DOGE Progress

pic.twitter.com/obbnlw6CxZ

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 6, 2025

I'm not sure if the New York Post writer fully understands the story here:

A federal judge temporarily limited members of the Department of Government Efficiency from accessing the Treasury Department’s payment system the day before a DOGE employee who was linked to offensive social media posts quit.

US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued the order Wednesday after three union groups — the Alliance for Retired Americans, the American Federation of Government Employees and the Service Employees International Union — filed a lawsuit against Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, accusing him of illegally sharing their members’ information with Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team.

Kollar-Kotelly, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, limited access to the payment records system to two DOGE employees — one of whom resigned Thursday — and Treasury officials.

The judge ordered that the two DOGE workers — Tom Krause and Marko Elez — must be provided “read only” access to payment records as part of their efforts to eliminate waste and fraud and modernizing federal information technology.

Read-only access is the only type of access such a program, which would fall into the broad category of "audit software", ever needs. In fact, if the purpose of an audit is to identify irregularities, it's important that the auditors be unable to change data -- otherwise, the auditors themselves could alter records to create the appearance of irregularity. Read-only access is a standard type of data access that all commercial data security systems provide; system administrators can set this up in a matter of minutes. So the judge hasn't restricted anything, in fact, she's enabled what needs to be done. She's given DOGE exactly the access it should have.

There's a separate question of one of the DOGE guys who got doxed:

Elez abruptly resigned from DOGE on Thursday after the Wall Street Journal connected him to racist posts made on X.

The 25-year-old engineer reportedly tweeted his support for “eugenic immigration policy” in the weeks before President Trump’s inauguration and expressed a hatred for people from India.

This happens; I assume Musk will replace him with another 25-year-old. The more interesting case is the other DOGE guy who was named in the story, Tom Krause, who will stay on the project:

Tom Krause—the current CEO of Citrix and several other tech companies’ parent company Cloud Software Group—is reportedly helping Elon Musk’s Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) with reviewing the nation’s federal payment system.

. . . Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has signed off on a plan to give access to the payment system to a team led by Krause, according to multiple reports.

. . . Krause’s role will be subject to safeguards that would not allow the ability to make changes to the system and that no one outside the Treasury Department would have access. “The secretary’s approval was contingent on it being essentially a read-only operation,” said sources familiar with the matter, according to a Politico report.

So as far as I can see, read-only access is all Krause and Bessent ever wanted, and the judge is simply giving them what they asked for. The ruling simply isn't a setback. A report this morning suggests DOGE has been working with the same speed and effectiveness I noted yesterday:

In a bombshell revelation that could shake the foundations of American healthcare, Elon Musk, leading the charge under President Trump’s newly minted Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has uncovered what he describes as a staggering “$100B of taxpayer money” wasted by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

“CMS has two senior Agency veterans – one focused on policy and one focused on operations – who are leading the collaboration with DOGE, including ensuring appropriate access to CMS systems and technology,” the agency said in a statement to Reuters.

The DOGE team was granted read-only access to the system.

. . . However, the narrative has quickly escalated from efficiency to accusations of rampant waste and potential fraud.

“This is where the big money fraud is happening,” Musk tweeted on Wednesday in response to a post suggesting that aides using DOGE are searching the Medicare agency payment systems for fraud.

There have been several stories in alt media trying to figure out how this is being done, but the problem is that reporters, alt or legacy, just aren't tech savvy. For instance, Townhall quotes the Washington Post behind a paywall:

The AI probe includes data with personally identifiable information for people who manage grants, as well as sensitive internal financial data. . . .

The DOGE team is using AI software accessed through Microsoft’s cloud computing service Azure to pore through every dollar of money the department disburses, from contracts to grants to work trip expenses, one of the people said. Lower level department staffers were directed by agency leadership to let Musk’s teams access the sensitive financial data, the person said.

The stories always refer to "AI" with no further explanation; one typical alt writer concludes,

He’s uncovering abuse, waste, and fraud at other agencies as well—but how is he doing it so quickly? After all, the administration is barely two weeks old.

Turns out his team is using that new technological marvel—“incomprehensible advancement” to many of us—artificial intelligence.

It seems to me that what DOGE is doing is simply the massive data search-and-comparison side of "AI", which isn't really AI. The programs involved simply use contemporary computational speed to do searches and comparisons of massive amounts of data -- something like the entire IRS data base run against the Treasury's entire accounts payable for the last 10 years run against, oh, say Google. The searches bring results in somewhere from seconds to maybe a few minutes at the outside, and the result is that official X has a side business with congressman Y to get grants from agency Z.

This sort of thing goes on all day every day in the real world. How do I know this? Two weeks ago I posted here on Blogger about stoles, tippets, and chimerics at the National Cathedral. The next day I got ads from vestment companies in my Facebook feed -- what's important is that my Blogger posts go to Google data bases, but Facebook is a whole different company with different data. No matter, Facebook was able to link with Google and send me ads that might match my interests just like that.

If the cost for Facebook to do this is negligible, think what Musk and his 25-year-olds can accomplish.