-coequal with the Legislature and the Executive; the Supreme Court is. Article III specifies that federal courts called "inferior" courts are subject to the leisure of Congress. These courts have been disbanded twice in history and do not hold the power that popular culture thinks they do.

[Juliate]

If you take USAID « revelations » by Musk at face value, you are… rather misled.

The very behavior of DOGE looks like kids unleashed in a factory they don’t understand, willing not to recognize their capacities are adequate to understand it in so little time.

There were knowledgeable people, they’ve been fired.

You wouldn’t accept it for a flying plane pilot or a surgeon in the surgery room, why would you accept it for state agencies?

[abernard1]

I was asked to join USDS by the head of the agency in 2018.

I am fully aware of the widespread fraud they were encountering, as well as the technical difficulties of fixing it. I am also aware of the less-than-neutral culture that pervaded that organization at that time. I also have experience as a defense contractor and have personally met and interacted with many people in the administrative bureaucracy, including high ranking cabinet members.

My comments come from personal experience both with the precursor to DOGE (which is a division in USDS), as well as how the federal government operates.

[Juliate]

And that’s a good point of view.

And yet you believe that fixing this requires pulling the plug on most if not all, by people totally remote to how it works?

That’s a peculiar way of fixing this. Especially in administrative matters (where the side effects are as deadly as putting an untrained random person in charge of a civil airplane).