Musk raiding personal data of fed employees?

[crazyfingers]

So that facist Musk guy who resigned appears to have had read/write access to the Treasury system.

Treasury Department officials said Tuesday that the agency last week “mistakenly” and “briefly” gave a member of Elon Musk’s team the power to alter a sensitive federal payments database, prompting an internal forensic investigation that remains ongoing.

The disclosure, made in a series of court filings, undercuts the Trump administration’s repeated public claims that the DOGE team’s access to the federal payments system was limited to a “read-only” basis.

Senior Treasury officials wrote in sworn declarations that Marko Elez, a 25-year-old former SpaceX and X engineer, was erroneously granted “read/write” privileges to a secure payments system on Feb. 5.

Elez resigned from the Treasury Department a day later, after The Wall Street Journal surfaced racist social media posts, and Treasury officials said he has not been reinstated to his previous role.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/11/musk-ally-mistakenly-power-alter-payments-system-00203714

 

[ZiprHead]

Is it just me or are the comment and social media corners of the web saturated with the same message asking 'Why are these departments afraid of being audited? What are they afraid will be found?'

Accountants do audits. Programmers not so much.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Is it just me or are the comment and social media corners of the web saturated with the same message asking 'Why are these departments afraid of being audited? What are they afraid will be found?'

Accountants do audits. Programmers not so much.

Yes... and generally people with experience do audits as well. My point was there was a coordinated social media blitz regarding posts on social media.

 

[KCFlyer]

Is any of what Trump is doing justified? For my part, from what I've seen, definitely. I could give plenty of examples of the rot within. But there should be an independent third party overseeing and giving a final thumbs up or down on a person's career.

There should be a third party called "Congress" that should get the review of the audit and make THEIR recommendations of what to cut. This should not be left up to Leon and the teenagers.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Is any of what Trump is doing justified? For my part, from what I've seen, definitely. I could give plenty of examples of the rot within. But there should be an independent third party overseeing and giving a final thumbs up or down on a person's career.

There should be a third party called "Congress" that should get the review of the audit and make THEIR recommendations of what to cut. This should not be left up to Leon and the teenagers.

Of course, they signed off on virtually all of this spending. They don't go the level of approving individual pens purchases though. And the Musks out there seems to think they should.

 

[TV and credit cards]

Is any of what Trump is doing justified? For my part, from what I've seen, definitely. I could give plenty of examples of the rot within. But there should be an independent third party overseeing and giving a final thumbs up or down on a person's career.

There should be a third party called "Congress" that should get the review of the audit and make THEIR recommendations of what to cut. This should not be left up to Leon and the teenagers.

Of course, they signed off on virtually all of this spending. They don't go the level of approving individual pens purchases though. And the Musks out there seems to think they should.

Yes. This isn't Congress. Departments heads need to trust their agency heads who need to trust their managers and on down the chain and they are all delegated a certain amount of authority. It has to be this way. You can't have one person micromanaging thousands of people.
Musk can do a lot, management and above. The rank and file will be untouchable without cause. Trump can starve the system, heap more on the rank and file as long as it is the same stuff that is in their job description. Department/agency heads need to get good managers in. Will this actually happen though? Who knows?
Musk can do a lot of good. What he is actually doing only Musk and his little entourage knows. News media is only going to feed us the juicy bits they know of.

 

[KCFlyer]

Is any of what Trump is doing justified? For my part, from what I've seen, definitely. I could give plenty of examples of the rot within. But there should be an independent third party overseeing and giving a final thumbs up or down on a person's career.

There should be a third party called "Congress" that should get the review of the audit and make THEIR recommendations of what to cut. This should not be left up to Leon and the teenagers.

Of course, they signed off on virtually all of this spending. They don't go the level of approving individual pens purchases though. And the Musks out there seems to think they should.

Yes. This isn't Congress. Departments heads need to trust their agency heads who need to trust their managers and on down the chain and they are all delegated a certain amount of authority. It has to be this way. You can't have one person micromanaging thousands of people.
Musk can do a lot, management and above. The rank and file will be untouchable without cause. Trump can starve the system, heap more on the rank and file as long as it is the same stuff that is in their job description. Department/agency heads need to get good managers in. Will this actually happen though? Who knows?
Musk can do a lot of good. What he is actually doing only Musk and his little entourage knows. News media is only going to feed us the juicy bits they know of.

And I wish that Musk would audit, make recommendations and THEN take it to Congress. NOT fire and slash because THEY deem it wasteful. A good friend of mine is a research scientist at a university. He and another guy developed something using a Department of Defense grant that was for research into traumatic brain injuries for soliders coming home form Iraq and Afghanistan. It was a brain implant. The did a lot of the research into this an reached a point where it needed private money to advance it. They even had a name for the device that they created - NeuraLink. Now a certain autistic South African liked that name and bought it but the bulk of the work for HIS project came from a university with a government grant. They slashed "indirect costs". Leon wouldn't have seen the technology for "his" company were it not for the work done by universities getting grants. He shared what "indirect costs" pay for. I wonder if Leon knows this.

 

[Shadowy Man]

The average American does not understand how science works at all, let alone the details of indirect costs on federally funded grants.

This is why they can get away with this stuff and why the societal moves toward the delegitimization of experts has been so dangerous.

 

[Elixir]

I wish that Musk would audit, make recommendations and THEN take it to Congress.

The back room deal between Trump and Republicans seems to be

"Y'all STFU and play Sargent Schultz if they ask about Musk or anything else, ok?
Or get your ass unelected, guaranteed."

All competent or well intended people will be replaced at every level with self serving, avaricious tools or The Dictator.
All that remains to be seen are the questions of whether midterms will be held, whether the results will be favorable to Dems and whether the results will hold if all the above happens.
Barring that, I doubt that a bloodless return to Democracy is even possible. After four years, what remains of federal government will be inoperable by traditional means, due to the trust required for traditional means to produce a government that works.

 

[marc]

Guess DOGE didn't find any government waste here, nope none at all.

State Dept. Plans $400 Million Purchase of Armored Tesla Cybertrucks

The department plans to buy armored Tesla vehicles. Elon Musk, who is leading efforts to cut government spending, has won more than $13 billion in government contracts in the past five years.

www.nytimes.com

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Is it just me or are the comment and social media corners of the web saturated with the same message asking 'Why are these departments afraid of being audited? What are they afraid will be found?'

Accountants do audits. Programmers not so much.

And you don't need write access to audit. I'd much prefer my auditors to have no write access. Write access is about cooking the books, not about auditing them.

 

[KCFlyer]

And you don't need write access to audit. I'd much prefer my auditors to have no write access. Write access is about cooking the books, not about auditing them.

Before I retired I had been thru several audits. In all of them the auditors had at least a basic knowledge of what we did and made recommendations on that. Plus, while some were young, none were teenagers. Leon is an idiot savant, and I"m not so sure of the savant part of that. I'm not against an audit..I would prefer that professional auditors would dig and ask questions and write reports....then make recommendations....then take it to Congress. Leon has said that "some things I say may not be right". That's true enough for all of us, but the problem is that Leon has ACTED on that. That's dangerous as hell.

 

[Shadowy Man]

And you don't need write access to audit. I'd much prefer my auditors to have no write access. Write access is about cooking the books, not about auditing them.

Before I retired I had been thru several audits. In all of them the auditors had at least a basic knowledge of what we did and made recommendations on that. Plus, while some were young, none were teenagers. Leon is an idiot savant, and I"m not so sure of the savant part of that. I'm not against an audit..I would prefer that professional auditors would dig and ask questions and write reports....then make recommendations....then take it to Congress. Leon has said that "some things I say may not be right". That's true enough for all of us, but the problem is that Leon has ACTED on that. That's dangerous as hell.

But that would be the legal way to do it. What fun is that?