This is running here as a story about cybersecurity, but it's apparently every advisory committee at DHS; there were a bunch of them, mostly not about technology; for instance, the National Commercial Fishing Safety Advisory Committee.
Maybe I've been burned lately and my faith in humanity is ebbing but I'm hoping the reference to that specific committee isn't about "government sounds stupid if you take it out of context, so it's good that we burn it all down"
The Coast Guard having a plan for when large fishing vessels get into trouble, and indeed a plan to stop them getting into trouble, seems like a good thing to me even if it's grouped somewhat incongruously under Department of Homeland Security.
edit: your other comment on this makes me think we are at the "letting commercial fisherman, and the coastguards trying to rescue them, drown to own the libs" stage, and my faith in humanity drops another notch.
> ...even if it's grouped somewhat incongruously under Department of Homeland Security.
DHS is arguably a much more appropriate home for the Coast Guard than its previous department, Transportation, given all of the facets of their actual mission (source: father and grandfather both in the Coast Guard for 30+ years).
I imagine there is a big gap between the things they deal with the most and the things they need to plan for the most.
I send more emails than anything, but if you tried to get me to spend time being trained on sending email they wouldn’t find your body.
Conversely I design new courses rarely, but when I do it matters immensely that it’s done well. Resources and support and structure to help me do that well when I need to is most welcome.
1. "...advise and provide recommendations in writing to the Secretary of Homeland Security...on matters relating to the safe operation of commercial fishing industry vessels"
2. "review regulations..."
3. "review marine casualties and investigations of vessels..."
The NTSB, through its Office of Marine Safety (OMS), investigates major marine accidents across all sectors, determines probable causes, and issues safety recommendations. It operates independently.
In contrast, NCFSAC is an advisory body focused solely on commercial fishing safety, providing recommendations but not conducting investigations.
Or maybe dozens of K-street hotshots carefully scrutizined every possible department that could include such committees.
Or more likely, somewhere inbetween, thousands of teams, mediated by a few hundred of the most influential, struggling to get the attention of this or that decision maker. Most of them just throwing random things at a wall and seeing what sticks.
The truth is HN readers won’t know and can’t ever know, barring a tiny handful who can read the tea leaves successfully year after year.
Again I can't tell if you've quoted three vaguely regulation-y phrases in an attempt to justify generic contempt for government regulation or if you're backing me up with documentary proof that this is a boring sensible thing.
As your document says, it is literally the commercial fishing industry, shipbuilders, shipowners, equipment manufacturers, insurers etc. getting together to swap notes on safety because shipwrecks and deaths are not good for business.
"members serve as representatives of their
respective interests, associations, or organizations"
I found a job posting from 2020. I didn't know much about this agency so I looked them up. Turns out I didn't know much about them because this was established in 2018.
One of the interesting bits about the job posting is that, not too surprisingly, there are no salaries:
> All members will serve at their own expense and receive no salary or other compensation from the Federal Government, with the exception that members may be reimbursed for travel and per diem in accordance with Federal Travel Regulations.
Which, to me, can read two ways: altruistic people trying to make the industry better
OR
You won't even be selected to this committee unless you're already wealthy enough to foot the bill yourself and shape policy in a way that advantages ones self.
I don't know which way to read it, but if it wasn't costing anything, cutting it "for cost savings" can't be completely true. Maybe there were other overhead costs, but even saying that those costs are $1M/yr is a rounding error for the national budget.
This sounds to me like industry bodies such as WG21, TC39, JSR expert groups, etc. A way to get people with full-time jobs in relevant industries together to plan their shared future. I doubt the members of this board are wealthy people joining it in their own capacity. As such, i don't think it makes sense to consider them as either altruistic or self-serving; it's just part of their job.
A very small nitpick but the discretionary budget of the US is far smaller than most realize - in 2024 it was only 1.75 trillion.
And notably, most military spending is discretionary, so the remaining funds for basically all the neat dynamic things government can do is less than a trillion.
A million is of course still a rounding error at e.g. $900 billion, but it adds up really fast, especially when you consider that these are ongoing costs.
An advisory counsel may not get paid but they submit findings to the Secretary. There's a long tail where the government becomes more aware of long standing and emergent issues.
Industry associations have no such reach unless individual members make it so, and unofficially at that.
That's a terrible idea for a group which is trying to prevent ships getting into trouble to begin with. Measuring the rescues would be a here incentive that would get more people in dangerous situations.
The "U.S. Coast Guard was formed by a merger of the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service and the U.S. Life-Saving Service on 28 January 1915" (wiki).
The US Department of Homeland Security "began operations on March 1, 2003, after being formed as a result of the Homeland Security Act of 2002, enacted in response to the September 11 attacks" (wiki).
So are you saying that for 78 years of its existence, the USCG had no "plan for when large fishing vessels get into trouble, and indeed a plan to stop them getting into trouble" until the DHS assembled a (assuming this is a thing) "National Commercial Fishing Safety Advisory Committee"? You dont think theres any redundancy? That just maybe bureaucracy cant help but to expand forever every time someone with a title has a question that cant be answered immediately by someone standing in the room, they have to create a committee so they can have someone on speed dial? If the coast guard doesnt have plans for this, one wonders what the coast guard does all day.
It’s common for organizations to reorganize. It’s quite possible that the committee was formed for purposes of centralization and efficacy. It’s also possible it was government overreach. What are the justifications for axing a committee or regulations and are those justifications correct?
I grew up in the commercial fishing industry and then worked in the tug boat industry. Many USCG regulations that were vehemently opposed by the old men save lives every day.
This is a classic Chesterton's Fence. Those who don't understand the origin of the regulations will continue to have strong, uninformed opinions about them.
Many crew working on boats have safety gear only because USCG requires it. The owners of those boats would not expend the money without the regulation.
This committee doesn’t make regulations they make expert suggestions.
This is way off the original topic of course…but you can do a quick search of the federal register they you can see the agenda of meetings and such. A recent one reviewed structural failures that led to boats sinking.
Fields learn as new things happen. There’s a reason aerospace industries talk about rules having body counts. Freezing regulations rarely makes work easier or faster, it just makes knowledge sharing worse.
There this large assumption across HN that if one doesn’t understand something l, that must meant it doesn’t make sense. It’s a bad way to operate in the world…independently of ideology…lack of understanding is not unique insight.
> The owners of those boats would not expend the money without the regulation.
Some owners would not, most would. Humans are generally social, intelligent and caring animals. The regulations are helpful guidelines to save lives, not to be seen as mandatory rules that would be flaunted at every chance.
You are too naive. Owners who do not incur extra expenses are more competetive in capitalistic market. At some, point, you become disadvantaged if you do take extra precautions.
That's not how Chesterton's Fence works? The point isn't that the fence was always there. It's that people who try to dismantle the fence never bothered to learn why the fence was put up in the first place.
The fence could have been put up yesterday but if you never even bother to learn why the fence was put up before trying to remove it, that's still Chesterton's Fence.
Chesterton's point wasn't that the fence should never move (which is what you seem to be implying), but that it should only be moved (or technically removed) when you understand why it was initially put in place.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that there is bloat and over-regulation, but most of the laws and regulations on the books are in response to a bad thing happening. It's kind of like a legacy code base - just deleting the repo and starting over from scratch is usually not the best idea, it takes some careful refactoring and judicious tests to move in the right direction.
It's sort of an interesting idea - what are "tests" in the context of the legal/regulatory framework? The constitution? The judiciary?
The fence is a restriction. i.e. a regulation or series of rules. These committees make those rules. It's not just a state of being.
Getting rid of a fence doesn't mean there's magically an older fence you've moved to. It's only when you replace a set of rules with a different set of rules to serve the same purpose that you've moved the fence.
Removing the fence is exactly that, getting rid of the fence. There is no before fence. You've just removed the fence.
“No problem, as a non-employee you are hereby confined to your cabin except to use the head, and you can eat in the galley but you have to pay for your meals, they cost $100 and will be deducted from your final paycheck. If you have a negative balance when we dock at a port in around 3 months, you must pay immediately or we will send the debt to collections. Have a nice day”
Maybe you want to read up on how things work at sea?
> ...to make sure workers have good working conditions and proper pay. That's universal to any job.
This is wildly untrue. The less skilled your labor, the more exploitative the available jobs are. This is why we have labor regulations, to protect these people.
Did they? What were the accident rates before and after? Why was the committee created? Do you think the people who axed these committees have an answer to the above questions? Or is it simply "government is bad"?
>I look forward to the evaluation by the administration to see if it's needed or it's redundant red tape.
That's kind of the point: they're doing no such thing.
All of the talk from Trump, Musk, the now-departed Ramaswamy, etc. hasn't been about sober analysis and careful evaluation, it's endless mockery and dumb jokes ("look at this agency name or person's title, what does that even mean LOL"), or "government bad" as the parent put it.
The pushback this gets isn't because people love bureaucracy or hate efficiency but because it's obvious this isn't an actual effort to improve anything, just mindlessly slashing things businesses/the powerful don't like and stunts to make the base clap.
It just happened. You have no idea what the evaluations were, they haven't been released and you weren't in the discussions. I hope they will be though.
From an outsider perspective this committee in particular seems redundant as there are other agencies that handle this scope.
If you want to boil it down to "government bad" sure, but I view it more as "over-regulation is bad".
Or do you view the government as a well oiled machine that couldn't have any bloat and we should never evaluate and cull feature creep in it?
Sure we do because, again, the people put in charge of these initiatives spend endless time just making jokes about agency names that they clearly (sometimes explicitly!) have no idea about or mindless promises to cut the government in half.
>Or do you view the government as a well oiled machine that couldn't have any bloat and we should never evaluate and cull feature creep in it?
Since you missed it the first time I'll copy the part of my comment that addresses exactly this again:
>The pushback this gets isn't because people love bureaucracy or hate efficiency but because it's obvious this isn't an actual effort to improve anything, just mindlessly slashing things businesses/the powerful don't like and stunts to make the base clap.
The problem is you're assuming good faith when there has been ample demonstration that there isn't any here.
You're assuming good faith of these committees. Comes down to who you trust.
I voted in Trump to do this and more, I trust the evaluations were made properly and I support the decision.
There's obvious bias in your tone (which is okay, which is why I stated my position) so it makes sense you don't like this move because you don't trust this administration.
We're similar in that regard in that I don't trust the government implicitly, which is why I support culling bloat.
If they were made in good faith, then surely we have some documentation for it in order to learn from those original mistakes. Or some way for people to evaluate that choice... It was a transparent decision not some random populist move... Right?...
Fishing is dangerous work and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.
What matters are the data which nobody has dug up. Was there a significant reduction in fatalities following this committee's creation? Did it have a significant and likely causal relationship on those declines? And finally - assuming there was a decline d the committee was responsible for it, are they still meaningfully necessary or are the prior established rules sufficient to maintain the improvements moving forward?
Seems the Cybersecurity Executive Orders that dealt with Memory Safe Languages and the ONCD Report (which mentioned Rust, if I remember correctly) are all gone from whitehouse.gov as well.
The CISA report that dealt with memory safety is still on the CISA site. What do these recent developments mean for CISA? Is it an independent organization that will continue to exist without DHS support or is it essentially dead and its site and reports will vanish as well?
> Seems the Cybersecurity Executive Orders that dealt with Memory Safe Languages and the ONCD Report (which mentioned Rust, if I remember correctly) are all gone from whitehouse.gov as well.
It's a brand new website and old URLs won't work (this has been somewhat routine since Obama's first term). I wouldn't take that as a sign that a specific executive order is rescinded. However it may have been grouped in with other Biden tech executive orders (such as AI safety) which are being rescinded as excessive regulation
I am mostly ignorant but from hearsay CISA is part of DHS (the chief of CISA is a DHS official). doubt Trump loves it because he literally fired Krebs directly for not supporting misinformation and overthrow attempt in 2020 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Krebs#2020_dismissal)
CISA has an important job to do, but their mission was put at risk when it's leadership under Krebs chose to repeatedly violate the first amendment. Elections and Covid-19 are topics they've been documented in influencing, but with the capability there, what other narratives was it influencing that we don't know about?
The legal fight against CISA to stop their censorship was lost not on the basis of it being constitutional, but because the plaintiffs powerful enough to bring it to court couldn't show they had been directly harmed by it. A common stumbling block for many court cases for legitimate issues. CISA has publicly stated they will be changing their approach as a result of these controversies.
Can somebody give me a rational take on why? It feels immensely reactive. Salt Typhoon would seem to represent an active threat. Didn't DHS act quite.. conservatively?
A comment on the blusky thread went to "five eyes should stop sharing information" which I suspect won't happen, but I could see people thinking it should.
When someone comes in to slash everything, they generally don't bother understanding what they are slashing. This is the same as when a company hires someone to come in and cut costs, generally everything, good or bad, gets cut. That's what's happening on the US federal level right now. Eventually some things will be picked back up when someone realizes that it wasn't a good idea to stop it, but most things are just going to be wasted effort.
It's like the twitter thing. You start shutting off servers until someone says, "ouch it hurts". Then you turn it back on if you care. You then end up with less servers than you started.
and Twitter is bleeding money like anything, unable to retain users and advertisers. You may end up with less servers but not necessarily a stable and functional system.
Twitter is bleeding money in part because the owner refused to play ball with advertisers moderation demands, and the majority who don't see any downtime on twitter consider it more than "stable and functional".
And for the owner, who probably thinks he's co-piloting the strongest government in the world right now and attributes part of that success to the platform he controls, it is functioning magnificently.
Except we're not dealing with software here. The "ouch it hurts" once a government initiative has been "turned off" could be medical services, or social services, or food, or ensuring safe and clean products, or poisoned air or water, etc.
"There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it"
However, DHS was almost entirely formed from existing departments and agencies that were merely rehoused under a new structure, so Chesterton's Fence definitely applies to all of those. Even CISA, which is one of the newest elements, is now almost a decade old with a lot of accumulated expertise and experience.
You seem to have Chesterton’s fence completely backwards.
Chesterton’s fence can never be an argument against creating something new.
The whole point of it is that if you come across a fence then that was the result of a conscious human decision and subsequent effort, which strongly implies there was a reason it was created, and until you understand what that reason was, you’re taking a risk by destroying the fence.
But if there is “nothing” and you’re creating something new, Chesterton’s fence doesn’t apply because the lack of existence of anything was not the result of intentional human design and effort, therefore there’s no evidence that the lack of existence of something “had a reason for it”.
Read The Drift From Domesticity, where this whole "fence" thing comes from. It's an appeal to (small-c) conservatism, to respect and understand traditions and norms. It is not a logical rule about it being improper to alter absolutely anything without a clear understanding of its origins. You can disagree with me about its applicability to the newest cabinet branch, but our disagreement isn't rooted in me not knowing the metaphor.
Does the metaphor actually include the age of the fence? I always thought the idea is just to understand why the fence is there before removing it, regardless of its age.
In theory, it should be easier to understand the reasoning behind the existence of newer fences, but the idea is still to do that step first...
I mean, clearly some people just reject this entire idea as creating too much friction, and I can often see their point!, but I think we can at least avoid saying "it's a good concept, but it just doesn't apply in this case", and be honest about just rejecting the concept.
I’ll say this as someone who’s moderately wealthy: this administration is a massive wealth transfer to those with either capital or connections to it. Taking apart these committees means less-regulated telecoms, infrastructure and financial services. If you’re in those spaces, this is great for you.
The size of each of those industries entirely dwarfs the military-industrial bogeyman, which is largely just being transferred from one set of owners (Boeing, Lockheed, et cetera) to another (Musk, Bezos, Lucky, et cetera)
Sure, but DHS long predates this admin. The list of giants suckling at the public teat is huge (Rapiscan, anyone?) and spans many different administrations.
One possible upside of the current situation is that the very obvious corporate ownership of the federal government is dropping the “emperor has clothes” pretense. We are ever closer to simply paying taxes to Buy-N-Large.
If people don’t like it, at least now they can have a practical conversation about it (Luigi notwithstanding). It’s sort of like when Snowden showed us how fucked we were/are.
The 9/11 terrorist attacks might have been the triggering event but bringing a bunch of related federal departments and agencies under a single umbrella in DHS was probably a net positive. The previous structure was tremendously inefficient with a lot of duplication of effort and time wasted on interdepartmental coordination. Obviously graft should be addressed but it's unlikely the total graft was any lower before 2002.
If said fence was across a road that a school bus was hurtling towards at 60 mph… you’d stop asking these questions and remove it (and maybe put it back after you’ve solved the other emergency).
Several (of the new government) have expressed belief that the government is headed towards a catastrophic debt overload. In their view, emergency relief is necessary.
Not arguing for or against this view, but that seems to be what people voted for.
I am a big fan of Chestertons fence but it doesn’t always apply.
I'll counter that it does, allowing that it's perfectly fine to adjust the threshold of certainty about a particular thing's purpose to suit the circumstances.
If that fence is stopping the school bus from driving off the edge of a cliff, for example, I would absolutely not want to remove it - and you can bet I'll spare a modicum of thought to make sure that's not the case before I yank it out of the way.
Republican strategy since the 1980s had been 'starve the beast'. That strategy is the deny actual funding and instead create debt load in order to kill the government, support for government programs, and destroy trust in government.
I heard there's going to be those teams of hr+legal+engineer doing the cutting - the only reason I can guess there'd be an engineer in the mix is if they do intend to understand what they're cutting.
The one wrinkle in this, to me, is that Trump spent four years as President already. Full disclosure: I despise the guy and wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire, BUT ... what if he saw a bunch of waste in his first run and therefore does understand what he's slashing?
Personally I don't believe that or want to believe that and would rather chalk it up to neo-toddlerism, but there's a chance right?
I examined my 2024 November general election ballot carefully. Ever since 2020's election denial, I've had a heightened awareness of election procedure, going so far as to read the Colorado Secretary of State's web pages on risk limiting audits, and making some attempt to understand the math behind them.
My Colorado general election ballot contained nothing I could see that would associate me as a registered voter to the ballot itself. Colorado ballots are hand marked, machine readable, and human readable as has been the best and obvious practice since 2000's "hanging chad" debacle. There are certainly "index marks" on the ballots so that the tallying machines can get squared up, but they don't appear different per ballot. I compared to my wife's ballot, just in case.
Because your comment does nothing against the original "I'm mostly seeing people who voted against this continue to grumble." comment.
People that vote are not always hush hush about who they voted for, and has nothing to do with can you pick their particular ballot out of the pile. If I tell you I voted for A but B won and now I'm grumbling about the things B is doing, there's no need for discussions about ballots at all.
Just like you don't need to find someone's secret ballot when they're wearing a red MAGA hat.
It is, though. The word "people" here refers in aggregate to the citizens who voted in November. It would be equally accurate for me to say "This is what we voted for" even though it's not what I voted for.
I don't have a dog in this race - I am not even from the US.
But, by definition, not voting is an action rather than absence of one. What you are doing by not voting is giving out a tacit agreement that the people who went and vote get to decide who will be elected.
Following that line of thought, by not voting, you actively chose the current government, no matter what the current government is.
I agree, but there are many who say that not voting is the only way to show contempt for a system rigged against them. Voting would be a tacit endorsement and recognition of the legitimacy of that system.
Those that don't care to vote are doomed to be ruled by those who care.
You still have to pay taxes, and perhaps see a government you truly despise making all sorts of decisions that will get the system even more rigged against you.
Not voting out of spite is similar to stabbing your own head to show contempt for your brain when you have a migraine.
Not voting, practically, is empowering the status quo. Particularly in America, where almost every election features intense down-ballot competition.
Someone who didn’t vote is more in concordance with the current government than someone who voted against it. Actions speak louder than words, and not voting is an action.
AWS and starlink have exposure of risk. You would think DHS work here went to net beneficial outcomes for both of them, and the wider telco sector. (Assuming you meant the tech sector)
What risk? There isn’t a consumer liability, and they can control the cybersecurity risk-reward balance they’re exposed to. From their perspective, oversight is the liability.
A good rule of thumb, at least for the next couple of months, is that any rules and regulations that have been criticised by the billionaires, banks or oil & gas industry are likely to be shredded. (The “deep state” stuff is mostly whoever has the king’s ear sort of politics. It’s unclear that had any influence here.)
I get what youre saying but Im not sure absolute liability is quite right. Im thinking of SBOM directives, or industry network security requirements for bgp announcements, for example. Amazon and, I assume, some of the other mega corps are AGES ahead of industry at large. Like huge multi year investments so that theyre plausibly close to complying with secure provenance, review, build tracking, and artifact integrity reporting from initial CR to request processing for everything that touches customer or business data. My impression is that the industry generally isnt any further than tracking some package names and version strings and calling it SBOM. If the new directives can preclude a large number of contract competitors that seems like a huge win.
Or, maybe Im thinking more of advantageous requirements/regulations than oversight per se.
Arent they differentiating only _if_ they required to get federal and dod money? The coordination definitely seems to be more of amzn (and similar) employees providing technical expertise to congress and regulators. They certainly take deployments and internal security seriously, but it doesnt seem to be monetizable outside of the contract requirements. Or maybe im missing your point?
What OP is saying is instead of having some sort of legal liability attached or outside directives being handed to them, they would rather implement on their own or push their own standards.
A notable example is SEC mandates on breach disclosures, which will most likely be dead now. Those were a major forcing function to make companies realize security is important. Otherwise, paying a ransom and doing the bare minimum to not get cut by Chubbs or AXA is the norm.
I agree with JumpCriscross on his read of this situation. It ain't great. At least I'm well off enough to weather the negative impacted by a lot of the chaos. Sucks for everyone else.
> The coordination definitely seems to be more of amzn (and similar) employees providing technical expertise to congress and regulators
It's bidirectional. CISA, FBI, and others often get intel or actively take down a botnet or offensive actor, and will percolate this information to security teams at larger organizations before percolating en masse.
For example, when this one APM/data collection tool that almost every DevOps team ik was using was pwned early last year, CISA notified CISOs days before they officially announced it in the news.
There is two ways for efficiency, either wipe everything clean or well setup a committee to evaluate which committees can be eliminate. And usual joke in bureaucracy is that later one will discover that even more committees are actually needed.
So the knee jerk reaction of current administration is burning it to ground. Which could actually change something.
Seems like a false dichotomy, between authoritarianism and Kafkaesque bureaucracy.
An effective administration would be thoughtful about things and reorganize rather than simply cut. So they're either being thoughtful and decided something like state sponsored infiltration isn't good to investigate or are being thoughtless.
I see you're making a joke about conservatism, but Trump isn't a conservative: he's a radical. His goal is to blow up the system, not conserve it. Getting rid of protections is part of that.
Slash and burn policies from a reactionary administration that doesn't and in fact refuses to think about the second and third order consequences of their decisions.
One of the reasons a lot of people are worried about this administration is the vibes based policy decisions they seem intent on making. Everything is haphazard, arbitrary and contradictory. Some of it comes down to personal grievance and some of it comes down to favors for people in the business sphere who chose to kowtow to this administration.
It's probably as simple as Trump not wanting agencies to consult advisory boards consisting of outside experts since they might get in the way of his agenda.
It's probably not a specific decision based on what the individual boards have been doing.
Yes. I don't want to assume an adversarial posture on this, I'm mostly an outsider, observer. I probably can't understand nuances in US domestic politics (although i am opposed to this kind of semi random behaviour by institutions, I did not see this signalled in NOG lists and the like as coming down the pipe)
So I'm wondering if this is as simple as cost/benefit? Did somebody do the sums and decide the delivery was sub par for spend?
The alternatives are mostly very sad: they're fools. Replacing a process can be beneficial. There's usually overlap.
> Did somebody do the sums and decide the delivery was sub par for spend?
That would be a very interesting analysis and something to learn from. It would also help prevent similar mistakes in the future. It's really unlikely someone would go to such effort and just keep the results to themselves.
The "rational" explanation is that Trump's staff are trying to clear house of anyone they don't trust will give in to any demands they make, and put everyone else who works for the government directly or indirectly in a state of fear and confusion.
Current South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem wants CISA to be “refocused” on critical infrastructure and to no longer address mis- or disinformation efforts online.
It's because of the misinformation/disinformation mission that CISA took on during the Biden admin, it was a boondoggle that really pissed off Republicans.
Shut up TREASONer! To bring efficiency we must burn everything to the ground and rehire whomever will work unpaid overtime and very low wage. They all happen to be of chinese, russian, and north korean descent, but that just means we are winning at the deal... ART .. OF ..THE .. DEAL
/s
Really though, competence would create the new "efficient" thing, hire best of the best and get it running before tearing down important security, this is business-leader level incompetence being attempted at global super power scale, we are going to need a new word for businessjerks breaking things they should have never been able to touch
The current techbro CEO squad is a small group of people who got extraordinarily lucky and made a bunch of money.
The techbro CEO squad takes their luck to be ability, and they think the fact that they have more money than other people means that they're smarter than everyone else. Some members of the techbro CEO squad think of themselves as prophets or messiahs.
In addition to this, the techbro CEO squad is addicted to money and its accumulation. This isn't a "I need more money to live a more comfortable retirement" thing, it is a "my sole purpose for being is the accumulation of wealth" thing. They are more akin to machines whose purpose it is to grab onto as much money as possible than they are actual human beings.
The techbro CEO squad's vast wealth has enabled them to surround themselves with an army of staff whose only job it is to make their dreams a reality and execute their orders. There is a vast, impenetrable field of personnel and money that insulates them from the reality of the world.
So, they think that they're better than anyone else to the point of being god-like, they are sociopaths who only care about money, they are surrounded by an army of yes men, and they have lost (or never had) any connection to the average human being and his or her existence.
They believe that any restriction on their ability to accumulate wealth is an assault on their freedom, an enemy to be defeated, an injustice to be made right by any means possible.
Limits on their ability to pollute, protections for employees operating in the heat or cold or around hazardous materials, regulations designed to prevent market manipulation or money laundering, it is all evil and must be destroyed.
They are willing to dismantle any system to get what they want.
Because they think that they are better than everyone else, the techbro CEO squad does not value consensus or institutional knowledge that has led to regulation slowly building up over centuries in response to events and emergencies: if they don't like it, it must go.
So, the slow infiltration of government by the Peter Theil, Andreessen and Horowitz, Musk, (but mainly their servants) and the rest started a couple of years ago and continues to this day.
tl;dr: Billionaires will rape your grandmother's corpse for lower taxes, harvest and sell her organs for a laugh, then label you a woke communist and kick you off twitter for criticizing them.
Whatever problems or limitations the existing approach had dropping everything on the floor is one of the least helpful ways of trying to fix it (assuming good intent).
You have to assume competence too. You may have good intent but that doesn't help if you don't really know what you are doing or are blinded by ideology or some wayward belief.
Burning everything to the ground is a way of demolishing something though.
And if your intent is to just destroy it, it’s a far more effective one than bringing in experts to slowly try to disassemble the giant jenga tower without it falling over.
Is this explainable in any way by the cost of running these boards? By the sound of it the cost-benefit of thwarting Salt Typhoon is probably not optimal at zero investment.
Replacing government run and funded cyber security and threat assessment roles with privately owned contracters will be quite profitable for a few of the Brolliegarks.
No. The cost of running these is so small as not to be worth top officials' time in worrying about them. If they are looking to save lots of money, there are far more efficient ways to do that. This is just clearing house, establishing a tone, and making it clear that expert opinion is not valued.
It really is despairingly sad how many of these comments (assumedly by U.S. citizens) seem to not realize or believe these actions will have an effect on them.
Are some of these things normal SOP for a regime change? Sure. But to normalize everything under that blanket assumption is just foolish.
Unless you are an exceedingly (liquid) wealthy white male, you are entirely disposable to the incoming administration. You are less than nothing. If anything, you are an inconvenience buried deep in the calculations that needs to be factored out of the equation because your existence hinders the "progress" being sought.
All these pragmatic or, worse, so-called "libertarian" views demonstrate a supremely naïve, if not outright harmful (to yourself and countless others), understanding of what is going to be aggressively pursued these next few years.
The efforts will inherently destabilize the US which, for some, will be a really massive gift and this administration will be praised both externally and internally. That will close the feedback loop since that’s primarily what motivates this administration.
The core tenet of Muskism, as described at length in Isaacson's bio is around those lines:
* question all the rules
* when in doubt, slash the rule, and see what happens
* if it's really bad without it, bring back the rule
* if you don't have to bring back 10% of the rules that you slashed, you haven't slashed enough yet
USA is now entering the phase where everything is getting slashed - following the will of the majority of -Pennsylvania- the people.
At the level of a company, this can bring great efficiencies, and make reusable self-driving cancer-free nuclear-fusion based rockets. Or crypto scams.
Unfortunately, at the level of a Federal Government, it will bring lower taxes, but some of the 10% will end with coffins. And crypto scams.
We'll watch from the other side of the Atlantic how the great libertarianism experiment goes for the USA.
I expect both impressive improvements, and dramatic karmic irony.
> At the level of a company, this can bring great efficiencies, and make reusable self-driving cancer-free nuclear-fusion based rockets. Or crypto scams.
This is questionable. There are many times when bureaucracy exists for bureaucracy sake. But many, many times they exist for a reason.
Get any sufficiently large company and try to understand its complexity. Simply slashing it is a recipe for disaster.
> Unfortunately, at the level of a Federal Government, it will bring lower taxes, but some of the 10% will end with coffins. And crypto scams.
This is highly questionable, especially the "lower taxes" part. Governments are not very keen on reducing revenue, more likely they will only direct the surplus by cutting off services to other things - in the case of US, I wouldn't be surprised if they just increase spending in military, for example. Those sleasy and juicy defence contracts need funding, you know.
Regardless, I think the primary costs created by regulation aren't directly to the government budget, but rather knock-on effects of compliance incurred by the entire nation's economy.
Which seems to show a different story. But looks like there is a lot of analysis on the numbers which can be done? (Eg I saw something in your article about ‘Biden will contribute 1.9T to the debt by 2031’.. even if he hadn’t gotten reelected, he wouldn’t be in office in 2031, so this includes the long-term effects of policies?)
Maybe, but it’s not like it hasn’t happened before… Clinton (yes, a democrat!) campaigned on balancing the budget, and iirc it actually was for a few years. In his case I don’t think taxes changed much either direction.
By cutting, they're centralizing authority at the top. More and different rules will come - some written, many not - but not by the people that were in place before the change.
Most of the commenters here seem to be taking it on faith that these government organizations are necessary and serving a crucial function. But the entire thrust of this election is that the majority of the country doesn't share that level of faith in the federal government.
"When in doubt, slash and see what happens" seems like a highly effective, albeit a bit reckless, approach to finding out which agencies are truly needed and which are not.
You would only need to wonder if you had been paying no attention to the clarion call about Project 2025 and what the incoming admin was directly planning to do wholesale.
I'd argue this government has not just experienced no consequences, they've experienced the opposite of no consequences. Somehow the American people saw everything they'd done and were saying they'd do and then the people emphatically voted for it. I'm still gobsmacked.
Hitler apparently had solid 15-20% support even up to a decade after defeat and Nazism generally had 50% support (before and after, as a good idea executed badly) so both your high and low are off.
This has been a definite problem with the rhetoric starting at an intensity of 10/10 and having nowhere to go. The other problem is that everything that's happened has had people actively diminishing it, to make the reaction seem more outrageous, so we're all numb to so much of it. I've thought of it as The Boy Who Cried Wolf, but that's incorrect, because there's always been a wolf.
It's just the beginning. There's a good breakdown of what it would take to reduce the government by Musk's "at least 2 trillion" and it doesn't look very good (for US citizens). I mean he what, is going to cut SpaceX contracts? Please...
'Musk told political strategist Mark Penn in an interview broadcast on X that the $2 trillion figure was a “best-case outcome” and that he thought there was only a “good shot” at cutting half that.'
'That figure was quickly dismissed as implausible by budget experts, who said the entire discretionary budget was only $1.7 trillion. Musk hadn’t waved people off the number until Wednesday, and it has been widely cited in reports about DOGE’s plans. '
> people outside of the government tasked with reducing the government
My point is we have seen zero evidence of this influence in Trump’s executive actions thus far. DOGE is analogous to the Federalist Society or NRA. Influential. But not policy prescriptive.
2 trillion is not prescriptive, but is there any unambiguous number published officially? Otherwise 2 tril is the only figure publicly advertised and I guess TFA is a sign they are starting to chip at this campaign promise
Blame it on Musk, replace the humans with computers. It could be an chronological digitalisation step and since the US is leading in the AI field they just start replacing the government with artificial intelligence.
Ah so you're saying he not only will not cut his existing gov contracts but actually add some more now for "AI government"? Sounds great and totally no conflict of interest
What has the federal government done for me lately?
Not a casual dismissal; I’m deadly serious. What is so bad about dismantling large chunks of the most useless, violent, criminal, and wasteful organization in the country?
It's absolutely impossible to answer you because the very premise of your question is made in bad faith. You wouldn't even need to think, by yourself, very long to get a long list of examples; the fact that you somehow can't means you don't want to and don't intend to.
The grandparent comment is abrasive and excessive but to some extent that opinion is shared by many. The federal government was never intended to be what it is today; the technocrats just keep growing it in wasteful directions and the general public feels a disconnect. A smaller and leaner government with a balanced budget is not a shocking thing to ask for.
That world is long gone. And impossible to define objectively. What's the smallest leanest monopoly of violence that keeps the peace so that the most ambitious peoples' journies help deliver the greatest standard of living increases for the most amount of people while also preventing human rights violations and atrocities?
If the govt wasn't meant to do that, then we still have those problems and I don't see any interest in any individual to solve it.
If I understand the polls correctly, the federal government was intended to be what it is, in the sense that the parts were intentional. Medicare was intended, and so on. Each of the parts that have large numbers of employees or large budgets was intended.
The only thing that wasn't intended was that the sum of the large numbers should be large.
Maintaining our status as the global hegemon requires lots of people and money, you don’t want to find out what happens if we fail to remain the sole global superpower.
> The federal government was never intended to be what it is today
Many parts of all our government were never intended to be what it is today, executive branch included. We have a system that at least kind of works, changes should be made cautiously because a world-leading economy and country is a complex system.
Yes, alright, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what has the federal government ever done for us?
My local government runs all those, federal just provides the funding. Redistribution of tax proceeds is enough of a job to excuse everything else for you?
Your local government runs all your roads, canals, railroads and public order? Even the largest cities in America parcel that out to the federal government.
Well, we don't really have much in the way of canals or railroads, but they do the actual maintenance and construction of roads in the first place. They also enforce the traffic laws (which they also set for the most part), maintain and install the signage, etc. The local and state police are obviously run by local government. Federal police are obviously not.
Roads. There's a large port nearby, but it doesn't depend on canals. The electrical grid is also maintained by the state along with the other states on the same regional grid, again, the federal contribution is largely limited to funding.
GPS, OK, that's useful and it's existence depend(-s/-ed?) on the federal government/military I guess.
Who makes it viable by protecting international shipping, guarding the coast and regulating port infrastructure? (If you’re on a Great Lake, it absolutely depends on canals. That and Canada.)
> electrical grid is also maintained by the state along with the other states on the same regional grid
Not how North American grids work, outside Alaska, Texas, Florida and maybe the SPP. States have influence on NERC through the utilities. Grids don’t line up neatly with state lines, and the whole mess requires regular federal coordination.
This is a tired trope. Above, user "sneak" alludes to the infamous "Who will build the roads?" gambit. Below, users invoke it.
Reasonable people will disagree about their preferences. Some will even find polite ways to agree to disagree about ideology. Consider if the Federal Government nationalized toilet paper production and distribution. Perhaps in a few years, posters on this forum would assume that they could not perform these basic tasks without the state's support.
Just because something is currently a function of the public sector, does not mean that it could not be achieved better by the private sector. The entire thread is filled with hyperbole. The efficacy of either approach is not being discussed. There is very little substance here. Instead there are two to three sentence zingers thrown around. Most of this has been discussed at length by authors who specialize in the field.
>When students are taught about public goods, roads and highways serve as the default example in virtually every economics class. The cliché question every libertarian has encountered—“Who will build the roads?”—is predicated on the idea that without the state, private actors will have no incentive to construct or finance roadways because they will be unable to monetize them (or, at least, unable to do so sufficiently to meet the needs of the community). This assumption is accepted with such a degree of faith that few scholars have seen fit to even question whether and to what degree private roads have been constructed historically.
>But in the early years of the new republic, Americans underwent what some historians have described as a “turnpike craze.” The term “turnpike” specifically refers to roadways constructed and operated privately. Early Americans, wanting to connect their communities to the developing market economy, eagerly subscribed to turnpike corporations for local roads. In fact, turnpike corporations were among the first for-profit corporations in the country, and dramatically widened the population of shareholders at a time when corporate stock was rarely available to the public.
> The term “turnpike” specifically refers to roadways constructed and operated privately.
I don't know about the rest of the comment, but this is definitely not correct. According to the OED, the term "turnpike" as a shortening of "turnpike road" pre-dates the United States, and generally refers to any toll road, not specifically privately operated ones.
It's also something that could be handled by an excel spreadsheet as long as the budget was set. Providing a forum for the states to argue about issues is an actually useful and non-redundant thing that the federal government does - setting the budget wouldn't work without it. The facilitation of interstate commerce through a federated union is a great thing. A coordinated foreign policy and unified military is more effective and probably more efficient. The federal government isn't useless or lacking any impact at all on my life, but the state and local governments are far, far more involved in "getting the things I depend on done", and many of the things federal government does could probably be done without a federal government or with much less of one.
Put differently:
“What has COBOL done for me lately? Can’t we just cut out all COBOL code, and replace it today to save money on paying COBOL cowboys?”
It put fraudulent get-rich-quick pyramid scheme scammers and Bitcoin Ponzi scheme shills like SBF in jail where they belong. Why, are you afraid of that happening to you too?
Perhaps someone came in and realized that this advisory board had 0 benefit and just a waste of tax payer money? If so, I’m all for getting rid of wasteful spending
Good. From day 1 DHS has been the most Orwellian department of the US government, which casually violates our freedom on a regular basis. The entire department should be abolished.
The list goes on. There's 24 years of history you can comb through. The DHS' security theater exists solely to compromise the constitutional rights of American citizens. To this day there's no evidence they're even that successful at their job. The fact the impeachment of Mayorkas failed was quite mind-boggling but characteristic of a government that doesn't truly believe anyone, even citizens, have certain inalienable rights.
The DHS was and still is bipartisan. It's America's Staatspolizei.
This is running here as a story about cybersecurity, but it's apparently every advisory committee at DHS; there were a bunch of them, mostly not about technology; for instance, the National Commercial Fishing Safety Advisory Committee.
Maybe I've been burned lately and my faith in humanity is ebbing but I'm hoping the reference to that specific committee isn't about "government sounds stupid if you take it out of context, so it's good that we burn it all down"
The Coast Guard having a plan for when large fishing vessels get into trouble, and indeed a plan to stop them getting into trouble, seems like a good thing to me even if it's grouped somewhat incongruously under Department of Homeland Security.
edit: your other comment on this makes me think we are at the "letting commercial fisherman, and the coastguards trying to rescue them, drown to own the libs" stage, and my faith in humanity drops another notch.
> ...even if it's grouped somewhat incongruously under Department of Homeland Security.
DHS is arguably a much more appropriate home for the Coast Guard than its previous department, Transportation, given all of the facets of their actual mission (source: father and grandfather both in the Coast Guard for 30+ years).
By the numbers though I wouldn’t be surprised if the number one issue coast guard deals with is drunken recreational boaters.
I imagine there is a big gap between the things they deal with the most and the things they need to plan for the most.
I send more emails than anything, but if you tried to get me to spend time being trained on sending email they wouldn’t find your body.
Conversely I design new courses rarely, but when I do it matters immensely that it’s done well. Resources and support and structure to help me do that well when I need to is most welcome.
Here is the National Commercial Fishing Safety Advisory Council charter:
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2024-09/24_0712_ncfs...
The activities listed are:
Based on just that text, they're the water version of the NTSB and thus one of the most important groups in the country.
NCFSAC isn’t the water version of the NTSB.
The NTSB, through its Office of Marine Safety (OMS), investigates major marine accidents across all sectors, determines probable causes, and issues safety recommendations. It operates independently.
In contrast, NCFSAC is an advisory body focused solely on commercial fishing safety, providing recommendations but not conducting investigations.
So, maybe the new administration did a global "ctrl-f regulation, uncheck".
Or maybe dozens of K-street hotshots carefully scrutizined every possible department that could include such committees.
Or more likely, somewhere inbetween, thousands of teams, mediated by a few hundred of the most influential, struggling to get the attention of this or that decision maker. Most of them just throwing random things at a wall and seeing what sticks.
The truth is HN readers won’t know and can’t ever know, barring a tiny handful who can read the tea leaves successfully year after year.
What's a "K-street hotshot"? K-street is new to me.
Edit: Thanks to @lelandfe for pointing to
* n.b. HN can't handle the period at the end of the link, see the jump page link for convenience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_StreetI'll leave this comment up in case there are others this term is also new to.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Street_(Washington,_D.C.)>
Again I can't tell if you've quoted three vaguely regulation-y phrases in an attempt to justify generic contempt for government regulation or if you're backing me up with documentary proof that this is a boring sensible thing.
As your document says, it is literally the commercial fishing industry, shipbuilders, shipowners, equipment manufacturers, insurers etc. getting together to swap notes on safety because shipwrecks and deaths are not good for business.
"members serve as representatives of their respective interests, associations, or organizations"
This is not woke communism.
I found a job posting from 2020. I didn't know much about this agency so I looked them up. Turns out I didn't know much about them because this was established in 2018.
One of the interesting bits about the job posting is that, not too surprisingly, there are no salaries:
> All members will serve at their own expense and receive no salary or other compensation from the Federal Government, with the exception that members may be reimbursed for travel and per diem in accordance with Federal Travel Regulations.
Which, to me, can read two ways: altruistic people trying to make the industry better
OR
You won't even be selected to this committee unless you're already wealthy enough to foot the bill yourself and shape policy in a way that advantages ones self.
I don't know which way to read it, but if it wasn't costing anything, cutting it "for cost savings" can't be completely true. Maybe there were other overhead costs, but even saying that those costs are $1M/yr is a rounding error for the national budget.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/10/13/2020-22...
This sounds to me like industry bodies such as WG21, TC39, JSR expert groups, etc. A way to get people with full-time jobs in relevant industries together to plan their shared future. I doubt the members of this board are wealthy people joining it in their own capacity. As such, i don't think it makes sense to consider them as either altruistic or self-serving; it's just part of their job.
A very small nitpick but the discretionary budget of the US is far smaller than most realize - in 2024 it was only 1.75 trillion.
And notably, most military spending is discretionary, so the remaining funds for basically all the neat dynamic things government can do is less than a trillion.
A million is of course still a rounding error at e.g. $900 billion, but it adds up really fast, especially when you consider that these are ongoing costs.
What’s the advantage of having this as a government agency vs. just an industry association?
Direct line to the head of the agency, who is in a position to help advance the goals of the members?
Without the direct line, the association has to rely on lobbying/bribing politicians for access.
An advisory counsel may not get paid but they submit findings to the Secretary. There's a long tail where the government becomes more aware of long standing and emergent issues.
Industry associations have no such reach unless individual members make it so, and unofficially at that.
We need to see YoY growth on ship rescues to justify their existence. Otherwise they're just a parasitic cost center.
That's a terrible idea for a group which is trying to prevent ships getting into trouble to begin with. Measuring the rescues would be a here incentive that would get more people in dangerous situations.
'twas surely a joke.
The "U.S. Coast Guard was formed by a merger of the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service and the U.S. Life-Saving Service on 28 January 1915" (wiki).
The US Department of Homeland Security "began operations on March 1, 2003, after being formed as a result of the Homeland Security Act of 2002, enacted in response to the September 11 attacks" (wiki).
So are you saying that for 78 years of its existence, the USCG had no "plan for when large fishing vessels get into trouble, and indeed a plan to stop them getting into trouble" until the DHS assembled a (assuming this is a thing) "National Commercial Fishing Safety Advisory Committee"? You dont think theres any redundancy? That just maybe bureaucracy cant help but to expand forever every time someone with a title has a question that cant be answered immediately by someone standing in the room, they have to create a committee so they can have someone on speed dial? If the coast guard doesnt have plans for this, one wonders what the coast guard does all day.
It’s common for organizations to reorganize. It’s quite possible that the committee was formed for purposes of centralization and efficacy. It’s also possible it was government overreach. What are the justifications for axing a committee or regulations and are those justifications correct?
It's probably about mission creep, I'd guess.
Came to say exactly this. Headline is extremely disingenuous and meant to provoke a reaction.
American workers don't deserve to be safe while working in commercial fishing apparently. Good news!
I think fisherman know how to be safe without bureaucrats in DC that have never been in a fishing boat butting in.
You just need coast guard for emergencies.
They got along just fine before 2018 when this committee was created.
I grew up in the commercial fishing industry and then worked in the tug boat industry. Many USCG regulations that were vehemently opposed by the old men save lives every day.
This is a classic Chesterton's Fence. Those who don't understand the origin of the regulations will continue to have strong, uninformed opinions about them.
Many crew working on boats have safety gear only because USCG requires it. The owners of those boats would not expend the money without the regulation.
What regulations of this committee do you think saved lives that other agencies did not?
The USCG, NMFS, NIOSH, and OSHA regulations are still there.
When you were growing up, was it earlier than 2018?
This committee didn't exist before then.
But yeah, maybe we should add 20 more agencies just to be safe...
This committee doesn’t make regulations they make expert suggestions.
This is way off the original topic of course…but you can do a quick search of the federal register they you can see the agenda of meetings and such. A recent one reviewed structural failures that led to boats sinking.
Fields learn as new things happen. There’s a reason aerospace industries talk about rules having body counts. Freezing regulations rarely makes work easier or faster, it just makes knowledge sharing worse.
There this large assumption across HN that if one doesn’t understand something l, that must meant it doesn’t make sense. It’s a bad way to operate in the world…independently of ideology…lack of understanding is not unique insight.
I think we'll get by without their "expert suggestions" as we did in 2017 before they existed.
It boils down to whether or not this committee was beneficial or not.
I have not seen any data backing up that it helped at all since it's inception in 2018.
> The owners of those boats would not expend the money without the regulation.
Some owners would not, most would. Humans are generally social, intelligent and caring animals. The regulations are helpful guidelines to save lives, not to be seen as mandatory rules that would be flaunted at every chance.
You are too naive. Owners who do not incur extra expenses are more competetive in capitalistic market. At some, point, you become disadvantaged if you do take extra precautions.
Regulations level the playing field.
People who cite Chesterton's Fence love to pick an arbitrary point in time when their pet fence existed as the starting point.
If we take the birth of the federal government or the USCG as our start point, it is these type of committees that actually moved Chesterton's Fence
That's not how Chesterton's Fence works? The point isn't that the fence was always there. It's that people who try to dismantle the fence never bothered to learn why the fence was put up in the first place.
The fence could have been put up yesterday but if you never even bother to learn why the fence was put up before trying to remove it, that's still Chesterton's Fence.
Chesterton's point wasn't that the fence should never move (which is what you seem to be implying), but that it should only be moved (or technically removed) when you understand why it was initially put in place.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that there is bloat and over-regulation, but most of the laws and regulations on the books are in response to a bad thing happening. It's kind of like a legacy code base - just deleting the repo and starting over from scratch is usually not the best idea, it takes some careful refactoring and judicious tests to move in the right direction.
It's sort of an interesting idea - what are "tests" in the context of the legal/regulatory framework? The constitution? The judiciary?
My point is that a fence existed (Fence #1). Someone moved Fence #1 (by making these DHS committees), which we will call Fence #2.
We are now removing Fence #2 back to Fence #1, which is more Chesterton-y by virtue of being there first.
The fence is a restriction. i.e. a regulation or series of rules. These committees make those rules. It's not just a state of being.
Getting rid of a fence doesn't mean there's magically an older fence you've moved to. It's only when you replace a set of rules with a different set of rules to serve the same purpose that you've moved the fence.
Removing the fence is exactly that, getting rid of the fence. There is no before fence. You've just removed the fence.
“This is unsafe! I quit!”
“No problem, as a non-employee you are hereby confined to your cabin except to use the head, and you can eat in the galley but you have to pay for your meals, they cost $100 and will be deducted from your final paycheck. If you have a negative balance when we dock at a port in around 3 months, you must pay immediately or we will send the debt to collections. Have a nice day”
Maybe you want to read up on how things work at sea?
That's not what this committee handled, other government programs such as OSHA, NIOSH, and DOL handle that.
You don't need a special fishing committee to make sure workers have good working conditions and proper pay. That's universal to any job.
> ...to make sure workers have good working conditions and proper pay. That's universal to any job.
This is wildly untrue. The less skilled your labor, the more exploitative the available jobs are. This is why we have labor regulations, to protect these people.
Why did you leave all the important parts out of the quote?
I already noted that there are agencies that handle labor regulations. You left that out.
This committee had nothing to do with labor regulations...
Did they? What were the accident rates before and after? Why was the committee created? Do you think the people who axed these committees have an answer to the above questions? Or is it simply "government is bad"?
I look forward to the evaluation by the administration to see if it's needed or it's redundant red tape.
There's already OSHA, NIOSH, and NOAA that cover these things, so imo it's probably redundant at the least, harmful and wasteful at the worst.
>I look forward to the evaluation by the administration to see if it's needed or it's redundant red tape.
That's kind of the point: they're doing no such thing.
All of the talk from Trump, Musk, the now-departed Ramaswamy, etc. hasn't been about sober analysis and careful evaluation, it's endless mockery and dumb jokes ("look at this agency name or person's title, what does that even mean LOL"), or "government bad" as the parent put it.
The pushback this gets isn't because people love bureaucracy or hate efficiency but because it's obvious this isn't an actual effort to improve anything, just mindlessly slashing things businesses/the powerful don't like and stunts to make the base clap.
It just happened. You have no idea what the evaluations were, they haven't been released and you weren't in the discussions. I hope they will be though.
From an outsider perspective this committee in particular seems redundant as there are other agencies that handle this scope.
If you want to boil it down to "government bad" sure, but I view it more as "over-regulation is bad".
Or do you view the government as a well oiled machine that couldn't have any bloat and we should never evaluate and cull feature creep in it?
>You have no idea what the evaluations were
Sure we do because, again, the people put in charge of these initiatives spend endless time just making jokes about agency names that they clearly (sometimes explicitly!) have no idea about or mindless promises to cut the government in half.
>Or do you view the government as a well oiled machine that couldn't have any bloat and we should never evaluate and cull feature creep in it?
Since you missed it the first time I'll copy the part of my comment that addresses exactly this again:
>The pushback this gets isn't because people love bureaucracy or hate efficiency but because it's obvious this isn't an actual effort to improve anything, just mindlessly slashing things businesses/the powerful don't like and stunts to make the base clap.
The problem is you're assuming good faith when there has been ample demonstration that there isn't any here.
You're assuming good faith of these committees. Comes down to who you trust.
I voted in Trump to do this and more, I trust the evaluations were made properly and I support the decision.
There's obvious bias in your tone (which is okay, which is why I stated my position) so it makes sense you don't like this move because you don't trust this administration.
We're similar in that regard in that I don't trust the government implicitly, which is why I support culling bloat.
If they were made in good faith, then surely we have some documentation for it in order to learn from those original mistakes. Or some way for people to evaluate that choice... It was a transparent decision not some random populist move... Right?...
Trust shouldn't even be a factor.
Decisions should be made based on facts and numbers and your side (you, Trump and Elon included) have provided none of these.
It's pure ideology without basis in objectivity.
DHS merely inherited the Coast Guard's responsibility for the fishing industry. It wasn't just unregulated before 2003!
That's false. The DHS didn't inherit any fishing responsibilities in it's creation.
The Coast Guard has and still does work with related agencies (NOAA/NMFS, Fish and Wildlife, EPA, etc.) in this regard.
This committee in question didn't even exist before 2018.
> I think fisherman know how to be safe without bureaucrats in DC that have never been in a fishing boat butting in.
There's 1000 years of people killing themselves needlessly that says they don't.
Fishing is dangerous work and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.
What matters are the data which nobody has dug up. Was there a significant reduction in fatalities following this committee's creation? Did it have a significant and likely causal relationship on those declines? And finally - assuming there was a decline d the committee was responsible for it, are they still meaningfully necessary or are the prior established rules sufficient to maintain the improvements moving forward?
Yes it's commonly known when sailors takeoff, they sing praise of the NCFSAC saving them after a 1000 years of ocean deaths.
Other agencies may do the same thing, but the NCFSAC changed the sea game (when created in 2018)
Before 2018, sea blood bath.
Seems the Cybersecurity Executive Orders that dealt with Memory Safe Languages and the ONCD Report (which mentioned Rust, if I remember correctly) are all gone from whitehouse.gov as well.
The CISA report that dealt with memory safety is still on the CISA site. What do these recent developments mean for CISA? Is it an independent organization that will continue to exist without DHS support or is it essentially dead and its site and reports will vanish as well?
Big C Plus Plus must be in play here
Big Stroustrup?
> Seems the Cybersecurity Executive Orders that dealt with Memory Safe Languages and the ONCD Report (which mentioned Rust, if I remember correctly) are all gone from whitehouse.gov as well.
Do you have any clues for the "why" ?
It's baffling, traditionally his highest support has come from the Rust belt.
Thank you for this comment. Gold. :D
It's a brand new website and old URLs won't work (this has been somewhat routine since Obama's first term). I wouldn't take that as a sign that a specific executive order is rescinded. However it may have been grouped in with other Biden tech executive orders (such as AI safety) which are being rescinded as excessive regulation
I am mostly ignorant but from hearsay CISA is part of DHS (the chief of CISA is a DHS official). doubt Trump loves it because he literally fired Krebs directly for not supporting misinformation and overthrow attempt in 2020 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Krebs#2020_dismissal)
It is not hearsay that CISA is part of DHS. This is an easily verified fact.
CISA has an important job to do, but their mission was put at risk when it's leadership under Krebs chose to repeatedly violate the first amendment. Elections and Covid-19 are topics they've been documented in influencing, but with the capability there, what other narratives was it influencing that we don't know about?
The legal fight against CISA to stop their censorship was lost not on the basis of it being constitutional, but because the plaintiffs powerful enough to bring it to court couldn't show they had been directly harmed by it. A common stumbling block for many court cases for legitimate issues. CISA has publicly stated they will be changing their approach as a result of these controversies.
Can somebody give me a rational take on why? It feels immensely reactive. Salt Typhoon would seem to represent an active threat. Didn't DHS act quite.. conservatively?
A comment on the blusky thread went to "five eyes should stop sharing information" which I suspect won't happen, but I could see people thinking it should.
When someone comes in to slash everything, they generally don't bother understanding what they are slashing. This is the same as when a company hires someone to come in and cut costs, generally everything, good or bad, gets cut. That's what's happening on the US federal level right now. Eventually some things will be picked back up when someone realizes that it wasn't a good idea to stop it, but most things are just going to be wasted effort.
The goal of these people isn't to understand. They don't care. They know they're slashing important stuff. It's a numbers game to them.
It's like marking read all your emails. The important stuff will pop back up.
It's like the twitter thing. You start shutting off servers until someone says, "ouch it hurts". Then you turn it back on if you care. You then end up with less servers than you started.
and Twitter is bleeding money like anything, unable to retain users and advertisers. You may end up with less servers but not necessarily a stable and functional system.
Twitter is bleeding money in part because the owner refused to play ball with advertisers moderation demands, and the majority who don't see any downtime on twitter consider it more than "stable and functional".
And for the owner, who probably thinks he's co-piloting the strongest government in the world right now and attributes part of that success to the platform he controls, it is functioning magnificently.
..and that is all that matters to him.
Except we're not dealing with software here. The "ouch it hurts" once a government initiative has been "turned off" could be medical services, or social services, or food, or ensuring safe and clean products, or poisoned air or water, etc.
This is the result of hiring people that will "run the country like a business". The human element is removed from consideration
>Except we're not dealing with software here.
You're not, sure. The people who are in charge view the whole apparatus as a machine, and the people doing the work as cogs in that machine.
I didn't write > Except we're not dealing with software here
Maybe you're replying to someone else?
The majority of voters voted for this. I think it was pretty clear they are just going to cut things.
Unfortunate for some people who may be affected by this.
Chesterton's Fence
"There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it"
I don't think Chesterton has much to say about DHS, which is relatively new.
However, DHS was almost entirely formed from existing departments and agencies that were merely rehoused under a new structure, so Chesterton's Fence definitely applies to all of those. Even CISA, which is one of the newest elements, is now almost a decade old with a lot of accumulated expertise and experience.
You seem to have Chesterton’s fence completely backwards.
Chesterton’s fence can never be an argument against creating something new.
The whole point of it is that if you come across a fence then that was the result of a conscious human decision and subsequent effort, which strongly implies there was a reason it was created, and until you understand what that reason was, you’re taking a risk by destroying the fence.
But if there is “nothing” and you’re creating something new, Chesterton’s fence doesn’t apply because the lack of existence of anything was not the result of intentional human design and effort, therefore there’s no evidence that the lack of existence of something “had a reason for it”.
Read The Drift From Domesticity, where this whole "fence" thing comes from. It's an appeal to (small-c) conservatism, to respect and understand traditions and norms. It is not a logical rule about it being improper to alter absolutely anything without a clear understanding of its origins. You can disagree with me about its applicability to the newest cabinet branch, but our disagreement isn't rooted in me not knowing the metaphor.
The newness of DHS has nothing to do with whether or not Chesterton’s Fence applies.
Does the metaphor actually include the age of the fence? I always thought the idea is just to understand why the fence is there before removing it, regardless of its age.
In theory, it should be easier to understand the reasoning behind the existence of newer fences, but the idea is still to do that step first...
I mean, clearly some people just reject this entire idea as creating too much friction, and I can often see their point!, but I think we can at least avoid saying "it's a good concept, but it just doesn't apply in this case", and be honest about just rejecting the concept.
…and entirely a kneejerk reaction to 9/11, enabling a massive public-private wealth transfer graft under the false pretense of national security.
> a massive public-private wealth transfer
I’ll say this as someone who’s moderately wealthy: this administration is a massive wealth transfer to those with either capital or connections to it. Taking apart these committees means less-regulated telecoms, infrastructure and financial services. If you’re in those spaces, this is great for you.
The size of each of those industries entirely dwarfs the military-industrial bogeyman, which is largely just being transferred from one set of owners (Boeing, Lockheed, et cetera) to another (Musk, Bezos, Lucky, et cetera)
Sure, but DHS long predates this admin. The list of giants suckling at the public teat is huge (Rapiscan, anyone?) and spans many different administrations.
One possible upside of the current situation is that the very obvious corporate ownership of the federal government is dropping the “emperor has clothes” pretense. We are ever closer to simply paying taxes to Buy-N-Large.
If people don’t like it, at least now they can have a practical conversation about it (Luigi notwithstanding). It’s sort of like when Snowden showed us how fucked we were/are.
The 9/11 terrorist attacks might have been the triggering event but bringing a bunch of related federal departments and agencies under a single umbrella in DHS was probably a net positive. The previous structure was tremendously inefficient with a lot of duplication of effort and time wasted on interdepartmental coordination. Obviously graft should be addressed but it's unlikely the total graft was any lower before 2002.
If said fence was across a road that a school bus was hurtling towards at 60 mph… you’d stop asking these questions and remove it (and maybe put it back after you’ve solved the other emergency).
Several (of the new government) have expressed belief that the government is headed towards a catastrophic debt overload. In their view, emergency relief is necessary.
Not arguing for or against this view, but that seems to be what people voted for.
I am a big fan of Chestertons fence but it doesn’t always apply.
I'll counter that it does, allowing that it's perfectly fine to adjust the threshold of certainty about a particular thing's purpose to suit the circumstances.
If that fence is stopping the school bus from driving off the edge of a cliff, for example, I would absolutely not want to remove it - and you can bet I'll spare a modicum of thought to make sure that's not the case before I yank it out of the way.
Republican strategy since the 1980s had been 'starve the beast'. That strategy is the deny actual funding and instead create debt load in order to kill the government, support for government programs, and destroy trust in government.
I heard there's going to be those teams of hr+legal+engineer doing the cutting - the only reason I can guess there'd be an engineer in the mix is if they do intend to understand what they're cutting.
Chesterton's fence is always lost on populists.
The one wrinkle in this, to me, is that Trump spent four years as President already. Full disclosure: I despise the guy and wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire, BUT ... what if he saw a bunch of waste in his first run and therefore does understand what he's slashing?
Personally I don't believe that or want to believe that and would rather chalk it up to neo-toddlerism, but there's a chance right?
Considering the surprise he showed on video when being told what he's signing, I don't believe he knows what he's slashing, let alone understands it.
> Can somebody give me a rational take on why?
Investigations are annoying to people who were behind the President at his inauguration.
People voted for this and now act surprised.
I'm guessing the people who voted for this are not surprised. They either expected it, want it, or don't care.
It shouldn't be surprising to anyone here with a functioning brain and is roughly aware of what is going on. Expect more of this.
The question is whether "don't care" will remain true.
I think what we're seeing in this moment is the overreach that precedes the backlash, like clockwork.
You mean the same way as with Brexit? We can only hope that the people who voted for him will have the same capacity for regret.
People voted for unrealistic pipe dreams. They often do, but happens in particular with reactionary and populist votes.
I'm mostly seeing people who voted against this continue to grumble.
and, unfortunately, grumbling is all that they will do
How do you know this? The USA still has secret (Australian) ballots last time I checked.
You checked with what/who?
I examined my 2024 November general election ballot carefully. Ever since 2020's election denial, I've had a heightened awareness of election procedure, going so far as to read the Colorado Secretary of State's web pages on risk limiting audits, and making some attempt to understand the math behind them.
My Colorado general election ballot contained nothing I could see that would associate me as a registered voter to the ballot itself. Colorado ballots are hand marked, machine readable, and human readable as has been the best and obvious practice since 2000's "hanging chad" debacle. There are certainly "index marks" on the ballots so that the tallying machines can get squared up, but they don't appear different per ballot. I compared to my wife's ballot, just in case.
Why do you ask?
Because your comment does nothing against the original "I'm mostly seeing people who voted against this continue to grumble." comment.
People that vote are not always hush hush about who they voted for, and has nothing to do with can you pick their particular ballot out of the pile. If I tell you I voted for A but B won and now I'm grumbling about the things B is doing, there's no need for discussions about ballots at all.
Just like you don't need to find someone's secret ballot when they're wearing a red MAGA hat.
I'm not sure it's the same people.
It is, though. The word "people" here refers in aggregate to the citizens who voted in November. It would be equally accurate for me to say "This is what we voted for" even though it's not what I voted for.
Not voting was the most popular choice among Americans eligible to vote in 2024, so "it's what we didn't vote for".
I don't have a dog in this race - I am not even from the US.
But, by definition, not voting is an action rather than absence of one. What you are doing by not voting is giving out a tacit agreement that the people who went and vote get to decide who will be elected.
Following that line of thought, by not voting, you actively chose the current government, no matter what the current government is.
I agree, but there are many who say that not voting is the only way to show contempt for a system rigged against them. Voting would be a tacit endorsement and recognition of the legitimacy of that system.
> show contempt for a system rigged against them
Those that don't care to vote are doomed to be ruled by those who care.
You still have to pay taxes, and perhaps see a government you truly despise making all sorts of decisions that will get the system even more rigged against you.
Not voting out of spite is similar to stabbing your own head to show contempt for your brain when you have a migraine.
I just realized, this is how Trump will reform the 2028 elections. Every non-vote will count as a vote for the status quo.
"You won't have to vote again" – Trump 2024
Not voting, practically, is empowering the status quo. Particularly in America, where almost every election features intense down-ballot competition.
Someone who didn’t vote is more in concordance with the current government than someone who voted against it. Actions speak louder than words, and not voting is an action.
how so? voter turnout was 64%, so voting was more popular than not voting
I think the math would be: ~32% Harris, ~32% Trump, ~36% didn't show up.
I see a big market for “Don’t blame me, I didn’t bother voting” bumper stickers.
AWS and starlink have exposure of risk. You would think DHS work here went to net beneficial outcomes for both of them, and the wider telco sector. (Assuming you meant the tech sector)
> AWS and starlink have exposure of risk
What risk? There isn’t a consumer liability, and they can control the cybersecurity risk-reward balance they’re exposed to. From their perspective, oversight is the liability.
A good rule of thumb, at least for the next couple of months, is that any rules and regulations that have been criticised by the billionaires, banks or oil & gas industry are likely to be shredded. (The “deep state” stuff is mostly whoever has the king’s ear sort of politics. It’s unclear that had any influence here.)
I get what youre saying but Im not sure absolute liability is quite right. Im thinking of SBOM directives, or industry network security requirements for bgp announcements, for example. Amazon and, I assume, some of the other mega corps are AGES ahead of industry at large. Like huge multi year investments so that theyre plausibly close to complying with secure provenance, review, build tracking, and artifact integrity reporting from initial CR to request processing for everything that touches customer or business data. My impression is that the industry generally isnt any further than tracking some package names and version strings and calling it SBOM. If the new directives can preclude a large number of contract competitors that seems like a huge win.
Or, maybe Im thinking more of advantageous requirements/regulations than oversight per se.
Amazon et al would much prefer to do that on their own terms than have to coördinate with government (or their competitors).
Arent they differentiating only _if_ they required to get federal and dod money? The coordination definitely seems to be more of amzn (and similar) employees providing technical expertise to congress and regulators. They certainly take deployments and internal security seriously, but it doesnt seem to be monetizable outside of the contract requirements. Or maybe im missing your point?
What OP is saying is instead of having some sort of legal liability attached or outside directives being handed to them, they would rather implement on their own or push their own standards.
A notable example is SEC mandates on breach disclosures, which will most likely be dead now. Those were a major forcing function to make companies realize security is important. Otherwise, paying a ransom and doing the bare minimum to not get cut by Chubbs or AXA is the norm.
I agree with JumpCriscross on his read of this situation. It ain't great. At least I'm well off enough to weather the negative impacted by a lot of the chaos. Sucks for everyone else.
> The coordination definitely seems to be more of amzn (and similar) employees providing technical expertise to congress and regulators
It's bidirectional. CISA, FBI, and others often get intel or actively take down a botnet or offensive actor, and will percolate this information to security teams at larger organizations before percolating en masse.
For example, when this one APM/data collection tool that almost every DevOps team ik was using was pwned early last year, CISA notified CISOs days before they officially announced it in the news.
They were elected on a mandate to burn it all down, in their view, and this is what that looks like.
I've never understood how 49.8% of the vote is a mandate.
It isn't, people who mindlessly repeat that this administration has a "mandate" are incapable of critical thinking.
There is two ways for efficiency, either wipe everything clean or well setup a committee to evaluate which committees can be eliminate. And usual joke in bureaucracy is that later one will discover that even more committees are actually needed.
So the knee jerk reaction of current administration is burning it to ground. Which could actually change something.
Seems like a false dichotomy, between authoritarianism and Kafkaesque bureaucracy.
An effective administration would be thoughtful about things and reorganize rather than simply cut. So they're either being thoughtful and decided something like state sponsored infiltration isn't good to investigate or are being thoughtless.
Especially wrt things setup, created, mandated during thr prior admin.
I see you're making a joke about conservatism, but Trump isn't a conservative: he's a radical. His goal is to blow up the system, not conserve it. Getting rid of protections is part of that.
If you stop assuming good intent, I think the answer is fairly obvious.
And that obvious answer is?
That it is not a good faith attempt to make better or more effective investigations, and rather to stop publicly ‘seeing’ high profile problems.
If we don’t test or investigate, there are no problems and no crimes eh?
Slash and burn policies from a reactionary administration that doesn't and in fact refuses to think about the second and third order consequences of their decisions.
One of the reasons a lot of people are worried about this administration is the vibes based policy decisions they seem intent on making. Everything is haphazard, arbitrary and contradictory. Some of it comes down to personal grievance and some of it comes down to favors for people in the business sphere who chose to kowtow to this administration.
It's probably as simple as Trump not wanting agencies to consult advisory boards consisting of outside experts since they might get in the way of his agenda.
It's probably not a specific decision based on what the individual boards have been doing.
Rational != principled.
Yes. I don't want to assume an adversarial posture on this, I'm mostly an outsider, observer. I probably can't understand nuances in US domestic politics (although i am opposed to this kind of semi random behaviour by institutions, I did not see this signalled in NOG lists and the like as coming down the pipe)
So I'm wondering if this is as simple as cost/benefit? Did somebody do the sums and decide the delivery was sub par for spend?
The alternatives are mostly very sad: they're fools. Replacing a process can be beneficial. There's usually overlap.
> Did somebody do the sums and decide the delivery was sub par for spend?
That would be a very interesting analysis and something to learn from. It would also help prevent similar mistakes in the future. It's really unlikely someone would go to such effort and just keep the results to themselves.
The "rational" explanation is that Trump's staff are trying to clear house of anyone they don't trust will give in to any demands they make, and put everyone else who works for the government directly or indirectly in a state of fear and confusion.
https://www.nextgov.com/people/2025/01/trumps-dhs-pick-says-...
Current South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem wants CISA to be “refocused” on critical infrastructure and to no longer address mis- or disinformation efforts online.
So less/no fact checking, including Trump claims.
Noem has practically zero influence over anything right now.
Her explanation, moreover, doesn’t make sense. The infrastructure advisory committees are also being disbanded.
It's because of the misinformation/disinformation mission that CISA took on during the Biden admin, it was a boondoggle that really pissed off Republicans.
Shut up TREASONer! To bring efficiency we must burn everything to the ground and rehire whomever will work unpaid overtime and very low wage. They all happen to be of chinese, russian, and north korean descent, but that just means we are winning at the deal... ART .. OF ..THE .. DEAL /s
Really though, competence would create the new "efficient" thing, hire best of the best and get it running before tearing down important security, this is business-leader level incompetence being attempted at global super power scale, we are going to need a new word for businessjerks breaking things they should have never been able to touch
>Can somebody give me a rational take on why?
The current techbro CEO squad is a small group of people who got extraordinarily lucky and made a bunch of money.
The techbro CEO squad takes their luck to be ability, and they think the fact that they have more money than other people means that they're smarter than everyone else. Some members of the techbro CEO squad think of themselves as prophets or messiahs.
In addition to this, the techbro CEO squad is addicted to money and its accumulation. This isn't a "I need more money to live a more comfortable retirement" thing, it is a "my sole purpose for being is the accumulation of wealth" thing. They are more akin to machines whose purpose it is to grab onto as much money as possible than they are actual human beings.
The techbro CEO squad's vast wealth has enabled them to surround themselves with an army of staff whose only job it is to make their dreams a reality and execute their orders. There is a vast, impenetrable field of personnel and money that insulates them from the reality of the world.
So, they think that they're better than anyone else to the point of being god-like, they are sociopaths who only care about money, they are surrounded by an army of yes men, and they have lost (or never had) any connection to the average human being and his or her existence.
They believe that any restriction on their ability to accumulate wealth is an assault on their freedom, an enemy to be defeated, an injustice to be made right by any means possible.
Limits on their ability to pollute, protections for employees operating in the heat or cold or around hazardous materials, regulations designed to prevent market manipulation or money laundering, it is all evil and must be destroyed.
They are willing to dismantle any system to get what they want.
Because they think that they are better than everyone else, the techbro CEO squad does not value consensus or institutional knowledge that has led to regulation slowly building up over centuries in response to events and emergencies: if they don't like it, it must go.
So, the slow infiltration of government by the Peter Theil, Andreessen and Horowitz, Musk, (but mainly their servants) and the rest started a couple of years ago and continues to this day.
tl;dr: Billionaires will rape your grandmother's corpse for lower taxes, harvest and sell her organs for a laugh, then label you a woke communist and kick you off twitter for criticizing them.
Whatever problems or limitations the existing approach had dropping everything on the floor is one of the least helpful ways of trying to fix it (assuming good intent).
“They are never as dumb as I hoped they were, and I am never as smart as I thought I was.”
Basically nearly every person who goes into a new situation thinking only they can fix it.
"The same level of awareness that created a problem, cannot be used to fix it"
You have to assume competence too. You may have good intent but that doesn't help if you don't really know what you are doing or are blinded by ideology or some wayward belief.
Which of the advisory boards do you think were run by incompetents or blind adherents to generally unpopular opinions?
Do you think it was half? More? Less?
I'm talking about the administration that dropped the boards, as per the post I was replying to.
Burning everything to the ground is a way of demolishing something though.
And if your intent is to just destroy it, it’s a far more effective one than bringing in experts to slowly try to disassemble the giant jenga tower without it falling over.
Why would you assume good intent at this point? Their motives and plans have been clear for years.
You don’t need advisory panels if you don’t want advice
Is this explainable in any way by the cost of running these boards? By the sound of it the cost-benefit of thwarting Salt Typhoon is probably not optimal at zero investment.
This seems entirely ideologically motivated to me.
with a dash of business motivation.
Replacing government run and funded cyber security and threat assessment roles with privately owned contracters will be quite profitable for a few of the Brolliegarks.
It seems that the Salt Typhoon investigation would be better handled by the NSA anyways..
Yeah those guys are so good at security. You can tell because the tools and plans of theirs that keep leaking sound great!
No. The cost of running these is so small as not to be worth top officials' time in worrying about them. If they are looking to save lots of money, there are far more efficient ways to do that. This is just clearing house, establishing a tone, and making it clear that expert opinion is not valued.
It really is despairingly sad how many of these comments (assumedly by U.S. citizens) seem to not realize or believe these actions will have an effect on them.
Are some of these things normal SOP for a regime change? Sure. But to normalize everything under that blanket assumption is just foolish.
Unless you are an exceedingly (liquid) wealthy white male, you are entirely disposable to the incoming administration. You are less than nothing. If anything, you are an inconvenience buried deep in the calculations that needs to be factored out of the equation because your existence hinders the "progress" being sought.
All these pragmatic or, worse, so-called "libertarian" views demonstrate a supremely naïve, if not outright harmful (to yourself and countless others), understanding of what is going to be aggressively pursued these next few years.
The efforts will inherently destabilize the US which, for some, will be a really massive gift and this administration will be praised both externally and internally. That will close the feedback loop since that’s primarily what motivates this administration.
The core tenet of Muskism, as described at length in Isaacson's bio is around those lines:
* question all the rules
* when in doubt, slash the rule, and see what happens
* if it's really bad without it, bring back the rule
* if you don't have to bring back 10% of the rules that you slashed, you haven't slashed enough yet
USA is now entering the phase where everything is getting slashed - following the will of the majority of -Pennsylvania- the people.
At the level of a company, this can bring great efficiencies, and make reusable self-driving cancer-free nuclear-fusion based rockets. Or crypto scams.
Unfortunately, at the level of a Federal Government, it will bring lower taxes, but some of the 10% will end with coffins. And crypto scams.
We'll watch from the other side of the Atlantic how the great libertarianism experiment goes for the USA.
I expect both impressive improvements, and dramatic karmic irony.
> At the level of a company, this can bring great efficiencies, and make reusable self-driving cancer-free nuclear-fusion based rockets. Or crypto scams.
This is questionable. There are many times when bureaucracy exists for bureaucracy sake. But many, many times they exist for a reason.
Get any sufficiently large company and try to understand its complexity. Simply slashing it is a recipe for disaster.
> Unfortunately, at the level of a Federal Government, it will bring lower taxes, but some of the 10% will end with coffins. And crypto scams.
This is highly questionable, especially the "lower taxes" part. Governments are not very keen on reducing revenue, more likely they will only direct the surplus by cutting off services to other things - in the case of US, I wouldn't be surprised if they just increase spending in military, for example. Those sleasy and juicy defence contracts need funding, you know.
There is essentially no relation to taxes. Everything they are cutting falls into the “Other” category in this chart:
https://www.crews.bank/charts/taxes-and-spending
Even if they cut 100% of government functions other than entitlements, healthcare, and defense, it would not solve the deficit.
Is DHS "other", or "defense"?
Regardless, I think the primary costs created by regulation aren't directly to the government budget, but rather knock-on effects of compliance incurred by the entire nation's economy.
DHS would fall under “other”.
At least officially, the stated goal is to eliminate the deficit, which at least Elon has been warning about lately.
If that holds up (and who knows if it will) I wouldn’t expect any taxes to be cut until the budget is close to balanced.
I expect a lot of noise about it, then an expansion of the deficit for tax cuts, followed by more noise about how evil the deficit is.
If we look historically since Nixon, Biden had the smallest deficit growth of 17%. Trump had 34%.
https://www.investopedia.com/us-debt-by-president-dollar-and...
Republicans do not bring up deficit when they are in power.
Interesting… I had looked here: https://www.thebalancemoney.com/us-deficit-by-year-3306306
(quick google search, first result)
Which seems to show a different story. But looks like there is a lot of analysis on the numbers which can be done? (Eg I saw something in your article about ‘Biden will contribute 1.9T to the debt by 2031’.. even if he hadn’t gotten reelected, he wouldn’t be in office in 2031, so this includes the long-term effects of policies?)
I wonder if I would be happier if I was as naive as a this.
Maybe, but it’s not like it hasn’t happened before… Clinton (yes, a democrat!) campaigned on balancing the budget, and iirc it actually was for a few years. In his case I don’t think taxes changed much either direction.
So the opposite of conservatism in the traditional sense which is do not change things?
Maybe more like radical libertarianism?
More like basic authoritarianism.
I think authoritarianism would be adding rules and bureaucrats, not cutting them.
By cutting, they're centralizing authority at the top. More and different rules will come - some written, many not - but not by the people that were in place before the change.
> following the will of the majority of -Pennsylvania- the people.
Or more specifically, the Amish...almost poetic.
did we mention crypto scams?
Basically this.
Most of the commenters here seem to be taking it on faith that these government organizations are necessary and serving a crucial function. But the entire thrust of this election is that the majority of the country doesn't share that level of faith in the federal government.
"When in doubt, slash and see what happens" seems like a highly effective, albeit a bit reckless, approach to finding out which agencies are truly needed and which are not.
I (sincerely) wish you and your family to not be on the path of one of the people who will rush to profit from the lack of regulation.
I preemptively nominate "unexpected knock-on effects" as "periphrase of the year" for 2025 ;)
The swiftness here really cements the notion of a useful idiot. Makes you wonder who crafted the details then the execution.
You would only need to wonder if you had been paying no attention to the clarion call about Project 2025 and what the incoming admin was directly planning to do wholesale.
Literally, for months.
There was doubt by many if Project 2025 was actually going to be executed.
The already highly compromised ideologues who seized control of the federal government are dismantling it because they said they would.
Every comment on this post is frighteningly uninformed about current events.
I'm inclined to write a Firefox addon that just replaces every headline out of the US with "Leopards Eating Faces official caught eating faces"
It works both ways.
"Department of Mission Creep, Pork-Barrel, Tax and Spend, continues to tax and spend as it endeavors to expand pork-barrel mission."
“Then makes weird noises, nothing bad happens, and continues eating faces”.
If there are no consequences, it just reinforces their power.
I'd argue this government has not just experienced no consequences, they've experienced the opposite of no consequences. Somehow the American people saw everything they'd done and were saying they'd do and then the people emphatically voted for it. I'm still gobsmacked.
Just wait. Hitler was very popular too. Until he unequivocally lost, at least.
By then, the country was destroyed along with most of it’s citizens, but boy howdy was it a ride eh?
Hitler apparently had solid 15-20% support even up to a decade after defeat and Nazism generally had 50% support (before and after, as a good idea executed badly) so both your high and low are off.
I was going to write something pithy about "Sure, we screwed up, but we'll get right the next time!", but that really doesn't feel funny right now.
I’m not sure you’re saying what you think you’re saying.
hE's HiTlEr!!
Every time. I lived in Austin in the early 2000s and have no idea how many "BUSH=HITLER" bumper stickers I saw. It was stupid then, it's stupid now.
This has been a definite problem with the rhetoric starting at an intensity of 10/10 and having nowhere to go. The other problem is that everything that's happened has had people actively diminishing it, to make the reaction seem more outrageous, so we're all numb to so much of it. I've thought of it as The Boy Who Cried Wolf, but that's incorrect, because there's always been a wolf.
Uh huh. How about we check in in about 5 years eh?
And don’t worry, I don’t think he’s literally Hitler. Hitler actually went to jail when he got convicted, after all.
It's just the beginning. There's a good breakdown of what it would take to reduce the government by Musk's "at least 2 trillion" and it doesn't look very good (for US citizens). I mean he what, is going to cut SpaceX contracts? Please...
https://youtu.be/5fvDfDDZ4Ms
> Musk's 2 trillion
There is no evidence this is an actual target for anyone in government.
Not for the government. For people outside of the government tasked with reducing the government. Musk is one of them
Musk did backtrack on the $2 trillion goal.
'Musk told political strategist Mark Penn in an interview broadcast on X that the $2 trillion figure was a “best-case outcome” and that he thought there was only a “good shot” at cutting half that.'
'That figure was quickly dismissed as implausible by budget experts, who said the entire discretionary budget was only $1.7 trillion. Musk hadn’t waved people off the number until Wednesday, and it has been widely cited in reports about DOGE’s plans. '
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/elon-musk-say...
> people outside of the government tasked with reducing the government
My point is we have seen zero evidence of this influence in Trump’s executive actions thus far. DOGE is analogous to the Federalist Society or NRA. Influential. But not policy prescriptive.
2 trillion is not prescriptive, but is there any unambiguous number published officially? Otherwise 2 tril is the only figure publicly advertised and I guess TFA is a sign they are starting to chip at this campaign promise
> 2 tril is the only figure publicly advertised and I guess TFA is a sign they are starting to chip at this campaign promise
Not a campaign promise if it didn’t come from the campaign!
This isn’t cost cutting. The DHS budget hasn’t been slashed. This is deregulation. (Which was a campaign promise.)
Blame it on Musk, replace the humans with computers. It could be an chronological digitalisation step and since the US is leading in the AI field they just start replacing the government with artificial intelligence.
Ah so you're saying he not only will not cut his existing gov contracts but actually add some more now for "AI government"? Sounds great and totally no conflict of interest
What has the federal government done for me lately?
Not a casual dismissal; I’m deadly serious. What is so bad about dismantling large chunks of the most useless, violent, criminal, and wasteful organization in the country?
It's absolutely impossible to answer you because the very premise of your question is made in bad faith. You wouldn't even need to think, by yourself, very long to get a long list of examples; the fact that you somehow can't means you don't want to and don't intend to.
The grandparent comment is abrasive and excessive but to some extent that opinion is shared by many. The federal government was never intended to be what it is today; the technocrats just keep growing it in wasteful directions and the general public feels a disconnect. A smaller and leaner government with a balanced budget is not a shocking thing to ask for.
That world is long gone. And impossible to define objectively. What's the smallest leanest monopoly of violence that keeps the peace so that the most ambitious peoples' journies help deliver the greatest standard of living increases for the most amount of people while also preventing human rights violations and atrocities?
If the govt wasn't meant to do that, then we still have those problems and I don't see any interest in any individual to solve it.
If I understand the polls correctly, the federal government was intended to be what it is, in the sense that the parts were intentional. Medicare was intended, and so on. Each of the parts that have large numbers of employees or large budgets was intended.
The only thing that wasn't intended was that the sum of the large numbers should be large.
Maintaining our status as the global hegemon requires lots of people and money, you don’t want to find out what happens if we fail to remain the sole global superpower.
> The federal government was never intended to be what it is today
Many parts of all our government were never intended to be what it is today, executive branch included. We have a system that at least kind of works, changes should be made cautiously because a world-leading economy and country is a complex system.
You didn't die of dysentery, for one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9foi342LXQE comes to mind!
Or food poisoning from drinking milk.
Yes, alright, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what has the federal government ever done for us?
Heh, good Life of Brian quote that one. ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ
My local government runs all those, federal just provides the funding. Redistribution of tax proceeds is enough of a job to excuse everything else for you?
> My local government runs all those
Your local government runs all your roads, canals, railroads and public order? Even the largest cities in America parcel that out to the federal government.
Well, we don't really have much in the way of canals or railroads, but they do the actual maintenance and construction of roads in the first place. They also enforce the traffic laws (which they also set for the most part), maintain and install the signage, etc. The local and state police are obviously run by local government. Federal police are obviously not.
> we don't really have much in the way of canals or railroads
How do goods get into and out of your town? Are you connected to a grid? Do you use GPS?
Roads. There's a large port nearby, but it doesn't depend on canals. The electrical grid is also maintained by the state along with the other states on the same regional grid, again, the federal contribution is largely limited to funding.
GPS, OK, that's useful and it's existence depend(-s/-ed?) on the federal government/military I guess.
> Roads
And who builds the big roads?
> a large port nearby
Who makes it viable by protecting international shipping, guarding the coast and regulating port infrastructure? (If you’re on a Great Lake, it absolutely depends on canals. That and Canada.)
> electrical grid is also maintained by the state along with the other states on the same regional grid
Not how North American grids work, outside Alaska, Texas, Florida and maybe the SPP. States have influence on NERC through the utilities. Grids don’t line up neatly with state lines, and the whole mess requires regular federal coordination.
@Jump You're talking to a wall man.
Then we can cut the federal funding of weapons and equipment for police that comes from the federal government. Right?
Apparently your local government didn't run the educational system that so spectacularly failed you very well.
This is a tired trope. Above, user "sneak" alludes to the infamous "Who will build the roads?" gambit. Below, users invoke it.
Reasonable people will disagree about their preferences. Some will even find polite ways to agree to disagree about ideology. Consider if the Federal Government nationalized toilet paper production and distribution. Perhaps in a few years, posters on this forum would assume that they could not perform these basic tasks without the state's support.
Just because something is currently a function of the public sector, does not mean that it could not be achieved better by the private sector. The entire thread is filled with hyperbole. The efficacy of either approach is not being discussed. There is very little substance here. Instead there are two to three sentence zingers thrown around. Most of this has been discussed at length by authors who specialize in the field.
>When students are taught about public goods, roads and highways serve as the default example in virtually every economics class. The cliché question every libertarian has encountered—“Who will build the roads?”—is predicated on the idea that without the state, private actors will have no incentive to construct or finance roadways because they will be unable to monetize them (or, at least, unable to do so sufficiently to meet the needs of the community). This assumption is accepted with such a degree of faith that few scholars have seen fit to even question whether and to what degree private roads have been constructed historically.
>But in the early years of the new republic, Americans underwent what some historians have described as a “turnpike craze.” The term “turnpike” specifically refers to roadways constructed and operated privately. Early Americans, wanting to connect their communities to the developing market economy, eagerly subscribed to turnpike corporations for local roads. In fact, turnpike corporations were among the first for-profit corporations in the country, and dramatically widened the population of shareholders at a time when corporate stock was rarely available to the public.
https://mises.org/mises-wire/who-will-build-roads-anyone-who...
> The term “turnpike” specifically refers to roadways constructed and operated privately.
I don't know about the rest of the comment, but this is definitely not correct. According to the OED, the term "turnpike" as a shortening of "turnpike road" pre-dates the United States, and generally refers to any toll road, not specifically privately operated ones.
“Redistribution of tax proceeds” is a snide way of saying “totally facilitating societies value concentration to get the things you depend on done”.
It's also something that could be handled by an excel spreadsheet as long as the budget was set. Providing a forum for the states to argue about issues is an actually useful and non-redundant thing that the federal government does - setting the budget wouldn't work without it. The facilitation of interstate commerce through a federated union is a great thing. A coordinated foreign policy and unified military is more effective and probably more efficient. The federal government isn't useless or lacking any impact at all on my life, but the state and local governments are far, far more involved in "getting the things I depend on done", and many of the things federal government does could probably be done without a federal government or with much less of one.
Well, the stories goes that's actually an Al Capone gift to society
Put differently: “What has COBOL done for me lately? Can’t we just cut out all COBOL code, and replace it today to save money on paying COBOL cowboys?”
Edit: Your website states you live in Berlin, Germany; no, the US federal government has done nothing for you. This is a troll comment.
> you live in Berlin, Germany; no, the US federal government has done nothing for you
I mean…
It put fraudulent get-rich-quick pyramid scheme scammers and Bitcoin Ponzi scheme shills like SBF in jail where they belong. Why, are you afraid of that happening to you too?
Perhaps someone came in and realized that this advisory board had 0 benefit and just a waste of tax payer money? If so, I’m all for getting rid of wasteful spending
Good. From day 1 DHS has been the most Orwellian department of the US government, which casually violates our freedom on a regular basis. The entire department should be abolished.
Which party created the DHS again?
Pretty sure it was a solid bipartisan achievement.
Maybe you can share some of the examples of such infringements on our rights.
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/court-rules-warrantless-...
https://epic.org/dhs-disregards-internal-policies-and-avoids...
https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone
https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/breaking-dhs-will-begin-...
https://www.theverge.com/c/23311333/tsa-history-airport-secu...
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/us/tsa-screeners-win-i...
The list goes on. There's 24 years of history you can comb through. The DHS' security theater exists solely to compromise the constitutional rights of American citizens. To this day there's no evidence they're even that successful at their job. The fact the impeachment of Mayorkas failed was quite mind-boggling but characteristic of a government that doesn't truly believe anyone, even citizens, have certain inalienable rights.
The DHS was and still is bipartisan. It's America's Staatspolizei.