Moderators: Alyrium Denryle, Edi, K. A. Pital
I would really prefer my GOP CongressCritters to grow a fucking spine and stand up against Trump.bilateralrope wrote: ↑2025-02-12 08:31amYes, that's what I'd prefer. But I can't see it happening.
Right now the only hope for a response to that is the courts.
Which is unelected bureaucrat Enron Musk trying to undermine right now.bilateralrope wrote: ↑2025-02-12 08:31amRight now the only hope for a response to that is the courts.
So far judges aren't having any of it.wautd wrote: ↑2025-02-13 05:54amWhich is unelected bureaucrat Enron Musk trying to undermine right now.bilateralrope wrote: ↑2025-02-12 08:31amRight now the only hope for a response to that is the courts.
After all, the Rule of Law is a hindrance for scam artists and oligarchs
Just remember the Golden Rule: those who have the gold make the rules.bilateralrope wrote: ↑2025-02-13 06:44amSo far judges aren't having any of it.wautd wrote: ↑2025-02-13 05:54amWhich is unelected bureaucrat Enron Musk trying to undermine right now.bilateralrope wrote: ↑2025-02-12 08:31am
Right now the only hope for a response to that is the courts.
After all, the Rule of Law is a hindrance for scam artists and oligarchs
Sure, Musk is trying to ignore their orders. That is going to escalate until he gives in, the judges start imprisoning people for contempt* or it becomes impossible to pretend that the US is still a society of laws.
*I'm not sure if contempt can be pardoned. But if it's pardoned, the contempt is still happening. So the pardon won't free anyone.
It's probably going to take years for anything to reach SCOTUS. So the preliminary injunctions and the following contempt of court rulings will delay things.Tribble wrote: ↑2025-02-13 07:08am
Just remember the Golden Rule: those who have the gold make the rules.
While that’s always been the case, the difference is under Trump the US is just abandoning all the pretence.
And given that SCOTUS ruled that Trump can do whatever the hell he wants (including assassinating his political rivals) as long as it’s an “official act,” does anyone seriously think they’re not gonna twist themselves into pretzels to make sure whatever he’s doing is deemed “legal?”
And even if they do end up trying to block his agenda, what exactly can they do if he and the Republican Congress just ignore them?
An embargo is a big action.
They're five decades behind, but they're trying!RFK Jr. Wants to Send People Addicted to Antidepressants to Government “Wellness Farms”
The farms will “reparent” them.
Kiera Butler
Kiera Butler
Senior Editor/Reporter
Bio | Follow
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lectures the viewer from inside a prescription pill bottle.
Mother Jones; Michael Brochstein/Zuma; Getty
Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.
In a virtual event last week that was billed as a “Latino Town Hall,” presidential candidate and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unveiled his plan to overhaul addiction treatment programs. Speaking during a live recording of the Latino Capitalist podcast, Kennedy described opioid, antidepressant, and ADHD “addicts” receiving treatment on tech-free “wellness farms,” where they would spend as much as three or four years growing organic produce.
How to pay for these farms? Kennedy had an answer. With money generated through a sales tax on cannabis products, Kennedy said, “I’m going to dedicate that revenue to creating wellness farms—drug rehabilitation farms, in rural areas all over this country,” he said. “I’m going to make it so people can go, if you’re convicted of a drug offense, or if you have a drug problem, you can go to one of these places for free.”
On the farms, he said, residents would grow their own organic food—which would help them recover from addiction, “because a lot of the behavioral issues are food related. A lot of the illnesses are food related.” The idea that addiction is connected to consuming non-organic food is not backed by robust science—but it’s in line with many other unfounded claims that Kennedy has made in the past about pesticides and non-organic food causing chronic disease, behavioral problems, and autism.
Cell phones and other screens, he said, would be prohibited. “We’re going to re-parent people and restore connection to community,” he promised. “We have a whole generation of kids who are dispossessed, they’re alienated, their marginalized, their suicide rates are exploding; the second largest killer for young people is drug addiction.” Kennedy has suggested in the past that 5G cell phone technology could cause health problems.
The range of people receiving such treatment could potentially include wide swaths of the population, since the wellness farms wouldn’t just be for people addicted to illegal drugs, but also for people who are taking antidepressants and ADHD medications. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 11 percent of Americans ages 12 and older take antidepressants, and about 4 percent of Americans between the ages of five and 64 take medication for ADHD.
I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric drugs, if they want to, to get off of SSRIs, to get off of benzos, to get off of Adderall, and to spend time as much time as they need—three or four years if they need it—to learn to get reparented, to reconnect with communities.
Last year, Kennedy posited during a Twitter spaces event with Elon Musk that antidepressants could be to blame for school shootings.
The Kennedy campaign didn’t respond to Mother Jones’ request for comment on the remarks that Kennedy made during this event.
Can the Federal government tax sales of something that is illegal at the federal level ?How to pay for these farms? Kennedy had an answer. With money generated through a sales tax on cannabis products, Kennedy said
If you want to write something on the U.S. government’s official DOGE website, apparently you can just… do that. Not in the usual way of submitting comments through a form, mind you, but by directly injecting content into their database. This seems suboptimal.
The story here is that DOGE — Elon Musk’s collection of supposed coding “geniuses” brought in to “disrupt” government inefficiency — finally launched their official website. And what they delivered is a masterclass in how not to build government infrastructure. One possibility is that they’re brilliant disruptors breaking all the rules to make things better. Another possibility is that they have no idea what they’re doing.
The latter seems a lot more likely.
Last week, it was reported that the proud racist 25-year-old Marko Elez had been given admin access and was pushing untested code to the US government’s $6 trillion/year payment system. While the Treasury Department initially claimed (including in court filings!) that Elez had “read-only” access, others reported he had write access. After those reports came out, the Treasury Dept. “corrected” itself and said Elez had been “accidentally” given write privileges for the payments database, but only for the data, not the code. Still, they admitted that while they had put in place some security protections, it’s possible that Elez did copy some private data which “may have occasionally included screenshots of payment systems data or records.”
Yikes?
Now, you might think that having a racist twenty-something with admin access to trillion-dollar payment systems would concern people. But Musk’s defenders had a compelling counterargument: he must be a genius! Because… well, because Musk hired him, and Musk only hires geniuses. Or so we’re told.
The DOGE team’s actual coding prowess is turning out to be quite something. First, they decided that government transparency meant hiding everything from FOIA requests. When questioned about this interesting interpretation of “transparency,” Musk explained that actually DOGE was being super transparent by putting everything on their website and ExTwitter account.
There was just one small problem with this explanation. At the time he said it, the DOGE website looked like this:
--screenshot--
That was it. That was the whole website.
On Thursday, they finally launched a real website. Sort of. If by “real website” you mean “a collection of already-public information presented in misleading ways by people who don’t seem to understand what they’re looking at.” But that’s not even the interesting part.
These supposed technical geniuses managed to build what might be the least secure government website in history. Let’s start with something basic: where does the website actually live? According to Wired, the source code actually tells search engines that ExTwitter, not DOGE.gov, is the real home of this government information:
If you’re not a web developer, here’s what that means: When you build a website, you can tell search engines “hey, if you find copies of this content elsewhere, this version here is the real one.” It’s like telling Google “if someone copied my site, mine is the original.”A WIRED review of the page’s source code shows that the promotion of Musk’s own platform went deeper than replicating the posts on the homepage. The source code shows that the site’s canonical tags direct search engines to x.com rather than DOGE.gov.
A canonical tag is a snippet of code that tells search engines what the authoritative version of a website is. It is typically used by sites with multiple pages as a search engine optimization tactic, to avoid their search ranking being diluted.
In DOGE’s case, however, the code is informing search engines that when people search for content found on DOGE.gov, they should not show those pages in search results, but should instead display the posts on X.
“It is promoting the X account as the main source, with the website secondary,” Declan Chidlow, a web developer, tells WIRED. “This isn’t usually how things are handled, and it indicates that the X account is taking priority over the actual website itself.”
But DOGE did the opposite. They told search engines “actually, ExTwitter has the real version of this government information. Our government website is just a copy.” Which is… an interesting choice for a federal agency? It’s a bit like the Treasury Department saying “don’t look at our official reports, just check Elon’s tweets.”
You might think that a government agency directing people away from its official website and toward the private company of its leader would raise some conflict-of-interest concerns. And you’d be right!
But wait, it gets better. Or worse. Actually, yeah, it’s worse.
Who built this government website? Through some sloppy coding, security researcher Sam Curry figured out it was DOGE employee Kyle Shutt. The same Kyle Shutt who, according to Drop Site News, has admin access to the FEMA payments system. The same Kyle Shutt who used the exact same Cloudflare ID to build Musk’s America PAC Trump campaign website. Because why maintain separate secure credentials for government systems and political campaigns when you can just… not do that?
But the real cherry on top came Thursday when people discovered something amazing about the DOGE site database: anyone can write to it. Not “anyone with proper credentials.” Not “anyone who passes security checks.” Just… anyone. As 404 Media reported, if you know basic database operations, you too can be a government website administrator:
While I imagine those will be taken down shortly, for now, the insertions are absolutely visible:The doge.gov website that was spun up to track Elon Musk’s cuts to the federal government is insecure and pulls from a database that can be edited by anyone, according to two separate people who found the vulnerability and shared it with 404 Media. One coder added at least two database entries that are visible on the live site and say “this is a joke of a .gov site” and “THESE ‘EXPERTS’ LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN -roro.”
--screenshot --
--screenshot --
Look, there’s a reason we called this whole thing a cyberattack. When someone takes over your computer systems and leaves them wide open to anyone who wants to mess with them, we usually don’t call that “disruption” or “innovation.” We call it a cybersecurity breach.
Here’s the thing about government computer systems: They’re under constant attack from foreign adversaries. Yes, they can be inefficient. Yes, they can be bloated. But you know what else they usually are? Not completely exposed to the entire internet. It turns out that some of that inefficient “bureaucracy” involves basic things like “security” and “not letting random people write whatever they want in federal databases.”“Feels like it was completely slapped together,” they added. “Tons of errors and details leaked in the page source code.”
Both sources said that the way the site is set up suggests that it is not running on government servers.
“Basically, doge.gov has its codebase, probably through GitHub or something,” the other developer who noticed the insecurity said. “They’re deploying the website on Cloudflare Pages from their codebase, and doge.gov is a custom domain that their pages.dev URL is set to. So rather than having a physical server or even something like Amazon Web Services, they’re deploying using Cloudflare Pages which supports custom domains.”
This isn’t some startup where “move fast and break things” is a viable strategy. This is the United States government. And it’s been handed over to people whose main qualification appears to be “posts spicy memes on 4chan.” The implications go far beyond embarrassing database injections — this level of technical negligence in federal systems creates genuine national security concerns. When your “disruption” involves ignoring decades of hard-learned lessons about government systems security, you’re not innovating — you’re inviting disaster.
Oh, he's had control of the Treasury for at least 3weeks now, didn't you read?
A slight overstatement, if only because a lot of these systems run on an ancient programming language called COBOL which none of the prats involved have any understanding of.LadyTevar wrote: ↑2025-02-15 02:01pmOh, he's had control of the Treasury for at least 3weeks now, didn't you read?
And so far, no one knows what he's doing with our money. No one knows if anyone will get their SSI, Social Security, or even Tax Returns from the Treasury, because Musk's Minions have control over the database.
As with most things in this administration, there are lawsuits about it: Judge continues to block Musk, DOGE from Treasury data while mulling injunction
Musk fired people before knowing what they did. Again.6 hours ago
Brandon Drenon
BBC News
The US government is trying to bring back nuclear safety employees it fired on Thursday, but is struggling to let them know they should return to work, NBC News has reported.
The National Nuclear Security Administration workers were among hundreds of employees in the energy department who received termination letters.
An email obtained by NBC said the letters for some NNSA employees "are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel".
The terminations are part of massive effort by President Donald Trump to slash the ranks of the federal workforce, a project he began on his first day in office, less than a month ago.
Last week, nearly 10,000 federal workers were let go, according to multiple US outlets.
That figure was in addition to the estimated 75,000 workers who have accepted an offer from the White House to leave voluntarily in the autumn.
The nuclear security officials who were laid off on Thursday helped oversee the nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons. That included staff who are stationed at facilities where the weapons are built, according to CNN.
Attempting to reach the workers, the email, which was sent to current employees, said: "Please work with your supervisors to send this information (once you get it) to people's personal contact emails."
Trump is working to slash spending across the board, abroad and at home, and going so far as to call for eliminating the education department. He is getting help from the world's richest man, Elon Musk, who, through an effort called Doge for Department of Government Efficiency, has sent workers to comb through data at federal agencies and helped implement the "buyout" offer.
Last week, the Trump administration ordered agencies to fire nearly all probationary employees, those who had generally been in their positions for less than a year and not yet earned job protection. That included the NNSA staff members.
Altogether, the move could potentially affect hundreds of thousands of people.
Several of the Trump administration's efforts to shrink the government's size and spending have been met with legal challenges.
More than 60 lawsuits have been filed against the Trump administration since the president was inaugurated on 20 January.
The DOGE-bags are probably going to keep doing what Musk tells them to. He hired people too young to understand the consequences of what they are doing. But everyone else seems to understand the dangers of disobeying a court order.
Yeah, I was about to post this.bilateralrope wrote: ↑2025-02-16 01:56am US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago
Musk fired people before knowing what they did. Again.
But it's going to be worse this time.
At some point, DOGE members are going to commit state crimes.“People are scrambling” to see if their sensitive information has been accessed by Musk’s programmers, said one federal intelligence employee.
Jennifer Bendery
Feb 14, 2025, 02:25 PM EST | Updated Feb 14, 2025
WASHINGTON — Elon Musk’s team at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency has posted classified information about the size and staff of a U.S. intelligence agency on its new website, raising bigger concerns about where Musk’s programmers got this information and what they are doing with it.
DOGE, which President Donald Trump created to purportedly root out waste in the federal government, launched its website on Wednesday night with a feature allowing users to “trace your tax dollars through the bureaucracy.” People can navigate through all federal agencies and offices for details about their head counts, budgets and average ages of employees.
The website states in tiny print at the bottom that its database excludes information from U.S. intelligence agencies.
But an easy search shows that DOGE’s database provides details on the National Reconnaissance Office, the federal agency that designs, builds and maintains U.S. intelligence satellites. Not only are NRO’s budgets and head counts classified, but the prospect of Musk’s tech team meddling in sensitive personnel information is setting off alarms for some in the intelligence community.
“DOGE just posted secret NOFORN info on their website about [intelligence community] headcount, so currently people are scrambling to check if their info has been accessed,” said one Defense Intelligence Agency employee, who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation from senior leaders.
NOFORN stands for “Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals,” meaning information in this category can’t be shared with any foreign governments, international organizations or foreign nationals without specific authorization.
NRO appears to be the only intelligence agency with its data publicly available on DOGE’s website. The U.S. intelligence community is composed of 18 organizations, and HuffPost searched DOGE’s website for details on all of them. None of the others had any data.
Musk can’t claim he wasn’t aware that the National Reconnaissance Office is one of the nation’s intelligence agencies. His company, SpaceX, has a $1.8 billion contract with NRO to build hundreds of spy satellites.
Two Senate aides who work on intelligence matters confirmed that NRO’s headcount and budget are classified, though they noted there have been debates within the intelligence community as to whether they should be. The reason to keep this information private at all, they said, is because foreign adversaries could use it to extrapolate how much the U.S. is prioritizing certain intelligence activities.
Nonetheless, DOGE sharing this information “is absolutely a problem under the current intelligence standards,” said one of the Senate aides.
And the real concern is that Musk’s surrogates are bumbling around in classified programs. “These 25-year-old programmers, I don’t think they have enough experience to know what they don’t know,” said this aide. “Really, the question is: Where did they get this information and what are they doing with it?”
A spokesperson for the National Reconnaissance Office punted questions about this back to DOGE.
“We defer to the Department of Government Efficiency for comment on the release of information posted on DOGE.gov,” said the spokesperson.
Hours after this story published, a White House spokesperson said in a statement that DOGE did not share classified information ― even as NRO’s classified information was still accessible on DOGE’s website.
“DOGE did not share classified information, any assertion to the contrary is a lie,” said the spokesperson. “Yesterday the accusation was DOGE was not transparent and today the accusation is DOGE is too transparent. Stop the fearmongering, DOGE’s mission remains to cut waste, fraud, and abuse and are doing so with the proper security clearances and following the law.”
'At some point'?!bilateralrope wrote: ↑2025-02-17 06:05am
At some point, DOGE members are going to commit state crimes.
Right now they are only committing Federal crimes, where Trump can protect them.Ralin wrote: ↑2025-02-17 07:29am'At some point'?!bilateralrope wrote: ↑2025-02-17 06:05am
At some point, DOGE members are going to commit state crimes.
Ah right, for some reason I read that as crimes against the state.bilateralrope wrote: ↑2025-02-17 08:11amRight now they are only committing Federal crimes, where Trump can protect them.Ralin wrote: ↑2025-02-17 07:29am'At some point'?!bilateralrope wrote: ↑2025-02-17 06:05am
At some point, DOGE members are going to commit state crimes.
