Year: 2025

Categories
Government

Dear Buddy Carter

Screenshot of interview CNN had with Buddy Carter

Messages to my House Representative

Disregarding law, disregarding Congressional oversight, and disregarding just plain common sense, Trump is allowing Elon Musk and his kids to decimate our working government. Last night it was the CFPB.

This is the same organization that has helped consumers recover billions from financial services that have harmed us. This is also the same organization that would oversee Musk’s own entry into payment systems, which is likely why it was targeted.

Why does Musk have such power? Because the United States has been bought for a mere $280 million dollars by Musk, while Trump sits in the White House, trying to remember why he’s there. And Musk wants his money’s worth.

You, in Congress, could stop all this nonsense. You could, as a group, show a little bit of courage, as well as responsibility to the people who elected you to office. No, instead, you put your party over the people. You put Trump and Musk over the people.

All that matters now, to you, is what Trump/Musk want, they get. No matter how harmful to the people, no matter the lasting damage.

Instead of celebrating the 250th anniversary of our country, we get to watch it be destroyed.

More lawsuits will come from these actions, and the judges—appointed by both Republican and Democratic presidents—recognize what’s happening and are doing their best to enforce the rule of law…the same rule of law you just don’t give a damn about.

What did you say in your Sunday newsletter?

Together with Elon Musk, a business mastermind, President Trump is delivering on his promise to the American people that he will remove unnecessary government spending and save taxpayers money.

Save us money? The billions of dollars recovered for US taxpayers, that kind of money? The money to ensure our water is clean, our air breathable, that people aren’t harmed by defective products, to help farmers and small businesses, to ensure corporations don’t harm people, to help in disasters, to help kids go to school, to provide healthcare and financial stability for the nation’s retired community.

That money?

No, that money won’t be saved. The only money ‘saved’ will be tax cuts for you and your other rich friends.

Categories
Government

A bell that cannot be unrung

Screenshot of interview CNN had with Buddy Carter

Among the many lawsuits against the Trump/Musk actions is one filed by the AFL/CIO and other labor organizations and unions against the Department of Labor for DOGE access to what should be confidential and private data.

In response, the government attempted to blow off the concerns by stating that DOGE folk are now employed by the DOL, but this is cold comfort when it’s obvious these people have an original allegiance to DOGE/Musk, and only a tenuous at best connection to the requirements of federal employment.

In the reply to the government response, the lawyers for the AFL/CIO highlight the real problem with the continue DOGE access at federal agencies.

Moreover, Defendants’ reassurance that all is well because DOGE1
personnel who have been granted broad access to the Department of Labor’s systems have been detailed to that agency is both cold comfort and legally insufficient. As a consequence of DOGE’s establishment as a free-floating component within the Executive Office of the President, it lacks the requisite authority to detail its personnel to federal agencies and, for the same reason, agencies may not receive those detailees.

 

Accordingly, the violations causing Plaintiffs irreparable harm, including under the Privacy Act, will persist, absent intervention from the Court.

These faux employees that Musk bullied into each department with Trump’s willing compliance have not undergone the regular reviews, with its checks and balances, for federal employment.  They have also not demonstrated a respect for law, particularly the stringent laws that guard the privacy and confidentiality of government systems.

And what harm is it to give DOGE this access?

Many of Plaintiffs’ members will be chilled from reporting legal violations by their employers and prevented from exercising their rights to seek the Department’s protections if they know that records memorializing their complaints may no longer be secure on Department servers (and, indeed, may be made freely available to individuals concurrently serving as executives of companies subject to Department enforcement).

Executives, such as Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, which had over 600 workplace injuries unconvered by a Reuters’ investigation, as reported to OSHA, an organization contained within the Department of Labor.

The response also notes another item of importance: that DOGE has no authority to employ people within the federal government. And federal departments have no authority to accept these people as employees.

Defendants argue that, because DOGE personnel at the Department have been “detailed” from DOGE to the Department, those individuals are functioning as employees of the Department and, accordingly, may lawfully perform Department functions and access Department systems. … But DOGE is not authorized to detail its personnel to the Department, or any federal agency, and the Department was not authorized to accept their services

So the employment of people such as Thomas Shedd, who I have written about previously, is inherently illegal, as is allowing them unlimited access to our data and our data systems.

As was noted in the response, once data has been exposed the damage is done and can’t be undone, “a bell that cannot be unrung.”

We shouldn’t have to sue to stop these people. The President’s first duty is to have a care for the American people. And Congress should be stepping up to prevent such atrocities, but evidently, it’s more concerned about $15 million dollars in condoms for the Taliban per Buddy Carter, my own Republican representative to the House.

 

Categories
Government Political

Georgia Republican attack on trans kids

Now that Georgia Republicans no longer have abortion as their ‘moral cause’ they’re attacking trans people. The same people who they’ve ignored for decades but—all of a sudden!—have become the seeming greatest need and threat to Georgians!

Not the price of eggs any more, is it?

According to the Georgia Recorder, the GOP-controlled Senate just passed a bill banning trans girls and women from playing in any women’s sporting team. But more than that, they’re going after trans kids healthcare:

Savannah Republican Sen. Ben Watson has filed a bill that would ban the use of puberty blockers or hormone therapy on minors.

So, something that Republicans didn’t care about for decades now is an immediate problem, so much so that they insert themselves not only between patients and doctors but between parents of the kids and the doctors…solely to have some ‘moral cause’.

Without that ‘moral cause’, they don’t have something to drive hysteria—some made-up threat to distract and to deflect from the very real harms being inflicted on you by the state, by Congressional Republicans, and by Trump and Musk.

Georgia GOP-controlled Senate passes ban on trans girls from school sports teams

 

Categories
Government Legal, Laws, and Regs

Trump’s and Musk’s Betrayal

It was a tip to Washington Post that gives us an indication of what’s really happening with DOGE.

Musk’s claims of changing code and stopping payments was nothing more than a distraction, a way of keeping our focus on what one hand is doing while the other operates freely.

Trump’s blathering out developing Gaza, or the photogenic migrant raids and talk of El Salvador prisons—while heinous and shocking to see and hear from a US President—also serve to distract us fom what DOGE is really doing.

They’re siphoning up all our data, every bit of it. They may be running it through AI systems, true, but that’s not the problem: the problem is all that data is leaving federal systems and being transferred to cloud systems and computers that Musk controls, not us.

Microsoft Azure is a cloud-based platform. This means all that data is being moved outside of strict federal protections and into privately held accounts on Microsoft’s cloud system.

We thought we had stopped them in court, but even that was a distraction. How Musk must have laughed when lawyers out to protect our data inadvertently gave DOGE permission to do what they really wanted to do in the first place: get the data.

As Wired notes:

Speaking of data: They want that, too. DOGE agents are installed at or have visited the Treasury Department, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Small Business Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Labor. Probably more. They’ve demanded data, sensitive data, payments data, and in many cases they’ve gotten it—the pursuit of data as an end unto itself but also data that could easily be used as a competitive edge, as a weapon, if you care to wield it.

The tip was about the Department of Education, but we’ve heard about DOGE people in the Treasury and Medicare/Medicaid systems. We know they’ve already grabbed data related to USAID. And Musk has bragged about accessing all government systems—ostensibly to improve them, but in actuality, to get the data. All that data.

All the information about student loans, all the information about grants, all Medicare and Medicaid payments—and the procedures, diagnoses, and treatments related to those payments.

All of our tax filings, our social security payments and records, any government expenditure, FEMA claims…all of it being siphoned off and sent to the cloud. Not only data about government employees, but data about us.

All corporate data, including taxes, government fees and fines, confidential decisions and actions related to farm and factory.

Data from and about banks and financial institutions, including payment details if we have direct deposit.

And once it’s out there, there’s nothing we can do to grab it back and keep it safe.

We are witnessing the greatest data breach in history, and it’s happening not because of hackers from China or Russia, but from agents in our own federal government. Agents put there by Musk with President Trump’s approval.

What a profound betrayal of the people of this country.

Categories
Government Legal, Laws, and Regs

Oh geez, lawyers, please next time talk to the techs

Adding on to my previous post, about the lawsuit against Treasury for allowing DOGE free reign in sensitive systems, we’re now hearing that DOGE people are illegally accessing sensitive data at the Department of Education, and feeding it wholesale—without scrubbing it of identifying information—into a Microsoft Azure cloud-based AI tool of some kind.

In other words, sending all that confidential and protected data to an external data system outside of the control of the federal government.

Why should we stop the Russians and Chinese hacking our systems when Musk is putting the data out for easy access to anyone who promises to perform some gee wizbang tech voodoo on it? Now we can save them time by eliminating any federal protection.

Oh, but we’re told, these DOGE people are ’employees’ who have been properly vetted. That’s the same gotcha that I mentioned would happen to get around the court order in the lawsuit I covered.

But wait…there’s more.

The original lawsuit was about DOGE people _accessing_ data. But the court order allowed ‘read only’ access, which actually plays into the Trump/Musk minion hands.

How did this happen? Why did we allow this to continue even when there’s a court case to stop it?

Because we got caught up about the script kiddies changing the code, and we forgot that the real danger was them vacuuming up every bit of confidential data about all of us, and offloading it to an external cloud-based system. And we got so caught up in them mucking with such a key system in the Treasury, we neglected to extend that concern to all systems.

As for the employee-trick, what DOGE is doing is grossly illegal for _anyone_, even DOGE people masquerading as government employees. I have to wonder if these people realize that they could be liable for possible criminal penalties for their activities?

Oh right, Trump will just pardon the bunch.

The lawyers for Treasury system lawsuit need to either amend their complaint or expand it, or a new set of lawyers needs to make a broader lawsuit that would encompass all data systems in the federal government.

And next time…talk to the damn techs, first.