Keith S

Being a historian, people ask me if I think the US is living through Germany 1933.

I answer no, analogies are always imperfect but to me it feels more like Russia 1999: a blatant theft of state assets and liberals in a fugue state, refusing to believe the arc of progress is bending against them.

Stand With Trans Americans You don’t have to understand everything about the transgender experience to know that Trump’s acts of humiliation and dehumanization are unjust and dangerous.

Stand with trans Americans. You don’t have to understand everything about the transgender experience to know that Trump’s acts of humiliation and dehumanization are unjust and dangerous.

www.thebulwark.com/p/stand-with...

Newt Gingrich says the "McKinley Model" requires high tariffs over a three-year transition period.

Notable: Three years after the 1890 McKinley tariff, the economy had fallen into a severe depression. The GDP shrank by 10% and unemployment hit 18%. Certainly not the economic model I'd be copying. 😳

What he said about Social Security payments has been repeatedly debunked - so the question isn’t whether he’s lying about this, the question is why.

What is this a pretext for? He and the GOP have long shown interest in going after Social Security. What are they going to try?

This whole riff on the ages of people on social security is IDENTICAL to the lies he's told about voter rolls and voting fraud.

This resignation letter from 21 people who were working for the USDS (DOGE before it became DOGE) is definitely worth a read.

archive.is/AKhKO

Think of Congress and its budget as the broke husband on his way to put a $250,000 Ferrari on the family credit card, and DOGE as the $2-off gas card he used on the way.

Sure, saving $2 on gas is nice. But his wife may be a bit too focused on burying them in $250k of debt to congratulate him.

Layoffs to hit IRS as DOGE targets tax collections Several people briefed on the matter said cuts to the IRS cuts numbering in the thousands. One target is tax collections.

Laying off thousands of IRS agents will worsen budget deficits.

I understand the IRS is deeply unpopular, but the more we encourage tax evasion among high-earners and corporations, the more they'll eventually need to raise your taxes to plug the gap.
washingtonpost.com/business/202...

Maybe because it’s a badly coordinated mishmash of Project 2025 and the random political revolution theories of Peter Thiel’s favorite Silicon Valley “philosopher” Curtis Yarvin 🤷‍♂️

The CFPB is one of the American people’s best defenses against waste, fraud, and abuse.

Demolishing it will, of course, lead to more waste, fraud, and abuse.

The "Don't Tread on Me" crowd really want's to Tread on others.

The other shoe. Is dropped. Like I said, this is coordinated.

All kidding aside, the reason he is doing this is to establish some kind of culpability by @profgalloway.com and I. We never threatened these people but it is all in service of getting his supporters to think we did. It’s not a random tweet — all planned for a larger effort to silence us or worse.

While the cybersecurity stuff around DOGE engages me because it's easy for tech industry folk to see the constitutional issues at play, maybe the message to general moderate business owners could be simplified to "Would YOU give your junior IT staff line-item vetos over the yearly budget?"

So Russell Vought will be Christ-washing the technofascists’ punch list. Watch what he does closely, but don’t emotionally fixate. No one has to answer to his projected outrage or demanded shame: that’s his leverage.

He’s just a man. Calculating and cruel, but being scared misses the point.

I hope one thing digital government practitioners are taking away from attempting to divine what is happening in the US: it should be a mater of public record how digital public services and infrastructure work, when they change and what data they use. No more excuses.

All that self-debasement just to get someone’s systems permissions 🙄

And there it is — next shoe dropping. Steal the bank, control the military and then silence the media

I can't wait to hear their take on source material for requirements. If these guys are pushing past civil workers who would typically spell out processes that need to be replicated, they're probably just feeding available random documents into an AI and asking it what the requirements are. 😬

So glad you’re on this angle. Having worked with gov’t data as well as AI, the requirements of this endeavor are enormous, and the process/product is rife with anti-competition and conflicts of interest, not to mention resulting power. Already reached out to my Rep/Senators, if they’re listening

There is no "out-of-the-box" data permissions/security management in LLMs, so the coders will have to build it from scratch. The risk of data mixing is very high here. This should never touch real-life data until after extensive testing. These engineers aren't smarter than reality.

The test cycles needed for a tool like the reported GSAi chatbot MUST be extensive due to confidential/private data being analyzed/synthesized for response. You would need human SMEs to craft and evaluate prompts and responses related to every process in the government and catch errors.

I know the DOGE team building a chatbot called GSAi sounds wonky, nerdy, and boring, but the project is also anti-competitive as hell. Real-life municipal data, even just empty data structures related to government processes, is scarce and would be worth A LOT to train chatbots for municipal use.

This isn’t internet research, I lived it. It was like dating a family to see if they’d want to teach you. Lots of dead ends and half promises. I finally applied to college under everyone’s backs and told my parents right before my first semester. I’ve never looked back. It was shady boots.

For most, “apprenticeship” means structured training from an expert for a specialized role. Be aware that Christian Nationalists also use the same word to represent a doctrine of replacing accredited colleges with only apprenticeship, in law/tech/anything. It’s a closed system, y’all.

Great journalism! Gonna have to follow the WSJ news feed a little closer. Thank you!

(This would make an interesting interview sometime soon, @maddow.msnbc.com —started at the WSJ last week! 😃)

This is a good time to note that I started at the Wall Street Journal last week! If you work with or around DOGE, I'd love to speak with you. My email address is katherine.long@wsj.com and I'm on Signal at longka.38. Use a non-work device to contact me.

DOGE Staffer Resigns Over Racist Posts A staffer for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency whose access to U.S. Treasury payment systems was approved by a federal judge on Thursday has links to a deleted social-media account that...

I linked DOGE staffer Marko Elez to a deleted X account that advocated repealing the Civil Rights Act, backed a “eugenic immigration policy,” and wrote, “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity."

He just resigned. www.wsj.com/tech/doge-st...

Elephant calf with trunk up

Elephant calf with trunk down

Elephant calf update: very baby

The White House has said that any of Elon Musk's conflicts of interest regarding his work with DOGE will be monitored and addressed by....Elon Musk.

He's determining which government contracts are "fraud" while he himself has billions in government contracts.

Hello?