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
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from danhon@dan.mastohon.com
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.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from danhon@dan.mastohon.com
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.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from danhon@dan.mastohon.com
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.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from danhon@dan.mastohon.com
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.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from danhon@dan.mastohon.com
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.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from danhon@dan.mastohon.com
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.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from danhon@dan.mastohon.com
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.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from danhon@dan.mastohon.com
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.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from danhon@dan.mastohon.com
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"*
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from danhon@dan.mastohon.com
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.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from danhon@dan.mastohon.com
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.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from danhon@dan.mastohon.com
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
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from danhon@dan.mastohon.com
@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)
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from mwyman@mastodon.social
@mwyman @danhon I'm pretty sure chaos is the point of the exercise.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from jjdavis@infosec.exchange
@mwyman @danhon
I hope they'll relish having seniors with nothing to lose beat them senseless with canes.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from Nazani@universeodon.com This content has been proxied by September (3851b).Proxy Information
text/gemini