Although the so-called Division of Authorities Effectivity doesn’t seize as many headlines because it did in its Elon-Musk-led heyday, its employees cling like wooden ticks on numerous businesses and proceed to have entry to a staggering quantity of knowledge.
Take the Division of Agriculture.
On Tuesday, Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin wrote a letter to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins on behalf of Wisconsin farmers, expressing the professional concern that letting DOGE rummage round in USDA databases of personal knowledge appears not nice. Baldwin additionally identified that DOGE additionally has entry to the Nationwide Cost System, giving it management over billions of {dollars} in loans and funds to farmers.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, proven in February.
DOGE intrusion “not only breaches [farmers’] privacy, but also raises serious concerns about the future of USDA payments, our nation’s food security, and the consolidation of farmland and processing operations,” Baldwin wrote.
This mission appears to be led by a DOGE bro named Jordan Wick. Who’s Jordan Wick? Certainly somebody with deep expertise in agriculture, the intricacies of farm funds, and/or authorities fee methods? Oh, heavens no. He’s a 28-year-old former software program engineer for Waymo, the self-driving automotive firm. Sure, the exact same Waymo that simply recalled over 1,200 autos as a result of they have been susceptible to crashing into obstacles, which is admittedly not what you need in a taxi.
Nonetheless, Wick seems to have unprecedented entry to USDA knowledge. A supply offered NPR with entry logs revealing that Wick can see all of the personal, private, and monetary info at USDA, and might change or cancel funds and loans. He has entry that nobody else at USDA has.
Even these tasked with the skilled duty of explaining why Wick wants this degree of entry can give you solely a sequence of buzzwords. The “USDA Efficiency Team”—which is outwardly what they’re calling the burrowed-in DOGE children now—is reviewing “many loans, guarantees, and payments” for supposed fraud and nationwide safety considerations, per a USDA spokesperson.
Why? As a result of “the abuse of USDA systems and data centers is a serious issue,” mentioned a USDA spokesperson, and the DOGE crew has been “immensely supportive due to their unmatched skillset in protecting our data and ensuring those that use their positions to access systems to defraud American taxpayers.”
It’s unclear if the spokesperson is accusing farmers or USDA staff of defrauding American taxpayers, however let’s speak about that “unmatched skillset” half. What skillset, precisely? Wick’s previous expertise programming self-driving automobiles? Or maybe the spokesperson meant Wick is a genius at preserving knowledge secure. Effectively, aside from the half the place he could have been part of DOGE’s unlawful exfiltration of Nationwide Labor Relations Board knowledge.
Letting Wick decide what contracts and funds are legitimate will most likely go in addition to when the federal government let a unique DOGE bro evaluation Division of Veterans’ Affairs contracts. The bro wrote an AI program—or moderately, he co-wrote it with one other AI. Mentioned new AI program then was turned free within the VA methods, the place it promptly and incorrectly decided that over 1,000 contracts have been value $34 million apiece, when a few of them have been value extra like $35,000.
These tech kiddies don’t have an “unmatched skillset.” They don’t actually have a regular baseline skillset for the roles they’ve barged into. The Trump administration’s mission of firing all federal employees with specialised data was dangerous sufficient, but it surely’s simply including insult to damage that we now must faux that random software program guys perceive the interior workings of presidency much better.
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