> I don't see anything that lends credence to the idea that Congress can control the workings of executive departments.
Along with what others have said, you might want to recognize that Congress controls the purse. They dictate how much the executive should spend on each item, though that can be nuanced (as in "up to this much" vs "exactly this much")
Friend, I think I see your concern, and I may have an answer. Most of the bureaucracy is apolitical. However, the heads and higher-ups of each agency are appointed by the currently in-office politicians.
So the upper management is composed of political appointments. And like any other organization, the upper management has considerable discretion in setting priorities.
re: "politically selective law enforcement" is not a good thing, because laws are one of the things that are supposed to constrain politicians.
> But our government doesn’t have independent branches.
In theory it does, that is the whole idea and genius of the constitution.
In fact at the moment it does not, because Trump has so captured the Republican party that the legislature has almost no power to stand up to him. The Supreme Court has a long history of judges aligning with the political party that seated them, and Trump put 3 of them into their seat.
this alarming trend seems to coincide with DOGE’s unrestricted access to federal networks.
the first 2 paragraphs:
Beginning on January 8, 2025, a surge of U.S. government infrastructure began appearing on what’s known as “the search engine of Internet-connected devices,” Shodan.io.
Federal agencies typically secure their systems behind multiple layers of protection, ensuring that critical services – such as mail servers, directory services, VPNs, internal IP addresses, and remote access gateways – remain isolated from public access.
Now is this conclusive proof that DOGE did it? Hardly. However, can you think of anything else that changed since 8 Jan that would override decades of policy in the matter of hours?
These posts have a high political index, which given America's current culture wars tends to bring out the kind of behavior which none of us want on HN.
It's a damn tough balancing act.
Also, look at my post history, I'm pretty strongly anti-DOGE. I'm defending Dang because I love HN and appreciate what he is doing under extremely tough conditions.
yeah, the claim that the bureaucracy is the thing that is broken-- can we look at a few things?
Every time the administration changes, the heads of all the departments change, and the incoming people are typically pretty ignorant of what the department does. How would a corporation work if every 4 years you rotated the C-suite and 2 levels down, with people from a completely different business sector?
Meanwhile, funding is shifted even more often. Or is just outright cut once every few years.
Meanwhile, every action they take is an official government action. Which means it is LEGALLY REQUIRED to happen in certain ways based on laws written by people who don't think about consequences or how they are enacted.
And it is 2.2 Million people. There are economies of scale here.
So I wonder how this compares to current Google, current Facebook. I've heard people here talking about how messed up those companies are, projects started/stopped at whim, massive investments that get abandoned 2 years later, etc.
Or to banks. Banks don't modernize their software because they can't, not because they don't want to. No wonder the US government has similar issues.
This all sounds like examples of how the bureaucracy is broken. I suppose a better way to say it is the bureaucracy is unable to respond in any sort of effective way to the problems it is meant to solve because there are far too many people who have the option to change the rules whether it's the president, congressional committee, judges, etc.
By "thought crimes", would you mean firing people for holding positions responsible for DEI policies which were assigned to them and which there was a legal obligation to enforce?
Because that would NEVER happen in the US, certainly no government agency would fire its own people for having following legally enacted government policy just because that policy was no longer in fashion (though still legal government policy, because Congress hadn't yet changed the law).
I respect that you have been a HN member since 2016, making it unlikely that this is a troll account.
However, your views read like propaganda.
The "internal resistance" you refer to is simply people trying to follow the law, while being constantly whipsawed by changing political winds. We see similar stories here on HN about work in large corporations. What do you think it is like in an org with 2.2 MILLION employees, where their actions have the power of government behind them often including access to extremely sensitive information?
HN talked about leaking any Youtuber's contact information for 10K, with suggestions that Google should better protect people's data.
HN frequently talks about the dangers of non-accountability for police. Would you like that same non-accountabilty spread to all aspects of the Federal government? (if so, merry christmas because now you have it)
If you cannot find any steel-man arguments against DOGE, may I suggest that you read the remainder of this HN article?
Why would you even suspect this is a troll account? These are clearly genuinely held opinions, stated plainly and without the normal wild rhetoric I typically hear in comments in such threads, yet you read it as propaganda.
This is why I flag all articles on DOGE/etc, because genuine conversation is assumed to be in bad faith.
Expecting someone to read an article having an obvious propaganda hit-piece title like "DOGE as a National Cyberattack" is silly.
Would you read an article titled "technology is the mark of the beast" and take your time to debate its merits?
I personally hold the belief that DOGE and president Trump are acting in good-faith to keep his campaign promises as best as they're able, in a messy and tumultuous environment.
At the same time, I have a lot of empathy for the great number of people that are afraid and hurting right now for a multitude of reasons. People are facing food/job/business insecurity, genuine threats to various core ideological beliefs, an environment of fear and uncertainty for many affected people, threats to the desired direction of our laws and societal moral compass, etc. I hurt for those affected, and I do what I can within my spheres of influence to help.
I don't see why we can't have an honest conversation with each other without assuming that the other is operating in bad-faith. I think BOTH sides should stop using propaganda, and start LISTENING to each other, that eventually we might determine paths forward together without cancelling each other.
Why is it silly? Is it reasonable to hold the opinion that DOGE should not have been given access to these systems (note: this doesn't mean that the opposite view isn't also reasonable)? If it's a reasonable position to hold, then getting access to these systems can be reasonably construed as an attack, can it not?
I don't really think this argument merits a comparison to "technology is the mark of the beast" or that the only people that can be opposed to DOGE suffers from "personality derangement" or "glorifies bureaucratic power"
> Is it reasonable to hold the opinion that DOGE should not have been given access to these systems
"We audited ourselves" typically doesn't fly, so no, I'd say not a reasonable position. Someone external has to do it, and DOGE is the one tasked by the president to do so.
Audit are already conducted by outsiders, but the objection to DOGE is less the concept of auditing but how they’re doing it by bypassing all kinds of policies. Normally auditors would be qualified, have passed background checks, and agree to follow the same security and privacy policies.
The outrage is because they’re taking a lot of risk and clearly treating it as a political exercise when it shouldn’t be.
>I don't see why we can't have an honest conversation with each other without assuming that the other is operating in bad-faith.
>I think BOTH sides should stop using propaganda
Well you proved it right here. You're "both sides"-ing this when the responsibiliry and power at the moment is horribly disproprtionate. It isn't at all. We can throw all the links we want, but I've yet to see any "liberal propaganda" posted in response to suggest that Democrats are "playing dirty".
If we can't even talk about objective facts like "Musk retaliated on Judges who gave him court order", then we can't talk much. We're not in the same reality and facts like that aren't even denied by Musk. You're defending someone who is outright saying "I want to take down the courts". He isn't even defending himself.
Same with ICE raids. People are upset because they built their house on sand and have to start again. Businesses are upset because they can't get around labour laws
I find it funny that you're getting downvoted though. Maybe in a few years it'll all blow over
Along with what others have said, you might want to recognize that Congress controls the purse. They dictate how much the executive should spend on each item, though that can be nuanced (as in "up to this much" vs "exactly this much")