Because running a company is different to running a state and we doubt his intentions, not his skills.
Someone that is not elected gets 8mill/day from the government now overseas the government with some 20-year old fanatics that can’t even put up a secure website for DOGE?
Yeah, most of the government isn't elected, that's how it works. You only vote for 3 roles in the Federal government (I guess 4 if you count the veep). The rest of them are hired.
For those downvoting, the roles are President, Vice President, Senator, and Representative.
Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the US Constitution:
""[The President] shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: *but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.*"
Emphasis on the last sentence. There have been a plethora of such vestments in the Executive branch over the decades.
5 U.S.C. § 105 - This statute authorizes the creation of "necessary agencies" within the Executive Office, giving the President flexibility to establish entities like the USDS and staff them as needed, subject to funding.
5 U.S.C. § 3101 - This law states that "each Executive agency" (including the EOP) "may employ such number of employees ... as Congress may appropriate for." It implies broad authority to hire staff, with Congress controlling the budget but not necessarily the individual appointments.
Excepted Service Authority (5 U.S.C. § 3301 and Schedule A) - Under 5 CFR § 213.3102, agencies like the OMB can use Schedule A hiring authority for positions requiring specialized skills (e.g., tech expertise) that aren’t practical to fill through standard civil service exams.
This authority, delegated by Congress via the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 (Public Law 95-454) and regulations from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), allows the President (or OMB leadership) to appoint USDS personnel directly.
Term Appointments - Many roles are temporary or term-limited (e.g., 2-4 years), often filled by detailees from other agencies or private-sector experts. These don’t require Senate confirmation because they aren’t permanent "officers." This flexibility is supported by 5 U.S.C. § 3161, which allows temporary organizations within the executive branch to hire staff for specific projects.
Thanks, I’ve read the constitution too. Ever heard of congress, full of elected officials? Or the senate? Your claim that there are so few elected officials is patently absurd.
Because he and his organization have demonstrated ignorance of the services he's not only auditing, but making pretty substantial cuts to. One example I'm familiar with, cutting up to 10% of the personnel to the Technology Transformation Services at GSA is quite likely to reduce the efficiency of both government and private sector government contractors.
Because he owns companies that contract with the government and are affected by its policies. It's the very definition of a conflict of interest.
And he's not even "auditing" the government. When you're auditing, you emit a report that the audited party later analyzes and acts upon. He's been given freeway to fire government workers as he pleases as if he's an elected officer, which he's not.
> He's doing everything he's doing by executive order of the President of the United States, who was elected.
And already has a number of lawsuits started because he's trying to do things neither he nor the president are allowed to do. Getting an EO to do something doesn't mean it's automatically legal. Multiple big decisions have already been reverted or are held until judges can review them. Even things like the promised payout for quitting are not practical, because only congress can approve the money for that.
There's lawsuits naturally as lawfare is a normal part of modern politics. All the laws necessary to do payouts for voluntary separation already exist, as long as it fits within the budgetary appropriations already set by Congress.
I'm sure he's trying his best. But I don't doubt that, even if not doing it on purpose, he will mostly cut departments and services that do not hurt him or indirectly benefit any of his many businesses.
He, a single person, has far too much control of our system.
It's lost 80% of it's value in 2 years, which usually isn't great. The most charitable view of X/Twitter is that it's now a propaganda platform that Musk doesn't mind taking a loss on in order to enact political change.
Im pretty sure he doesn't like that he is not able to make it more successful but i don't believe he regrets it.
He would have regretted it if it wouldn't have played out (and this game he is currently playing, is not finished yet) like it currently does. He said in an interview that he puts everything on one card now.
Edit: Also he gets a lot of valuation due to him being a cult or whatever. From companies surviving the AI phase we are in right now, if he can't get the nazi people on his side to buy his stuff, he is a very high risk.
He destroyed twitters brand and bluesky emerged. He destroys Tesla and other car makers making ground. SpaceX needs a lot of subsidies and his goal for mars is only a cult topic not a financial success topic.
But are they well-versed in the things accountants specialize in? Is there a possibility that not every programmer can be a good accountant, or that accountants know things you're unaware of when you wrote that statement?
Even better, they're well versed in things that accountants aren't. When you're auditing trillions of dollars in spending, it helps to have software, data science and analytics experts that can use modern tools beyond COBOL written 62 years ago.
They can use data processing, detect anomalies better, leverage AI models, automate data extraction from analog records, ingest unstructured data like emails and memos, build complex financial dependency graphs, detect leaks, build custom scrapers, etc etc.
I'm sure there's at least one accountant in the loop, but you really want the team to consist mostly of data nerds.
What about GAAP/IFRS? How do you endow these software engineers with knowledge of common patterns of fraud or leaks so they can actually write the correct software to find them automatically? How do they identify material misstatements?
You also seem confused; COBOL might be used, but it isn't the only tool available to accountants working for the government. COBOL is a straw-man. What you're describing here—software engineers who presumably have training in accounting—already exists, and they work inside and out of the government. This is an existing career path.
You're speaking about this as though you know a better way to do something, but it's already happening, and has been for years. Accountants aren't writing 62 year old programming languages waiting to die in their chairs while the world continues to progress without them.
Accounting just about anywhere you find it is already accomplished by accountants, some of them technically trained, as well as data scientists and software engineers. It's an interdisciplinary collaboration in any serious organization.
As a person who works with data and has done both consulting and product building in Data Science and lack of domain knowledge is what makes or breaks the end result. Too often do technical people think they know better and then build mediocre solutions that don't get used.
An audit accountant can ask an engineer to implement whatever is needed to achieve a goal they understand. An engineer with no finance background will have no idea where to start or what questions they can ask an accountant.
You can easily get drowned by a see of numbers and get confused and gaslighted, unless you don’t make sure all data is available and computable.
Not sure how this release, which impressive by all means transformed into an attack on DOGE which is the exact approach startups are taking to disrupt an industry.
No one doubts his abilities, and reasonable people are grateful for his work with DOGE and support of free speech. Unfortunately, this platform has become an echo chamber for mainstream media, merely repeating news and links from sources like verge/bbc/politico etc. This is just a bias in the user groups. Still, we should hopefully put politics aside and focus on more tech related subject in this website :)
I think a lot of that comes from people thinking the eye-catching memorable views they've read are the most common views. When they're really not and are mire likely just the views of the most passionate 1%.
For the same reason I doubt Einstein's abilities as a painter. History is littered with the stories of smart people who tried to treat government dysfunction like corporate dysfunction and failed spectacularly.
He bids for contracts just like anyone else and most of those contracts were won under Democrat presidents, but I digress. If you're saying government contractors can't work for the government, then you're going to have to explain the military-industrial complex to me.
It’s not a doubt of abilities, it’s a doubt of his interests aligning with the interests of US citizens.
Here is an unelected NAZI and ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT (worked illegally on a student visa) who did a seig heil at the presidential inauguration taking up an informal unconfirmed-by-congress department head role (DOGE is just US Digital Services renamed) and getting wide access to government systems, and seemingly firing thousands of government employees.
Billionaires, who should not exist, are so rich that they don’t need government services and would rather the government go away so they can make more money. But regular people do need a government, and that’s just one reason of many why Elon shouldn’t be anywhere near policy decisions.
Now, you might say I’m being dramatic. But I’ll say there is no criticism of this man is unfair. He is one of the world’s biggest hypocrites, along with the other MAGA Nazis in his camp.
The (unelected) richest person in the world, with a sprawling business empire that has many interactions with the federal government, has been given free-reign with no oversight to fire any federal workers that he wants and has usurped Congress' power of the purse by stopping Congressionally appropriated spending.
This creates numerous conflicts of interests and opportunities for self-dealing.
Consider a NASA employee that is awarding government contracts. They know all of the above. They have three bids in front of them. One from Boeing (lol), one from SpaceX, and one from Axiom Space. They NASA employee thinks the bid from Axiom Space is the best value and fits the requirements the best. But will they select them, or will they select SpaceX, knowing that they could be fired tomorrow by Musk's whim?
Repeat this scenario across every interaction any of Musk's companies have with the federal government.
This isn't a novel scenario. Putin's Russia is a great example of what happens when oligarchs are granted significant autonomy over organs of the government. It is a system designed to facilitate corruption.
You could assuage my concerns, though, by describing the ways that there is effective oversight over Musk, or by describing the anti-corruption anti-self-dealing measures that have been imposed on Musk. The Press Secretary gave a statement on this saying: "As for concerns regarding conflicts of interest between Elon Musk and DOGE, President Trump has stated he will not allow conflicts, and Elon himself has committed to recusing himself from potential conflicts." That...does not resolve my concerns.
> Fixing the deficit is the opposite of looting, actually.
I think this has two errors.
First, I don't agree that he's fixing the deficit. I think that's an assumption not in evidence. We'll see in a few years time, though. I'd be willing to bet in 4 years the deficit is > 0, and likely larger than it is today.
But let's assume arguendo that he is fixing the deficit. It's still possible to loot the treasury while fixing the deficit, which shows that they aren't actually the opposite.
Consider this example with completely made up numbers:
Before
- Revenue: $1T
- Defense Spending: $500B
- Benefits Spending: $1T
- Public Services Spending: $499.9B
- Government Contracts with Musk's Companies: $100M
The before scenario has $1T in revenue, and $2T in spending, for a deficit of $1T. Now, let's allow hypothetical Musk to have free-reign to "fix the deficit"
After
- Revenue: $800B
- Defense Spending: $300B
- Benefits Spending: $300B
- Public Services Spending: $100B
- Government Contracts with Musk's Companies: $100B
In this scenario the deficit has been reduced to $0, while Musk has enriched himself and his companies with $99.9B in government funds. This would be an extreme example of Musk looting the treasury, while still completely resolving the deficit.
There is no solid evidence of a path to fixing the deficit at the moment.
There is no evidence of this happening, nor of a serviceable plan to do so.
All recovered expenses, to date, add up to a laughably small amount, and are one-time cutbacks. The strategy shows signs of costing the government in unexpected ways as well.
Most governments of developed nations operate in more sensible ways with clearer plans than this. I won't claim they are looting, but it's absurd to suggest they are fixing the deficit at the moment. The economy appears to be getting worse, not better.
Nazis would incarcerate people into work camps and turn them into soap or hang them in public squares, kind of different than what Elon did. There's a pretty big gap between doing something in poor taste like Nazi salutes in public because you have the intellectual maturity of a 12 year old edge-lord on Xbox live seeking attention, and being an a actual Nazi committing crimes against humanity.
When everyone goes around calling everyone they hate a Nazi, it only desensitizes people to the real Nazi behavior, kind of like the boy who cried wolf, since there's people out there committing actual atrocities against humans going under the public radar because they never do the Nazi salutes on camera to not draw attention. So then the Nazi term starts to loose any meaning, kind of like the overuse of calling everything "woke" today.
The problem is people as a whole are retarded due to mob behavior and too focused on optics and only judge based on feelings rather than facts, that's how we have actual criminal Nazis going free under the radar while innocent people being swatted and doxxed because they said something right wing on social media. Not all Nazis today wear jackboots and do heils, plenty go about appearing like normal people in public, they could even be your neighbor, police officer or local congressman.
So save your anger for those people instead, as Elon is just a 3 year old throwing tantrums seeking attention, annoying but relatively harmless. If people stopped giving him so much attention, he'd stop doing it.
What makes you so sure/special in this regard? What are you gaining from this? If your were that enlightened as you claim, Germany wouldn't be in such a mess right now. If you only spent as much effort in securing your borders, energy independence and defence, as you spent lecturing others on imaginary Nazis and banning hate speech on social media, you'd be a respectable world power right now at the table with Trump and Putin ending this war before it even happened. The "we know better than you" arrogance is Germany's biggest problem.
>This is basically blaming the thing criticized on the people criticizing it.
It's not blaming, I'm just telling you what the simplest solution is. Ignoring attention seekers is better than giving them more attention. Which is why I'm also gonna ignore your future comments form now on.
Germany? the scope of the discussion is already limited to the AfD. What makes Germans special in their opinions about Nazis in Germany to is deep experience and knowledge with the subject you are belittling. And I'm also not spending any time banning hate speech on social media, heh. Whatever chip on your shoulder you have about Germany I can barely even decipher and you're right, it's best to agree to disagree.
