What are the assurances that they don’t already have the data? This would be the largest data breach in US history that would make the OPM breach look like a stolen garden gnome in comparison.
I doubt there are any real assurances considering this:
> the career official who was in charge of that program resigned rather than grant the request. He was later replaced by a DOGE staffer on assignment to Treasury.
I do my best at work, and if my employer tells me to do something I don't agree with I continue choosing my actions, at the risk of getting fired. Point is, it's on them to fire me.
I've only ever resigned when I don't want to do the work anymore or I'm moving away.
I've never made over ~$60k/year, and I'm fine with that; many ways to be rich.
Also, I like the idea of public luxury, private sufficiency.
The practice of resigning rather than follow illegal/immoral orders seems ill suited to operating in a context where the leadership is an active adversary and can instantly replace you with someone who will just do the thing. I feel like civil servants need to internalize that the old customary practices are based on a context where there are checks and balances in the system, as well as standards of decency and democratic accountability, that make these sorts of formal actions have teeth. When none of that exists a principled resignation is basically just saying “My principles make me a hurdle to your attempts at violating the Constitutional rights of the public, so let me just get out of the way so you can sprint towards that goal more easily.”
Obviously though, it’s the dirty hands problem. 99% of the time we don’t want civil servants to do this because 99% of the time the President isn’t actively trying to unmake the Constitutional order. It’s very problematic to have civil servants thinking their judgement should overrule their leadership, but we’re in extraordinary times and there is no leadership of an opposition movement that can coordinate to set any sort of guardrails around that kind of willful insubordination.
> 99% of the time we don’t want civil servants to do this because 99% of the time the President isn’t actively trying to unmake the Constitutional order. It’s very problematic to have civil servants thinking their judgement should overrule their leadership[.]
Civil servants use their personal judgment 100% of the time because they're tasked with bringing local context to decisions made elsewhere. 99% of the time this isn't a problem because most of the people involved understand the process and their role in it.
> When none of that exists a principled resignation is basically just saying “My principles make me a hurdle to your attempts at violating the Constitutional rights of the public, so let me just get out of the way so you can sprint towards that goal more easily.”
While I sort of agree, there is also the very real threat of retaliation that could severely damage or destroy person's life. Both Trump and Musk are known to be very vindictive, and have both massive power and money. I'm not really sure what I would do when presented that kind of choice.
> for the government to have access to government data
It is very much under dispute whether or not the data has been used/shared in a legal manner.
Imagine a new CEO arrives at <b2b platform tech company> and has stated their top goal is to cut costs and improve efficiency.
Then imagine this CEO brings in outside technical people and instructs the existing security team to grant full access to all customer data. They plan to analyze this data to assess how customer’s use of the platform impacts operating costs.
This would be insanely inappropriate and would likely breach customer contracts and break privacy laws. It is of little comfort that the “breach” is wholly “inside” the company.
In almost every large organization, there are numerous internal boundaries that large amounts of data should never cross for any reason. Framing this as “the government having access to government data” is problematic, for the same reason a tech company allowing unfettered access to customer data for some analysis project could not be described in good faith as “the company having access to company data”.
Exactly who it is within the organization that has access to the data and how that access aligns with existing laws/policies is extremely important.
I work in consulting. When we sign statements of work, there are confidentiality clauses. Say we had an internal sales tracking system and then our company decided to move to SalesForce and hire McKinsey to do the conversion at the bequest of the CEO.
Our company would sign a confidentiality agreement with McKinsey.
This would be perfectly valid.
There are restrictions that some clients put on consulting companies like everyone on the project has to go through background checks, be US citizens (some government contracts) or have security clearance. But those are some other rules that Musk and team are breaking.
In other words, any contract between businesses usually has a broad chain of confidentiality that goes down to subsidiaries and sub contractors.
I think a better analogy would be high value data in high espionage environments like GPU trade secrets at TSMC or nuclear secrets, not military codes, but maybe knowledge about the production process. Individual tax payer data is well above the value of commercial data as it can be used in chain attacks to compromise much of our society.
Imagine working IT and having to train people that even when their jobs are directly threatened they are still supposed to withhold data, and then those same people are fired anyways for complying with security policy.
And people are gleeful that these people are losing their jobs.
> it's not a data breach for the government to have access to government data
This absurd oversimplification needs to be called out.
The 'government' is not a single individual, nor should 'government data' be treated without regards to specifics.
The exact entity doing the accessing, and the exact data that's being accessed, all need to be accounted for, and the appropriateness of the access will change depending on the context.
DOGE hasn't been transparent in any of this, which is my chief complaint at the moment.
Then why do we have different levels of security clearance?
Obviously we have an extensive framework for data security within the government that is built upon the idea that compartmentalization of data and limiting access is incredibly important.
Even in situations where it is unavoidable that someone have access to data as a function of their job requirements, we very frequently have strict logging and auditing of access to that data. You might not be able to reasonably prevent a DBA from having access to the information in a database and allow them to still perform their work, but plenty of places will log and audit every action they take and review them accessing that data.
We know there are people in DOGE that clearly would not pass security screenings for access to the data that they have - one of them was recently fired for leaking data from their previous employer!
Acting like the fact that they are nominally part of the government so it is OK for them to have basically unfettered access to all sots of sensitive information is bizarre to me.
It can very much so be a data breach for government to "have access to" other agencies' data. Check whether U.S.C. § 3552(b)(2) contains any exceptions or carve-outs for government agencies!
One of the main points of privacy legislation is to functionally limit the government's ability to collect, use, disclose, and retain personal information in the first place. That's entirely contrary to the idea that government departments can share or access it pell-mell.
you have a lot of faith that Big Balls hasn't been compromised. Because surely none of them are using their personal smartphones or laptops and are following strict access protocols. Seeing that they are so so careful with everything else they've been doing.
I feel like this is a bad episode of the Twilight Zone.
One of the more bizarre things with this whole saga is seeing people act as though the existing government employees are any different. People throwing our “vetted” like it means something meaningful.
No, “vetting” basically means they checked to see if you ever got caught embezzling money, or in the case of clearances, if you lied about committing any crimes (committing them is ok). They are regular people and getting them to abide by sensible IT policies is a giant nightmare and compliance is poor.
Heck, have people already forgotten Trump’s tax returns were leaked by politically motivated “vetted” people working for the IRS? Not the first time that happened either. And they didn’t even find anything interesting!
"Had previously been fired from a job for leaking sensitive company data" tends to be the sort of thing that stops you from getting jobs where you work with extremely sensitive data.
Some system protect against that. The philosophy behind IBM RACF is :《 A key security principle is the separation of duties between different users so that no one person has sufficient access privilege to perpetrate damaging fraud.》
> The philosophy behind IBM RACF is :《 A key security principle is the separation of duties between different users so that no one person has sufficient access privilege to perpetrate damaging fraud.》
I am so primed to parse emoticons eagerly that I thought that the philosophy was :《
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say no, not without first going through a change management process and going through a privileged session management system, except in the case of an emergency break-glass scenario where using those emergency creds throws all kinds of big DANGER alerts across the org if the access was unexpected. I can't speak to the Treasury and IRS specifically, but that's kinda standard across large orgs, especially ones that get audited regularly on their handling of sensitive data.
> No, “vetting” basically means they checked to see if you ever got caught embezzling money, or in the case of clearances, if you lied about committing any crimes (committing them is ok). They are regular people and getting them to abide by sensible IT policies is a giant nightmare and compliance is poor.
However little is involved in vetting, it's something that has been done for regular government employees and hasn't been done for these employees. I'd rather have minimal safeguards than none.
"the front door and all windows are open, but don't worry. No one robbed the house yet so it's not a robbery "
I wouldn't discount such reckless vulnerabilities happening here. Any decent IT department would faint imagining the overtime needed to fix such issues.
What is the data classification of the data that they're accessing? Are they authorized to view it? Did they follow the normal procedures for accessing that data? Was their access limited to the information they needed to perform their stated function and nothing else? Was the data stored on or transferred through any systems that were not adequately secured?
It is entirely possible for an insider or internal data incident to be a "breach," regardless of whether the data leaked outside the org or they had the permission of the President. If someone came in to my office with an employee badge, said that they had been personally hired by the CEO, and demanded super admin access to all systems, I would laugh in their face. If anyone actually agreed to that person's demands, it would be a massive, all-hands-on-deck incident to figure out what they touched and how much we were going to get fined for the breach in security controls.
If the Treasury gets access to the CIA’s data that’s a data breach. Treasury does not have a compelling need to use that data and if they do, there are processes to determine that need and agreements to ensure appropriate safeguards are in place to handle and manage that data.
Yeah in theory they’re both parts of “the government” but “government” is a big umbrella that comprises a bunch of separate entities, each with varying degrees of independence from each other. We’re used to thinking of it all as one entity because we’re used to operating under political leadership that isn’t actively trying to destroy the government. But now that they are, the separation of duties matters a lot more. All of this stuff is happening either in violation of, or indifference to the actual law.
We can be all but certain that the CCP has its tendrils into Big Balls' phone and computers. A bunch of idiots with no opsec skills makes for easy pickings.
Why does the ccp always come up in these discussions? You have Rogue billionaire taking an axe at the pillars of government and there’s still someone bringing up the ccp.
It's a good story. Having a tangible villain helps some people internalize the message more easily than if it was a dry account with vague connections to reality. If you're out to "rally the troups", stirring up emotion is a required component.
Take CCP is an example to form an emotional attachment to.
The CCP is used to shake and wake the folks that see Musk as the hero and everything taking place as lovely. Since they only see a hero in the story a villian is introduced to attempt to make think about how things could go wrong.
A lot of people are so brainwashed by U.S. propaganda they cannot comprehend that American billionaires are independently evil. Add to that the fanboyism where his sycophants can't see how utterly rotten Musk is and always has been.
Their sense of world order requires there be a shadowy threat actor such as Russia or China, instead of the obvious truth that this is American capitalism operating as designed.
What makes Musk so utterly rotten? Otherwise "it's just like your opinion, man..."
"Requires a shadowy threat actor such ad Russia and..."? Trump is trying to normalize US-Russian relations.
"This is American capitalism operating as designed" - Honestly what do you mean?
Trump and Musk's reforms looks different enough from anything else tried in the last 25 years that I am super curious to see where it goes. I'm not into fear porn that this is the end of the world, H*tler, or whatever.
I'm also curious about Billionaires being independently evil - what do you mean, are virtually all billionaires evil? Are they really morally worse people than the average or do they just have access to more resources and influence?
>Trump and Musk's reforms looks different enough from anything else tried in the last 25 years that I am super curious to see where it goes. I'm not into fear porn that this is the end of the world, H*tler, or whatever.
Arbitrarily firing arbitrary amounts of federal employees on the belief that this will make the gov't function better? Are you also currently in talks to buy the Brooklyn Bridge?
It is possible to be unhappy with the end result of Ukraine or Trump's views of Ukraine without psyching ourselves up that these two dudes are literally H*tler.
It's possible but the concentration camps, the removal of trans rights, the push towards a unitary executive, referring to the disabled as "parasites," the scapegoating of minorities, talk of annexations etc etc etc all add up to one thing.
Congress is in charge of the IRS, and the president is charged with operating it.
Since the president and members of Congress are not posted up in there 24/7, the IRS has created internal controls and procedures so that when the president or Congress asks for a report, the IRS can give them an accurate one. It’s these controls that people are thinking of. The article has an example:
> Political officials do not have access to the Integrated Data Retrieval System, or IDRS. The IRS’s commissioner, national taxpayer advocate and even senior officials in the office of the chief information officer, do not have IDRS access either.
“Do not have access” in this case means they have made internal rules, essentially denying themselves access, in order to better document that they are doing what Congress wants them to do.
This is true in many agencies, and one of the concerns with DOGE is that they seem to be trying to circumvent these controls. That may impair the ability of an agency to meet their legislative mandate (e.g. protecting taxpayer privacy), and also impair the agency’s ability to even document what they are doing.
So the answer to “what oversight” is that Congress ultimately has the power of oversight, and the executive branch has the responsibility to operate in such a way that they can accurately satisfy requests from Congress.
I'm familiar with IRS contracts and while security clearances are not involved, they do have a unique background investigation process that involves a tax audits.
> The USAID systems the DOGE team tried to access included personnel files and security systems, including classified systems beyond the security level of at least some of the DOGE employees, according to three of the sources. The systems also included security clearance information for agency employees, two of the sources said.
This. IRS data isn’t protected because it’s classified. It’s protected because of confidentiality enforced by laws passed by Congress (the Tax reform act I believe)
(and the fact that the executive branch can be sued out of their pants for civil damages).
It would not be security clearances, but some form of assurances for protecting PII. Think of it this way. If this system contained people’s credit cards numbers, the entire system would be required to be PCI certified, and that requires that processes and procedures be in place so that even employee access is extremely limited. Data shouldn’t even be plaintext at rest. No one really needs to see anyone’s credit card number. Anonymized data is just fine.
So some agency, authorized by the president or not, barging in asking for read/write access to card numbers should not be allowed, because the data aren’t the president’s to give.
Same should be valid for social security numbers. You can’t guarantee that 100% of DOGE’s employees are benign, or that they are have the best opsec, or that their devices are not exploitable (or exploited already). So you minimize this attack surface by minimizing access.
Because if anything happens, then you can be 100% certain that Musk/Trump will not voluntarily answer for it/make people whole. They will at best be taken to court where they will fight for years while the victims suffer the consequences in the present.
So you do everything you can to prevent this nebulous, blameless “we meant well, we couldn’t know this would happen, we’re sorry for all the pain, let’s move forward together” outcome.
Like technically he does have the authority to compel you to do that but at the same time it's a massive red flag if he asks you in the first place.
I do understand why this administration is trying very hard to centralize authority because it's faster than vetting a bunch of people they can trust to act on their behalf. But on the other hand federal employees making it as hard as possible to do what they perceive as bad/immoral is a soft-check on the executive.
He may not actually have the authority for it; Imagine you're a cto receiving this request - you don'respond to the ceo, but to the administration board instead, just like the ceo.
In fact, if you were a cto and you carried out this request without any kind of due diligence or vetting, you'd probably be legally and criminally liable for it.
The same applies to anyone under the cto management (so basically all IT); they don't respond to the ceo, their top boss is the cto. I know, in smaller companies, where the ceo is also the owner, there is a tendency to confuse the boundaries of the roles - in my experience, it is up to the cto to politely deny these requests and educate the ceo on the "why"; if he still wants to move forward, he can hire another cto
Could you please stop posting flamebait comments and please stop duplicating comments? You've been doing way too much of this and are over the line at which we'd ban an account.
I don't want to ban you because everyone goes on tilt sometimes, but please stop now.
I was pretty nervous about voterfile / irs data merges. I sensed this was headed towards building retribution tools for those who didn't vote for the admin.
Why bother when you can delete all the organizations responsible for ensuring a valid election then rig it using the same methods as the Russians do. Only thing in your way are state level officials, but they are easy enough to steamroll with "Federal Investigations" by your newly appointed investigators.
Who cares how someone voted at that point. Voting just becomes an exercise in futility.
Could you provide me some links or background on this? I did a couple of lazy searches and didn't find anything. I knew they tracked that you voted, but not who/what you voted for, if that's what you're saying, unless you mean party affiliation.
Join that with Drivers license -> Voter registration number.
Search the voter records (if the states still have them) with the issued ballot number to that voter registration number and bingo. You got voting records.
Think most states discard actual ballots over time though so maybe old data might be gone. Republican states garbage as they are probably stored this election for some reason. I bet you can guess what that reason is.
> Search the voter records (if the states still have them) with the issued ballot number to that voter registration number and bingo. You got voting records.
To be clear, you can’t find out how someone voted this way. You can only find out if they submitted a ballot, not what the ballot said.
Sure, but oodles of people are publicly members of one party or another. It isn't terribly hard to figure out who lots of people voted for. I don't think that some false positives are something that these people worry about.
Sure but all that data is already publicly available. Political parties, financial institutions, researchers, even hobbyists grab copies of it after every cycle.
> Search the voter records (if the states still have them) with the issued ballot number to that voter registration number and bingo. You got voting records.
I believe this involves a court order and to physically access the ballots in most states, where the ballots haven't been destroyed.
I would be very surprised if such a database existed in most states and if it was easy for someone from the federal government to make a query without many hoops and ladders.
My registered party is public record and yours probably is too. Most the real election for high level office happens in the primaries, so in most states if you want your slice of influence everyone knows roughly what party you chose, albeit with rough accuracy.
In some states maybe you can do primaries without registering.
I think it's premature to rule this out. Trump has previously abused government agencies to harass his opponents, so why wouldn't he and Musk use IRS data for this purpose?
1936: Think it's time to start flagging all posts related to the takeover of that Nazi party, it's getting a bit tiring for everyone outside of Germany.
Replace DOGE with any subcontractor or executive pen authorization in the last 20 years. What makes you think what you are afraid of happening right now has not already happened? Too late may have left the room a long time ago and we are just wasting our breath fearing the corpse of the boogie man
contractors are given limited access within a clearly defined scope and procedures in place to ensure that they don't do anything they shouldn't. This is _not_ what is happening here, where DOGE has unfettered access, with those who offer resistance being fired or resigning.
Well, contractors are typically not hellbent on destroying everything they touch, for one. Oh, and they have actual clearance, and consequences if they deliberately ruin something.
Good. If, however, DOGE gets access, then, like some Nordic countries, I think we should demand public disclosure of all of it.
The public deserves seeing what the richest rich pay in taxes, the middle class, and the poor. There’s so much fud and fog in the political discourse around tax burden.
Current POTUS famously, notoriously, refused to disclose his, as has been tradition.
Actually the kernel of a good idea. Over a certain level of wealth taxpayers have a right to know why you're denying them millions of dollars of income, so your tax returns are a legitimate public interest.
Basically if you're paying close to the "full amount" of your tax rate in say the $5 million dollar range, then no disclosure required. If you're substantially under that your deductions should be public.
My issue with this is that it still won't make people happy, because ultimately people care about wealth too. Like say some big CEO's income is $100M/year. And they pay half of it in taxes. Then after a decade they have half a billion dollars. Will people be content seeing that? Or still be unhappy at the obscene wealth?
I think you missed my point. I was saying that even if they did, a lot of people would still be unhappy with that kind of outcome.
Which isn't to say that they shouldn't pay more in income taxes. It's just to say that it's important to identify the real problem and address it directly, and to realize when you're not going to be happy with a solution beforehand.
What? The fact that I believe higher income taxes aren't going to make people happy makes me defeatist? All I'm staying is you have to lead with the fundamental problems are instead of your desired solution, and to realize when your proposed solution won't get you there. The whole point is to find better solutions, not to throw your hands and give up. At the end of the day, taxes are a means to an end, not an end.
Thank you this got me thinking. The issue isn't (just) whether the rich are paying a high enough rate, it is that a lot of people currently complaining still won't be happy even if we increase it by a lot.
I can only speculate, but I wonder if the reason a lot of people shout "tax the rich" isn't that they want a bit more resources for geniunely deserving causes, but that they hate uber successful people and just want to see them "cut down to size".
In this view, higher taxes aren't meant to bring in more revenue (Laffer curves place limits on the effectiveness of higher taxes), but to hurt Rich people. Bring them down so we don't see some people doing 100,000 times better than the average person.
Maybe they think hurting Rich people will make the world a better place? Maybe they just wanna hurt them because they feel jealous? I'm super curious about what the true motives are.
Why are people so unhappy to see the existence of centinares and billionares?
I'm especially talking about people who made their money by creating new things, or made the world more efficient in some way.
I suspect you (and most people who are disliking my comments here) are thinking way too hard and missing the more obvious/mundane explanations.
The simple fact is that people want their lives and their loved ones' lives to be comfortable, happy, and secure. If they believe they are being denied that, they become unhappy.
At the end of the day, money, markets, taxes, wealth, etc. are just tools for creating happy societies. Nobody (to first-order approximation) wakes up thinking "tax the rich" merely because they're jealous they don't have a private jet. Certainly nobody wakes up deciding we need to upend the entire system of government merely because they see other people being happier than them. They do these things because they see the juxtaposition of others' obscene wealth side-by-side with the fact that they themselves e.g. can't even afford the basic necessities, or don't see security in their future, etc. At that point, they think: "if you're going to support a system that makes some of us miserable, it's only fair that you feel it too."
Obviously, the solution in this case isn't to make everyone be miserable. It's to help everyone be happy.
The problem I see we have right now is that people focus solely on the mechanism (taxing income) while forgetting the goal. Or they focus on the current state, while missing the trajectory. Taxing income more steeply could be one component of the mechanism for creating a happy society, but it's neither sufficient (it's quite possible to do that and still have everyone have worse lives...), nor necessary (there are lots of other ways to generate revenue too).
To give just one extremely vivid example that hopefully puts into perspective just how insufficient (and pointless) taxing the rich can be if it is done carelessly:
America's top 20 billionaires have some ~$3T in wealth. Tax the rich, right? OK, let's say the government somehow just seized all their money.
What would happen next? It's not exactly rocket science.
Spoiler: America's national debt would decrease from $36T to $33T. Which is like turning the clock back to... 2024? or 2023 at best?
Exactly what problems would turning the economy back 1 year solve?
Another way of stating this straw-man argument might be "what if we tried to do anything meaningful at all about wealth inequality and the market distortions it causes and people liked it?"
But you're just defining the "full amount" as what you think they should pay. If they're abiding by the tax code, they are paying what the law considers "the full amount".
It would not be discriminatory to say "we're going to publicize the returns of anyone who commits tax fraud". It would be discriminator to publicize the returns of anyone the Marxist hive mind thinks should pay more taxes than they are legally required to.
If the rich commit tax fraud, put them in jail. If they don't "pay their fair share of taxes" but don't commit any crime in so doing, be mad at the people who wrote the tax code.
There are a million different ways to ascertain "income" to evaluate whether or not a person is paying their "fair share". That we doggedly refuse to do any of them if your income is not subject to payroll taxes is a big reason why people (rightly, I think) don't trust elites.
To be honest, I have no special qualms with businesses doing their level best to minimize their tax obligations, provided they invest in their workers and/or R&D. Its just that they don't. The whole point of the old-timey ridiculously high highest marginal rate was to induce companies to do literally anything else than just pay their top executives more. Higher wages for the rank and file, investment in facilities, R&D, charitable giving, etc etc etc all have far greater impacts on society than the equivalent quantity shipped to the fed as taxes. If the ultra-rich want to avoid paying taxes by instead donating large sums of money to charities with broad socioeconomic impact, I have no problem with that either, for the same reason.
The issue is not that the ultra-rich don't pay their "fair share" (whatever that means), its that the tide that raises their ships does not raise all ships equivalently, and the ways they avoid paying that "fair share" disproportionately benefits only them. I don't really benefit if Jeff Bezos donates a lot of money to Jeff Bezos' nonprofit to manage his art collection or whatever. I do benefit if he just paid an equivalent amount into the general tax fund (or donated it to the March of Dimes or something).
I regularly pay out 20% of my annual income in the form of taxes. Its hard to be super sympathetic to e.g. Elon "I paid $11 billion in taxes last year!" Musk, when most years he pays far far less than that, and his net worth (as figured by his borrowing potential) grows proportionally a lot faster than mine does.
> I do benefit if he just paid an equivalent amount into the general tax fund
Questionable. Tax receipts that get spent on roads, bridges, other infrastructure that over time increase your and everyone's standard of living? Sure. Funding of boondoggles and sinecures for political allies? Not at all.
> his net worth (as figured by his borrowing potential) grows proportionally a lot faster than mine does
You were talking about income tax, so net worth shouldn't matter, right? And I think you're alluding to the fact that the ultra-wealthy can often temporarily avoid capital gains tax by borrowing against their stock holdings instead for their income; I don't think this matters that much in the end, because it's all taxed anyway. Interest paid to the lender is income to that lender which is taxed, and eventually the bill comes due, at which point shares will have to be sold and capital gains taxes incurred.
Stepped-up basis is weird, I agree. I don't see any good reason for it to stay, other than reducing overall tax burden. On the other hand, I don't see any good reason to be strongly against it, either, other than believing in progressive taxation as a public good. After all, it's not like stepped-up basis only applies to the ultra-rich; it applies just the same to someone who leaves behind a $500k stock portfolio or a dilapidated house worth $75k.
Having said that, upon, say, Elon Musk's passing, his estate would still owe billions of dollars in tax.
Stepped up basis just makes no sense at all. If I get $500,000 in capital gains and realize them, I pay capital gains taxes on them. If, however, I give them to my children when I die, no taxes are paid.
It would be entirely reasonable to put a cap in there if we are concerned about it hurting the middle class and wanted to just be a tax benefit.
The whole idea is that capital gains taxes are lower than income taxes because it comes from something that was already taxed, but that isn’t even true a lot of the time either. As Warren Buffett always says his overall tax bill is still lower than his secretary’s.
It’s not even just the idea that progressive taxes are better, it’s that this is a regressive tax system. One more accurately, and uneven one because two people who make the same money could end up paying very different tax bills throughout their life.
Nobody is asking you to be sympathetic. But we must design ia system, and that system must be (and in fact is) rules based.
The comment to which I was responding was suggesting some mechanism other than the tax code to determine “the full amount”. What is that and why isn’t that just the tax code?
It’s because they’re just determining “the full amount” to be something that makes them feel a certain way which isn’t really a sound basis for law. The full amount is whatever the tax code legally obligates one to pay, no more, and to suggest we should expose people’s private data simply because we don’t like the tax code is preposterous.
I feel this doesn't happen as often as it should. I don't even think the IRS is catching enough wealthy tax cheats. The GOP has traditionally cut funding to the IRS which lowers their audit rate and/or limits their audits to those to the less wealthy. (Since going after the really wealthy requires a lot more work.)
I'll add every dollar of IRS funding nets many more dollars of taxes--if we ran the government like a business (for the sake of argument) we should invest a lot more into the IRS. It's free money.
It doesn’t and advocating for that is sensible. Advocating for exposing private data because we don’t feel the amount they paid is fair, even when they’ve not been accused of crime, is not.
Don’t blame them, there aren’t that many of them and we live in a democracy. If we’re dumb enough to keep electing politicians who don’t fix it, that’s on us
There’s never been more access to information. I can read news about American from Al Jazeera, The BBC, NPR, The Economist, or a wealth of other news stories not owned by rich Americans.
If I vote against my own self-interest it’s my own fault for not knowing better, or because I think something else is more important.
> But you're just defining the "full amount" as what you think they should pay.
No, I think they're defining it as something like "the tax you would have paid if all your personal revenue that year had been ordinary income". The baseline is not an opinionated criterion, it's what most people deal with.
So if you're a well-off retiree living on long-term investments and don't want your finances public, then, what, you have to donate extra money to the government? Because long-term gains are simply taxed at a lower rate. It's not some kind of special tax-avoidance scheme you can just refrain from doing.
I think most people intuitively group people that have worked their whole lives and living off of their retirement savings and pensions and those that have inherited vast amounts of wealth and haven't worked the differently. Another group would be people that became very wealthy during life due to business, and yet structure their wealth in a way that avoids taxes because the relatively little they need to life their luxuriously life isn't represented as income either.
We know these are different, it also seems quite unfair that their standard of living would be unaffected by higher taxes but poorer people are sometimes disastrously affected.
I don't know why you're putting the 'Marxist hive mind' in charge, maybe some academics across the political spectrum instead?
I think maybe the point is to shame those using aggressive tax strategies. You can always exploit the law as written, if you put enough money behind the endeavor. It's impossible to write a law that is bullet proof.
There’s a deep strain of inculcated Marxism on the political left and it is very prevalent here. They don’t even know they have it.
If someone thinks that a tax payer who hasn’t even been accused of tax fraud should be punished, and that “the full amount” is one penny more than the tax code dictates, they’re certainly infected. Someone who wasn’t would instead simply advocate for changing the tax code.
Oh god you're right. I heard that some vendors are already buying data from credit card companies and joining that with their data on you to do price discrimination but this will enable price discrimination on a country wide level. :/
The multiple daily submissions about DOGE are getting a bit tiresome and are offtopic for HackerNews IMO. Unless they're doing something technically interesting I'm not sure why it has to be posted here. Judging by the fact that they make the front page daily I seem to be in the minority though, so whatever.
HN's in for some rough waters as far as typical de-facto (or community) editorial policy, since half of SV and even PG himself have declared for the fascists, one of whom (another SV darling, and also a fascist, that is) is the richest man on the planet, twice gave an entirely unambiguous nazi salute at the inauguration (in case anyone was still confused about what kind of people we're dealing with) and is now running roughshod over the government while every word that comes out of his mouth, somehow, (even the prepositions and articles!) is brain-meltingly stupid to anyone who has half a clue about anything in this realm.
On the front page there is 1 DOGE article. I didn't even find this on the front page. So at the very best this is 3% of the front page at any given time, when people aren't flagging the stories.
^Judging by the fact that they make the front page daily I seem to be in the minority though, so whatever.
Yes, but it'd be nice if there were insights in the comments not present in the original text on these sorts of political articles. I have not seen that lately, and frankly "anything that good hackers would find interesting" has become so tortured as to become meaningless. People are missing the "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic" line that follows.
The real issue is that there are too many articles on the front page that everyone can participate in (news, 150 word anecdotes on AI, language/editor wars, ...). If there is too much pent up demand for those topics, it should just be moved to a certain day of the week. I think you could more or less violently suppress it while having very limited collateral damage on actual technical discussions. And by allowing politics to remain on the front page for many days, you basically slowly change the composition of the community to people who want to debate politics all the time, which is explicitly not the intent of HN. I'm probably violating the guidelines by complaining instead of silently flagging the article, but hoping this inspires other people to start flagging as well.
I have mixed feelings. It's a potentially great manifestation of zero-trust and insider risks, and why you should collect less data to begin with. Or maybe not, idk. Could see interesting discussions in theory, but I'm not sure I have so far.
It's a historic tech-related government coup, which I'd think is of great interest to "Hackers". It's very rare that a bunch of tech whiz-kids are so directly embedded in current events. For better or worse, Musk and his minions are very much at the forefront of tech related news for the forseeable future.
https://lobste.rs seems to still have technical focus. The issue I have with the comments is that a lot of them don't go into technical issues per se, and are not based on first hand information. What would be useful is if somebody in the government could post specifics about their abuses.
you might want to have a few special agents swing by big balls' apartment and go through whatever hard drives can be found. ive got to think they've already made an offsite backup.
https://archive.is/fEtbi
What are the assurances that they don’t already have the data? This would be the largest data breach in US history that would make the OPM breach look like a stolen garden gnome in comparison.
I doubt there are any real assurances considering this:
> the career official who was in charge of that program resigned rather than grant the request. He was later replaced by a DOGE staffer on assignment to Treasury.
I do my best at work, and if my employer tells me to do something I don't agree with I continue choosing my actions, at the risk of getting fired. Point is, it's on them to fire me. I've only ever resigned when I don't want to do the work anymore or I'm moving away.
I've never made over ~$60k/year, and I'm fine with that; many ways to be rich.
Also, I like the idea of public luxury, private sufficiency.
The practice of resigning rather than follow illegal/immoral orders seems ill suited to operating in a context where the leadership is an active adversary and can instantly replace you with someone who will just do the thing. I feel like civil servants need to internalize that the old customary practices are based on a context where there are checks and balances in the system, as well as standards of decency and democratic accountability, that make these sorts of formal actions have teeth. When none of that exists a principled resignation is basically just saying “My principles make me a hurdle to your attempts at violating the Constitutional rights of the public, so let me just get out of the way so you can sprint towards that goal more easily.”
Obviously though, it’s the dirty hands problem. 99% of the time we don’t want civil servants to do this because 99% of the time the President isn’t actively trying to unmake the Constitutional order. It’s very problematic to have civil servants thinking their judgement should overrule their leadership, but we’re in extraordinary times and there is no leadership of an opposition movement that can coordinate to set any sort of guardrails around that kind of willful insubordination.
> 99% of the time we don’t want civil servants to do this because 99% of the time the President isn’t actively trying to unmake the Constitutional order. It’s very problematic to have civil servants thinking their judgement should overrule their leadership[.]
Civil servants use their personal judgment 100% of the time because they're tasked with bringing local context to decisions made elsewhere. 99% of the time this isn't a problem because most of the people involved understand the process and their role in it.
For local context yeah, but in open defiance of their leadership not so much.
> When none of that exists a principled resignation is basically just saying “My principles make me a hurdle to your attempts at violating the Constitutional rights of the public, so let me just get out of the way so you can sprint towards that goal more easily.”
While I sort of agree, there is also the very real threat of retaliation that could severely damage or destroy person's life. Both Trump and Musk are known to be very vindictive, and have both massive power and money. I'm not really sure what I would do when presented that kind of choice.
Again, it's not a data breach for the government to have access to government data. If it gets outside then it's a data breach.
DOGE has enough real problems that we don't need to cry wolf about its hypothetical (although maybe "inevitable") future actions.
> for the government to have access to government data
It is very much under dispute whether or not the data has been used/shared in a legal manner.
Imagine a new CEO arrives at <b2b platform tech company> and has stated their top goal is to cut costs and improve efficiency.
Then imagine this CEO brings in outside technical people and instructs the existing security team to grant full access to all customer data. They plan to analyze this data to assess how customer’s use of the platform impacts operating costs.
This would be insanely inappropriate and would likely breach customer contracts and break privacy laws. It is of little comfort that the “breach” is wholly “inside” the company.
In almost every large organization, there are numerous internal boundaries that large amounts of data should never cross for any reason. Framing this as “the government having access to government data” is problematic, for the same reason a tech company allowing unfettered access to customer data for some analysis project could not be described in good faith as “the company having access to company data”.
Exactly who it is within the organization that has access to the data and how that access aligns with existing laws/policies is extremely important.
I work in consulting. When we sign statements of work, there are confidentiality clauses. Say we had an internal sales tracking system and then our company decided to move to SalesForce and hire McKinsey to do the conversion at the bequest of the CEO.
Our company would sign a confidentiality agreement with McKinsey.
This would be perfectly valid.
There are restrictions that some clients put on consulting companies like everyone on the project has to go through background checks, be US citizens (some government contracts) or have security clearance. But those are some other rules that Musk and team are breaking.
In other words, any contract between businesses usually has a broad chain of confidentiality that goes down to subsidiaries and sub contractors.
I think a better analogy would be high value data in high espionage environments like GPU trade secrets at TSMC or nuclear secrets, not military codes, but maybe knowledge about the production process. Individual tax payer data is well above the value of commercial data as it can be used in chain attacks to compromise much of our society.
Imagine working IT and having to train people that even when their jobs are directly threatened they are still supposed to withhold data, and then those same people are fired anyways for complying with security policy.
And people are gleeful that these people are losing their jobs.
> it's not a data breach for the government to have access to government data
This absurd oversimplification needs to be called out.
The 'government' is not a single individual, nor should 'government data' be treated without regards to specifics.
The exact entity doing the accessing, and the exact data that's being accessed, all need to be accounted for, and the appropriateness of the access will change depending on the context.
DOGE hasn't been transparent in any of this, which is my chief complaint at the moment.
Then why do we have different levels of security clearance?
Obviously we have an extensive framework for data security within the government that is built upon the idea that compartmentalization of data and limiting access is incredibly important.
Even in situations where it is unavoidable that someone have access to data as a function of their job requirements, we very frequently have strict logging and auditing of access to that data. You might not be able to reasonably prevent a DBA from having access to the information in a database and allow them to still perform their work, but plenty of places will log and audit every action they take and review them accessing that data.
We know there are people in DOGE that clearly would not pass security screenings for access to the data that they have - one of them was recently fired for leaking data from their previous employer!
Acting like the fact that they are nominally part of the government so it is OK for them to have basically unfettered access to all sots of sensitive information is bizarre to me.
It can very much so be a data breach for government to "have access to" other agencies' data. Check whether U.S.C. § 3552(b)(2) contains any exceptions or carve-outs for government agencies!
One of the main points of privacy legislation is to functionally limit the government's ability to collect, use, disclose, and retain personal information in the first place. That's entirely contrary to the idea that government departments can share or access it pell-mell.
you have a lot of faith that Big Balls hasn't been compromised. Because surely none of them are using their personal smartphones or laptops and are following strict access protocols. Seeing that they are so so careful with everything else they've been doing.
I feel like this is a bad episode of the Twilight Zone.
One of the more bizarre things with this whole saga is seeing people act as though the existing government employees are any different. People throwing our “vetted” like it means something meaningful.
No, “vetting” basically means they checked to see if you ever got caught embezzling money, or in the case of clearances, if you lied about committing any crimes (committing them is ok). They are regular people and getting them to abide by sensible IT policies is a giant nightmare and compliance is poor.
Heck, have people already forgotten Trump’s tax returns were leaked by politically motivated “vetted” people working for the IRS? Not the first time that happened either. And they didn’t even find anything interesting!
This is the guy you're equivocating with the average government employee: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/02/teen-on-musks-doge-team-...
"Had previously been fired from a job for leaking sensitive company data" tends to be the sort of thing that stops you from getting jobs where you work with extremely sensitive data.
Regular government employees only have access to the systems they need to do their job, so they are, in fact, different.
You don’t think anyone else has root?
Some system protect against that. The philosophy behind IBM RACF is :《 A key security principle is the separation of duties between different users so that no one person has sufficient access privilege to perpetrate damaging fraud.》
> The philosophy behind IBM RACF is :《 A key security principle is the separation of duties between different users so that no one person has sufficient access privilege to perpetrate damaging fraud.》
I am so primed to parse emoticons eagerly that I thought that the philosophy was :《
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say no, not without first going through a change management process and going through a privileged session management system, except in the case of an emergency break-glass scenario where using those emergency creds throws all kinds of big DANGER alerts across the org if the access was unexpected. I can't speak to the Treasury and IRS specifically, but that's kinda standard across large orgs, especially ones that get audited regularly on their handling of sensitive data.
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> No, “vetting” basically means they checked to see if you ever got caught embezzling money, or in the case of clearances, if you lied about committing any crimes (committing them is ok). They are regular people and getting them to abide by sensible IT policies is a giant nightmare and compliance is poor.
However little is involved in vetting, it's something that has been done for regular government employees and hasn't been done for these employees. I'd rather have minimal safeguards than none.
Not sure why what they found matters to your argument.
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"the front door and all windows are open, but don't worry. No one robbed the house yet so it's not a robbery "
I wouldn't discount such reckless vulnerabilities happening here. Any decent IT department would faint imagining the overtime needed to fix such issues.
What is the data classification of the data that they're accessing? Are they authorized to view it? Did they follow the normal procedures for accessing that data? Was their access limited to the information they needed to perform their stated function and nothing else? Was the data stored on or transferred through any systems that were not adequately secured?
It is entirely possible for an insider or internal data incident to be a "breach," regardless of whether the data leaked outside the org or they had the permission of the President. If someone came in to my office with an employee badge, said that they had been personally hired by the CEO, and demanded super admin access to all systems, I would laugh in their face. If anyone actually agreed to that person's demands, it would be a massive, all-hands-on-deck incident to figure out what they touched and how much we were going to get fined for the breach in security controls.
It's a data breach because DOGE is a bunch of random people chosen by Elon Musk, who act arbitrarily and completely outside the law.
If the Treasury gets access to the CIA’s data that’s a data breach. Treasury does not have a compelling need to use that data and if they do, there are processes to determine that need and agreements to ensure appropriate safeguards are in place to handle and manage that data.
Yeah in theory they’re both parts of “the government” but “government” is a big umbrella that comprises a bunch of separate entities, each with varying degrees of independence from each other. We’re used to thinking of it all as one entity because we’re used to operating under political leadership that isn’t actively trying to destroy the government. But now that they are, the separation of duties matters a lot more. All of this stuff is happening either in violation of, or indifference to the actual law.
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It's not really a breach if it is from the same organization (i.e. the executive branch). It may lead to one.
We can be all but certain that the CCP has its tendrils into Big Balls' phone and computers. A bunch of idiots with no opsec skills makes for easy pickings.
Why does the ccp always come up in these discussions? You have Rogue billionaire taking an axe at the pillars of government and there’s still someone bringing up the ccp.
Why
Because that's what an intelligence agency from a rival nation state would do?
It's a good story. Having a tangible villain helps some people internalize the message more easily than if it was a dry account with vague connections to reality. If you're out to "rally the troups", stirring up emotion is a required component.
Take CCP is an example to form an emotional attachment to.
But the tangible villain is already there no? Musk?
The CCP is used to shake and wake the folks that see Musk as the hero and everything taking place as lovely. Since they only see a hero in the story a villian is introduced to attempt to make think about how things could go wrong.
A lot of people are so brainwashed by U.S. propaganda they cannot comprehend that American billionaires are independently evil. Add to that the fanboyism where his sycophants can't see how utterly rotten Musk is and always has been.
Their sense of world order requires there be a shadowy threat actor such as Russia or China, instead of the obvious truth that this is American capitalism operating as designed.
What makes Musk so utterly rotten? Otherwise "it's just like your opinion, man..."
"Requires a shadowy threat actor such ad Russia and..."? Trump is trying to normalize US-Russian relations.
"This is American capitalism operating as designed" - Honestly what do you mean?
Trump and Musk's reforms looks different enough from anything else tried in the last 25 years that I am super curious to see where it goes. I'm not into fear porn that this is the end of the world, H*tler, or whatever.
I'm also curious about Billionaires being independently evil - what do you mean, are virtually all billionaires evil? Are they really morally worse people than the average or do they just have access to more resources and influence?
>Trump and Musk's reforms looks different enough from anything else tried in the last 25 years that I am super curious to see where it goes. I'm not into fear porn that this is the end of the world, H*tler, or whatever.
Arbitrarily firing arbitrary amounts of federal employees on the belief that this will make the gov't function better? Are you also currently in talks to buy the Brooklyn Bridge?
> I'm not into fear porn that this is the end of the world, H*tler, or whatever.
Are you are okay with Trump splitting Ukraine with Russia and blessing Russia's war on Ukraine?
There are historical parallels with Hitler annexing other countries. You not being into that reality is a choice.
It is possible to be unhappy with the end result of Ukraine or Trump's views of Ukraine without psyching ourselves up that these two dudes are literally H*tler.
It's possible but the concentration camps, the removal of trans rights, the push towards a unitary executive, referring to the disabled as "parasites," the scapegoating of minorities, talk of annexations etc etc etc all add up to one thing.
Trump has blood on his hands. Full stop. He made Putin's war his own and embraced the idea of the US annexing other countries.
Things will get better once more brown people are at Guantanamo. /s
I guess the alternative to cut the loss and move on would be to go for the global extended suicide option.
Although authorised by some members of the executive branch, it is missing some of the oversight the executive branch is supposed to have.
Such as what oversight exactly?
Congress is in charge of the IRS, and the president is charged with operating it.
Since the president and members of Congress are not posted up in there 24/7, the IRS has created internal controls and procedures so that when the president or Congress asks for a report, the IRS can give them an accurate one. It’s these controls that people are thinking of. The article has an example:
> Political officials do not have access to the Integrated Data Retrieval System, or IDRS. The IRS’s commissioner, national taxpayer advocate and even senior officials in the office of the chief information officer, do not have IDRS access either.
“Do not have access” in this case means they have made internal rules, essentially denying themselves access, in order to better document that they are doing what Congress wants them to do.
This is true in many agencies, and one of the concerns with DOGE is that they seem to be trying to circumvent these controls. That may impair the ability of an agency to meet their legislative mandate (e.g. protecting taxpayer privacy), and also impair the agency’s ability to even document what they are doing.
So the answer to “what oversight” is that Congress ultimately has the power of oversight, and the executive branch has the responsibility to operate in such a way that they can accurately satisfy requests from Congress.
Security clearances are surely one? Government employees with access to that data are heavily vetted. DOGE, not so much.
I'm familiar with IRS contracts and while security clearances are not involved, they do have a unique background investigation process that involves a tax audits.
Security clearances for classified information and most IRS employees don’t have security clearances.
Yeah, let's just assume there are no safeguards in place at the IRS to protect personal data.
You’re the one assuming DOGE is ignoring “safeguards” you don’t even know exist.
We know they are?
> The USAID systems the DOGE team tried to access included personnel files and security systems, including classified systems beyond the security level of at least some of the DOGE employees, according to three of the sources. The systems also included security clearance information for agency employees, two of the sources said.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/usaid-sec...
They have 500MB email boxes! Actually I wonder, now, because they wanted to hire 84k people last year...
These IRS safeguards will not be of the “security clearance required” form. IRS data, while private, is not classified.
This. IRS data isn’t protected because it’s classified. It’s protected because of confidentiality enforced by laws passed by Congress (the Tax reform act I believe)
(and the fact that the executive branch can be sued out of their pants for civil damages).
*(and the fact that the executive branch can be sued out of their pants for civil damages)
if the government agrees to allowing itself to be sued...
It would not be security clearances, but some form of assurances for protecting PII. Think of it this way. If this system contained people’s credit cards numbers, the entire system would be required to be PCI certified, and that requires that processes and procedures be in place so that even employee access is extremely limited. Data shouldn’t even be plaintext at rest. No one really needs to see anyone’s credit card number. Anonymized data is just fine.
So some agency, authorized by the president or not, barging in asking for read/write access to card numbers should not be allowed, because the data aren’t the president’s to give.
Same should be valid for social security numbers. You can’t guarantee that 100% of DOGE’s employees are benign, or that they are have the best opsec, or that their devices are not exploitable (or exploited already). So you minimize this attack surface by minimizing access.
Because if anything happens, then you can be 100% certain that Musk/Trump will not voluntarily answer for it/make people whole. They will at best be taken to court where they will fight for years while the victims suffer the consequences in the present.
So you do everything you can to prevent this nebulous, blameless “we meant well, we couldn’t know this would happen, we’re sorry for all the pain, let’s move forward together” outcome.
The legislation and the judiciary, this is Civics 101.
It's like if your CEO sent you an email saying you should give the production DB credentials, and any encrypted at rest keys to their cousin.
Probably you wouldn't do that.
Like technically he does have the authority to compel you to do that but at the same time it's a massive red flag if he asks you in the first place.
I do understand why this administration is trying very hard to centralize authority because it's faster than vetting a bunch of people they can trust to act on their behalf. But on the other hand federal employees making it as hard as possible to do what they perceive as bad/immoral is a soft-check on the executive.
He may not actually have the authority for it; Imagine you're a cto receiving this request - you don'respond to the ceo, but to the administration board instead, just like the ceo.
In fact, if you were a cto and you carried out this request without any kind of due diligence or vetting, you'd probably be legally and criminally liable for it.
The same applies to anyone under the cto management (so basically all IT); they don't respond to the ceo, their top boss is the cto. I know, in smaller companies, where the ceo is also the owner, there is a tendency to confuse the boundaries of the roles - in my experience, it is up to the cto to politely deny these requests and educate the ceo on the "why"; if he still wants to move forward, he can hire another cto
You might resist, but if you didn’t it would hardly be a data breach.
You can have data breaches within an organization.
Ok, you’re right, but this is not that. This is the leader of the organization specifically wanting them to have the data.
It is if it's actually to a foreign adversary.
https://www.businessinsider.com/musk-spotted-pro-putin-russi...
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Could you please stop posting flamebait comments and please stop duplicating comments? You've been doing way too much of this and are over the line at which we'd ban an account.
I don't want to ban you because everyone goes on tilt sometimes, but please stop now.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Technically yes. I'd still be just as worried as a breach given the context though.
I was pretty nervous about voterfile / irs data merges. I sensed this was headed towards building retribution tools for those who didn't vote for the admin.
Why bother when you can delete all the organizations responsible for ensuring a valid election then rig it using the same methods as the Russians do. Only thing in your way are state level officials, but they are easy enough to steamroll with "Federal Investigations" by your newly appointed investigators.
Who cares how someone voted at that point. Voting just becomes an exercise in futility.
Could you provide me some links or background on this? I did a couple of lazy searches and didn't find anything. I knew they tracked that you voted, but not who/what you voted for, if that's what you're saying, unless you mean party affiliation.
Join SSN column with Driver License table
Join that with Drivers license -> Voter registration number.
Search the voter records (if the states still have them) with the issued ballot number to that voter registration number and bingo. You got voting records.
Think most states discard actual ballots over time though so maybe old data might be gone. Republican states garbage as they are probably stored this election for some reason. I bet you can guess what that reason is.
> Search the voter records (if the states still have them) with the issued ballot number to that voter registration number and bingo. You got voting records.
To be clear, you can’t find out how someone voted this way. You can only find out if they submitted a ballot, not what the ballot said.
Sure, but oodles of people are publicly members of one party or another. It isn't terribly hard to figure out who lots of people voted for. I don't think that some false positives are something that these people worry about.
Sure but all that data is already publicly available. Political parties, financial institutions, researchers, even hobbyists grab copies of it after every cycle.
> Search the voter records (if the states still have them) with the issued ballot number to that voter registration number and bingo. You got voting records.
I believe this involves a court order and to physically access the ballots in most states, where the ballots haven't been destroyed.
I would be very surprised if such a database existed in most states and if it was easy for someone from the federal government to make a query without many hoops and ladders.
What are "voting records"?
Are you suggesting that how I voted is stored somewhere by my Social Security Number?
My registered party is public record and yours probably is too. Most the real election for high level office happens in the primaries, so in most states if you want your slice of influence everyone knows roughly what party you chose, albeit with rough accuracy.
In some states maybe you can do primaries without registering.
Germany, 1933.
Year's not over.
I think it's premature to rule this out. Trump has previously abused government agencies to harass his opponents, so why wouldn't he and Musk use IRS data for this purpose?
It certainly seems to be the goal. Military purges will be starting soon.
This, they don't care about normal citizens, they just need to purge democrat military personnel
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Yea I think it’s soon time to flag all Us politics/DOGE threads — it’s a bit tiring, especially for the majority of the world that lives elsewhere
1936: Think it's time to start flagging all posts related to the takeover of that Nazi party, it's getting a bit tiring for everyone outside of Germany.
Oh, this is now the entire world's problem lol.
That's the point. That has always been the point.
Too late. You think DOGE is going to go back in and uninstall whatever hooks they put into the system? Nobody would even be able to verify that.
Replace DOGE with any subcontractor or executive pen authorization in the last 20 years. What makes you think what you are afraid of happening right now has not already happened? Too late may have left the room a long time ago and we are just wasting our breath fearing the corpse of the boogie man
contractors are given limited access within a clearly defined scope and procedures in place to ensure that they don't do anything they shouldn't. This is _not_ what is happening here, where DOGE has unfettered access, with those who offer resistance being fired or resigning.
The regular employees had to wait outside while DOGE brought additional hardware in.
Well, contractors are typically not hellbent on destroying everything they touch, for one. Oh, and they have actual clearance, and consequences if they deliberately ruin something.
Do you really think all your data hasn’t already been for sale for years? Cmon now
Thank goodness for small mercies.
I wasn't looking forward to Musk posting my tax return on a twatter rant.
Do you actually believe all your financial and personal data hasn’t already been leaked and sold online numerous times already?
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Based on what? There's no guarantee that moron (yes, moron) wouldn't do it if he could.
There's no guarantee that a meteorite won't destroy your house today either.
But it is unlikely. These conjectures are about as silly.
Didnt musk dox the daughter of a judge who ruled against him?
Given what happened with the ISS recently, how do you know?
I give this less than 72 hours before reversal
Why do they need to see any tax returns?
They don't, thus why they're not.
Treasury didn't want DOGE having access so agreeing to block DOGE access seems like weird wording here.
Indeed.
The new Trump head of Treasury is just making a statement confirming what already was.
Works where archive.is is blocked:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/taxes/treasury-agrees-to-blo...
Text-only:
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1ztoSy
Good. If, however, DOGE gets access, then, like some Nordic countries, I think we should demand public disclosure of all of it.
The public deserves seeing what the richest rich pay in taxes, the middle class, and the poor. There’s so much fud and fog in the political discourse around tax burden.
Current POTUS famously, notoriously, refused to disclose his, as has been tradition.
Actually the kernel of a good idea. Over a certain level of wealth taxpayers have a right to know why you're denying them millions of dollars of income, so your tax returns are a legitimate public interest.
Basically if you're paying close to the "full amount" of your tax rate in say the $5 million dollar range, then no disclosure required. If you're substantially under that your deductions should be public.
My issue with this is that it still won't make people happy, because ultimately people care about wealth too. Like say some big CEO's income is $100M/year. And they pay half of it in taxes. Then after a decade they have half a billion dollars. Will people be content seeing that? Or still be unhappy at the obscene wealth?
Warren Buffett famously claimed he paid a lower effective tax rate than his secretary.
Yes. The whole point of my comment was to assume a less unequal hypothetical than the current situation and show people still wouldn't like it.
The problem is that aren’t paying “half of it in taxes”, not even close.
I think you missed my point. I was saying that even if they did, a lot of people would still be unhappy with that kind of outcome.
Which isn't to say that they shouldn't pay more in income taxes. It's just to say that it's important to identify the real problem and address it directly, and to realize when you're not going to be happy with a solution beforehand.
This is the worst kind of defeatism. By that logic literally no progress on anything is ever possible.
What? The fact that I believe higher income taxes aren't going to make people happy makes me defeatist? All I'm staying is you have to lead with the fundamental problems are instead of your desired solution, and to realize when your proposed solution won't get you there. The whole point is to find better solutions, not to throw your hands and give up. At the end of the day, taxes are a means to an end, not an end.
Thank you this got me thinking. The issue isn't (just) whether the rich are paying a high enough rate, it is that a lot of people currently complaining still won't be happy even if we increase it by a lot.
I can only speculate, but I wonder if the reason a lot of people shout "tax the rich" isn't that they want a bit more resources for geniunely deserving causes, but that they hate uber successful people and just want to see them "cut down to size".
In this view, higher taxes aren't meant to bring in more revenue (Laffer curves place limits on the effectiveness of higher taxes), but to hurt Rich people. Bring them down so we don't see some people doing 100,000 times better than the average person.
Maybe they think hurting Rich people will make the world a better place? Maybe they just wanna hurt them because they feel jealous? I'm super curious about what the true motives are.
Why are people so unhappy to see the existence of centinares and billionares?
I'm especially talking about people who made their money by creating new things, or made the world more efficient in some way.
I suspect you (and most people who are disliking my comments here) are thinking way too hard and missing the more obvious/mundane explanations.
The simple fact is that people want their lives and their loved ones' lives to be comfortable, happy, and secure. If they believe they are being denied that, they become unhappy.
At the end of the day, money, markets, taxes, wealth, etc. are just tools for creating happy societies. Nobody (to first-order approximation) wakes up thinking "tax the rich" merely because they're jealous they don't have a private jet. Certainly nobody wakes up deciding we need to upend the entire system of government merely because they see other people being happier than them. They do these things because they see the juxtaposition of others' obscene wealth side-by-side with the fact that they themselves e.g. can't even afford the basic necessities, or don't see security in their future, etc. At that point, they think: "if you're going to support a system that makes some of us miserable, it's only fair that you feel it too."
Obviously, the solution in this case isn't to make everyone be miserable. It's to help everyone be happy.
The problem I see we have right now is that people focus solely on the mechanism (taxing income) while forgetting the goal. Or they focus on the current state, while missing the trajectory. Taxing income more steeply could be one component of the mechanism for creating a happy society, but it's neither sufficient (it's quite possible to do that and still have everyone have worse lives...), nor necessary (there are lots of other ways to generate revenue too).
To give just one extremely vivid example that hopefully puts into perspective just how insufficient (and pointless) taxing the rich can be if it is done carelessly:
America's top 20 billionaires have some ~$3T in wealth. Tax the rich, right? OK, let's say the government somehow just seized all their money.
What would happen next? It's not exactly rocket science.
Spoiler: America's national debt would decrease from $36T to $33T. Which is like turning the clock back to... 2024? or 2023 at best?
Exactly what problems would turning the economy back 1 year solve?
Another way of stating this straw-man argument might be "what if we tried to do anything meaningful at all about wealth inequality and the market distortions it causes and people liked it?"
But you're just defining the "full amount" as what you think they should pay. If they're abiding by the tax code, they are paying what the law considers "the full amount".
It would not be discriminatory to say "we're going to publicize the returns of anyone who commits tax fraud". It would be discriminator to publicize the returns of anyone the Marxist hive mind thinks should pay more taxes than they are legally required to.
If the rich commit tax fraud, put them in jail. If they don't "pay their fair share of taxes" but don't commit any crime in so doing, be mad at the people who wrote the tax code.
There are a million different ways to ascertain "income" to evaluate whether or not a person is paying their "fair share". That we doggedly refuse to do any of them if your income is not subject to payroll taxes is a big reason why people (rightly, I think) don't trust elites.
To be honest, I have no special qualms with businesses doing their level best to minimize their tax obligations, provided they invest in their workers and/or R&D. Its just that they don't. The whole point of the old-timey ridiculously high highest marginal rate was to induce companies to do literally anything else than just pay their top executives more. Higher wages for the rank and file, investment in facilities, R&D, charitable giving, etc etc etc all have far greater impacts on society than the equivalent quantity shipped to the fed as taxes. If the ultra-rich want to avoid paying taxes by instead donating large sums of money to charities with broad socioeconomic impact, I have no problem with that either, for the same reason.
The issue is not that the ultra-rich don't pay their "fair share" (whatever that means), its that the tide that raises their ships does not raise all ships equivalently, and the ways they avoid paying that "fair share" disproportionately benefits only them. I don't really benefit if Jeff Bezos donates a lot of money to Jeff Bezos' nonprofit to manage his art collection or whatever. I do benefit if he just paid an equivalent amount into the general tax fund (or donated it to the March of Dimes or something).
I regularly pay out 20% of my annual income in the form of taxes. Its hard to be super sympathetic to e.g. Elon "I paid $11 billion in taxes last year!" Musk, when most years he pays far far less than that, and his net worth (as figured by his borrowing potential) grows proportionally a lot faster than mine does.
> I do benefit if he just paid an equivalent amount into the general tax fund
Questionable. Tax receipts that get spent on roads, bridges, other infrastructure that over time increase your and everyone's standard of living? Sure. Funding of boondoggles and sinecures for political allies? Not at all.
> his net worth (as figured by his borrowing potential) grows proportionally a lot faster than mine does
You were talking about income tax, so net worth shouldn't matter, right? And I think you're alluding to the fact that the ultra-wealthy can often temporarily avoid capital gains tax by borrowing against their stock holdings instead for their income; I don't think this matters that much in the end, because it's all taxed anyway. Interest paid to the lender is income to that lender which is taxed, and eventually the bill comes due, at which point shares will have to be sold and capital gains taxes incurred.
Well, no. They have several ways of avoiding the eventual capital gains actually, and that is a legit problem changes to the tax code could fix.
Stepped up basis is one good Google search to explain one way.
Stepped-up basis is weird, I agree. I don't see any good reason for it to stay, other than reducing overall tax burden. On the other hand, I don't see any good reason to be strongly against it, either, other than believing in progressive taxation as a public good. After all, it's not like stepped-up basis only applies to the ultra-rich; it applies just the same to someone who leaves behind a $500k stock portfolio or a dilapidated house worth $75k.
Having said that, upon, say, Elon Musk's passing, his estate would still owe billions of dollars in tax.
Stepped up basis just makes no sense at all. If I get $500,000 in capital gains and realize them, I pay capital gains taxes on them. If, however, I give them to my children when I die, no taxes are paid.
It would be entirely reasonable to put a cap in there if we are concerned about it hurting the middle class and wanted to just be a tax benefit.
The whole idea is that capital gains taxes are lower than income taxes because it comes from something that was already taxed, but that isn’t even true a lot of the time either. As Warren Buffett always says his overall tax bill is still lower than his secretary’s.
It’s not even just the idea that progressive taxes are better, it’s that this is a regressive tax system. One more accurately, and uneven one because two people who make the same money could end up paying very different tax bills throughout their life.
Nobody is asking you to be sympathetic. But we must design ia system, and that system must be (and in fact is) rules based.
The comment to which I was responding was suggesting some mechanism other than the tax code to determine “the full amount”. What is that and why isn’t that just the tax code?
It’s because they’re just determining “the full amount” to be something that makes them feel a certain way which isn’t really a sound basis for law. The full amount is whatever the tax code legally obligates one to pay, no more, and to suggest we should expose people’s private data simply because we don’t like the tax code is preposterous.
> If the rich commit tax fraud, put them in jail.
I feel this doesn't happen as often as it should. I don't even think the IRS is catching enough wealthy tax cheats. The GOP has traditionally cut funding to the IRS which lowers their audit rate and/or limits their audits to those to the less wealthy. (Since going after the really wealthy requires a lot more work.)
I'll add every dollar of IRS funding nets many more dollars of taxes--if we ran the government like a business (for the sake of argument) we should invest a lot more into the IRS. It's free money.
It doesn’t and advocating for that is sensible. Advocating for exposing private data because we don’t feel the amount they paid is fair, even when they’ve not been accused of crime, is not.
Do I blame the wealthy for paying only what’s owed? No.
Do I believe it’s unfair that the wealthy pay a lower effective tax rate than me simply because their income is passive and not wages/salary? Yes.
Do I blame them for perpetuating this state of affairs to the detriment of the nation as a whole? Yes.
Don’t blame them, there aren’t that many of them and we live in a democracy. If we’re dumb enough to keep electing politicians who don’t fix it, that’s on us
Yeah, don't inquire further. What does it matter that these same people also own the news media? We live in a democracy. End of story.
There’s never been more access to information. I can read news about American from Al Jazeera, The BBC, NPR, The Economist, or a wealth of other news stories not owned by rich Americans.
If I vote against my own self-interest it’s my own fault for not knowing better, or because I think something else is more important.
That's just incredibly naive and not representative of the general American voting public.
> But you're just defining the "full amount" as what you think they should pay.
No, I think they're defining it as something like "the tax you would have paid if all your personal revenue that year had been ordinary income". The baseline is not an opinionated criterion, it's what most people deal with.
So if you're a well-off retiree living on long-term investments and don't want your finances public, then, what, you have to donate extra money to the government? Because long-term gains are simply taxed at a lower rate. It's not some kind of special tax-avoidance scheme you can just refrain from doing.
I think most people intuitively group people that have worked their whole lives and living off of their retirement savings and pensions and those that have inherited vast amounts of wealth and haven't worked the differently. Another group would be people that became very wealthy during life due to business, and yet structure their wealth in a way that avoids taxes because the relatively little they need to life their luxuriously life isn't represented as income either.
We know these are different, it also seems quite unfair that their standard of living would be unaffected by higher taxes but poorer people are sometimes disastrously affected.
Claiming a deduction does not actually mean you are entitled to that deduction.
I don't know why you're putting the 'Marxist hive mind' in charge, maybe some academics across the political spectrum instead?
I think maybe the point is to shame those using aggressive tax strategies. You can always exploit the law as written, if you put enough money behind the endeavor. It's impossible to write a law that is bullet proof.
There’s a deep strain of inculcated Marxism on the political left and it is very prevalent here. They don’t even know they have it.
If someone thinks that a tax payer who hasn’t even been accused of tax fraud should be punished, and that “the full amount” is one penny more than the tax code dictates, they’re certainly infected. Someone who wasn’t would instead simply advocate for changing the tax code.
Only if pricing information is also made public. Otherwise, a person with relatively high income, but who also wants to be frugal, will get gouged.
Discriminatory pricing could become a private income tax.
Oh god you're right. I heard that some vendors are already buying data from credit card companies and joining that with their data on you to do price discrimination but this will enable price discrimination on a country wide level. :/
Sure, you want to be thoughtful about disclosure and unintended consequences.
A bit late for that
The multiple daily submissions about DOGE are getting a bit tiresome and are offtopic for HackerNews IMO. Unless they're doing something technically interesting I'm not sure why it has to be posted here. Judging by the fact that they make the front page daily I seem to be in the minority though, so whatever.
HN's in for some rough waters as far as typical de-facto (or community) editorial policy, since half of SV and even PG himself have declared for the fascists, one of whom (another SV darling, and also a fascist, that is) is the richest man on the planet, twice gave an entirely unambiguous nazi salute at the inauguration (in case anyone was still confused about what kind of people we're dealing with) and is now running roughshod over the government while every word that comes out of his mouth, somehow, (even the prepositions and articles!) is brain-meltingly stupid to anyone who has half a clue about anything in this realm.
Like, HN's in an awkward position.
On the front page there is 1 DOGE article. I didn't even find this on the front page. So at the very best this is 3% of the front page at any given time, when people aren't flagging the stories.
^Judging by the fact that they make the front page daily I seem to be in the minority though, so whatever.
I sure wish they'd slow down as well.
Like any other "algorithm" feed, if you dislike what is engaging the masses then switch to a chronological view and sip from the feed as you will.
ie: https://news.ycombinator.com/newest
Yes, but it'd be nice if there were insights in the comments not present in the original text on these sorts of political articles. I have not seen that lately, and frankly "anything that good hackers would find interesting" has become so tortured as to become meaningless. People are missing the "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic" line that follows.
The real issue is that there are too many articles on the front page that everyone can participate in (news, 150 word anecdotes on AI, language/editor wars, ...). If there is too much pent up demand for those topics, it should just be moved to a certain day of the week. I think you could more or less violently suppress it while having very limited collateral damage on actual technical discussions. And by allowing politics to remain on the front page for many days, you basically slowly change the composition of the community to people who want to debate politics all the time, which is explicitly not the intent of HN. I'm probably violating the guidelines by complaining instead of silently flagging the article, but hoping this inspires other people to start flagging as well.
I have mixed feelings. It's a potentially great manifestation of zero-trust and insider risks, and why you should collect less data to begin with. Or maybe not, idk. Could see interesting discussions in theory, but I'm not sure I have so far.
It's a historic tech-related government coup, which I'd think is of great interest to "Hackers". It's very rare that a bunch of tech whiz-kids are so directly embedded in current events. For better or worse, Musk and his minions are very much at the forefront of tech related news for the forseeable future.
https://lobste.rs seems to still have technical focus. The issue I have with the comments is that a lot of them don't go into technical issues per se, and are not based on first hand information. What would be useful is if somebody in the government could post specifics about their abuses.
What's getting tiresome is the insane shit DOGE is pulling every day, not the submissions
It's not their fault for doing it, it's your fault for pointing it out.
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you might want to have a few special agents swing by big balls' apartment and go through whatever hard drives can be found. ive got to think they've already made an offsite backup.
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Hilarious. IRS is all worried about $601 I'm paying to a friend but they themselves don't want any transparency.
Honestly tired of the overreach by the federal government.