Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
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User ID: 863
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
4mo ago
This is a weird reply. No one questions Trump's ability to create DOGE, only what powers the DOGE administrator can have. Did Obama's USDS administrator purport to be able to fire any government employee? Cancel federal government contracts? Impound congressionally appropriated funds? If Trump wants DOGE just to do the kind of thing previous USDS administrators have done that's fine, but clearly they want much more power. Power the constitution denies to officers not subject to senate confirmation.
Here's a question that seems like it should have a straightforward answer but apparently doesn't: Who is the Administrator of USDS and DOGE? The Executive Order renaming USDS and establishing DOGE reads, in relevant part:
(b) Establishment of a Temporary Organization. There shall be a USDS Administrator established in the Executive Office of the President who shall report to the White House Chief of Staff. There is further established within USDS, in accordance with section 3161 of title 5, United States Code, a temporary organization known as “the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization”. The U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization shall be headed by the USDS Administrator and shall be dedicated to advancing the President’s 18-month DOGE agenda. The U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization shall terminate on July 4, 2026. The termination of the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization shall not be interpreted to imply the termination, attenuation, or amendment of any other authority or provision of this order.
(c) DOGE Teams. In consultation with USDS, each Agency Head shall establish within their respective Agencies a DOGE Team of at least four employees, which may include Special Government Employees, hired or assigned within thirty days of the date of this Order. Agency Heads shall select the DOGE Team members in consultation with the USDS Administrator. Each DOGE Team will typically include one DOGE Team Lead, one engineer, one human resources specialist, and one attorney. Agency Heads shall ensure that DOGE Team Leads coordinate their work with USDS and advise their respective Agency Heads on implementing the President ‘s DOGE Agenda.
So USDS and the The DOGE Service Temporary Organization are headed by the same person and that person is the individual Agency Heads are supposed to work with to determine their DOGE Teams. There's been a bunch of reporting over the last few weeks about DOGE Teams arriving in various departments, so presumably this consultation has happened. Who was the consultation with? The obvious answer is "Elon Musk." Certainly everyone seems to assume he's in charge of DOGE. He (and Trump) talk like Musk is in charge of the effort. So much so that even Wikipedia lists Musk as the "Administrator of the Department of Government Efficiency." Case closed, right? Well, not so fast says the United States government. According to a sworn declaration by Joshua Fisher (Director of the Office of Administration):
5. In his role as a Senior Advisor to the President, Mr. Musk has no greater authority than other senior White House advisors. Like other senior White House advisors, Mr. Musk has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself. Mr. Musk can only advise the President and communicate the President's directives.
6. The U.S. DOGE Service is a component of the Executive Office of the President. The U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization is within the U.S. DOGE Service. Both are separate from the White House office. Mr. Musk is an employee in the White House office. He is not an employee of the U.S. DOGE Service or U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization. Mr. Musk is not the U.S. DOGE Service Administrator.
That declaration comes from a filing in State of New Mexico v. Musk, where a bunch of U.S. States are suing Musk and DOGE for allegedly exercising the powers of a principal officer of the United States without Senate confirmation in violation of the Appointments Clause. You can read the filings in that link if you care about the arguments (I think they have a pretty good case, given the actions attributed to DOGE) but I want to focus on a more basic question: If Elon Musk is not the DOGE Administrator, then who is? The answer seems to be: nobody knows! Actual USDS employees who pre-date Trump seem unable to get an answer about who is running their agency. This culminated yesterday in a hearing where a federal judge asked a DOJ lawyer point blank “Is there an administrator of DOGE at the present time?” and the response was "I don’t know the answer to that."
This is crazy right? The executive order is pretty clear that DOGE has to have an Administrator and that Administrator is responsible for working with Agency Heads to determine DOGE employees for each Agency. Are none of the DOGE employees embedded at various agencies actually DOGE employees? Has the actual DOGE organization done nothing? That's certainly not how people who seem to be involved talk about it! Either DOGE has an Administrator and someone knows who or, I guess, every action every DOGE employee has taken has been unlawful?
ETA:
Of course, right after I post this the White House says Amy Gleason is DOGE Administrator.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
4mo ago
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
4mo ago
I am skeptical. He's tweeting they are going to do another email and totally for real fire the people who don't respond this time!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
4mo ago
I guess adding another layer here is that taking adverse action against people who did not respond to the email would probably be unlawful. There are laws that govern how agencies (including OPM) within the federal government are permitted to collect data or information about government employees. There's already a lawsuit about this particular system and whether it meets the requirements. In that case OPM filed a Privacy Impact Assessment which states, in relevant part:
GWES collects, maintains, and uses the names and government email addresses of federal government employees. GWES also collects and redistributes responses to emails sent to those addresses, which are limited to short, voluntary, non-identifying information. Specifically, GWES contains the following:
...
Employee Response Data: After an email is sent using Employee Contact Data, GWES collects, maintains, and redistributes short, voluntary responses.
...
4.2. What opportunities are available for individuals to consent to uses, decline to provide information, or opt out of the project?
The Employee Response Data is explicitly voluntary, The individual federal government employees can opt out simply by not responding to the email.
"Respond to this email or we'll take adverse action against you" is hardly voluntary. Forget about agency heads. The very entity apparently sending the email on Musk's behalf has to repudiate the consequences he described or, uh, admit they lied to a federal court?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
4mo ago
I don't see the contradiction. Some of the cuts (NIH indirect costs, firing thousands of employees) are real and likely to be devastating. Other cuts (a purported $8B DHS contact) are fake or wildly overstated. There is only a contradiction if one is talking about the same cut.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
4mo ago
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
4mo ago
Yes. I am very skeptical Darone experienced sexual arousal as part of their role play.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
4mo ago
I would probably remove such a person, if I intended my group to be trans-friendly. Though I am inclined to extend some grace to someone dealing with that kind of trauma.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
4mo ago
I could go either way. I see how it can be in bad taste but I also see why a trans positive space wouldn't permit members to misgender people.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
4mo ago
I think what Darone did was weird but as long as she was up front about it and other group members seem broadly ok with it then I don't see the issue. As to (3) I would be interested in seeing the objections. I can imagine them taking forms for which I would have a problem with their being kicked out and forms for which I would think it was fine.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
4mo ago
I guess I'm confused. From the OP I had the impression Darone concealed the fact that she was trans and had posted in the group as if she had actually been pregnant and had a miscarriage. The posts linked seem like the total opposite of that. Darone was up front that she was trans and that her pregnancy was simulated rather than actual. She does in fact seem to stick strictly to her own experiences in the posts in question. The screenshots do not show other members' posts but the way Darone talks about them it seems like other commenters were broadly supportive.
What am I supposed to be mad about?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
4mo ago
I think I would defend such norms generally. There seem to me three broad considerations at play here.
1. How much harm is done by false negative determinations? That is, how much harm is done when we treat bad faith actors as being their preferred gender.
2. Much harm is done by false positive determinations? That is, how much harm is done when we treat good faith actors like bad faith actors?
3. How reliably can we differentiate good and bad faith actors?
My perception is that in the particular case of pronoun usage (1) is perceived to be quite small, (2) is comparatively larger, and (3) is highly uncertain. This leads to the development of a norm of erring on the side of caution and using people's preferred pronouns without some very compelling evidence to the contrary.
Coincidentally on X I recently ran into a GC account describing the behavior of another trans bad actor in a Facebook group for lactating mothers. This transwoman was pretending to have lived through a pregnancy and then lost the baby in a miscarriage. He sought sympathy, support, and validation from the group. This was obviously fulfilling some sort of fantasy for him, to which the women of the group were made non-consenting participants. This incident got some play on social media because some of the real women in the group did object to the presence of the transwoman and those women were kicked out. This group chat was governed by suburban nice liberal norms, which like the rationalists have completely capitulated to trans beliefs.
Do you have any links? I would be interested in reading more. To my mind the central bad thing in this incident is the "pretending to have lost a pregnancy to miscarriage," something cis women could also do. If the individual in question had been "really" trans (whatever that means to you) and had stuck strictly to relating their own experiences would that still have been bad?
More generally I think the considerations I have identified above vary contextually and will not always yield the same answer as it does for pronoun usage.
It's actually stupid how easy it is to find inflation of savings by DOGE. You can do it yourself! This thread walks through an example showing that a claimed savings of $120M at DHS is actually $0. And I was able to find another example of this myself!
There is unfortunately not a way I can find to link directly to a row in the stupid DOGE table of savings so I have to be more rounbdabout. If you go to the main DOGE savings page here and click on the "see more" row at the end of the Contracts page you get a much longer list of contracts cancelled. Pop down to the Department of Commerce section and you'll see a few contracts for $20M to various firms with the description "BLANKET PURCHASE AGREEMENT TO CREATE HIGH-QUALITY EDUCATIONAL AGENCY VIDEO(S)". From either the screenshots or FPDS link copy the "Procurement Identifier" field. Then head over to the contract search on usaspending.gov. Scroll down to the "Award ID" filter and put in the Procurement Identifier from above. Hit "Submit" and you should see 1 result for your ID. Here is one such contract, I see three on the DOGE site.
If you look at these contracts above you can see that all three were awarded Jan 22 2024. That they all have the same potential award amount ($20M) and that no money has actually been spent (Combined Outlayed/Obligated Amounts are 0). The contracts are also still listed as "Open", meaning they have not even been cancelled! $60M dollars in purported savings at the Department of Commerce are for awards that are not actually cancelled and for which no money has been spent in the first ~year. Is it really correct to say all this money was "saved"? It took minutes to find this. Just look for any suspiciously large/round number and you're going to uncover something like this.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
5mo ago
I think it is pretty common for any large entity (not just government) to have separate departments for authorizing payments and making payments. I am pretty sure in my own employer this is exactly how it works. If department or individual X with authority to authorize payments has done so it's not clear why department or individual Y should be second guessing them about whether the payment is permitted. Especially for large and complex operations it's not clear to me how the "department of writing checks" can also be expert in the subject matter of every other department and what they are and aren't authorized to spend money on. The accountability is (properly) located in the entity that authorized the payment, not the department that wrote the check. Blaming the department of check writing would be like blaming my bank for letting me send a bunch of money to gambling platforms.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
5mo ago
My point, and what I assume workers would be concerned about, is that you don't get certain parts of your retirement (specifically the Basic Benefit Plan) if you resign your position with the government (as opposed to retiring). The OPM page on the Federal Employee Retirement System specifies:
FERS is a retirement plan that provides benefits from three different sources: a Basic Benefit Plan, Social Security and the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP). Two of the three parts of FERS (Social Security and the TSP) can go with you to your next job if you leave the Federal Government before retirement. The Basic Benefit and Social Security parts of FERS require you to pay your share each pay period. Your agency withholds the cost of the Basic Benefit and Social Security from your pay as payroll deductions. Your agency pays its part too. Then, after you retire, you receive annuity payments each month for the rest of your life.
So you get 8 months of pay but you don't get your post-retirement annuity (unless you get another job with the government and retire through that).
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
5mo ago
All federal workers also received an offer to resign immediately. If they accept, they will get their current salary and benefits until September (an incredibly generous 8 month severance package). All they have to do is reply with the word "resign".
I can't help but perceive this as being a way to get federal workers to give up their retirement benefits but I am not a legal expert. You can read the full email here. Relevant paragraph:
Given my impending resignation, I understand I will be exempt from any “Return to Office” requirements pursuant to recent directives and that I will maintain my current compensation and retain all existing benefits (including but not limited to retirement accruals) until my final resignation date.
Is the implication of that last clause that ones' benefits ("including but not limited to retirement accruals") will not be maintained post-resignation date? "Give up whatever pension you've earned for 8 months pay" sounds less good I think? Although that probably depends on how much you've accrued. There's also a federal law that restricts how long agencies can put employees on administrative leave to no more than 10 days per year.
So by law you're probably going to have to work most of the time beyond when you've accepted this offer through the actual resignation. Logistically it seems like people who accept will be getting paid out as if they were working (a biweekly check or whatever) rather than as a lump sum. The deal seems to be "keep working for 8 months and then quit." I guess the idea is your agency cuts back your duties in a way that is not legally "leave?" Seems like the only way this could work.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
5mo ago
Edited To Add. Just a way to specify the content was not in the original comment.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
5mo ago
They won't have to choose. A judge will enjoin this before the week is out.
Illinois and other states claiming that federal Medicaid portals are not working as of this morning. The memo contains a footnote carving out Medicare and Social Security but not Medicaid. I doubt this freeze persists through the end of the week. Someone who was a recipient of a federally authorized grant is going to sue and a court is going to enjoin this in short order.
ETA:
Lawsuit and request for TRO already filed.
ETA2:
Politico has posted what is alleged to be a spreadsheet of the list of impacted programs. I'm sure there's something in here for everyone. Hope people weren't relying on their WIC or SNAP benefits!
ETA3:
Turns out end of the week was wildly conservative. I'm seeing reporting the judge assigned to the lawsuit above granted the TRO from the bench a few minutes ago, lasting at least until Monday Feb 3rd.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
5mo ago
Probably not. Their cited basis is they are individuals who are currently pregnant who will have children born more than 30 days from now that will be impacted by the order.
I predict a TRO or preliminary injunction before the week is out. The ACLU has already announced its intention to sue.
ETA:
Lawsuit already filed in the District of New Hampshire.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
5mo ago
I feel like this comment still comes back to the notion of being subject to the criminal law, rather than political allegiance. The reason the quote from The Schooner Exchange v. M’Faddon talks about it being "obviously inconvenient and dangerous to society ... if such individuals or merchants did not owe temporary and local allegiance, and were not amenable to the jurisdiction of the country" is that if people did not owe such allegiance then they would not be subject to the criminal law or the jurisdiction of courts of the nations such individuals were in. It seems like the proposed logic here is that the lack of a "license" (implied or otherwise) to enter is supposed to imply a lack of that temporary and local allegiance and that lack of temporary and local allegiance implies a lack of jurisdiction necessary for the 14th amendment to come into effect. Somehow that lack of temporary and local allegiance and related jurisdiction doesn't mean that courts actually lack jurisdiction though (such as for criminal prosecutions) even though that seems like the take The Schooner Exchange would imply. If the local and temporary allegiance is not intertwined with the jurisdiction of courts for the prosecution of criminal matters where comes the concern about the lack of such allegiance being dangerous to society?
According to the New York Times Gleason didn't know the White House would be revealing her as administrator and was allegedly supposed to be on vacation today. I am skeptical Gleason is who Agency Heads actually consulted with regarding their DOGE employees but I guess we'll find out via various lawsuits.
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