We need engineers and technologists to advance the country forward, including in the government. It’s a great tragedy that when we gave a technologist, Elon Musk, great governmental power, he used it not to build, but to destroy. Rather than using his business and technical expertise to make government better, he used his biased ideology and political incompetence to destroy things that were providing good to Americans and the world.
Musk claimed that if USAID activities could even send him flimsy evidence that they were doing something useful, DOGE wouldn’t cut it. But Musk’s and Trump’s DOGE cut USAID programs that in total saved half a million to one million preventable deaths a year.
The head of USAID during W Bush’s presidency says that the idea that USAID is a Marxist organization is ridiculous. He said that while he was head, he moved the organization to the right and focused on free market reforms, and when Obama came in, he moved it to the left; the career people do what the people at the top tell them to do. Trump just came in and destroyed it.
A Biden tweet about football was doing better than a Musk tweet, so Musk had engineers come in on off-hours and “fix it” so that his own post would do better.
Musk has turned Twitter/X into his personal propaganda machine that leans right wing.
After Shirley’s daycare video accusing specific day care centers of fraud simply because they didn’t open up their doors to a group of men, the state checked on those centers and found they were all operating normally.
“Two members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team working at the Social Security Administration were secretly in touch with an advocacy group seeking to “overturn election results in certain states,” and one signed an agreement that may have involved using Social Security data to match state voter rolls, the Justice Department revealed in newly disclosed court papers.
Elizabeth Shapiro, a top Justice Department official, said SSA referred both DOGE employees for potential violations of the Hatch Act, which bars government employees from using their official positions for political purposes.
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Also among the corrections: DOJ revealed that a DOGE team member was briefly granted access to private Social Security profiles even after a court prohibited it. Shapiro said the access was never “utilized.” And in another instance, a DOGE team member had access for two months to a “call center profile” that contained private information.
“It is unknown at this time whether any [private information] was accessed,” Shapiro said.
Shapiro also revealed that despite prior assertions in court, SSA’s DOGE team members “were using links to share data through the third-party server ‘Cloudflare.’”
“Cloudflare is not approved for storing SSA data and when used in this manner is outside SSA’s security protocols,” Shapiro indicated.”