anon6789

SSA is just part of the package. DOGE’s “services” are in exchange for special privileges for Elon’s companies. Removing regulations, worker protections, limits on what can go on in his company town, oversight for whatever nonsense Boring Company gets up to, and so on.

Exactly. They made it very clear that these were just things they felt were obstacles slowing them down from doing as they pleased.

For all the controversy DOGE has generated, its time at the Social Security Administration has not amounted to looming armageddon, as some Democrats warn. What it’s been, as much as anything, is a missed opportunity, according to interviews with more than 35 current or recently departed Social Security officials and staff, who spoke on the condition of anonymity mostly out of fear of retaliation by the Trump administration, and a review of hundreds of pages of internal documents, emails and court records.

The DOGE team, and Bisignano, have prioritized scoring quick wins that allow them to post triumphant tweets and press releases — especially, in the early months, about an essentially nonexistent form of fraud — while squandering the chance for systemic change at an agency that genuinely needs it.

They could have worked to modernize Social Security’s legacy software, the current and former staffers say. They could have tried to streamline the stupefying volume of documentation that many Social Security beneficiaries have to provide. They could have built search tools to help staff navigate the agency’s 60,000 pages of policies. (New hires often need at least three years to master the nuances of even one type of case.) They could have done something about wait times for disability claims and appeals, which often take over a year.

They did none of these things.

I have a real hard time believing there are any good people in DOGE.

The people they talk to in this article, and the people NPR have interviewed all like to talk like they were there to bring in sweeping good changes.

But when everything before these people signed up for these jobs was so public, about Musk and Trump and their highly visible opinions of these agencies and how they felt about them, how any reasonable person could think this is the type of change that would be implemented is beyond me.

They all come off as people with no capability to read the room or to understand they’re being used by evil people. They might be good IT people or programmers, but if accounting knowledge or any experience with an agency or what it does isn’t a requirement or even a consideration when you are coming in as a “reformer,” that should raise red flags.

I don’t trust any of these people, and I no longer have faith in any of the data they hold or share being secure. I think everyone should get a new SSN if/when sanity returns to the agency. There is no way this important information was held securely with people this sloppy and of poor judgement in charge of it.

Some basic Google sleuthing shows he’s a centrist and hasn’t made a public political donation since the 90s and that was $5000.

He has the second largest private personal charity, Dalio Philanthropies, which seems to dabble in a bit of everything.

Private charities don’t thrill me, because it can be a huge source of dark money and it still maintains the charity owner’s personal will and keeps their personal influence level high instead of just donating money to be used however the people receiving donations feels is best.

This link gives a little more specific insight to what he participates in, but it’s still fairly vague. He’s basically trying to do the Gates/Buffet give it all away by the time you die thing, so it’s probably as good as one can expect from a hedge fund guy.