gtyellowjacket
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I agree with his main points but no need to throw the xenophobia in there. Musk is a US citizen and has been for two decades.
Musk now controls all US payments 🚨 | USDA freezes payments to farmers
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I agree with his main points but no need to throw the xenophobia in there. Musk is a US citizen and has been for two decades.
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“… Elon Musk, a private citizen with no official government role, has been handed sweeping, unchecked power over key functions of the U.S. government.
After days of pushing career civil servants out of their jobs, Musk seized control of the U.S. Treasury’s payment systems—systems that handle more than $6 trillion annually in payments to households, businesses, and government agencies.
Millions of Americans rely on these systems, and now they’re under the influence of a billionaire with no government position.
This comes on the heels of Musk effectively taking over the Office of Personnel Management, locking out federal employees from their own systems.
The consequences of that power grab are still unfolding, but this latest move makes one thing clear: Musk isn’t just advising the president—he’s running parts of the government himself.
And here’s the most disturbing part: Musk is not a government official. He was not elected. He was not nominated. He was not confirmed.
His so-called “Department of Government Efficiency”—a name literally put in quotes in the executive order creating it—is not a real government agency.
It’s a smokescreen for consolidating power in the hands of a single private citizen.”
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“…
The Journal also reports that “a person familiar with the arrangement said DOGE representatives won’t have direct authority to stop individual payments or make other changes, describing their access as ‘read only’”:
The report doesn’t specific who might be doing that monitoring; the Treasury Department’s inspector general was one of the 15 independent agency watchdogs the Trump White House purged a week ago.
So now Musk and DOGE have access to and potentially power over what is basically America’s checkbook, weeks before another debt ceiling crisis looms, at a time when Musk is vowing to somehow cut a hysterically large amount of federal spending, and during a chaotic period in which he and other officials in the Trump administration are running roughshod across the federal government like they have unchecked power.
On Saturday, Musk was already making wild unsubstantiated claims on X about what his DOGE investigators had discovered about federal payment processes. …”
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“… But again, it’s not actually clear what Musk and his DOGE and White House allies intend to do with the federal payment system or the information it holds. The executive director of the progressive economic think tank Groundwork Collaborative, Lindsay Owens, notes some troubling possibilities in an MSNBC op-ed:
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I said it was coming, but sadly I don't have a platform of any consequence.
heelslegup
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There are far easier ways to find out exacltly how fedeeral money is spent than this. The info is public. If he wants something more granular, go to Treasury or the appropriate Congressional committees. Check disbusing needs to be controlled by the Treasury Dept PERIOD.
When you get politicians or non-govt olfficials like Musk access to that, you run the risk of potential abuse, be it delaying authorized payments, or going around authorizations.
He probably wants the govt to start paying in bitcoin.
When you get politicians or non-govt olfficials like Musk access to that, you run the risk of potential abuse, be it delaying authorized payments, or going around authorizations.
He probably wants the govt to start paying in bitcoin.
Burgawnc
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Trump released to Musk and his merry group of hackers the SSNs, ages, addresses and every data point needed to enable IDENTITY FRAUD. This is greatest security breach in American history.
It is appalling that the GOP is standing by silent, stupefied and complicit.
It is appalling that the GOP is standing by silent, stupefied and complicit.
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Trump confirms:
“Well, he’s [Musk] got access only to letting people go who he thinks are no good if we agree with him, and it’s only if we agree with him. He’s a very talented guy from the standpoint of management and costs and we put him in charge of seeing what he could do with certain groups and certain numbers, the numbers, some of the numbers are horrible what he’s found uh a hundred, think of it, a hundred million dollars in condoms to Hamas. Condoms to Hamas and many other things that are frankly even more ridiculous. And they’re finding tremendous waste, really waste more than anything else, I think you could say, probably fraud and abuse could be added to it … “
“Well, he’s [Musk] got access only to letting people go who he thinks are no good if we agree with him, and it’s only if we agree with him. He’s a very talented guy from the standpoint of management and costs and we put him in charge of seeing what he could do with certain groups and certain numbers, the numbers, some of the numbers are horrible what he’s found uh a hundred, think of it, a hundred million dollars in condoms to Hamas. Condoms to Hamas and many other things that are frankly even more ridiculous. And they’re finding tremendous waste, really waste more than anything else, I think you could say, probably fraud and abuse could be added to it … “
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JCTarheel82
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Looks like the fictional Hamas condom budget has now doubled. How long before it hits $1 billion?
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A 25-Year-Old With Elon Musk Ties Has Direct Access to the Federal Payment System
The Bureau of the Fiscal Service is a sleepy part of the Treasury Department. It’s also where, sources say, a 25-year-old engineer tied to Elon Musk has admin privileges over the code that controls Social Security payments, tax returns, and more.
A 25-Year-Old With Elon Musk Ties Has Direct Access to the Federal Payment System
The Bureau of the Fiscal Service is a sleepy part of the Treasury Department. It’s also where, sources say, a 25-year-old engineer tied to Elon Musk has admin privileges over the code that controls Social Security payments, tax returns, and more.
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“
A 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who previously worked for two Elon Musk companies, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the US government, three sources tell WIRED.
Two of those sources say that Elez’s privileges include the ability not just to read but to write code on two of the most sensitive systems in the US government: The Payment Automation Manager (PAM) and Secure Payment System (SPS) at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). Housed on a top-secret mainframe, these systems control, on a granular level, government payments that in their totality amount to more than a fifth of the US economy.
Despite reporting that suggests DOGE has access to these Treasury systems on a “read-only” level, sources say Elez, who has visited a Kansas City office housing BFS systems, has many administrator-level privileges. Typically, those admin privileges could give someone the power to log into servers through secure shell access, navigate the entire file system, change user permissions, and delete or modify critical files.
That could allow someone to bypass the security measures of, and potentially cause irreversible changes to, the very systems they have access to. …”
A 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who previously worked for two Elon Musk companies, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the US government, three sources tell WIRED.
Two of those sources say that Elez’s privileges include the ability not just to read but to write code on two of the most sensitive systems in the US government: The Payment Automation Manager (PAM) and Secure Payment System (SPS) at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). Housed on a top-secret mainframe, these systems control, on a granular level, government payments that in their totality amount to more than a fifth of the US economy.
Despite reporting that suggests DOGE has access to these Treasury systems on a “read-only” level, sources say Elez, who has visited a Kansas City office housing BFS systems, has many administrator-level privileges. Typically, those admin privileges could give someone the power to log into servers through secure shell access, navigate the entire file system, change user permissions, and delete or modify critical files.
That could allow someone to bypass the security measures of, and potentially cause irreversible changes to, the very systems they have access to. …”
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“… “You could do anything with these privileges,” says one source with knowledge of the system, who adds that they cannot conceive of a reason that anyone would need them for purposes of simply hunting down fraudulent payments or analyzing disbursement flow.
"Technically I don't see why this couldn't happen," a federal IT worker tells WIRED in a phone call late on Monday night, referring to the possibility of a DOGE employee being granted elevated access to a government server.
"If you would have asked me a week ago, I'd have told you that this kind of thing would never in a million years happen. But now, who the fuck knows."
A source says they are concerned that data could be passed from secure systems to DOGE operatives within the General Services Administration (GSA).
WIRED reporting has shown that Elon Musk’s associates—including Nicole Hollander, who slept in Twitter’s offices as Musk acquired the company, and Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who now runs a GSA agency, along with a host of extremely young and inexperienced engineers—have infiltrated the GSA, and have attempted to use White House security credentials to gain access to GSA tech, something experts have said is highly unusual and poses a huge security risk. …”
"Technically I don't see why this couldn't happen," a federal IT worker tells WIRED in a phone call late on Monday night, referring to the possibility of a DOGE employee being granted elevated access to a government server.
"If you would have asked me a week ago, I'd have told you that this kind of thing would never in a million years happen. But now, who the fuck knows."
A source says they are concerned that data could be passed from secure systems to DOGE operatives within the General Services Administration (GSA).
WIRED reporting has shown that Elon Musk’s associates—including Nicole Hollander, who slept in Twitter’s offices as Musk acquired the company, and Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who now runs a GSA agency, along with a host of extremely young and inexperienced engineers—have infiltrated the GSA, and have attempted to use White House security credentials to gain access to GSA tech, something experts have said is highly unusual and poses a huge security risk. …”