Privileged For Being Special

A while ago, there was a saying about people like Paris Hilton. whom nobody could understand what they had done to make themselves famous, that they were "famous for being well known". What I've been noticing in recent years is a phenomenon of people who are, or were, privileged for being special. Nobody can quite figure out what made, or makes, them privileged. Take the example of Rebecca Lobach, the pilot of the helicopter that by current general consensus was at fault for flying into a regional jet on January 29. The jet was following the controller's instructions, at the precise altitude and course it should have been. The helicopter appears to have been above its authorized altitude and even slightly off course.

The initial news the morning after the crash had to do with the loss of 14 prominent figure skaters on the jet:

U.S. Figure Skating, the organization that serves as the sport's national governing body, confirmed the plane's passengers included several of its members, who had attended a prestigious training camp for novice and intermediate skaters in Wichita, Kansas, where the flight took off.

"These athletes, coaches, and family members were returning home from the National Development Camp held in conjunction with the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Wichita, Kansas," U.S. Figure Skating said in a statement. "We are devastated by this unspeakable tragedy and hold the victims' families closely in our hearts. We will continue to monitor the situation and will release more information as it becomes available."

But almost immediately, the focus changed. The Army was withholding the name of the helicopter pilot at the request of the family, even though it had released the names of the other two crew members. This immediately shifted attention to the pilot. For days after the eventual release, media carried tributes to her ahchievement and character:

U.S. Army Capt. Rebecca Lobach earned it.

She was an athlete and a top student. She was, more than anything, a patriot, in the best sense of the word, serving her country and, at the age of 28, becoming a leader and a mentor.

Notice the constant repetition in the quotes I've found over the past several days stressing that she "earned it", or, "Not only did she deserve what she achieved, but she was overqualified most of the time". Why the need to stress this? She was the pilot of a helicopter that was out of position, ignored the warnings of the tower, and crashed into a jet that was carrying 64 people who neither earned nor deserved the fate they got. Indeed, it sounds as if the jet's pilots were fully qualified, while at least 14 of the passengers were prominent athletes.

Somehow the media bought into the idea that Rebecca Lobach, beyond anyone else involved in the accident, was the casualty who was prominent for being special.

Another puzzling case is Luigi Mangione, who has been arrested and indicted for killing Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, on December 4, 2024 in New York City. According to the New York Post,

Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, has accepted nearly $300,000 in donations from his so-called fans to pay for his criminal defense, his lawyer says.

The December 4 Legal Committee, a group that raised the money and is named after the date in which Thompson was shot and killed in Manhattan, confirmed the transfer on Monday to Mangione’s legal fund.

. . . Mangione, who is charged with first-degree murder in furtherance of terrorism for killing the father-of-two, has gained a cult-like following over the high-profile case.

Jamie Peck and Sam Beard, of the “Party Girls” podcast who also serve as spokespeople for the fund, said they were thrilled to learn that Mangione was making use of the resources they helped build for him after making contact with his attorney on Monday.

One of numerous stories trying to make sense of the phenomenon says,

Mangione can be described with a host of adjectives, among them young, fit, wealthy and male. The valedictorian of an elite private high school with two Ivy League degrees, he comes from a prominent upper-class family in Maryland and maintained an active presence online.

. . . "This, of course, is framed as, 'He's one of us,'" said Ioana Literat, a communications professor at [Columbia University's Teachers College].

"'One of us' as in a social media user, 'one of us' as a young person and, very importantly, 'one of us' as someone that is dealing with this system that doesn't work for regular people."

The same story points out, though, that Mangione was not a customer of UnitedHealthCare. However he may have been dealing with "the system", it was at least one level removed, and the peculiar thing is that "the system" was in fact working for him. According to Wikipedia,

Mangione's father now runs the Mangione Family Enterprises. The extended family also owns Hayfields Country Club, Turf Valley Resort, Lorien Health Services, the WCBM radio station, as well as the Mangione Family Foundation

Mangione attended Gilman School, an all-boys private secondary school in Baltimore, where he graduated as valedictorian in 2016. Mangione received a Bachelor of Science in Engineering (BSE) in computer engineering and a Master of Science in Engineering (MSE) in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2020. His undergraduate studies included a minor in mathematics, and his graduate curriculum was concentrated in artificial intelligence. He was a UI programming intern with the video game company Firaxis Games from May 2016 to August 2017 while he was an undergraduate student.

Mangione began to work remotely in November 2020 as a data engineer for TrueCar, a car retailing website company headquartered in Santa Monica, California. His employment there ended at some point during 2023, according to the company. His last known residence was in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Wait a moment. After a career in tech, I can guarantee you that you do not need an MSE from Penn to work for a car retailing website. Most of my colleagues in system engineering didn't have four-year degrees, and many had just GEDs they'd obtained through the military. In general, he appears to have underperformed in life after leaving an educational system that his family was almost certainly able to game in his favor.

In the summer of 2024, Mangione stopped posting on social media. On November 18, 2024, his mother reported him missing to the San Francisco Police Department, saying the family had not heard from him since July of that year, shortly after a trip to East and Southeast Asia. Mangione's mother contacted the San Francisco Police Department because she believed that Mangione lived in San Francisco and still worked for TrueCar, which had an office there.

Although unemployed since leaving his remote job in 2023, he appears to have been able to travel to Southeast Asia, as well as to New York, with no visible means of support. What he apparently did have, though, was an overridng sense of grievance against "the system", when as far as anyone can tell, "the system" had been working in his favor all his life, or at least until he basically checked out.

I say this only as someone with a layman's general understanding of mental health issues, and we know very little of Mangione's specific case, but it's hard to avoid speculating that schizophrenia begins to manifest in the late teens and early 20s, and something like this may have taken place. But this hardly makes him admirable, just a very sad situation.

But somehow in the popular imagination, he's entitled to be privileged for being special because he's "one of us", which apparently means wealthy, attractive, fit, and privileged, but basically hollow, and in fact with a deep-seated fear they haven't earned their position in life and don't deserve what they have. And this also comes with a free-floating sense of grievance against "the system" that actually works in their favor. Seems like there's a lot of people who are that way, and they can all relate to each other.

How come so many of them are in the Ivy League/

Golly Gee, We Still Don't Know Much More About What Caused The Accident!

Yesterday I posted about indications that very powerful influences were able to insert themselves into the Army's press releases about the Reagan National collision January 29, especially that the family was able to override Army policy and delay release of the pilot's name an additional two days, as well as to include a family-written eulogy of the pilot in the Army's own press release, despite the strong likelihood that that pilot played a major role in the collision. It's hard to avoid thinking similar influences have been delaying the release of other key information about the crash.

As of Janary 31, over a week ago,

The National Transportation Safety Board has recovered the flight “black box” from the downed Black Hawk helicopter, that appears to be undamaged, board member Todd Inman said.

Yesterday, the NTSB has recovered a flight data recorder “in good condition” from the accident, he said, though it will not be releasing information from that device immediately. The cockpit voice recorder that was recovered, in contrast, had “water intrusion,” a problem that investigators are now dealing with, but they have “a very high level of confidence” that they will get information from that device, Inman said.

Regarding the helicopter voice recorder itself, another version of what the NTSB said was,

The Sikorsky has a combined black box, which was retrieved and is at NTSB headquarters; they will begin its evaluation to determine when/how to take action; they saw no exterior damage, indicating it was compromised; they have a high level of confidence in full extraction.

So, how long does it take to extract the voice recorder data if there's been water incursion? Should we maybe have had some info by now? The answers are vague:

It most likely take a day, or a couple days depending on the environment it was found in. For example I’ve heard that if the crash is at sea they will bring the box in, using the same surrounding water it was submerged in. But these days the actual downloading of the audio is no more than downloading of digital audio files. What takes a long time is releasing it to the public. It first will need to be analyzed by “experts” and the cause of the crash determined and possibly attempted to be rectified. Making sure the last of kin are all ok with releasing the recordings. Respect for the dead. Logistical things surrounding the black box recording. That’s what takes a long time.

On February 3, a week ago, the NTSB gave what appers to have been the last detailed public press conference on the crash. It gave an extensive timeline of the regional jet's cockpit voice recorder, as well as a report that the altitude of the jet, based on the jet's flight data recorder and ADS-B data, was 325 feet, which gave a strong impression that the helicopter was well above its 200 foot authorized altitude. However, the NTSB spokesman claimed

the NTSB cannot yet give any information on the altitude of the helicopter (call sign Priority Air Transport 25 or PAT25). But he called the helicopter recorders “the third prong” of information that needs to be confirmed to understand the conflicting altitude information being seen in preliminary data. Whenever those data points are finalized, NTSB will feel “very comfortable” in saying exactly what altitude this collision occurred at.

Meanwhile, the last semi-public statements from the NTSB, as far as I can determine, were on Thursday, February 6, when it briefed the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation on the accident. It apparently provided no update on the helicopter voice recorder in that briefing, but the main subject was the question of whether the helicopter’s ADS-B advanced surveillance technology was installed or activated, which would have solved the pesky problem of its altitude, as we saw just above. As of this past Saturday, it's all still just a big puzzle:

Investigators have revealed that the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter that collided with American Airlines Flight 5342 over the Potomac River was flying with its automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) system turned off. The turned-off ADS-B is possibly another contributing factor to a crash that was the deadliest in U.S. aviation since 2001.

. . . What it all means, with respect to the Potomac collision, is that had the Black Hawk’s ADS-B been turned on, American Airlines Flight 5342 would have been more likely to have been aware of the Black Hawk’s location, reducing the likelihood of a collision.

Of course, the investigation is still ongoing, and it is unlikely to conclude that the turned-off ADS-B was solely responsible for the collision. But the disclosure raises questions and further suggests that the tragedy could have been avoided.

There are other questions about errors that were made just before the collision.

Michael Pearson, who was a FAA air traffic control specialist for over 26 years, is a lawyer in the lawsuit against the FAA regarding alleged racial discrimination in the agency’s hiring practices. Pearson told Just the News on Tuesday that ATC didn’t follow proper procedure, which led to the crash. He said there was a conflict alert on the radar, giving the ATC “27 seconds to do something.”

“When a [conflict alert] goes off, you take immediate action,” he said.

While the media largely appears to holding the crew of the Army helicopter to blame for the crash, Pearson believes that the ATC is primarily at fault. Pearson says that the controller "didn't tell the jet that the helicopter was in sight,” despite being “required to, and didn’t give safety advisories” when the conflict alert went off. Also, the “helicopter route was horrible,” and “the controller didn't apply the rules properly.”

So the NTSB needs data from the helicopter's flight data recorder to say for sure what its altitude was at the time of the collision. Although it's released a detailed timeline of the jet's flight data and voice recorder, it just can''t seem to get the same data from the helicopter, even though it's had the black boxes for well over a week. And if it had the helo's ADS-B data, well, that would have helped, too, but for some reason, the helo's ADS-B just wasn't turned on, so I guess maybe we'll never quite know. Nor will we even know why the helo's ADS-B was turned off, when the jet had it on. One of history's great mysteries, huh? And what a tragedy for the pilot!

"Not only did she deserve what she achieved, but she was overqualified most of the time for what she was able to accomplish," said Capt. Bilal Kordab, who recruited Lobach to the North Carolina National Guard. "Nothing was just handed to her."

. . . [Close friend Lt Smantha] Brown said she was confident, despite the political rhetoric swirling around her friend's death, that Lobach would be remembered for one thing – that she heartily deserved her success.

"Rebecca earned her place in that aircraft," she said. "She was outstanding, and she deserved to be there."

Here's another incongruity: the Lobach family somehow prevailed on the Army to violate its policy and withhold her name for an additional two days so they could scrub her social media, and indeed, they requested privacy. But somehow, the family publicist has been releasing photo after photo of a gleeful Rebecca, as well as interviews with all her friends, to legacy media, which it eagerly prints, and indeed, the family publicist has used Rebecca's death to remind everyone in York, PA of what a great humanitarian her Uncle Jeff is. He's even gonna have a gala at the country club next month!

Except Rebecca's last flight was a check ride, which she unquestionably failed. As I asked yesterday, why does everyone she knew keep insisting she earned everything she got? It's almost as if there are nagging doubts.

Something's hinky.

Rebecca Lobach And The Golden Rule

As soon as I heard the news last week that the Army was withholding the name of the Black Hawk helicopter pilot involved in the Reagan National collision, my antennae went up. There had to be family money involved. Here's the problem:

On Saturday the U.S. Army released the name of the second pilot—reported to have been pilot in command—of the Blackhawk helicopter that collided with American Airlines flight 5342 over the Potomac River, killing 67 people. This was a marked departure from Army policy that states “Names, city, and state of deceased will be withheld until 24 hours after next of kin notification.” This was the standard process used to identify the other two members of the Army’s flight crew, Chief Warrant Officer Andrew Eaves, and Staff Sgt. Ryan O'Hara. . . . Yet, in an unusual deviation, the Army selectively withheld Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach’s identity for an additional two days. When her name was finally released over the weekend, the Army included a family statement of eulogy that praised Lobach and requested privacy. Army officials claim that violating its own rules was done to respect Lobach’s family’s wishes, but that decision casts an unnecessary shadow over her service and memory.

I saw a military YouTuber claim the family had insisted they feared for their safety if Rebecca's name were made public, and they apperantly needed the extra time to scrub their social media for their own protection, but I haven't found anything to corroborate this. It does sound like the lame excuse someone might try to make -- if they aren't protected, mobs of MAGA types might riot outside their front door. The link above goes on,

The information shared by the Army and Lobach’s friends indicate that she was a stellar soldier. However, stellar soldiers do not ask for special consideration—they demand equal treatment to prove that they are one among a team. Yet we now see a movement to essentially canonize Lobach as a hero while civilian remains are still being recovered from the submerged and fragmented passenger jet that her aircraft knocked from the sky. Army officials rushed to defend a single pilot among a flight crew of three and 64 dead civilians.

. . . Beyond violating military regulations, the Army strategically released Lobach’s identification on a Saturday—a classic public relations tactic used to bury news. Meanwhile, it appears her social media history was erased, despite the insistence that she was an admirable public servant. The inclusion of a family eulogy in the Army’s announcement further signaled that her passing was somehow more profound than the rest. Why?

In short, her family appears to have asked for, and received, special treatment. How could they do this? According to the York, PA Daily Record,

"She was a wonderful, admirable young lady," her uncle, York attorney Jeff Lobach, said. "She deserves a lot of respect. She will be sadly missed."

Jeff Lobach, a partner in the Barley Snyder law firm and a well-known philanthropist, didn't want to go into great detail about his niece, who was a member of the crew of the Blackhawk helicopter that crashed with a regional jet over the Potomac near Reagan National Airport last week.

Capt. Lobach's father, Jeff Lobach's brother David, is from York but currently lives in Durham, N.C. He earned his undergraduate degree from Bucknell University before completing his medical degree and a doctorate at Duke University.

"This is really their story," Lobach said.

Even if it's the Durham Lobachs' story, here's more on Uncle Jeff:

Jeff and Cindy Lobach, whose work on behalf of the Golden Venture immigrants detained in York County Prison garnered international recognition, are this year's recipients of Penn-Mar Human Service's Distinguished Humanitarian Award.

They will receive the award at the organization's 33rd Gala fundraiser at the Marriott Owings Mills Center in Owings Mill, Md., on March 1.

. . . Jeff Lobach, former managing partner and CEO of the Barley Snyder law firm, was a leader of the volunteer asylum project that provided legal services to the Chinese refugees who were detained in York County after their ship, the Golden Venture, ran aground at Rockaway Beach in Queens, N.Y., in June 1993. The Lobachs took in one of Jeff's clients and his wife and daughter, making them a part of their family.

Elsewhere,

Jeff and Cindy Lobach’s varied and eclectic volunteer service led them to create the Jeff and Cindy Lobach Community Fund at the Community Foundation. Jeff, the current Community Foundation board chair, said, “I have a front row seat for the evolution of the Community Foundation to a proactive and impactful driver of positive community change. With college in the rearview mirror for our three sons, we thought now would be a good time for us to focus our giving more strategically and the Community Foundation is the perfect vehicle.”

The Lobachs are passionate about youth, education, health care, and their church, and support organizations that can have “transformative or life-saving effects on our neighbors,” according to Cindy. Globally, the Lobachs are currently working to preserve an area of the Amazon rainforest by helping the villagers living on the edges of the gigantic Tahuayo Tamshiyacu reserve.

Ah, the Jeff and Cindy Lobach Community Fund. But the family requeats privacy. These are powerful Democrat donors. What about Rebecca's dad down in Durham? He's David Franklin Lobach, Medical Associate Professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health in the Duke Univeristy School of Medicine, M.S. 1994 - Duke University, M.D. 1987 - Duke University. Ph.D. 1986 - Duke University. His list of grants and citations is impressive. In fact, I would bet he's on a first-name basis with Tony Fauci. He's a member of the medical and public health establishment, after all.

This in turn says to me that there's generational wealth and influence that extends back beyond brothers Jeff and David. I suspect another half hour of searching could turn that up, too, but I don't have the time right now. But this explains why Rebecca was a White House social aide, among other things, and why her friends, contacted for comment, were so insistent that she'd earned everything she got, just like her dad and Uncle Jeff did. What do you bet all the Lobachs are Democrats?

Come to think of it, they didn't do all that great a job of scrubbing their media, either, even with all the extra time they got.

"Who Are These Guys?" Indeed

This is a job for Big Balls 😂 https://t.co/vqYD0XyCfB

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 8, 2025

On Thursday, I asked of DOGE, "Who are these guys?", and yesterday, I began to get an answer: one of them is named Big Balls. The doxing campaign was immediate. Per Wired:

A young technologist known online as “Big Balls,” who works for Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has access to sensitive US government systems. But his professional and online history call into question whether he would pass the background check typically required to obtain security clearances, security experts tell WIRED.

Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old high school graduate, established at least five different companies in the last four years, with entities registered in Connecticut, Delaware, and the United Kingdom, most of which were not listed on his now-deleted LinkedIn profile. Coristine also briefly worked in 2022 at Path Network, a network monitoring firm known for hiring reformed blackhat hackers. Someone using a Telegram handle tied to Coristine also solicited a cyberattack-for-hire service later that year.

Per The New Republic:

Shocking: The 19-year old DOGE goon with a questionable résumé who goes by “big balls” online was fired from his last real gig for leaking company information online.

Bloomberg is reporting that Edward Coristine was fired from cybersecurity firm Path Network in 2022 for “leaking internal information to the competitors.” Now Coristine has access to the most sensitive internal information there is, the federal government’s, and he has no confirmed clearance that legitimizes that access.

Wait a moment. Isn't it guaranteed that if a deep-stater with all the right clearances has an interest in leaking classified info, especially if it will help the deep state, he'll leak it? But let's look at it from another direction. Mr Coristine can't be a dummy. He's got to know, given his own history and likely connections, that if he offends the wrong people, this is exactly what can happen to him. Big balls indeed.

At the same time, I sometimes worked in computer security in my tech career. It was generally understood, especially in the early days of the field as corporations began to recognize the risks of data breaches, that companies themselves and consulting firms would hire "white hat" hackers to penetrate their systems to demonstrate vulnerabilities -- and those early insights formed the basis of continuing strategies in the business.

But the sort of person who becomes a "white hat" hacker, let's face it, isn't necessarily an Eagle Scout. He probably started out as a "black hat" hacker and may even have a prison record to demonstrate his qualifications for the job. This is simply the sort of person who goes into that line of work. I would bet that Elon Musk himself has a strong internal sympathy for that sort of person as well. After all, he's a rule breaker, a norm shatterer, a risk taker. Just look at his "family" life.

So this is precisly the sort of person he would hire, and precisely the sort of person he did hire. And Musk being Musk, the calculated risk paid off. Beyond that, after a public debate on X, and with J D Vance's endorsement, Musk rehired Big Balls:

By saving that staffer’s job, Trump, Vance, and the team will end up putting an entire class of point-and-sputter journalists out of theirs

No one will pay for digging up mean tweets if there’s no payoff at the end

— Will Chamberlain (@willchamberlain) February 7, 2025

As the saying goes, not a bug but a feature. This somewhat fanciful "maybe it was this way" account nevertheless matches my own surmise:

In Treasury's basement, fluorescent lights hummed above four young coders. Their screens cast blue light across government-issue desks, illuminating energy drink cans and agency badges. As their algorithms crawled through decades of payment data, one number kept growing: $17 billion in redundant programs. And counting.

"We're in," Akash Bobba messaged the team. "All of it."

Edward Coristine's code had already mapped three subsystems. Luke Farritor's algorithms were tracing payment flows across agencies. Ethan Shaotran's analysis revealed patterns that career officials didn't even know existed. By dawn, they would understand more about Treasury's operations than people who had worked there for decades.

This wasn't a hack. This wasn't a breach. This was authorized disruption.

. . . "Pull this thread," a senior official warned, watching patterns emerge across DOGE's screens, "and the whole sweater unravels."

He wasn't wrong. But he misunderstood something crucial: That was exactly the point.

This wasn't just another transition. This wasn't just another reform effort. This was the start of something unprecedented: a revolution powered by preparation, presidential will, and technological precision.

. . . The secret wasn't just speed—it was precision. Instead of waiting for Senate confirmations, the transition team prioritized non-Senate-confirmed positions. While Democrats prepared for traditional confirmation battles over cabinet posts, an army of aligned personnel was already moving into place. Strategic positions were identified. Legal authorities were mapped. Support networks were established.

. . . This urgency drove innovation. When DOGE's young coders breached Treasury's payment systems, pre-positioned legal teams neutralized resistance within hours. When career officials tried revoking system access, they discovered DOGE's authority came from levels they couldn't challenge. When leaks surfaced, rapid-response units fed counter-narratives to alternative media almost instantly.

Musk must have already gamed out what would happen to Big Balls and had the response ready beforehand. And he and Trump clearly had the whole DOGE strategy worked out well before Inauguration Day.

HOW DEMS BUILT THE WORLD'S BIGGEST RAKE, THEN STOMPED ON IT: THE DOGE ORIGIN STORY

1. Obama creates WH office to hire Silicon Valley types exempt from rules (USDS)
2. 2017-2020, staff use it to undermine Trump WH from within
3. Biden puts it under a political appointee
4. DOGE pic.twitter.com/L5YiWV3ITv

— Luke Rosiak (@lukerosiak) February 7, 2025

I can't wait for the next news cycle.

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.

Who Are These Guys?

According to The Hill,

DOGE aides have been fanning out across the federal government, exerting control of agencies as part of a mandate to cut at least $1 trillion in federal spending, most recently at the Treasury Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. They have demanded, and received access to, highly sensitive information, raising alarms among Democrats and government employees.

I saw someplace that their dress code is blazer-over-T-shirt, and that's about all I know about them, except from the stories, it doesn't sound like they work from home:

ABC News reported on how DOGE showed up at USAID offices in Washington, D.C., late last week and demanded access, speaking to one employee who claimed to have seen it all play out.

"DOGE was in the building. We started -- we took down our Pride flags, we took down- I took out any books I felt would be incriminating," Kristina Drye, a speechwriter for USAID, said. "No one was talking. We heard they started taking transcripts automatically of all of our Google Meets."

She added further, "They unplugged the news in the little kitchen galleys. It didn't feel good. And then Saturday, all of the websites went down. And then I lost complete access to my computer."

On Monday, the White House listed a variety of questionable and DEI-related projects USAID has contributed to.

Aha, this is how you do these sorts of things, you get in quickly, go for low-hanging fruit, and show immediate results:

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed reports that millions in federal funding went to Politico and declared taxpayer dollars would no longer “essentially” subsidize subscriptions to the outlet.

. . . “So upon coming out here to the briefing room, I was made aware of the funding from USAID to media outlets, including Politico, who I know has a seat in this room,” Leavitt said.

“I can confirm that the more than $8 million in taxpayer dollars that have gone to essentially subsidizing subscriptions to Politico on the American taxpayers’ dime will no longer be happening,” she added. “The DOGE team is working on canceling those payments now.”

These guys are smart, and they're fast. They worked all weekend, and by Monday, they had the dirty laundry in the news. But let's keep in mind that the total USAID budget is a relatively piddling amount:

USAID's budget for 2024 was approximately $44 billion, representing about 0.6% of the U.S. government's $6.75 trillion budget.

And even though the individual payments to news organizations, NGOs, and such are maybe $8 million here, $30 million there, these are really just teases. The Hill link above understands the real objective and the real stakes:

Representatives of billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have turned their focus to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency confirmed Wednesday.

. . . The Wall Street Journal reported earlier Wednesday that DOGE aides had been granted access to key payment and contract systems.

. . . The CMS spent more than $1.5 trillion in 2024, around 22 percent of federal spending. Lawmakers often say the massive amount of spending on health care programs is rife with fraud and abuse, though bipartisan efforts to curb Medicare spending over the years have been met with political backlash.

So in a matter of days, they set expectations by bringing about near-immediate results, and they've proven their methods out as well. They seem to have a knack for looking at payments, exactly whom they're going to, quickly locating the deposit slips and the receipts, and getting this all into the news cycles. And now they're focused on the real money.

Democrats are terrified of DOGE and Musk because they have never witnessed this degree of competence. It looks alien to them.

I mean that literally. People with experience see in DOGE a process that is necessarily messy but 100% on target in terms of speed, talent, and energy…

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) February 6, 2025

Well, Scott Adams knows a thing or two about competence. Now and then in my career I ran across truly competent people. It was always a privilege to work with them. But what does it say about Musk that he's been able to find and employ whole teams of them?

Scott Adams concludes, "I pity the inexperienced."

Suddenly There Are Federal Layoffs

Just this morning:

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has reportedly extended a buyout offer to its entire workforce.

This follows President Trump’s proposal to encourage millions of federal workers to resign by February 6 in exchange for pay and benefits lasting until September 30.

Trump is offering the buyouts to make sure all federal workers are “on board with the new administration’s plan to have federal employees in office,” CNBC reported.

Only 6% of all federal workers actually work full-time in the office!

This follows:

After going offline over the weekend as part of Trump’s goal to streamline federal operations and slash government spending, the official website of USAID is back online—but not for the reasons anyone expected.

The agency’s website now serves as a digital pink slip for its global workforce.

All USAID direct hire personnel are to be placed on administrative leave globally, with mandates for many to return to the U.S. This directive excludes only those deemed essential for “mission-critical functions.”

But the cuts won't stop with just the direct hires at USAID:

Last month, the State Department ordered an immediate pause on U.S. foreign aid for 90 days and issued “stop-work orders” on nearly all existing foreign assistance awards. This swift decision has effectively left many government contractors and global aid providers — including groups that supply HIV/AIDS care, provide child health services, set up education programs, fight food insecurity and counter disinformation in developing nations — struggling to operate or pay their workers.

Eight U.S.-based individuals who work in the foreign aid sector, all granted anonymity due to concerns about retaliation from the administration, told POLITICO that the foreign aid freeze had undermined their ability to carry out global aid efforts. Some predict that thousands of foreign aid professionals across the industry may soon be out of work.

“I can’t even begin to describe how cataclysmic it is, everyone is furloughing or laying off staff,” said one person. “It’s almost 5,000 people, and it’s just starting.”

And it's not just foreign aid:

The Trump administration has sent shockwaves through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by notifying over 1,000 employees that they are on the chopping block, marking a decisive step in dismantling bloated government agencies notorious for regulatory overreach.

EPA employees who have been with the agency for less than a year received an email last week notifying them that they could be dismissed immediately, according to NBC News citing sources familiar with the matter.

These employees, who are still on their “probationary” status, were bluntly informed that their tenure could end without delay at the administration’s discretion.

“As a probationary/ trial period employee, the agency has the right to immediately terminate you,” the email reads. “The process for probationary removal is that you receive a notice of termination, and your employment is ended immediately.”

At the FBI:

On Saturday, the FBI Agents Association issued a statement expressing concern about what it said are further efforts to force FBI agents to quit.

“There are several amongst our ranks who are extremely fearful of being removed — and some of those have started to pack up their desks,” it said in a bulletin to members.

The message gave agents advice about what to do if they believe they are at risk of being fired. “Do NOT resign or offer to resign,” the message said. “While we would never advocate for physical non-compliance, you need to be clear your removal is not voluntary.”

“Stay calm and refrain from making any statements that could be deemed to violate the Hatch Act," it added, referring to law that bars federal civil servants from engaging in political activities. "If you are told you will be terminated, make sure you get the termination notice in writing and forward it to us ASAP.”

After I left graduate school, I spent my whole career in tech. Part of that was in disaster recovery and contingency planning, where the running joke was "a good contingency planner has a current backup copy of his resume off site at all times". In fact, this was pretty much the mindset throughout tech. Every few years, no matter where I worked, my employer was acquired, which meant layoffs, or went bankrupt, which meant layoffs, or waas spun off, which meant layoffs, or downsized, which meant layoffs. Even if I wasn't caught in that particular wave of cuts, the handwriting was always on the wall, and as a good contingency planner, I always more or less had to have my resume out, which meant I also had to have good situational awareness about the job market.

It's hard to avoid thinking federal workers have been in never-never land for quite some time.

The House Oversight and Accountability Committee found Wednesday [January 15] that vast numbers of federal employees telework from home, wasting billions of taxpayer dollars spent on office space, and the Biden administration has enabled such accommodations to continue during President-elect Donald Trump’s next administration.

“The Biden-Harris administration has ceded too much authority to the federal union bosses, allowing their preference to work from home to take precedence over fulfilling agencies’ missions and serving the American people,” the committee declared in a report decrying the continued widespread use of telework since the COVID-19 pandemic ended.

"Working from home" was a dodge that I began to see only late in my own career, and it was mostly a perk for the bosses. If the boss didn't feel like coming to work that day, fine, he or she would "work from home", which meant you called in for the staff meeting via conference call, and the boss would be in the family van ferrying the kids to soccer practice while on the call. Given all the potential distractions, even less would get done than in the usual staff meetings. I don't have too much sympathy for those who get laid off:

“If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” This famous observation was made by Herb Stein, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. It became famous largely because it was just that, obvious. Yet, what is no less obvious is that public policy is commonly based on a wholly contrary assumption, that the future will be like the past, more or less. This is deeply unfortunate since many of the most important systems on which the future of mankind depends are evolving in an unsustainable way.