Huh, I came at this with the background of doing data analysis in large organizations and had a very different take.
You’re a data scientist. You want to analyze what this huge organization (US government) is spending its money on in concrete terms. That information is spread across 400 mutually incompatible ancient payment systems. I’m not sure if you’ve viscerally felt the frustration of being blocked, spending all your time trying to get permission to read from 5 incompatible systems, let alone 400. But it would take months or years.
Fortunately, your boss is exceptionally good at Getting Things Done. You tell him that there’s one system (BFS) that has all the data you need in one place. But BFS is protected by an army of bureaucrats, most of whom are named Florence, who are Very Particular, are Very Good at their job, Will Not let this system go down, Will Not let you potentially expose personally identifiably information by violating Section 3 subparagraph 2 of code 5, Will Not let you sweet talk her into bypassing the safety systems she has spent the past 30 years setting up to protect oh-just-$6.13 trillion from fraud, embezzlement, and abuse, and if you manage somehow manage to get around these barriers she will Stop You.
Your boss Gets Things Done and threatens Florence’s boss Mervin that if he does not give you absolutely all the permissions you ask for, Mervin will become the particular object of attention of two people named Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
You get absolutely all the permissions you want and go on with your day.
Ah, to have a boss like that!
EDIT TL/DR: I think this looks weirder in Far mode? Near mode (near to data science, not near government), giving outside consultant data scientists admin permissions for important databases does not seem weird or nefarious. It’s the sort of thing that happens when the data scientist’s boss is intimidatingly high in an organization, like the President/CEO hiring a management consultant.
As someone who has been allowed access into various private and government systems as a consultant, I think the near mode view for classified government systems is different for a reason.
E.g., data is classified as Confidential when its release could cause damage to national security. It’s Secret if it could cause serious damage to national security, and it’s Top Secret if it could cause exceptionally grave damage to national security. People lose their jobs for accidentally putting a classified document onto the wrong system, even if it’s still owned by the government and protected (but, protected at an insufficient level for the document). People go to jail for putting classified data onto the wrong system on purpose, even if they didn’t intend to, say, sell it to the Chinese government.
Bringing in personnel who haven’t had the standard single-scope background investigation and been granted a clearance, and a new set of computers which has not gone through any accreditation and authorization process, and giving unrestricted write and read access to classified data is technically something the president could allow. But it’s a completely unprecedented level of risk to assume; and AFAICT the president has not actually written any authorizations for doing this.
There is, actually, a Government Accounting Office which does audits; they have identified billions in fraud, waste, and abuse, identified the perpetrators for punishment, and remediated the programs at fault. They have done it without unprecedented breaches in national security, or denying lawful, non-fraudulent payments from the US Treasury. (Also, outside of my personal area of expertise, I believe denying lawful, non-fraudulent payments from the US Treasury is crossing a really big Chesterton’s Fence. GPT-4o estimated a $1T-$5T impact from treasury bond yield spread, forex USD reserves, CDS spreads on US foreign debt, loss of seignorage in global trade, depending on how rare and targeted the payment denial is).
Sure, I think that’s a fair objection! Maybe, for a business, it may be worth paying the marginal security costs of giving 20 new people admin accounts, but for the federal government that security cost is too high. Is that what people are objecting to? I’m reading comments like this:
Yeah, that’s beyond unusual. It’s not even slightly normal. And it is in fact very coup-like behavior if you look at coups in other countries.
And, I just don’t think that’s the case. I think this is pretty-darn-usual and very normal in the management consulting / private equity world.
I don’t think foreign coups are a very good model for this? Coups don’t tend to start by bringing in data scientists.
What I’m finding weird is...this was the action people thought worrying enough to make it to the LessWrong discussion. Cutting red tape to unblock data scientists in cost-cutting shakeups—that sometimes works well! Assembling lists of all CIA officers and sending them emails, or trying to own the Gaza strip, or <take your pick>. I’m far mode on these, have less direct experience, but they seem much more worrying. Why did this make the threshold?
And, I just don’t think that’s the case. I think this is pretty-darn-usual and very normal in the management consulting / private equity world.
I don’t know anything about how things are done in management consulting or private equity.[1] Ever try it in a commercial bank?
Now imagine that you’re in an environment where rules are more important than that.
Coups don’t tend to start by bringing in data scientists.
Coups tend to start by bypassing and/or purging professionals in your government and “bringing in your own people” to get direct control over key levers. It’s very standard. The treasury is a big lever. It doesn’t matter what you call the people.[2] And DOGE is far from the only thing along those lines.
Sowing chaos is another fairly common coup tactic.
Assembling lists of all CIA officers and sending them emails
That’s a bit garbled. What they did was request a list of CIA employees, including covert employees, and specifically demand that the list be sent in email on an unclassified system. Why that demand was made is unclear thus far, but yeah, it’s a problem. It puts your people at risk for no clear reason.
So that’s one example. They also asked for a list of FBI agents. Also at least threatened to mass-fire FBI agents. And did fire US Attorneys, explicitly for doing their jobs by charging criminal activity… in cases that they won in many different courts because they were legally in the right. Also purged military officers. Also sent a bunch of people into OMB and had them, plus White House staff, issue a bunch of memos freezing random government activities and demanding sudden disruptive changes at crash priority in the name of rooting out a very broad interpretation “DEI”… which, even if it were a problem, would definitely not be an emergency demanding Shutting. Down. Everything.
or trying to own the Gaza strip, or <take your pick>
The Gaza thing hasn’t involved any actual action, and is the sort of thing Trump has always said. Same for the Greenland grab. He sounds a bit more serious now, but he still hasn’t done anything. The worst of the tariffs were suspended after Trump got properly stroked by the right foreign leaders.
… and anyway those are all foreign policy things, and all within the purview of the Presidency. They’re spectacularly bad ideas and would harm huge numbers of people. And they definitely could be part of a “flood the zone” strategy. But Trump has statutory authority to do the tariffs, even if he’s abusing it. What he did there wasn’t illegal. And Presidents have always been allowed to opine, and even negotiate, on foreign policy issues in general, even if the policies they advocate are stupid and even if they make foolish threats that alienate allies and damage US soft power. They usually don’t do quite so many dumb things in such a short time, but it’s not qualitatively new.
Some of this other stuff, including DOGE being at Treasury and trying to get into the DOL, involves actual action. Some of that action is clearly illegal under black letter law. And it’s the kind of action that would suggest of a real attempt to fundamentally rework how the whole US Government works. At a minimum, it’s definitely and openly trying to shift power to the executive and concentrating power within the executive in the office of the President and a few agencies. At least one of them brand new and created with no congressional buy-in with actual action behind it.
It’s the difference between loudly threatening to misuse the US system and taking illegal actions that look like they might be attempts to fundamentally alter the US system.
We’ll see how far that goes. The court orders have been coming in to stop a lot of this stuff. I don’t actually expect those orders to be defied… at least not at this point. In fact, the best reason I can come up with for them wanting to do all this stuff so fast has been to do as much damage as possible before the orders come in to stop them. But Trump has surprised me before.
The USAID thing is a weird case. I’m not even sure what made USAID such a target. I’ve heard speculations, and none of them are very good, but they’re also just that: speculations.
I’m far mode on these, have less direct experience, but they seem much more worrying. Why did this make the threshold?
I imagine it’s the one Raemon happened to hear about. But it’s also pretty typical of the truly fundamental things that are going on.
… and honestly neither of those has a very good reputation. Management consultants are not infrequently used in the corporate equivalent of coups. Private equity, well… not known for preserving value, let’s say? ↩︎
In terms of whether they’re acting or qualified as “data scientists”, I’ll quote a tweet from one of them (Luke Farritor) on December 10: “Are there LLMs made specifically for parsing things like documents/forms/PDFs/json/html/excel/etc and converting them from one format to another?”. ↩︎
Some of that action is clearly illegal under black letter law
This is one of those concrete claims which you will be unable to provide evidence of. The chief executive restructuring government departments is not ‘clearly illegal under black letter law.’
Because of the “flood the zone” strategy, I can’t even remember all the illegal stuff Trump is doing, and I’m definitely not going to go dig up specific statutory citations for all of it. I tried Gemini deep research, and it refused to answer the question. I don’t have access to OpenAI’s deep research.
Things that immediately jump to mind as black letter law are trying to fire inspectors general without the required notice to Congress, and various impoundments. I would have to do actual research to find the specific illegalities in all the “anti-DEI” stuff. I would also have to go do research before I could tell you what made it illegal to fire the chair of the FEC.[1]
For DOGE specifically, here’s a list that happened to cross my eyes this morning. It’s in an interview format, so it’s probably incomplete.
The bottom line is that the “unitary executive” idea is dead in law. If there’s a statute that says “the President shall establish a Department of Cat Videos, which shall promote cat videos [however], whose director shall be a calico cat which may not be dismissed once appointed, and here’s $10,000,000 to do it”, then the president is obligated to have a Department of Cat Videos, and find a cat to run it, and keep the cat on, and spend the money as directed. This is not a close call. Statutes have been passed, they’ve been litigated against, they’ve stood, other statutes have been passed relying on those precedents, there’s been litigation about those, and a whole edifice of well-established law has been built up. That’s what “black letter law” is.
It’s true that the current Supreme Court seems to have essentially no respect for precedent, and an, um, extremely idiosyncratic way of interpreting the actual text of the Constitution. It’s entirely possible that this whole blitz is meant, at least in part, to generate test cases to tear down that structure. But that’s more about the Court abandoning its job than about the established law.
I very much hope the computers brought in were vetted and kept airgapped.
You keep systems separate, yes.
For some reason I assumed that write permissions were on user in the actual system/secure network and any data exporting would be into secured systems. If they created a massive security leak for other nations to exploit, that’s a crux for me on whether this was reckless.
Added: what kind of idiot purposely puts data in the wrong system purposely? The DOGE guys doing this could somehow make sense, governmental workers??
When there’s little incentive against classifying harmless documents, and immense cost to making a mistake in the other direction, I’d expect overclassification to be rampant in these bureaucracies. And having documents basically be classified by default is handy if you’re doing embarrassing things you’d rather not be public (or susceptible to FOIA requests).
The claims that sidestepping procedural hurdles to enact significant reform of the system poses a serious threat to national security or whatever strike me as self-serving.
When there’s little incentive against classifying harmless documents, and immense cost to making a mistake in the other direction, I’d expect overclassification to be rampant in these bureaucracies.
Your analysis of the default incentives is correct. However, if there is any institution that has noticed the mounds of skulls, it is the DoD. Overclassification, and classification for inappropriate reasons (explicitly enumerated in written guidance: avoiding embarrassment, covering up wrongdoing) is not allowed, and the DoD carries out audits of classified data to identify and correct overclassification.
It’s possible they’re not doing enough to fight against the natural incentive gradient toward overclassification, but they’re trying hard enough that I wouldn’t expect positive EV from disregarding all the rules.
Huh, I came at this with the background of doing data analysis in large organizations and had a very different take.
You’re a data scientist. You want to analyze what this huge organization (US government) is spending its money on in concrete terms. That information is spread across 400 mutually incompatible ancient payment systems. I’m not sure if you’ve viscerally felt the frustration of being blocked, spending all your time trying to get permission to read from 5 incompatible systems, let alone 400. But it would take months or years.
Fortunately, your boss is exceptionally good at Getting Things Done. You tell him that there’s one system (BFS) that has all the data you need in one place. But BFS is protected by an army of bureaucrats, most of whom are named Florence, who are Very Particular, are Very Good at their job, Will Not let this system go down, Will Not let you potentially expose personally identifiably information by violating Section 3 subparagraph 2 of code 5, Will Not let you sweet talk her into bypassing the safety systems she has spent the past 30 years setting up to protect oh-just-$6.13 trillion from fraud, embezzlement, and abuse, and if you manage somehow manage to get around these barriers she will Stop You.
Your boss Gets Things Done and threatens Florence’s boss Mervin that if he does not give you absolutely all the permissions you ask for, Mervin will become the particular object of attention of two people named Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
You get absolutely all the permissions you want and go on with your day.
Ah, to have a boss like that!
EDIT TL/DR: I think this looks weirder in Far mode? Near mode (near to data science, not near government), giving outside consultant data scientists admin permissions for important databases does not seem weird or nefarious. It’s the sort of thing that happens when the data scientist’s boss is intimidatingly high in an organization, like the President/CEO hiring a management consultant.
As someone who has been allowed access into various private and government systems as a consultant, I think the near mode view for classified government systems is different for a reason.
E.g., data is classified as Confidential when its release could cause damage to national security. It’s Secret if it could cause serious damage to national security, and it’s Top Secret if it could cause exceptionally grave damage to national security.
People lose their jobs for accidentally putting a classified document onto the wrong system, even if it’s still owned by the government and protected (but, protected at an insufficient level for the document). People go to jail for putting classified data onto the wrong system on purpose, even if they didn’t intend to, say, sell it to the Chinese government.
Bringing in personnel who haven’t had the standard single-scope background investigation and been granted a clearance, and a new set of computers which has not gone through any accreditation and authorization process, and giving unrestricted write and read access to classified data is technically something the president could allow. But it’s a completely unprecedented level of risk to assume; and AFAICT the president has not actually written any authorizations for doing this.
There is, actually, a Government Accounting Office which does audits; they have identified billions in fraud, waste, and abuse, identified the perpetrators for punishment, and remediated the programs at fault. They have done it without unprecedented breaches in national security, or denying lawful, non-fraudulent payments from the US Treasury.
(Also, outside of my personal area of expertise, I believe denying lawful, non-fraudulent payments from the US Treasury is crossing a really big Chesterton’s Fence. GPT-4o estimated a $1T-$5T impact from treasury bond yield spread, forex USD reserves, CDS spreads on US foreign debt, loss of seignorage in global trade, depending on how rare and targeted the payment denial is).
Sure, I think that’s a fair objection! Maybe, for a business, it may be worth paying the marginal security costs of giving 20 new people admin accounts, but for the federal government that security cost is too high. Is that what people are objecting to? I’m reading comments like this:
And, I just don’t think that’s the case. I think this is pretty-darn-usual and very normal in the management consulting / private equity world.
I don’t think foreign coups are a very good model for this? Coups don’t tend to start by bringing in data scientists.
What I’m finding weird is...this was the action people thought worrying enough to make it to the LessWrong discussion. Cutting red tape to unblock data scientists in cost-cutting shakeups—that sometimes works well! Assembling lists of all CIA officers and sending them emails, or trying to own the Gaza strip, or <take your pick>. I’m far mode on these, have less direct experience, but they seem much more worrying. Why did this make the threshold?
I don’t know anything about how things are done in management consulting or private equity.[1] Ever try it in a commercial bank?
Now imagine that you’re in an environment where rules are more important than that.
Coups tend to start by bypassing and/or purging professionals in your government and “bringing in your own people” to get direct control over key levers. It’s very standard. The treasury is a big lever. It doesn’t matter what you call the people.[2] And DOGE is far from the only thing along those lines.
Sowing chaos is another fairly common coup tactic.
That’s a bit garbled. What they did was request a list of CIA employees, including covert employees, and specifically demand that the list be sent in email on an unclassified system. Why that demand was made is unclear thus far, but yeah, it’s a problem. It puts your people at risk for no clear reason.
So that’s one example. They also asked for a list of FBI agents. Also at least threatened to mass-fire FBI agents. And did fire US Attorneys, explicitly for doing their jobs by charging criminal activity… in cases that they won in many different courts because they were legally in the right. Also purged military officers. Also sent a bunch of people into OMB and had them, plus White House staff, issue a bunch of memos freezing random government activities and demanding sudden disruptive changes at crash priority in the name of rooting out a very broad interpretation “DEI”… which, even if it were a problem, would definitely not be an emergency demanding Shutting. Down. Everything.
The Gaza thing hasn’t involved any actual action, and is the sort of thing Trump has always said. Same for the Greenland grab. He sounds a bit more serious now, but he still hasn’t done anything. The worst of the tariffs were suspended after Trump got properly stroked by the right foreign leaders.
… and anyway those are all foreign policy things, and all within the purview of the Presidency. They’re spectacularly bad ideas and would harm huge numbers of people. And they definitely could be part of a “flood the zone” strategy. But Trump has statutory authority to do the tariffs, even if he’s abusing it. What he did there wasn’t illegal. And Presidents have always been allowed to opine, and even negotiate, on foreign policy issues in general, even if the policies they advocate are stupid and even if they make foolish threats that alienate allies and damage US soft power. They usually don’t do quite so many dumb things in such a short time, but it’s not qualitatively new.
Some of this other stuff, including DOGE being at Treasury and trying to get into the DOL, involves actual action. Some of that action is clearly illegal under black letter law. And it’s the kind of action that would suggest of a real attempt to fundamentally rework how the whole US Government works. At a minimum, it’s definitely and openly trying to shift power to the executive and concentrating power within the executive in the office of the President and a few agencies. At least one of them brand new and created with no congressional buy-in with actual action behind it.
It’s the difference between loudly threatening to misuse the US system and taking illegal actions that look like they might be attempts to fundamentally alter the US system.
We’ll see how far that goes. The court orders have been coming in to stop a lot of this stuff. I don’t actually expect those orders to be defied… at least not at this point. In fact, the best reason I can come up with for them wanting to do all this stuff so fast has been to do as much damage as possible before the orders come in to stop them. But Trump has surprised me before.
The USAID thing is a weird case. I’m not even sure what made USAID such a target. I’ve heard speculations, and none of them are very good, but they’re also just that: speculations.
I imagine it’s the one Raemon happened to hear about. But it’s also pretty typical of the truly fundamental things that are going on.
… and honestly neither of those has a very good reputation. Management consultants are not infrequently used in the corporate equivalent of coups. Private equity, well… not known for preserving value, let’s say? ↩︎
In terms of whether they’re acting or qualified as “data scientists”, I’ll quote a tweet from one of them (Luke Farritor) on December 10: “Are there LLMs made specifically for parsing things like documents/forms/PDFs/json/html/excel/etc and converting them from one format to another?”. ↩︎
This is one of those concrete claims which you will be unable to provide evidence of. The chief executive restructuring government departments is not ‘clearly illegal under black letter law.’
Because of the “flood the zone” strategy, I can’t even remember all the illegal stuff Trump is doing, and I’m definitely not going to go dig up specific statutory citations for all of it. I tried Gemini deep research, and it refused to answer the question. I don’t have access to OpenAI’s deep research.
Things that immediately jump to mind as black letter law are trying to fire inspectors general without the required notice to Congress, and various impoundments. I would have to do actual research to find the specific illegalities in all the “anti-DEI” stuff. I would also have to go do research before I could tell you what made it illegal to fire the chair of the FEC.[1]
For DOGE specifically, here’s a list that happened to cross my eyes this morning. It’s in an interview format, so it’s probably incomplete.
https://www.vox.com/politics/398618/elon-musk-doge-illegal-lawbreaking-analysis
The bottom line is that the “unitary executive” idea is dead in law. If there’s a statute that says “the President shall establish a Department of Cat Videos, which shall promote cat videos [however], whose director shall be a calico cat which may not be dismissed once appointed, and here’s $10,000,000 to do it”, then the president is obligated to have a Department of Cat Videos, and find a cat to run it, and keep the cat on, and spend the money as directed. This is not a close call. Statutes have been passed, they’ve been litigated against, they’ve stood, other statutes have been passed relying on those precedents, there’s been litigation about those, and a whole edifice of well-established law has been built up. That’s what “black letter law” is.
It’s true that the current Supreme Court seems to have essentially no respect for precedent, and an, um, extremely idiosyncratic way of interpreting the actual text of the Constitution. It’s entirely possible that this whole blitz is meant, at least in part, to generate test cases to tear down that structure. But that’s more about the Court abandoning its job than about the established law.
… and I suppose I can’t claim trying to change the Fourtheenth Amendment by executive order as an administrative law violation.
I very much hope the computers brought in were vetted and kept airgapped.
You keep systems separate, yes.
For some reason I assumed that write permissions were on user in the actual system/secure network and any data exporting would be into secured systems. If they created a massive security leak for other nations to exploit, that’s a crux for me on whether this was reckless.
Added: what kind of idiot purposely puts data in the wrong system purposely? The DOGE guys doing this could somehow make sense, governmental workers??
When there’s little incentive against classifying harmless documents, and immense cost to making a mistake in the other direction, I’d expect overclassification to be rampant in these bureaucracies. And having documents basically be classified by default is handy if you’re doing embarrassing things you’d rather not be public (or susceptible to FOIA requests).
The claims that sidestepping procedural hurdles to enact significant reform of the system poses a serious threat to national security or whatever strike me as self-serving.
Your analysis of the default incentives is correct. However, if there is any institution that has noticed the mounds of skulls, it is the DoD. Overclassification, and classification for inappropriate reasons (explicitly enumerated in written guidance: avoiding embarrassment, covering up wrongdoing) is not allowed, and the DoD carries out audits of classified data to identify and correct overclassification.
It’s possible they’re not doing enough to fight against the natural incentive gradient toward overclassification, but they’re trying hard enough that I wouldn’t expect positive EV from disregarding all the rules.