Yet another Hacker News

A 28-Year-Old DOGE Operative Gutted USAID. HR Had No Record of Him Working There

130 points ck2 1 hour ago 52 comments

lawn 1 hour ago | parent

Just the deaths of hundreds of thousands, nothing to see here.

imzadi 1 hour ago | parent

Interesting to see how USAID in the title is like the bat signal for scumbags

iugtmkbdfil834 54 minutes ago | parent

Huh? Can you elaborate?

Catloafdev 47 minutes ago | parent

Certain political topics bring out bots and narrative-pushing. It's very obvious with certain topics.

paul7986 1 hour ago | parent

omg have the political bots been directed at Hacker News. WTH?

cowlevel 1 hour ago | parent

Have been for years.

alsetmusic 55 minutes ago | parent

We’ll be reading about the crimes of dodge for years, similar to secrets of the CIA coming out in the 1970s. Wish politicians in US weren’t so spineless about going after them.

analognoise 49 minutes ago | parent

Hopefully the midterms results in massive investigations of Trump and everyone in his orbit, but if we get “we all need to come together” faux-centrism I wouldn’t be surprised.

We need to fully destroy the notion the DOJ isn’t independent, and make a number of changes that bring us back to having a modern country.

Arwill 23 minutes ago | parent

Its the curse of the two-party system. Politicians are not risking splitting from their party, because that would mean the end of their political career.

binarymax 50 minutes ago | parent

Whether or not you agree or disagree with the merits of USAID is beside the point. A single unelected and unqualified person must not be given the authority to dismantle a massive US government program.

woah 45 minutes ago | parent

Did his actions exceed the authority granted to the executive branch which employed him?

seanhunter 44 minutes ago | parent

Spending is supposed to be decided by congress not the executive branch so quite obviously yes.

eppp 37 minutes ago | parent

So that means congress exercised their authority to check and balance the executive and everything turned out ok?

broken-kebab 25 minutes ago | parent

Budget allocation, and managing authority are different things, though.

helterskelter2 37 minutes ago | parent

If there's no record, was the executive really employing him?

zzrrt 26 minutes ago | parent

When things get allegedly autopenned under Biden's administration: THE PRESIDENT'S AUTHORITY IS BEING HIJACKED!

When undocumented temporary-employee friends of Trump allies do whatever they want: This is fine.

aaronblohowiak 42 minutes ago | parent

elections have consequences. We have a representative democracy and administrative employees serve at the pleasure of the head of the administration. "shoulds" and "musts" only go as far as the political will to enforce them. The overwhelming majority of the electorate seems to care about how expensive their personal lifestyle is with various takes on individual liberty vs enforced morality used as wedge issues (neither party is consistently on one side or the other of this balance, fwiw.)

as an institutionalist myself, I agree with you that this is terrible governance.

jauntywundrkind 40 minutes ago | parent

i for one am pretty exhausted by "elections have consequences" being codeword for all previous rules systems norms obligations and institutions are totally ok to be thrown in the hopper. it's an exhausting and ridiculous shrug of the shoulder that in no way meets the moment, that is just the laziest "what can you do" nothing.

you'd hope that an internal insurrection against the United States would not be so ragingly popular. and part of the reason it's let slide, is so poorly seen as what it is is because of "elections have consequences". it's bad.

madaxe_again 34 minutes ago | parent

The US is hardly alone in this. The UK voted to shoot themselves in the face, because brown people are scary.

Elections (and referenda) do indeed have consequences.

It is however perfectly reasonable to look further up the causal chain and say "propaganda influences elections".

fabian2k 35 minutes ago | parent

They could have passed a law to shut down USAID, that would have been the proper, legal way to do this. They didn't. The executive legally can't do whatever they want, but the Republicans in the legislative simply stood by and cheered while the administration trampled over their legislative responsibilities and powers.

jeremyjh 33 minutes ago | parent

When it comes to government spending programs, according to our constitution the elections that have consequences are those for seats in Congress. The executive doesn’t have the authority to cancel USAIDs funding, nor the funding of specific programs within it.

On top of that, the executive has a responsibility to plan its work ahead of time and make such plans known before enacting them.

There are many cases currently in litigation regarding these failures.

correlatequint 29 minutes ago | parent

> A single unelected and unqualified person must not be given the authority to dismantle a massive US government program.

I'd honestly rather have someone hired for the purpose of doing such tasks than to have the result of any election doing it.

prajaybasu 48 minutes ago | parent

Impressive achievement for a 28 year old dude.

kccoder 14 minutes ago | parent

Breaking things is easy. Morality is difficult.

labrador 42 minutes ago | parent

Are we going to prosecute these people or what?

tombert 38 minutes ago | parent

Seems unlikely to me. We even gave up on Trump's tax returns, and gave up the emoluments clause given that he is the CEO of a publicly traded company and has multiple cryptocurrency scams. This administration has plot armor. Feel free to fill in the reason as to "why"; my opinions would likely get me banned.

khriss 10 minutes ago | parent

One can hope. The tide seems to be turning with Trump becoming toxic to a majority of voters.

If the GOP loses big in the midterms, we might finally see MAGA and the GOP turn on each other in an internecine frenzy.

podgorniy 28 minutes ago | parent

That will become a point in a court...