Take my comments with a grain of salt because I haven’t thought too deeply about this, but if I think to myself what I would do if I was tasked with cutting government waste and modernizing IT systems, it would probably look something like what Musk is doing.
You have a sprawling complex of legacy systems, a federal bureaucracy that (let’s face it) is institutionally obsessed with process, often at the expense of getting thigns done. You’re tasked with cutting out fraud and bloat and increasing efficiency but everything is all over the place. So the first place you go is directly to the treasury, because at least government payments are centralized.
Could the power they’ve been given be abused? Yes of course. And I think it’s worth keeping an idea of signs that the team Musk has hired is abusing its authority.
If someone knows something I’m missing, such as clear signs that they’re using their power for self-dealing or to target political rivals, please let me know. But until I see such signs my attitude is mostly just “wait and see”.
EDIT: After talking about this more with a friend, I’m more concerned about DOGE. I think many of the things they’re doing are pretty blatantly unconstitional (changing allocation of funds in ways that a pretty obvious violations of article 1).
I personally find the defunding of USAID (especially PEPFAR) to be pretty horrible. That’s one of the best programs the government invests money in.
I think a lot of their actions will get thrown out by the courts. But they’ll do some damage in the meantime.
Elon already has all of the money in the world. I think he and his employs are ideologically driven, and as far as I can tell they’re making sensible decisions given their stated goals of reducing unnecessary spend/sprawl. I seriously doubt they’re going to use this access to either raid the treasury or turn it into a personal fiefdom. It’s possible that in their haste they’re introducing security risks, but I also think the tendency of media outlets and their sources will be to exaggerate those security risks. I’d be happy to start a prediction market about this if a regular feels very differently.
If Trump himself was spearheading this effort I would be more worried.
There are three traders on this market; it means nothing at the moment. No need for virtue signalling to explain a result you might perceive as abnormal, it’s just not formed yet.
I’m in a similar position as you describe, perspective-wise, and would also like to understand the situation better.
I do think there are good reasons why someone should maybe have direct access to some of these systems, though probably not as a lone individual. I seem to remember a few government shutdown/debt ceiling fight/whatever crises ago, there were articles about how there were fundamentally no systems in place to control or prioritize which bills got paid and which didn’t. Money came into the treasury, money left to pay for things, first in first out. The claim I remember being repeated was that first, this was a result of legacy systems, and second, because all the money was authorized by law to be spent it might be illegal to withhold or deprioritize it. Which is also an insane system—there should be a way to say “Pay the White House electric bill, make the florist wait.” But to a first approximation, that can’t easily be fixed without some unelected people having more authority than you’d normally feel comfortable with them using, which is a risk even if you do it well.
Take my comments with a grain of salt because I haven’t thought too deeply about this, but if I think to myself what I would do if I was tasked with cutting government waste and modernizing IT systems, it would probably look something like what Musk is doing.
You have a sprawling complex of legacy systems, a federal bureaucracy that (let’s face it) is institutionally obsessed with process, often at the expense of getting thigns done. You’re tasked with cutting out fraud and bloat and increasing efficiency but everything is all over the place. So the first place you go is directly to the treasury, because at least government payments are centralized.
Could the power they’ve been given be abused? Yes of course. And I think it’s worth keeping an idea of signs that the team Musk has hired is abusing its authority.
If someone knows something I’m missing, such as clear signs that they’re using their power for self-dealing or to target political rivals, please let me know. But until I see such signs my attitude is mostly just “wait and see”.
EDIT: After talking about this more with a friend, I’m more concerned about DOGE. I think many of the things they’re doing are pretty blatantly unconstitional (changing allocation of funds in ways that a pretty obvious violations of article 1).
I personally find the defunding of USAID (especially PEPFAR) to be pretty horrible. That’s one of the best programs the government invests money in.
I think a lot of their actions will get thrown out by the courts. But they’ll do some damage in the meantime.
Elon already has all of the money in the world. I think he and his employs are ideologically driven, and as far as I can tell they’re making sensible decisions given their stated goals of reducing unnecessary spend/sprawl. I seriously doubt they’re going to use this access to either raid the treasury or turn it into a personal fiefdom. It’s possible that in their haste they’re introducing security risks, but I also think the tendency of media outlets and their sources will be to exaggerate those security risks. I’d be happy to start a prediction market about this if a regular feels very differently.
If Trump himself was spearheading this effort I would be more worried.
I do see some security risk.
Although Trump isn’t spearheading the effort I expect he will have access to the results.
I feel like a lot of manifold is virtue signaling .
There are three traders on this market; it means nothing at the moment. No need for virtue signalling to explain a result you might perceive as abnormal, it’s just not formed yet.
I’m in a similar position as you describe, perspective-wise, and would also like to understand the situation better.
I do think there are good reasons why someone should maybe have direct access to some of these systems, though probably not as a lone individual. I seem to remember a few government shutdown/debt ceiling fight/whatever crises ago, there were articles about how there were fundamentally no systems in place to control or prioritize which bills got paid and which didn’t. Money came into the treasury, money left to pay for things, first in first out. The claim I remember being repeated was that first, this was a result of legacy systems, and second, because all the money was authorized by law to be spent it might be illegal to withhold or deprioritize it. Which is also an insane system—there should be a way to say “Pay the White House electric bill, make the florist wait.” But to a first approximation, that can’t easily be fixed without some unelected people having more authority than you’d normally feel comfortable with them using, which is a risk even if you do it well.