Tag Archives: federal agencies

No More Rule Of Law

Talking Poiints Memo has been considering what the publication calls “Musk’s Little Green Men.”

The little green men are the Musk operatives who have been taking over the top federal administrative agencies–the Office of Personnel Management, the OMB, GAO, the Treasury Department…).  TPM asks “Who are these guys?” and the answer turns out to be far from comforting. These Musk flunkies are young men between 19 and 24 years of age. Several are college dropouts who left to go into tech and are currently interning at Thiel’s or Musk’s companies. At least one is a “Thiel fellow.”

They know a lot about computers–and nothing, obviously, about the Constitution or the rule of law.

These interns have gained access to the private information of millions of government employees. They have connected insecure computers to the secure ones used by the federal agencies, allowing them access that could allow them to cut off payments to government vendors, Social Security recipients, humanitarian NGOs and state governments.

Like Musk, these young “techie nerds” are unelected, unappointed and unauthorized– and happily violating numerous laws.

As Josh Marshall writes,

In other words, hard right, techno-red-pilled bros, who now have access to things like your social security checks (whether you get them or not), your financial and, likely in some cases, medical records and at least the ability to shut down whole sections of the federal government at will by simply turning off their funding spigots. (Not good!) It sounds crazy and absurd to think that individual people could have that kind of power absent anything the law recognizes. But this is what it means when you’re this far up (or down, choose your metaphor) in the brain stem of the national government. This is what it means when you have access to the central Treasury Department payment network. You can simply turn off a spigot of funding. (I’ve now had it described to me precisely how you do it.) If you have that access, whether it’s legal or not isn’t relevant. The best analogy I can provide is that there’s some person at your bank who could just change a setting and suddenly all your checks and payments would be rejected and your funds would be frozen. Now imagine if “you” is NIH or USAID or … well, Social Security.

Musk is claiming that they’ve “found” $4 billion dollars of “waste” a day, and is threatening to turn it off. Of course, what Elon Musk considers “waste” is undoubtedly similar to the version of “free speech” with which he destroyed Twitter’s utility and credibility. 

Whether Musk’s version of “waste” is accurate or not, however, is beside the point. What he and his band of techie hackers are doing is illegal. Monumentally illegal. 

Senator Ron Wyden has challenged the hacking–noting that Musk lacks a security clearance and has multiple conflicts of interest. (The full text of his letter is available here.) 

To put it bluntly, these payment systems simply cannot fail, and any politically-motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy. I am deeply concerned that following the federal grant and loan freeze earlier this week, these officials associated with Musk may have intended to access these payment systems to illegally withhold payments to any number of programs. I can think of no good reason why political operators who have demonstrated a blatant disregard for the law would need access to these sensitive, mission-critical systems … The federal government is in a financially precarious position, currently utilizing accounting maneuvers to continue paying its bills since it reached the debt limit at the beginning of the year. I am concerned that mismanagement of these payment systems could threaten the full faith and credit of the United States.”

The press has previously reported that Musk was denied a high-level clearance to access the government’s most sensitive secrets. I am concerned that Musk’s enormous business operation in China — a country whose intelligence agencies have stolen vast amounts of sensitive data about Americans, including U.S. government employee data by hacking U.S. government systems — endangers U.S. cybersecurity and creates conflicts of interest that make his access to these systems a national security risk.

Americans did (narrowly and with the help of significant voter suppression) elect one megalomaniac, but no one cast a vote for Elon Musk. No voter, no legislative chamber, no public official was empowered to authorize his takeover of vital federal agencies, or the substitution of his opinion about expenditures for that of Congress.

While Trump diverts public attention by undermining what had been the world’s strongest economy, terrorizing immigrants and making the country safe for White Christian Nationalists, Musk is managing the coup.

Neither respects–or obeys–the law.

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I Wonder Why We Have These Agencies and Programs?

Or, more accurately, why we had them.

A few days ago, The Hill came out with a list of 66 agencies that the tax “reform” bill simply eliminates. They include everything from Agriculture’s Economic Development agencies to the Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Grants and Education to the Education Department’s Grants for Comprehensive Literacy Development  and Effective Instruction.

At a time when our infrastructure is crumbling around us, the bill eliminates the Transportation Department’s National Infrastructure Investments (TIGER).

The list includes many other programs that would seem important, as well as a number of initiatives with puzzling names and obscure purposes.

I would be the last person to argue against pruning the mystifying thicket of federal programs and agencies. I’m sure many of them have outlived whatever usefulness they may have once had–and it wouldn’t shock me to discover that some of them didn’t ever have much justification for their existence. That said, the process through which they are being terminated is simply indefensible.

There has not been a single hearing held to determine the continued utility of any of these agencies. To the best of my knowledge, no notices were sent out to affected constituencies, no publication in the Federal Register invited public comment. Like the rest of this monstrous bill, these decisions were made hastily, in back rooms to which neither Democrats nor more moderate Republicans were invited.

This is not the way a democratic system works. In a representative government that honors due process and the rule of law, how decisions are made is ultimately more important than the substance of the decisions themselves.

The decision to terminate a program or agency should be made in daylight, with people familiar with the purposes and operation; those making the determination should hear from critics and defenders of the program, and from proponents and opponents of its termination. There should be some version of a cost/benefit analysis upon which a final decision is made.

These 66 programs were created for a reason. There should be a principled reason for their discontinuance.

Right now, America is being ruled–not governed, but ruled–by an illegitimate cabal empowered by vote suppression and gerrymandering and answerable not to the citizens who (theoretically) elected them, but to their donors and to a much lesser extent, their rabid and uneducated base.

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