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Onlookers freak out as 25-year-old set loose on Treasury computer system (rawstory.com)
113 points by brohee 15 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 133 comments



Recent and related:

The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42910910 - Feb 2025 (2691 comments)


I think it's less about "25-year-old" and more about unvetted stranger with no clearance given unfettered read-write access to the money of a country apparently not run by a dictator, but elected officials(none of which were involved).


How is this possible with any auditing/compliance framework in place? Any basic framework that I have been part of, the developers can't have access to production, and we have to show rigorous testing processes are passed before we update production.


> How is this possible with any auditing/compliance framework in place?

It is not, what happened is someone said “I have authority from the President which trumps your ‘frameworks’ and ‘processes’, and if you fight me on this you will be fired and then we’ll bring in your replacement with the same deal and repeat as necessary until there is compliance with our demands”.


Yes, it is not "turtles all the way down" (or code/processes/law).

The "base layer" has always been "men with guns".

If you fail to cooperate, an armed security guard will take your badge and escort you to the build exit.

If that security guard does not cooperate, another man with a gun can always be found.


I’d argue the base layer is money. The men with guns need to be paid so they can feed their families.


Fair point. "How to control the men with guns" occupies the minds of billionaires. A lot.

> Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.

source: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prep...


"The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed “in time”"


It's not really money though right? It's the power that money gives. Food, shelter, health care. The CIA might add sex into that list.

Without a US government the US greenback is worthless, and so is any power.


> auditing/compliance framework

Do people believe in these?

I've had tons of access over the years to all sort of projects right to my laptop, despite compliance and audits.


Because they are being guided by the rigor of trust me bro.


"I know how to code, therefore I know everything."


More like, "Therefore, I know nothing because instead of learning about life through experience I have wasted years playing with a computer instead."


Not commenting on this particular case, but on the general sentiment.

Aristotle did say in Politics IV that appointing public office by lottery, drawing from the real public, is more democratic (power to the people) than elections, which is an oligarchic exercise.


Makes sense.

I've always held the opinion that elected officials should have to use public health care, send their kids to public schools, and use public transport.

This would ensure that they would have to maintain these institutions and be able to face their constituents on the daily.


> A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation.

-- Gustavo Petro


Manhattan :)

"real public" at the time excluded women, slaves, and expats.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy


Sure but those need to be understood within context.

Obviously OP is not saying it was unilaterally better and the idea being commented on is just public lottery vs election. You can lift out that idea and apply our current understanding of “public” and the point of OP still stands.


I don't think it does. The voting pool back then would be the modern equivalent of free landowners with citizens parents, and excluding some felons (not gonna investigate which crimes carried the death/exile penalty in Athens).

You dismissed the criticism of your argument without comment and then repeated yourself. Thats very disingenuous and a sign of a weak argument.

I thought perhaps hen hadn't quite digested what it would mean for only a small class of elites to be in the pool that gets picked from.

By excluding over 3/4 of the population, we would hardly get what we think of as democracy.

With those exclusions, the power of being a citizen would increase dramatically and the lottery would make it unlikely bands of eligible citizens would unite to expand the electorate but instead would seek to make membership more stringent, like DPRK's haeksim.

Choice by lottery would also fail to exclude men who have no desire or capacity to do whatever job it is they pulled. I do not know what they did in ancient Greece but in modern times that would lead to a bureaucratic class with the leader being only a figurehead at their mercy--and at times that would be very good. But the bureaucrats class would not be the voice of the people, would not be democratic.

I felt this was obvious from the exclusions and so didn't see the need to elaborate.


how, exactly, is that relevant here?


Because the US democratically elected a would-be dictator who is now building out his oligarchy.


> building out

More like consolidating and cementing. It had already been built out


The thing I find most worrisome is that Musk, as part of SpaceX, was denied security clearance because of his extensive foreign ties. Now he has effectively-unsupervised access to the entire federal system.


When Americans voted for crazy, did they expect anything less than crazy? I don't understand how you can be shocked.


Interesting how you assume everyone with concerns must have voted for them. Maybe brush up on how voting percentages work - you'd be surprised how many Americans can be affected by election outcomes regardless of how they personally voted. Math is fun that way!

Funny how quickly we jump to 'you must have voted for them' these days. Maybe the real problem isn't who voted for who, but how we've all gotten so used to seeing each other as enemies instead of neighbors who sometimes disagree. Just a thought.


This assumption, that everyone upset about these actions voted for them, is only half the fallacy. The corollary and equally mistaken assumption is that people who voted for them are upset about the actions.

Plenty of people are happy about the actions because it’s exactly what they voted for – “promises made, promises kept.” This isn’t implementing some secret agenda without warning; it’s a fulfillment of a central campaign promise.


Exactly. The results of the US Presidential Election in 2024 show us that slightly more than 1 in 5 Americans cast a ballot in favor of Donald Trump.

assumptions: The publicly-available vote count numbers are correct and the US has a total population of around 341 million people.

The view that our Republican party got a "conservative mandate" and "won by a landslide" is an interesting one when considered with the above facts. They won by a margin of ~1.6% of the votes cast. The victory looks like a large one only when viewed through the distorted lenses of our Electoral College system.

> Maybe the real problem isn't who voted for who, but how we've all gotten so used to seeing each other as enemies instead of neighbors who sometimes disagree. Just a thought.

Exactly. Divide and conquer. Historically it's been pretty effective.


I agree that math is fun but not that it's fun in that case.


Lately I just cant get the thought out of my head that 69% of Americans either directly or tacitly approved Trump's agenda.

A big chunk of those people now voicing concerns did not vote to prevent the course we are now on because "both sides are the same," or variations of that demonstrable falsehood.


Americans experienced 4 years of the crazy just being superficial. They expected more of the same, not 4 years of the crazy going everywhere.

In term 1 Trump cabinet and staffers were Bush veterans whereas this term they are Trump loyalists. I tried convincing people that this time would be very different, but I got shouted down.


Yeah, but the alternative had a funny laugh.


That did happen, but then we finally got rid of Biden!


If a 55 year old with no knowledge of the system was set loose I'd still be freaking out


Hopefully by the time he got to be 55, the person with the access would be too cautious to do anything with it


If it's in COBOL you can probably count on one hand how many people have knowledge of the nuts and bolts of those systems and usually the new people talk to the old people.


> the ability to change code for the purposes of rooting out fraudulent payments or analyzing disbursement flow

Or making and hiding fraudulent payments.


Someone has to reimburse SpaceX for all the free labor in the treasury department!


we're gonna have a shiny new sovereign wealth fund to loot!


Why do people keep harping on the age. I don't care about how old they are, I know plenty of cracked teenagers. I care that they have no constitutional authority.


The age emphasizes the absurdist, incompetent slapdash nature of the whole thing. It's not a grizzled expert aiding a coup, it's some kid fucking around.


Why is it absurd for a 25 year old to write system-critical code? That's not even that young for the field. I'd been coding for 12 years at that age!


Do you think you, or anyone, have the capacity to understand changes you are making to a system developed over decades, that manages trillions and affects real lives, with only a few days worth of experience with the system?


I never made that claim, I only say the raw age is irrelevant and distracts from the real headline. Experience with those specific systems is a separate category. e.g. a 25 year old with 8 years of finance systems programming might be more qualified than a 50 year old with 3 years in that domain, it all depends on their background. The more important headline is that it's an illegal coup.


> a 25 year old with 8 years of finance systems programming

Show me one.


Hang out in some quant shops you'll see a bunch.

You don't think they grabbed one or two of the existing coders that know the system? (I have no idea)


The article explicitly mentions how the system's normal maintainers are in a panic because this kid 'Fred' they have no info about (not even a last name) has unlimited access to change things.


No, I don't think so.

I think it's the dumbest, high confidence kids(with big egos) in the room who agree to do shit like this.


PR submitted, comments by concerned coders with years experience in the system overruled and force merged with message "wcgw".


So was I, now I'm over 40 and boy oh boy can I tell you how I would definitely not trust myself at that age going into such critical systems.


You are rationally correct. However, most people react very quickly, and it is very effective to say "teenager" or "25 year old" to mean "ridiculously inexperienced" for what is happening right now

Yes, some teenagers and 25 year olds are capable, and probably do in fact, write system-critical code

But having people who previously had nothing to do with the government, take over a federal system, with seemingly no experience managing those types of systems before, is very alarming


It's not the quality of code in question, but of judgement.


I don’t care that the kid is writing code. I do care that the kid is an active participant in a coup against the US government.


> I don’t care that the kid is writing code

I really do care that the kid is writing code because Bessent told senior Republicans in a closed-door meeting Musk et al only have read access and that through another person (Krause). If this kid is writing code, he's doing so without legal authority. This isn't a coup, it's espionage.


> This isn't a coup, it's espionage

That's just play on words at this time

Clearly the federal government has been compromised by private citizens with unclear, or secret, affiliations to the president and his associates

Congress and the courts seem unable to repel the attack so far


>I care that they have no constitutional authority.

Opinion article that at least explains some of the authority that DOGE may have. DOGE is operating under U.S. Digital Service which was started by Obama, not congress, with a mission to assist other government services with technology, and may have authority via OMB and the president if the affected departs resist.

Nice to finally get some details, instead of rank speculation on all sides.

https://thehill.com/opinion/5126111-department-government-ef...


It’s called “experience”. HN skews young white and male, and if there’s one thing young white male coders are NOT is “humble.” Any decades plus veteran of the industry who has hired new college grads knows a lot more than you seem to.

I had to truncate the title a bit from:

'Go haywire': Onlookers freak out as 25-year-old set loose on Treasury computer system


Having RW permissions doesn’t mean this kid is different from the other engineers working on the project, or that he can circumvent check-in policies regarding code reviews and signoff.


If it's the person with the obviously named GitHub account (age seems plausibly matching), someone should tell Trump he's working on (well, at least cloned) a DeepSeek-related project. (The picture, now taken down but still available in caches, also matches the picture shown in various media, though I can't verify that the media has the right picture, so I won't link to the account).

Unsurprisingly, they have a YOLO badge.

edit: ok, based on Wired reporting, https://github.com/markoelez must be him...


He should be using H1-Bs


Story and politics aside, we shouldn't allow partisan blogs that larp as news media to be posted here. These guys and their conservative counterparts are the lifeblood of the misinformation war dividing the country.



I did the same manual analysis I did on the OP one, and could not find a first party source or non-anonymous claim.

I asked CoPilot to analyze the sources and identify the individual claims, and their proximity to a 'first party source'.

Once again, there is 0 evidence this is actually happening -- there are however a lot of news organizations ready to throw their reputations away over a few 'anonymous sources' that aren't even primary.

Here is the analysis of your source, AND the linked sources in that article:

Wired: Reports that Marko Elez, a 25-year-old engineer linked to Elon Musk, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the U.S. government. The sources are unnamed, and they claim Elez has administrator-level privileges, including the ability to write code on the Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System1.

Talking Points Memo: Confirms Wired's reporting, adding that Elez has already made extensive changes to the code base for the payment systems. Again, the sources are unnamed1.

The New Republic: Details that Elez has complete access to critical payment systems at the Department of the Treasury, despite being only 25 years old. The sources are unnamed, and the article mentions that senior government officials have been locked out of employee databases1.

Raw Story: Reports that Elez has been given full control over the computer code that directs Social Security payments, tax returns, and other payments owed to Americans. The sources are unnamed, and the article mentions that federal IT workers are concerned about the potential for irreversible damage to the systems2.

In summary, all the sources cited in the article are anonymous, and there are no first-party sources or direct evidence provided. This makes it difficult to verify the claims independently. The lack of named sources and concrete evidence raises questions about the credibility of the claims.


This evidence is circumstantial but Elez's GitHub account recently removed the profile picture.

Anyway, I don't know anything about the Wired reporters but I trust Josh Marshall to not make shit up.


Fair enough - I am going to wait until someone is willing to go on the record and preferably more than one source.

For what it's worth, I read the talkingpointsmemo article on this because of your statement as I take you for an actual human being who trusts someone who wrote on the topic, which is more than I can say about most of the articles so far. (https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/musk-cronies-dive-into-...)

I don't know anything about Josh Marshall but I did check his Bias Score (which I take with a grain of salt but it's at least somewhere to start with unknown actors) and it didn't raise red flags other than 'skews strongly left' and 'mostly accurate' (which is not unexpected given the subject): https://adfontesmedia.com/talking-points-memo-bias-and-relia... and https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/talking-points-memo/

However, the paragraph that Josh wrote really only makes one claim which is again not first party or 'on the record', where he stated

"I can independently confirm these details based on conversations going back to the weekend. I can further report that Elez not only has full access to these systems, he has already made extensive changes to the code base for these critical payment system."

'based on conversations going back to the weekend' is perhaps the weakest claim of the bunch of articles being analyzed here. He doesn't even bother to list the # of sources, the type of source - he is simply confirming he had a conversation during which this claim was made.

In fact, his entire post on this topic is pasted below:

"Overnight, Wired reported that, contrary to published reports that DOGE operatives at the Treasury Department are limited to “read only” access to department payment systems, this is not true. A 25-year-old DOGE operative named Marko Elez in fact has admin privileges on these critical systems, which directly control and pay out roughly 95% of payments made by the U.S. government, including Social Security checks, tax refunds and virtually all contract payments. I can independently confirm these details based on conversations going back to the weekend. I can further report that Elez not only has full access to these systems, he has already made extensive changes to the code base for these critical payment system."

I am going to need a lot more than that to take these extraordinary claims at face value -- and that does not mean I am saying he is 'making things up' either. I'm willing to take it at face value he had this conversation and believes it.

It still appears that this is just a circle of people who are predisposed to dislike what Trump/DOGE are doing, that are all referencing each other (circularly) making very wild claims. Nobody seems willing to take the liability of making the claim definitively though - it's all hearsay and '.. someone said' level discourse.

This is not news. It's rumors, at best.

I'm not saying it's not true - maybe it will shake out to be true when someone actually does some reporting on the topic. For the moment, it should be getting reported as rumors rather than fact - but that doesn't seem to be happening.

I just think it's wildly irresponsible to take such flimsy claims at face value, especially when so many people are emotionally invested in this outcome.

All said though, I certainly HOPE it isn't true - as that would be an egregious oversight that I would not expect either Trump or Musk to be OK with. Frankly I can't stand Musk, but this just doesn't pass the smell test.

EDIT: Not to belabor the point, but this 'fake' story from Josh Marshall doesn't exactly instill confidence his unsourced paragraph is going to hold up to whatever standards he has set for himself:

'Failed Fact Checks “We know this now. The banks no longer loan (Donald Trump) money because he’s a terrible risk. So he goes to these (Russian) oligarchs and borrows money.” – Mostly False'

It seems the 'mostly factual' basis is due to him generally being good about sourcing, which isn't even being attempted here.


Yes, it's always tricky when the sources are anonymous (to be clear, they're likely not anonymous to the journalist), but you can imagine not too many people would want their names to be public under the circumstances.


Scott Bessent OR David Lebryk could very easily confirm this story if it was true, and yet neither have.

They have absolutely nothing to lose at this point, so that should be another giant red flag that everyone is banking on the word getting out and the 'myth' that Elon gave some kid write access to the most important treasury databases in the world, and in 6 months it will turn out all of this was a 'misunderstanding' and half of the country will swear up and down it was proven to be true and the only reason no one got in trouble is because Musk/Trump are corrupt and in cahoots.

Absolute madness.

Again though - I will take the journalist at his word he heard a conversation where this was stated in the paragraph he published. He is still just regurgitating third hand info.

Honestly, how hard would it be if you were in DC to just plant ANY story you want right now with this level of 'fact checking' and 'reporting'?

If you had even a semblance of prominence or just spoke authoritatively, you could go to a coffee shop near the press corps, say a bunch of inflammatory stuff, and everyone has plausible deniability... "well, all I said was I heard it said... I didn't claim it was really true I just heard it!". Then the rumor mill gets ahold of it, and every reprint lends an air of credibility to a story created out of thin air.

Not trying to disparage him or say he is doing exactly that - but the level of reporting is genuinely that flimsy, and the continued reporting as if it is true is creating a veneer of 'truthiness' or whatever the fashionable word is these days.

It's very frustrating to watch all common sense go out the window just because something bad was said anonymously about 'the bad guys'.

If it turns out there is meat here I'll be the first to admit I was wrong and this is a crazy situation - right now it looks like the odds of that are reaching 0.


I am going to go out on a limb and say if this turns out to be true, you will find some way to rationalize it. Call me crazy.

I quite literally don't believe this. I fully believe he has 'read' access, but extraordinary claims require some evidence.

I just read the article and they go to great pains to make it -seem- like they have first party confirmation and not hearsay, but it was breaking my brain trying to determine with certainty.

I just asked copilot to review the article looking for 1st party witnesses, and it said there weren't any.

Then I asked it to summarize each 'witness' from the article, whether they are first party, and if not what degree of sepearatoin they have. This is what it said:

Sure, let's break down the key witnesses and their claims:

David Lebryk: Former acting Deputy Secretary of the Treasury. He resigned after resisting granting DOGE access to the Treasury data1. His claim is based on his direct experience and position within the Treasury Department, making him a first party witness.

Ron Wyden: The highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee. He expressed concerns about the potential misuse of the data by DOGE1. Wyden is a second party witness, as he is commenting on the situation based on his oversight role but not direct involvement.

Anonymous AP Sources: Two people familiar with the situation spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. They claim that DOGE has gained access to sensitive Treasury data1. These sources are second party witnesses, as they have indirect knowledge of the situation.

X User (@rayinsideout): Revealed names of alleged DOGE employees who accessed the Treasury payment system. Musk accused this user of committing a crime by sharing private information2. This user is a third party witness, as they are relaying information they claim to have obtained from other sources.

Scott Bessent: Treasury Secretary who granted DOGE access to the data. His actions are central to the claims, but he hasn't made public statements about the specifics of the access3. Bessent is a first party witness due to his direct involvement in the decision.

So it sounds like all of this is based of David Lebryk's claims, and the media contorting themselves to make this a 'thing'.

I am willing to hear actual evidence, but this list doesn't sway me and this feels a lot like "things people want to believe" more than "things that happened".

Time will tell I guess.


> this feels a lot like "things people want to believe" more than "things that happened"

Sure, and in the list of things that have happened, is them shuttering USAID (https://www.usaid.gov) over the weekend

And using the DOJ to threaten people with legal action, for disclosing the names of some of DOGE's members

"Only having" read access, is already a huge red flag, especially because of the way it was attained (illegally), and because of the people involved (private citizens with unclear affiliations to the federal government)

This is not just a small understanding about read vs write access


This isn't a discussion about shutting down an agency that was created by executive order.

It's a discussion about a bunch of anonymous sources and 'someone close to said' making extraordinary claims.

These claims need evidence - and "but I don't like what is happening with the Agency for International Development" is entirely irrelevant.

You are right that "This is not just a small understanding about read vs write access" though; it is a deliberate media blitz to insert the idea that this is happening into the cultural consciousness with absolutely 0 evidence.

If someone chimes in with some facts that can be validated from first party sources then I'll be happy to re-evaluate. This is just fear mongering as it is written today.


Oh btw the "David Lebryk" is not even mentioned in the article, CoPilot added that as context.

So the articles quite literally has 0 first party witnesses. Yet they are super-duper-certain that this person has 'read-write' and is rewriting COBOL on the fly. Give me a break, this is worst than "Weekly World News" -- it may as well say:

"BatBoy Terrorizing Treasury Database! Picture on Page 5!"


> Oh btw the "David Lebryk" is not even mentioned in the article, CoPilot added that as context.

Normally that would make you question the validity of everything Copilot told you about the article.


Well in this case CoPilot confirmed my own inferences, it wasn't just working on my behalf and 'doing a thing for me'.

I was asking it to check the sources because I found every article was doing exactly what was described, and was starting to doubt my own ability to trace the story because it was just going in circles.

So it acknowledging exactly what I observed, and adding additional context (which it was clear about) is not exactly a mark against it.

If I simply asked it to do a thing and it hallucinated something, sure. If I hadn't already done the work manually, sure.

That isn't close to what is happening here though. It correctly identified the issues in the reporting, and attempted to add additional context and still found there was no first party source. Which is all true.

David Lebryk and/or Scott Bessent could confirm this story right now and put everything to bed. Neither has anything else to lose. They haven't.

I'm sure someone will say "but what if Trump has them KILLED" or some nonsense like that -- they already came out and spoke against him, and if you have to resort to that kind of imaginary threat and use nothing but 2nd and 3rd party anonymous sources to make the claim.... you are floating a 'conspiracy theory'.


Yeah I agree with this. The mass media combined with social media is going to make it even harder over the next 4 years to know what's real and what isn't. We really need to train ourselves to look empirically at the evidence and form our beliefs based only on facts. I think this is not so much "onlookers" freaking out, but rather a massive propaganda machine freaking out.


Keep in mind, though, that Steve Bannon has developed strategies like "flooding the zone" to defocus attention and nip opposition in the bud. We can only look so many places, so for example if everyone is outraged about the flurry of ridiculous executive orders we may not pay attention to the tax cut bill.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...


People voted for this, didn't they?


> People voted for this

Quite literally, no. Elez (the 25-year old) reports to Musk. There is nobody elected above him.

Bessent, hours before this broke, claimed he "signed off on a plan to give 'read-only' access to the payment system to a team led by Tom Krause" [1]. This kid allegedly had write access. And he doesn't report to Krause. He should be getting arrested on espionage charges.

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/03/bessent-musk-doge-t...


lets not forget that Trump created a new department and put Elon in charge, the DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY. With that in mind Musk can hire anyone he wants yes? Trump gave Elon the clearances and powers needed to do this work. It's no different in my opinion than the CIA hiring confidential sources or the FBI hiring contractors.

I mean Elon isn't going to personally do the work as department head...


> Trump gave Elon the clearances and powers needed to do this work

Where? Trump gave Elon SGE status, nothing more.

Also, there are statues that Trump can’t unilaterally void. That isn’t practically relevant for Trump. But it is legally relevant for these kids—they’re illegally accessing government servers.

> no different in my opinion than the CIA hiring confidential sources or the FBI hiring contractors

If the CIA or FBI were breaking into the Treasury, we’d have an analogy.


I think the Executive has signed off on it. It's not like Trump would personally do these things. He has partnered with the best and brightest to implement the vision for America that the majority of voters asked for. Like it or not, it's how elections work.


That is not how elections work. Elections do not override existing law. Otherwise you could easily get a dictator who says "I am legitimately elected therefore there it is the will of the people that there are no more elections"

But you said "best and brightest" so I'm assuming you're trolling.


Good chance a lot of the "laws" that prevent the executive from taking actions are probably unconstitutional anyways. The constitution is pretty clear on this and the current executive is within its boundaries, even if various congresses made illegal laws to prevent these types of actions after FDR used them.


I don't recall seeing this mentioned in any campaigning, so no, people did not vote for it.

And even if this were understood to have been what voting trump meant, that is only 77M out of 334M people in America.


DOGE did feature prominently in the campaigning and some of us did vote for the full package primarily holding our nose on other parts of the campaign that we were not happy with specifically because we wanted to see this happen.

"that is only 77M out of 334M people in America" What's your point here? Our system is set up to give outsized power to whoever secures a majority of the electors. There may be a better alternative but are you complaining about the system being flawed or complaining that the numbers didn't go your way? The rest of us also had to put up with decisions under previous administrations that we didn't appreciate despite only a similar number of people actually voting for the administration.


> The rest of us also had to put up with decisions under previous administrations that we didn't appreciate despite only a similar number of people actually voting for the administration.

That's actually a little rich in this case, considering how few Republicans accept the results of the 2020 election.


Hospitals still treat people who shoot themselves in the foot, some times people make mistakes, crazy how there is no mechanism to correct this though.


There is. It's Congress and impeachment. That won't happen but the mechanism is there.


He also doesn't fear impeachment, zero impact to him or his position.


I know. I'm just saying, that's the mechanism for this. You could argue there should be other routes and other mechanisms and I agree.


I mean, I would assume that even many people who voted for ol' minihands are at least... somewhat surprised that _this_ is happening. Even as a committed minihands-sceptic, I'm a little surprised; he's really upping the absurdity factor quite a lot in term 2. Whoever's the next president of the US will presumably spend their whole term cleaning up the mess.


The "code that directs Social Security payments, tax returns and other payments owed to Americans" is "COBOL and ... it has been such a struggle to maintain it [because it was] developed for decades with very little documentation"

But having a SpaceX engineer start a rewrite is... bad?

I freak out when some minor component of my company becomes abandonware. When no one can or wants to read or work on the codebase, it's _time for it to die_. Either this good news, or you have no experience maintaining existing critical software infrastructure.

As for the "unelected" argument... Did anyone ever elect any of the software engineers who worked on this codebase? It has always been federal employees appointed by federal agencies. Some acronyms changed.


He may be "SpaceX" (if that is supposed to mean super talented), but having a maximum of 1 weeks worth of knowledge about a system before starting to rewrite it seems extremely unsecure. This isn't a disposable rocket, this is a system that millions of people rely on.


Q: Is that what's happening here? That SpaceX engineers are rewriting the Social Security payment system in some modern programming language?


The article doesn't really give any good details. We don't know enough to say what the process is. We're just supposed to be upset that young bright engineers are working on the system that until a month ago everyone would have agreed is a pile of garbage.

I'd love to know more about what the plan is - but as a older software engineer "young smart kids attempt to start maintaining ancient abandoned but important codebase" is good news, not bad news. It's what we beg for in Slack all day long.


Do we know that guy is bright? And do we beg for that? I was 25 years old and thought I can do everything. Now I know better and would definitely not trust myself going into such a system. I was in many companies and especially if it comes to payment systems I see the same mistakes over and over again.

If there is atleast a good supervision, then sure it might work.


> Do we know that guy is bright?

One of the other guys won the Vesuvius Challenge, so I’d say probably.


'everyone would have agreed" - no, please provide any basis to that or you're veering into the "common sense" and "many people, some straight from central casting with tears in their eyes" BS


A month ago you would have argued that the computer systems backing our tax return filings were in a good shape? Fair enough, but color me shocked.


Point me to anything that shows they were bad Anyway, DOGE was supposed to be finding inefficiencies not rewriting the codebase, how much is that saving?


You know that asshole that joins a team and says "wow this code is bad, we should scrap it all and rewrite?" And if he gets his way, how he fucks off somewhere else before the rewrite is completed and leaves everything in a total mess?

You know that's consider a bad thing in serious software engineering teams, right?


As with all engineering, it depends. If the code is bad, and they do complete the task, then good engineering. If the code isn't bad, and they don't...

Armchair quarterbacking engineering decisions with little to no information is not something I'm in the habit of doing.


Having a young optimistic uncynical person, untainted by years of painful lessons and bitterness, attempt to fix these systems with raw speed and brute urgency, might be the exact shock a system like the public sector needs.

People complain about Facebook's move fast and break things philosophy whenever something bad happens, completely ignoring the fact that they are a trillion dollar corporation that 20 years ago did not exist.

Sometime you just have to get rid of the guardrails and YOLO it


"Move fast and break things" may work well when you are making an entertaining website and selling ads. It works vastly less well when "break things" means people depending on the government for medical coverage die.

There's a reason why the people constructing bridges and nuclear power plants don't "move fast and break things" even if the people building a fundamentally unimportant website can do that.


...not when the consequences are "people die of starvation because their EBT didn't go through."

Moving fast and breaking things only works when the things you're breaking are low stakes. Grandma not getting her daily pic dump of her grandson is not the same as grandma not getting her groceries.


People are going to die of starvation from this administration.


People tend to forget that move fast and break things also includes move fast and fix things. No one will starve from this.


How much are you willing to bet on this? Will you be willing to pay into a fund to mitigate suffering caused by this nonsense?


Well,it didn't say anywhere that they are stopping grandma's checks. And if the system is so fragile that grandma will die before getting some human person to resolve her case, then we've got bigger problems than a 25 year old having r/w on the system.


That's a rather cynical take on what may amount to actual human suffering.


I think the claim here is that more actual human suffering is coming out of the status quo which we think needs to be fixed with fairly drastic action.

The Mexican cartels for example do provide aid in predominantly poor parts of the country but there are still many who would say that overall these organizations provide more harm than good.

The US is providing some resources for causes that you and other's support (presumably with a much higher "success" rate than the cartels) but they have also historically funded and perpetuated things that many are not happy with (various conflicts in the middle east come to mind).

Some of us wanted to see dramatic reform and we feel that claims like "grandma is going to starve because she won't get her groceries" are really just an attempt to connect with emotions around the ordeal rather than an honest attempt to point out flaws or discuss potential drawbacks with the current approach.


So shutting down USAID isn't going to cause human suffering?


The alarmist take is jumping to the conclusion that people will starve from efforts to improve the code behind this system. We can still print paper checks, probably with a simple script in the worst case.


Concern over even a low possibility of a catastrophic event is hardly alarmist.

And what if your assumption about printing checks is wrong? I find no basis for that assumption, by the way.


We're talking about payment system code, not AI targeting for drones. Changes can be reverted, transactions can be stopped, payments can be made other ways.


No they cannot, not legally, and certainly not in a timely manner.

There are simply no mechanisms in place to do what you're saying, nor does there appear to be any willingness to correct errors, given the desire to cut spending. Missed payments may be a feature, not a bug.


> nor does there appear to be any willingness to correct errors

> Missed payments may be a feature, not a bug.

> not legally, and certainly not in a timely manner.

Bad faith magic wand waving, these arguments do not have substance. People/bots are on a bandwagon against change many have been calling for years for. Our treasury system NEEDS an overhaul and there are much bigger problems with this admin to make an issue out of.


You say bad faith, but then you equivocate all "change" like any difference is good, or that Congress ought not be involved in the decisions related to how to spend government money, which is wildly unconstitutional.

It won't say on the tin what the negative consequences of breaking what's in the tin will be, it's never that simple in my experience.

There are substantially better ways to solve this problem, so the fact that those better methods aren't being tried screams ignorance and inexperience, which is a problem for critical payment systems.


USAID is being burnt to the ground. Those are "grandma's checks" to a lot of people.


so to be clear, you think world governments should be YOLOing it?

and you justify this because a platform for serving targeted ads has popularized the idea?

and you don't see a difference between a social network and our countries payment systems?

i'm just kind of shocked and disappointed by this, as i'm sure you're not the only one who perceives the world this way..


I am saying that a government,and any other system, operating in an environment of abundance without external pressures to improve, ends up accumulating year's of cruft, inneficiencies, unproductive bureaucracies and 4-eye principles everywhere .

Sometimes a system needs a good shock to improve. And at the end of the day, what is the absolute worst that can happen? Cause the upside of this working is definitely worth the risk in my eyes.


> the upside of this working is definitely worth any risk in my eyes.

then your eyes aren't open. a moment of thought would easily produce outcomes that dont match the risk.


> what is the absolute worst that can happen?

Bond payments to major bond holders are not sent out. At that point, the US can no longer be trusted and the dollar stops being the de facto world currency.

Is that bad enough for you?


If you approve of this, perhaps Marko Elez can find some efficiencies within the payroll system of your employer?


What is the absolute worst that can happen? People not getting their money is nothing bad for you?


Respectfully, the fact that you can’t think of any consequences that exceed the risk means that you don’t understand what is at stake.

One single missed interest payment to Treasury bond holders would be a default, something that has never happened to the US before. Our credit rating would be downgraded, investors all over the world would liquidate their US Treasury bonds, and our borrowing costs would skyrocket, both for government and commercial/consumer loans.

This instantly causes a recession, far worse than what we saw in 2008. A US Treasury default would have catastrophic consequences.

This is one of many catastrophic scenarios possible when messing with a government payment system that handles trillions of dollars in payments.

Any money saved by cancelling payments is going to be used to give people wealthier than you or I a tax cut. Is that really worth the risk?


millions die, wars and famine? why isn't DOGE in the DoD accounting their systems?


Respectfully, this is such a Valley attitude that one would be hard pressed to find anywhere else. The fact that this approach "works" on software and tech in general, does not make it a philosophy to live by IMHO. And I quote "works" because it doesn't always work, and even when it does, it produces a subpar experience for the end user, that sometimes the user has no option (or escape energy) but to withstand.

This might work when the thing you are constantly breaking is optional for me to use. I will keep using as long as the value it gives me outweighs the breakage pain. If you break it enough times, I might just get fed up with it and not use it anymore, or go with a competitor. It is a risk that YOU are taking with your product, that sometimes will work and sometimes will not.

In the case of the government social apparatus being handled by techie kids in crunch time, THEY are not the ones taking the risk, but the population that depends on those systems. There is a reason why those systems are analysed ad infinitum before replacing them or changing them. And yes, they evolve slower than modern tech systems, but most of the time there is good reason for it.

They might be ok with a release in production with a couple of bugs and come back on Monday and say -oops- on your morning standup. This is something that should not be acceptable when we are talking about services that millions of people's livelihoods depend on.

They can YOLO it all they want, in their private endeavour, with their (optional to me) product. They do NOT get to YOLO it with my life's critical things.




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