Somebody asked Donald Trump today why Elon Musk's crew of techbros needs access to private information about Americans:
Trump suggested that he has given the tech billionaire free rein and appeared blase about the details. Asked why Doge needs access to treasury payment systems including Americans’ social security numbers, home addresses and bank accounts, he replied: “Well, it doesn’t, but they get it very easily. We don’t have very good security in our country.”
Treasury's security is fine. But if the president orders them to give DOGE unlimited access, then of course that's what they get.
Musk won't tell anyone what he's up to, and it's obvious that Trump doesn't know either. If DOGE is dicking around with stuff they don't need, and Trump doesn't care, then who does?
While Trump issues edicts regarding plastic straws Musk lets us know his next target is the CFPB.
Also, Musk doesn’t like it that his guy lost his job for just being a racist so he puts his boot out for Vance to lick it and throw his own family under the bus (one of the guy’s racist tweets was “normalize Indian hate”. Vance is married to a woman with Indian immigrant parents and his kids are half Indian). So Musk gets to hire his guy back and humiliate Vance at the same time.
Looks to me like Musk is the guy in charge.
JD Vance belongs to the same cuck typology as Ted Cruz and Ron DeSantis: Jellyroll ass-kisser who not only smiles and nods when their wife is humiliated by the big ass, but also participates in the denigration of their wife to show the big ass that they're worthy.
For most of these guys, women are just tools they can use. Wives and daughters might be useful and expensive, but only in the way a good table saw or car might be.
What a stupid comment. Yes, republicans love their wives and daughters.
What a stupid comment. Republicans love their wealth and their power.
Which is why you elected a rapist who then appointed a bunch of other rapists to his cabinet. You're a fucking creep.
+1. It's amazing what a person can choose to ignore in favor of political and ideological goals.
+1
Well, we know Trump loves at least one of his daughters, but which wife do you think he loves?
He probably loves none of them, as a narcasist he only loves himself. Like everything else they are a tool to service his ego. I'm not even sure he loves Ivanka. She's probably his favorite tool, does that count?
Guy’s representing Republicans and voted for by Republicans sure have a funny way of showing it. What do you think of Vance? Seems kind of like a pathetic excuse for a man to me.
A man willing to play second fiddle to a con man and grifter is worse than the con man and grifter. Pence looks a bit better since Vance replaced him. I know, that's not saying much is it? lol.
From the evidence I’ve seen Pence’s wife has displayed more traditional manhood than Pence, Vance and Cruz put together.
And also more of a stand up gal than JayDee's high powered lawyer wife who was happy to conveniently disappear for pretty much the whole campaign, and is continuing to not exist publicly.
Ted Cruz's daughter attempted to unalive herself because her father is so horrible. So of course Ted Cruz responded by doubling down on how horrible he is. He doesn't give a single fuck about his daughter.
+1
In the case of DeSantis, smiles like he never smiled in his life and has no clue how to.
There are a few people/groups pulling the Trump puppet strings. Each one in service of their own goals. It's a den of serpents. I suspect they will start to bite each other sooner or later.
This needs to be talked about more widely, and to be the frame for how Trump is discussed in the media. It's plain that Trump has no fucking clue what the people around him are doing; he doesn't even seem to be aware that he lacks control over them; Trump demonstrably lacks the basic faculties required to actually run the presidency.
Witness him signing EOs without really knowing what they are ("Oh, that's a big one"), not understanding the scope of the insurrectionists pardons (or even grasping that as the man wot did the pardon, he ought to know), and here, Trump conceding that Musk shouldn't have access to information, while apparently admitting that there's nothing to stop him.
Angry grandpa is sundowning, and the dimwit isn't aware of what the various Rasputins around him are doing and getting him to sign.
+100. I've seen video of him doing that. it's embarrassing how little he knows about what he's signing or how little he actually cares.
But if Trump cared, then he might have to put in some work to understand what he's doing. And that would require some intelligence and some knowledge of the world, neither of which is possessed by Trump.
So, do you think he'd really want to care ?
Yep. It's the regime that's responsible for the outrages, not Trump himself. He's lost it.
"the regime"? Let's get specific. Russell Vought paging through the Project 2025 manual to decide on the next EO, and Stephen Miller.
Vought, Miller, Musk, Hegseth, Kennedy, Waltz, Wiles, Warrington, Vance...
This comment came at a perfect time for the lawsuit at DOGE's access to the Treasury.
My guess is that the treasury payment database hasn't been set up with minimisation of access requirements in mind - to be fair, a relatively new concept - so DOGE can't not see/access some of this stuff when they're accessing other actually necessary stuff in the database.
The "treasury payment database" is probably a list of payments with the payee, pay date, routing, and address information right in the record, because the Federal Government does not have a "single-silo" of person identification that all agencies read from. THEY provide all the information to make the payment in the request. Just because it says "US Treasury Department" on the check is meaningless, it's really being paid from some agency's budget.
So of course it has no access siloing; people who aren't check writing techs are not supposed to be anywhere in it! So if you can read the request queue at all, you can read all of the request queue. We can all pray that it has things like batch balances that provide an intrinsic check that no particular payment was modified.
There is nothing that it is actually necessary for them to access.
Matt Yglesias think their main objective was figuring out how payment prioritization can be done to give them more leverage in a debt ceiling standoff.
I'm skeptical, but it's not a crazy theory.
But if the president orders them to give DOGE unlimited access, then of course that's what they get.
Not any more:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjw4g2q62xqo
Does it even fucking matter what a judge says at this point? Have Musk's little shitspittles honored the judge's decision? Will we even know if they have at this point? He and those shitspittles should be locked up in Gitmo, but they will just keep rampaging through the government because no one is going to actually enforce any judge's ruling. I mean Pam Bondi and the soon to be confirmed Kash Patel are going to stop Musk?
Does it even fucking matter what a judge says at this point?
Yes. Of course it does. That said, I don't think anyone should count on every one of these law suits going against Trump, nor, needless to say, the appeals (he's bound to win some). But so far there are a good 6 or 7 injunctions and rulings stopping these blatantly illegal power grabs.
If at some point the administration decides to defy a court order we'll truly be in deep water. I hope this doesn't happen. But it cannot be ruled out. But we'll cross that bridge if we get there, I guess. No sense slitting our wrists over events that may not even happen. But doom and gloom aside, the judicial branch is holding up very well at present, no trade war has yet broken out, we're still in NATO, USAID has been saved, Trump's numbers are in the tank, a few of his cabinet appointments are likely to cost the GOP political capital, and the great deportation drive appears to be mostly smoke and mirrors.
I'm trying to keep my chin up and live day by day.
I'm hoping he'll over reach. Which he has already done to some extent. But the project 2025 people won't give up without a fight. Trump is their best hope at enacting their extreme agenda. He's the perfect patsy. Let him do whatever he wants while manipulating him into doing their bidding.
The first step in fighting back against Trump is getting him to reject Musk. Musk is the real threat here. Along with the project 2025 extremists. I just don't see that happening as long as he keeps getting to do what he wants, to grift. It's a three headed snake. All three are equally as dangerous. Four if you count the GOP. Persistent and constant resistance to the madness is what is desperately needed. We need the Democrats to be louder than the GOP now more than ever. I hope they step up.
The only reason why people follow court orders is the threat of consequences for not following them.
Trump knows he’s consequence-free, thanks to the Supreme Court. And anyone (rich) working for him knows they’re all-but-consequence-free because they can either get pardoned by Trump or flee the country. And the young adults in all this are probably too stupid or inexperienced to know what consequences are: the “invincibles” who often break laws and then are shocked, shocked when consequences happen to them.
So yeah, I don’t believe court orders will stop lawlessness from either Trump or Musk.
FFS!
GWB has a used "Mission accomplished" flag he'd sell you real cheap.
I get that you want to push back on assuming all is lost, and time may prove your optimism founded. But please, let's not become a caricature of credulity in the opposite direction.
A restraining order has saved USAID in about the same way Gaza has been saved by the current cease-fire agreement.
+100. Trump himself has ignored subpoenas. This time around he has 100% support of the Republicans and probably slightly less than that of the SCOTUS. There's no downside to ignoring the law.
This seems right.
Any excitement about a few individual judges throwing up a temporary, limited speed bump should be tempered with the admission that this likely won't amount to anything.
Remember the individual judges who thought stealing classified data was a punishable offense? Or the judge who thought trying to overthrow the government barred you from running for President? Or the judges who mistakenly thought Presidents could commit crimes? Nobody remembers these speed bumps and they certainly didn't stop Trump from doing future criming.
So we shouldn't trick ourselves into thinking that these temporary roadblocks will be meaningful and thr justice system will save the day. We know that the justice system will do no such thing.
"Or the judge who thought trying to overthrow the government barred you from running for President?"
It wasn't one judge, it was the Colorado Supreme Court.
Now that's a word: shitspittles. I was trying to think of a group name that could be applied to Musk's gang, and 'fellow travellers' was all I could think of. So thanks for the inspirational help.
Feed that data into AI and they have instantaneous access to everything about you.
Frankly, I know it is too late, but AI is a little like opening Pandora's box without the slightest bit of good coming from it. And sociopath/psychopaths like Elon and Trump with their delusions of grandeur are by nature unable to understand anyone's concern, the harm they are doing or regret anything that they do. In their minds they can do whatever the hell they want.
+35.
Sort of like nuclear weapons. Except probably more destructive to peoples daily lives. A.I won't make us slaves, the people programing it will.
That's not how AI works. It's not a magic box.
Josh Marshall at TPM says, “The standard should be: no help on the budget or the debt ceiling until the lawbreaking stops. Period. End of story. No wilding gangs marauding through the federal government. End the criminal conduct. Period.”
I just don’t think there’s any reason to trust that trump will keep any promises made. Why would he? It’s over. Sorry.
With his history of breaking promises, why would anyone believe anything donnie has promised?
+100. The guy has never kept a promise. The closest he ever gets is using it as the basis of theatrics. The illegal immigrant round up for instance.
Dismantle the euphemistically named DOGE. Republicans better wake up before they make themselves and everyone in congress irrelevant.
Well, if Trump won't stop breaking laws and violating the Constitution, then the Republicans in Congress (and Trump) get no help from Democrats. They either pass their massive tax cuts for the Have-too-muchers and big spending on foolishness with only Republican votes ... or they don't pass.
"Promises" should have nothing to do with it. Democrats have too many decades of "negotiating" with Republicans like Mitch McConnell, who gets the promised "exchange" benefit, then never delivers, to be suckers now, with the Fraudster in Chief back in power.
+100
What they need is irrelevant. They are not an officially sanctioned government entity, regardless of the fact what Trump has designate Musk as. If we lived in a sane country shit like DOGE wouldn't exist. If the Democrats did a mere fraction of the stuff Trump and his band of miscreants has done MAGA would be out with pitchforks and torches.
Look what I came across... https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/07/judge-denies-lawsuit-union-musk-doge-labor-department-00203245
It's going to be a very litigious four years for everyone. Mostly due to Trumps bullshit.
I'm a bit baffled by the Judge's ruling.
The attacks on the environment arent just in government. They'll just preasure lickspittles like Bezos to stop supporting pro environment groups. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/feb/06/jeff-bezos-climate-group-trump-bezos-earth-fund-science-based-targets-initiative-decarbonisation-aoe
Intimidation does wonders with weak and greedy people.
Look, more DOGE shit! https://www.npr.org/2025/02/07/g-s1-47322/musks-team-takes-control-of-key-systems-at-consumer-financial-protection-bureau
I have to stop surfing the net, it's all shit and bad news for our Republic.
And it continues... https://www.yahoo.com/news/pushed-elon-musk-office-personnel-181026418.html
Does all of this leave Musk personally liable for misuse of any of this information in the future?
Good question. It most certainly should. But then again who the hell knows in the era of Trump and the big grift.
Does all of this leave Musk personally liable for misuse of any of this information in the future?
Probably not, but it's a good question. While Trump can pardon him, pardons don't extend to civil liability. Here's what Claude has to say:
Musk doesn't receive a salary, I think, but I'd imagine it would be hard to argue he's not a government official given that he was appointed by POTUS and has a security clearance.
I think it'll be very hard to sue him personally for actions undertaken on order from the President. I strongly suspect the most feasible means of stopping Musk is to make him so politically toxic Trump begins to hear loud complaints from constituencies he listens to, and so fires him. But of course, he could be replaced at DOGE by someone just as odious, and that person would be free to consult with the now former DOGE boss.
The convicted felon has released an insane loose cannon in our private business. I'd say this was against the law.
The lawlessness will continue until one of the following happens:
1. Complete collapse of government services, riling up the currently-comfortable middle class. Unfortunately this is likely to be when the middle class is already facing waves of foreclosures and joblessness, so they might just go after designated scapegoats (visible minorities) instead.
2. Mere billionaires realize the government money spigot to their enterprises has been turned off by the multibillionaires. Mere billionaires do buy some congresspeople of their own, which they can use to impeach Trump when it’s clear that even lowly single-digit billionaires aren’t safe from the multibillionaires taking everything.
3. Terrorists, Russia, China or a natural disaster cause something to happen that is totally catastrophic and/or existential in its scope, requiring everyone to pull together to survive whatever it is. Something like terrorists gunning down Congress, a nuclear bomb detonated in Manhattan, a virus that this time spreads rapidly and kills 50% of people infected or merely just Russia starting WWIII. Since the Federal government will be incredibly compromised at this point, I’m guessing it would have to be each state on its own to band together to defeat whatever it is.
That’s it. We’re in a holding pattern of smash-and-grab until the Jenga tower that is the federal government has enough pieces pulled out of it that one of the above finally motivates either enough people to revolt, enough moneyed interests to revolt or enough states to revolt. None of those scenarios is likely to be good for most people.
+100
Trump doesn't care about any damage he does. He's out to make money. His casinos are a perfect example. He himself said he made out quite well. Mainly by saddling his investors with the debt his incompetence caused. We are the next casino.
" He's out to make money."
That is nonsense. He wants to become a dictator.
For making money he doesn't to mess up with the federal government.
I dont think that's the case at all. His only interest has always been making money. That and the payback for his perceived slights and grievances. Beyond that he has neither the focus nor attention span to be a dictator. The Republicans and project 2025 are the ones interested in creating a dictatorship. He's a means to an end. They'll gladly use him to achieve their goals. He's not the real danger, the ones that follow him are.
You ignore tons of evience over decades. For example:
1) a friend gave him a book of Hitler's speeches "because he thought Trump will find it interesting".
2) Complimenting the Chinese government for shooting their citizen.
etc.
When he was asked whether he is going to be a dictator, he wan't able to say 'no'.
After the way he subjugated the Republican party and the "conservatives", he is obvious capable of being a dictator.
The only thing that may stop him is health issues.
I believe that Donald collected a million a year in management fees while his casinos went down. Probably more.
I don't know why #3 would stop the lawlessness. I believe the exact opposite would happen: Diktator Trump would be unleashed in the name of national security.
We'd all best hope no truly diastrous event transpires before January, 2029. Trump is both dictatorial and grossly incompetent. The Covid epidemic wasn't a great omen.
Does Herr Musk and his goose steppers have the required security clearance to have access to all this highly sensitive personal information? I assume that employees of Federal contractors need this for having access to sensitive information?
I suppose it really doesn't really matter since Mango Mussolini can grant that with the wave of one of his little orange claws, and a good number of his Cabinet appointees wouldn't pass a "real" security review (or a psych eval).
It's going to be a real field day for Chinese, Russian, and Iranian spies, and all sorts of foreign operatives after the FBI and CIA get "DOGED" out of existence.
Just remember they are doing it illegally because they don't have the mandate to do it legally. But you know who actually can make laws and change funding on their own, congress can. They could zero out the White House, DOGE, and secret service budgets in a day. Perhaps a day or two longer depending upon how long the veto takes that needs to be overridden. Musk, Thiel and the people like Trump who work for them have very little real power.
They have to loudly exclaim and pretend Trump is king because as President his powers are basically non-existent without the support of both congress and the judiciary.
At the risk of (over) catastrophizing, I'm placing a marker here today: If the convicted felon's chaos remains at this feverish pace, there may be, within the next 2 years, a recession that severely sets back the poor and working class and triggers a true black swan: a populist revolt overshadowing the Occupy movement, resulting in violence against the rich and those who defend the rich, irrespective of their politics.
"violence against the rich"
Well, you would think so. However, that's why the well-off have been fanning the flames of racism and sexism for centuries now. We've got to put the blame on "those people"! And it's worked very well.
There was a strong movement in the late 1800s, early 1900s towards Marxism, due to the excesses of the very rich during the Gilded Age. It fired support for labor unions, limited work weeks, minimum wages, etc. There would have been a lot more of a revolution, had not FDR come in and saved capitalism by reducing some of the dog-eat-dog, monopoly-cartel features and starting a social support system.
The idea of "social classes" has been largely stamped out of Americans' consciiousness. "Classes" are something they have in "Old Europe"! Here, the rich are clearly better! Smarter! Harder working! More deserving!
Hard to get up a class revolution when this mantra have been drilled into us since birth.
If he would actually impose the tariffs he promised a thousand times a recession would definitely happen, and that's not counting the deportations he also promised a thousand times which would also do it. The externalities of both are endless.
Meanwhile his tariffs have been way less than promised and only used as a bullying tactic, and the much lower than promised one on China just got a waiver for deliveries under $800. No his cult will not notice.
Yeah but Trump doesn't need to fulfill his promises, all he needs to do is make show promises and his 'base' will believe he's done it anyway. They are as ignorant of reality as is Trump himself.
Anyway, how many of those public servants that Trump is terrorising voted for him and are still glad they did ?
Well you know they are the makers, not the takers. Job creators!
I'm still pissed off about that one.
Americans and their Social Security Numbers!!!
The SSN is a wonderfully useful “Unique Identifier” - it's NOT some sort of secret squirrel password!!
By its very nature it can’t be a “password” -
There are some American financial institutions that do use the SSN as a password - their leaders should be locked up in a different type of “Institution”!
The best thing to do with Social Security Numbers is to put them into a common and open database where they can be used for things like citizenship and voting status and with an open database even the dimmest financial manager should STOP using it as a password
“Well, it doesn’t, but they get it very easily. We don’t have very good security in our country.” A POTUS actually said that out loud. What a fucking idiot. I suppose he should know. He walked out of the White House with lots of top secret documents.
Fired the archivist. Actually surprised it took him so long.
He finnaly realized it or someone pointed it out to him. I'm gonna bet on the latter.
Suppose the aim is to make it easy to redirect or withhold appropriated funds without delay or interference by pesky bureaucrats or institutionalists in the agencies. If musk can stop Treasury checks at the source, trump can do this quickly, creating facts on the ground before anyone can intervene.