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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@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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