1/ Here's my take on what's happening with DOGE.
I've got fed experience through contracting with Health & Human Safety, Head Start, The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and DOD. I get brought in when people need to get shit done. Other people here have way more experience than me.
https://dan.mastohon.com/@danhon/113953007466779969
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2/ (Meanwhile, check out the reporting at https://wired.com and https://404media.co, it's good and you can tell they've got good sources.)
It's really bad!
Here's the thing about tech in general, and tech in gov specifically. It's always about people, not the technology.
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3/ The most important thing to realize here is that technology is just a tool and it's used at the direction of people to accomplish their goals.
The second most important thing is that things change when they are deemed important enough.
COVID and unemployment insurance is a good example.
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4/ When COVID hit, a whole bunch of government technology became critical and politically sensitive. Just the same way the launch of the Affordable Care Act website was botched.
In both cases, "we" knew what to do, how to figure it out, and and how to do it.
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5/ Unemployment Insurance (UI) systems needed to be modernized for lots of reasons before COVID hit.
But the lesson of COVID-19 is that modernizing, upgrading, and making government services simpler, clearer, faster could have happened at any time if it was deemed important enough.
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6/ I give you all this setup because like I said, the most important thing to realize is that the combination of Musk and the President and the administration's core have made what they want to achieve very, very, very important.
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7/ What's happening is the combination of:
i) People at the highest level of leadership with clear priorities
ii) People who don't care about the consequences
iii) A bureaucratic model of deference
And I think at the lowest level, some of the actual tech.
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8/ In normal times, it is very very very hard to make a change to government technology. This is mainly because there are rules to stop you and people who will enforce those rules. It is much less so because of the underlying technology.
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9/ Some of the rules stopping you from changing government technology (from the copy on a webpage to changing how rebates are calculated) are reasonable and make sense.
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10/ But many of the rules are unreasonable. They are absolutely too conservative in favor of reducing risk. Sometimes this is described as "doing nothing is the least riskiest option"*
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11/ Across government, most of the people who enforce & make these rules are unqualified and inexperienced.
In a safe environment, they will admit that. Most of our knowledge has been hollowed out to the private sector. On purpose.
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12/ One reason why rules make it so difficult to change government technology is because it's brittle.
It is reliable, but until the technology is capable of rolling back a change, making changes absolutely comes with risk.
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13/ Here's a reason why there are rules that make it hard to make changes to government technology:
A system in California deals with submitting federal Medicaid reimbursement. When I worked with that system, it dealt with so much that if it broke for one day, California would be insolvent
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14/ But the only effective, practical thing stopping changes is because there is a rule and you would get in trouble for breaking the rule.
The person running DOGE and this administration don't care about getting in trouble for breaking those rules.
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15/ There is a thing in federal government called an ATO, an Authority to Operate: digital.gov/resources/an...
You are not supposed to, uh, operate a software system without obtaining an ATO. Normally this is really hard! (In many cases it shouldn't be)
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16/ The DOGE team are absolutely behaving in a way that suggests they don't give a shit about ATOs.
What's terrifying is that there is nobody stopping them.
Which is why I said this comes down to people making decisions and whether those people care about consequences.
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17/ What's happening is just like a corny Bond supervillain plot. Get control of the computer and information systems and you can do a lot.
You can stop payments. You can just turn things off. You can just break them, which practically can be the same as turning things off.
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18/ "But Dan, what about security measures like, I don't know, some sort of 2FA or a PIV card, or multiple signoffs before deploying?"
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19/ In computer security, there's a class of problem called The Evil Housekeeper Problem*. Basically: once someone has physical access to a system, you are effectively screwed.
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20/ The Evil Housekeeper Problem is why the physical presence of DOGE is terrifying. Yes, "the cloud", but there's still on-premises technology.
And it's easier to coerce people when you are standing next to them, threatening them.
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21/ All the rules and measures I talk about above are put in place because you don't want something to break.
Musk, Trump and the rest of the administration want to break things. Accelerationists are in the executive branch. Leadership like Secretaries and Directors want to break things
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22/ So I want you to understand how easy it is to break things or turn things off.
i) government technology is brittle
ii) coercion is easy ("you're fired", "we will stop paying you", "we will tear up the contract")
Musk just stops paying for things he doesn't want to pay for.
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23/ Like, "Musk doesn't pay for things" isn't up for debate. There's ample evidence. "Trump doesn't pay for things" isn't up for debate either. These are both facts.
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24/ If you're, say, a major government contractor like Deloitte, or a consultancy that runs the system for tracking migrant unaccompanied minors for DHHS and the DHHS secretary or Musk says "we will not pay for this" and instructs the bureaucracy to do so, then that contractor won't get paid.
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25/ So now you're a government contractor with a contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and a whole bunch of people on staff working on it. Do you just... keep going? Knowing you won't get paid? Do you tell your staff to stop working? What if they've been told to stop already anyway?
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26/ I cannot imagine what it is like for the people in 18F and the US Digital Service right now and I don't hold them in judgment at all.
Like, I'm sure I know the person who was instructed to and made the commits on websites to scrub anything to do with DEI, likely under threat.
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27/ I don't pretend to know even a tenth of critical government systems, whether to do with regularly moving around stupendous amounts of money, or handling private information that can identify you.
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28/ What I know is what I said up top: tech does what you tell it to do. If there's no one to tell you to stop, and you don't care either way, all bets are off.
You have someone in charge who unplugs shit and doesn't care, and an administration on record that wants to break things.
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29/ The U.S. Digital Service is a good example of the deal with gov tech.
With political clout, USDS people were able to go in and change things "because the President wants it done". That's the lesson.
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30/ USDS' technical capability was parachuted in at the direction of the President. 18F has to be invited in. But the precedent was set for "rapid technical change can just happen because the executive wants it to".
Because it's all about people.
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31/ Government is built to be stable.
We're seeing what happens when the duly elected people who run it and make decisions disagree and don't care.
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@danhon youd definitely know better than me, but i get the distinct impression that one major MAJOR root cause of this is people in our position saying 'oh shit these systems are so old they're made of wood and still run on steam! you need a refresh and updates, badly!' and their response is something like 'get rekt, asshat, youre not on the gsa schedule and dont have 12 staff members to handle just the bureaucracy, we dont care about you'
or, insert your other favorite 'take a hike' quip
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@danhon like there have been people lined up around the block for decades to try and help, and that help was outright refused
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@Viss From my pov dealing with this has been a very tactical + political + leadership problem.
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@danhon @Viss
that help was refused, actively mocked, derided, persecuted.
and they did run amateur mail servers from the basement.
whilst obviously the people who are mainly responsible for the current situation are the group of people who have taken power, a great deal of the weakness that allowed this to happen is all self-inflicted.
a choice. not divine punishment.
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@vruz @danhon thats exactly what im saying. people saw this shit coming ten miles away and the folks at the time actively refused the help
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@Viss @danhon
they not only refused the help.
refused, mocked, derided, persecuted.
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@vruz @Viss @danhon If the systems were that fragile, wouldn't they have been hacked by now?
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@slashdottir @vruz @danhon
have uh
have you not beeing paying attention?
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@Viss @vruz @danhon fine, nvm.
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@danhon can't wait for them to unleash LLMs on federal data and systems. “Sorry your request has been denied based on an AI analysis of your application. Because it is a black box we can't actually tell you why you've been denied but you know whatevs. You may submit an appeal in 90 days (to the same unpredictable AI system, so hey better luck next time!)”
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@danhon that sucks. That is a shit position to be put in.
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@danhon I can imagine what it's like for USDS people right now since I'm in it myself, and believe me it's not good. Feel free to AMA but I may not be able to answer because I have to be careful that what I say doesn't damage my colleagues.
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@danhon I am actually wondering what will happen when Musk switches off payments to these big contractors like Deloitte, Raytheon, etc.
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@MisuseCase Lawsuits, I imagine. But he hasn't shown that he cares about those.
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@danhon apropos ... https://xkcd.com/538/
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@causticmsngo Exactly this.
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@danhon I’ve been wondering what the odds are that those relatively inexperienced engineers are being spear-phished. Their contact info appears to have been leaked and I’d be shocked if they’re maintaining good separate between personal and government resources in this kind of rush.
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@acdha Which inexperienced engineers?
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@danhon the guys DOGE has been installing seem to be in their early 20s, and limited professional experience. I am skeptical that they’re not cutting corners on security in how they work if they’re doing things like testing in production.
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@danhon@dan.mastohon.com @acdha@thepit.social
Presumably the ones the evening news have been citing as "fresh out of college or even highschool".
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@ferricoxide @acdha I imagine they're too busy to be phished, and also too self-important to bother listening to anyone else.
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@danhon @ferricoxide I’m just saying, if I was an intelligence agency I’d be wondering whether they’d open an attachment claiming to be evidence of some hidden DEI activity.
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@acdha @ferricoxide oh, yeah
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@danhon
🥥 We WERE making DEI progress, Dan. Sorry.
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@danhon yeah, the part that was always unbelievable about Bond is the motivation to just break shit didn't seem like it would scale up to someone with that much power and yet here we are. Breaking things is so easy.
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@danhon all well and good until there’s a brick to the face
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@danhon
Can I have that in writing please?
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@n_dimension sure, after we put your name on this website.
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@danhon
You are really making it easy for my estate lawyers 😁
This is why the need for being in the unions has never gone away.
Fascists are always one, last election away from seizing power
[#]UnionStrong #Unions #fascists
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@danhon so, I am not sure if trying to stop them is the same as stopping them, but it seems like some officials have tried:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/02/usaid-officials-put-on-leave-musk-doge
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@danhon My father worked in ACH processing at the federal reserve for the decade before he retired. Similarly there, you don’t make changes wily-nily because if the ACH calculations are wrong, it’s often billions of dollars and possible financial chaos.
These folks don’t seem like they care about those possibilities (and, in fact, might relish having that chaos happen)
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@mwyman @danhon I'm pretty sure chaos is the point of the exercise.
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@mwyman @danhon
I hope they'll relish having seniors with nothing to lose beat them senseless with canes.
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@danhon I think there’s also a general misunderstanding of how risk should work in govt. The vast majority of the federal budget is disbursements to entitlements that keep people alive. You want this system to change slowly because if you fuck it up you will kill lots of people
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@bckohan @danhon these guys absolutely want to kill lots of people.
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@SallyStrange @bckohan @danhon
The genocide is in the name.
"Accelerationists" are not accelerating Nirvana.
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@bckohan @danhon
When I was a UK civil servant - but most of my career in NGO sector - I realised that what looks like government inefficiency is actually a lot of internal coordination to avoid missteps. Because government department must never make mistakes, and there is so much scope for this to happen.
Other organizations are able to have a very different way of dealing with risk. There's a huge amount of waste in private sector btw.
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@bckohan @danhon
Which matters only when you care if you kill lots of people.
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@bckohan @danhon Although that view of the risks ignores the chance that the current system is killing lots of people already. Which it is. Change absolutely carries risk, but "no change" can cause plenty of harm by itself.
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@johnpettigrew @bckohan yes, see https://dan.mastohon.com/@danhon/113953436005876229
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text/gemini