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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32/ The end? I guess I can take questions.
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@danhon my experience as fresh (Oct 2024) off the boat H1-B holder is that some parts of US govt tech are very broken, and were so before DOGE got started.
E.g. the process of getting an SSN and the corresponding card is the most idiotic of similar processes in countries like Singapore, Netherlands, Germany, UK. E.g. here in US they type in data by hand from a PDF form you fill in, anno 2025. E.g. they badly mistyped my name, and I had to go back and request a fix. There is no option to request a fix online - as apparently typos never happen. And yes, you must fill in the same bloody form again.
H1-B visas processing. They get you to come to the consulate to tell you after few minutes of "interview" that your (not my case, my spouse case, who, unlike me, actually did a PhD in US, in Princeton in fact, and holds a passport of a small Baltic state, a EU member) is retained for "administrative processing". Something which can take months, and given that the in principle approval already took months, this doesn't make sense. And the pack of docs they send you is ludicrously fat, and ludicrously expensive for the employer.
Tax forms. Outsourced to some Thomson Reuters subcorp, and they just could not imagine that a UK tax resident might not have a UK passport - no, they fill in the citizenship from the country of the last residence. Waiting for a correction, already into 3rd month, as I couldn't sign such a factually incorrect form. How could anyone approve this sort of IT contract fulfillment, is beyond me. Kickbacks, or just not giving a shit?
etc...
I'm sure Kafka would have been delighted writing about all this...
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@dimpase @danhon I was once impressed by some US govt tech. When I was applying for a RealID I started on a desktop, and amazingly they were able to, in effect, hand off a continuation so I could carry on using my phone (to take a photo) and then hand back to the desktop.
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@dpiponi @danhon RealID is a luxury item. Try a local Social Security office for anything instead.
I suppose Dems managed to alienate quite a few of their potential voters by screwing up Social Security recepients.
Just to compare, the latest right-wing Dutch government came to power as a result of the fall of a considerably less right wing government. The fall which was triggered by a relatively small scale scandal related to Dutch social security system (child support payments were incorrectly deemed wrong for about 20000 families, IIRC, and they had to pay back, in many cases years of such support). One must not turn screws on the most vulnerable and still hope to get their votes, cause you present yourself as caring for them...
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@dimpase @danhon My wife works at the local library where they often have to deal with the victims of the catch-22's that government and health organizations throw down before people. It's the only place some people can access to a computer to do anything online. So yeah, I get to experience that stuff second or third hand.
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