“The top operatives of DOGE are reported to be young, tech-savvy “hackers” with unprecedented access to systems holding everything from personnel records to highly sensitive financial data.”
- Forbes
Basically all federal pay data is made public, so in this case its less of doge not being transparent and more of they haven't gotten to it yet (my guess). The Chief of Staff makes ~180-200k, if I remember, but I haven't looked it up for current admin. Also in this case it might not be public _yet_ because it might still be before the disclosure deadline (since the admin is still new).
> Basically all federal pay data is made public, so in this case its less of doge not being transparent and more of they haven't gotten to it yet (my guess).
So they are looking to republish information that is already public? That seems like a waste of resources, no?
Not disagreeing with you. But the OPM site data seems to be only for headcount, and it probably can be found by those who know how to deep dive on government sites?
Having said that, I am very much worried about the direction the US is heading. I came to the US for college and eventually end up being a permanent resident. My home country, Myanmar (Burma), has been ruled by military dictatorship for decades, and I see a lot of parallels in terms of disregard for rule of law; cult of personality; silencing free speech and journalists/reporting agencies that disagree with your point of view; etc. Add musk's chaotic way of meddling with the (albeit inefficient) government machine, not looking good at all.
I will admit, this administration is great at flooding the zone and making big splashes over trivial tasks. It's kind of like removing the muffler from your Civic, it'll sound like a sports car but it's still a Civic.
Correct me if I'm wrong, the "OPM report" is just the headcount? The linked "Org Chart" seems to at least add wages, age groups, and years of tenure, so not exactly the same as far as I can tell?
Right, you could manually build the same experience, granted you know how to use the tool? Sounds a bit like the stereo-typical Dropbox comment, "You could get the same with the raw data, add your own filters, setup the facets from the left side and ...." while the submission website just plainly render the data.
The UX seems different enough to be more for the common person, rather than people who mangle/unmangle data for a living.
You've moved the goalposts. Your previous comment implied that the OPM data set does not include the facets for age, tenure, salary band, etc that the DOGE website presents. That's incorrect- the OPM data set includes those facets.
The point stands, the data is publicly available. DOGE isn't creating some new radical transparency for the federal government. They're not even the first to reformat the data in a UX friendly manner. AFAICT all they've done is skinned it with "dark mode" and managed to put injection vulns in a .gov website.
> Somebody build a dashboard that simply replicates data already available on the OPM site
To me, that indicates that the person who wrote that, thinks that website has identical use case as to the website linked in the submission. I missed that you could add facets yourself, that is true and apologies for that, but I still see the websites as serving different audiences. One is for people who know what facets are (simplification), the other is for people who just wanna get an overview quickly, the average person lets say.
So sure, the data is available, just like rsync/scp/ftp is available one way or another on most computers, but the experience and presentation is still different.
Please don't take this as agreement with what DOGE is doing, or that I think it's a good overall idea or whatever, I'm just commenting on that the website seems very different than the website linked in the submission.
> The UX seems different enough to be more for the common person, rather than people who mangle/unmangle data for a living
Even people who do it for a living would appreciate not having to do work for no pay after a long day at work just to look at where their taxpayer dollars are going.
Theoretically, if someone defaces a government website like that, could the punishment be harsher than any other random website? Hope people were wearing protection.
I'm not sure why, but the sheer incompetence makes me even more angry. Sure, they are running roughshod across important institutions, ignorantly tearing everything apart, but the fact they are so poor at it is infuriating. There's a million competent devs in the world, but Elon chose amateur fanboys.
If you're going to take apart democracy, have some goddamn professional pride.
It's probably pretty obvious to you too, but spelling it out just in case it isn't as clear to everyone:
These people are not chosen based on their skill or experience, but most likely by loyalty or some other similar metric. It's literally the fascist playbook updated for modern times, for when you want to dismantle institutions.
The only solace I can find is that when the day comes to fight back their poorly constructed edifices will crumble at the first push. Unfortunately they'll have built theirs on the ruins of democracy and we'll just be adding to the rubble.
If Elon had selected a team of actual competent devs he would need to worry about them saying no to his idiotic ideas. These people were chosen because they were spineless yes-men and workaholics, not because they were competent. Plus most competent devs would not want to get into this mess in the first place.
Yeah, I am pretty sure that is it. Most of us have worked with a guy like Musk, someone who hates hearing that doing things the right way actually takes time.
Congress funds and sets goals for an agency. Agency creates rules to accomplish those goals. Said rules are now unconstitutional? Clearly it’s fake news if some sort to support them burning everything down. Same idea with the tweets - “we deleted 50m in contracts. Here is one example of 1M of a title that sounds crazy”
I can't figure it out, is it people who believe this doesn't matter, people who are actively cheering this on, or people who think this won't lead to a good discussion? I can see the argument for the latter, it's ultimately not something the invokes interests as much as outrage, but I don't know how many people are doing it for that reason.
My current theory is that it’s people in the throes of guilt, who voted for this, but can’t handle the daily reminder of the repercussions of their choices on the front page.
I feel guilty! Sitting in my office in Central Europe and flagging the relentless stream of repetitive, off topic content in my feed as it flies by. In so much pain, because I feel immense guilt when I see the constant whinging of those poor censored Americanos in need of a place to express their rage over their own political issues. I can barely handle it.
A huge part of the problem is that this information is not "on the front page". Regular people never see it. Foxnews doesn't run these stories and local TV stations are all mostly owned by Sinclair Broadcast Grp. Only people seeking this news sees it.
This is how we live in different realities. These people don't feel guilt because they live in ignorance.
Political content is technically off topic and shouldn’t be submitted per guidelines, but this seemingly falls into new and interesting. Not that that justifies a flag though.
Doge.gov database left open.
Mind boggles.