Enemy of the people: Elon Musk

[Winehole23]

The studio is staffed under the same hiring authority that ran Doge. The studio’s spending, and any contracts it holds with outside vendors, do not appear in the federal contracting database USAspending or in any other public-facing record of US government spending.

[Winehole23]

The use of commercial tools on the sites departs from federal web-team conventions. Davisson, the senior counsel at the EPIC, described the studio’s work as “trying to establish their own sort of fly-by-night version of what federal agencies normally do with added tracking technologies and less oversight”.


This is most apparent in the NDS’s employment of user tracking prior to outreach from the Guardian, such that when a member of the public visited one of the studio’s federal websites, a commercial tool called PostHog recorded what they did on the page.


PostHog’s session-recording feature, which can replay every click, scroll and keystroke of a visitor’s time on a webpage, is installed in the code of all four sites and enabled on two of them. On the remaining two, the recording is held inactive only by a single setting inside PostHog’s dashboard, which can be changed by whoever controls the website at any time.


The Guardian emailed PostHog for comment on its apparent provision of tracking tools to the NDS, but received no response.

[Winehole23]

lock him up

A 2002 federal law, the E-Government Act, requires any federal agency that collects personal information through a website to first publish a written privacy impact assessment explaining what it collects and where the information goes. The Privacy Act of 1974 requires a separate, parallel public notice, a “system of records notice”, describing the records the agency keeps. A 2010 office of management and budget memorandum extended both requirements to federal agencies’ use of commercial web-tracking tools, including the kind that PostHog provides.

The Guardian could find no such filings for the studio’s web-tracking layer. None of the four sites carry a privacy impact assessment naming PostHog or describing the IP addresses and on-site activity the tool collects. None of the four are covered by a system of records notice that addresses what is collected or where it goes.

The one published privacy instrument that relates to any of the four programmes,a treasury notice for the Trump Accounts programme, describes how the children’s-investment programme is administered but does not name PostHog and does not describe the tracking on trumpaccounts.gov at all.

Davisson, the EPIC attorney, called the studio’s failure to publish such a notice “a pretty clearcut violation of section 208” of the E-Government Act, adding: “There’s just no suggestion that they’re trying to comply in good faith with any of their obligations when it comes to the collection of personal information.”

[Winehole23]

The studio has also built versions of services legally assigned to other agencies, including a passports website, and a copy of Login.gov, the gateway more than 150 million Americans use to sign in to federal services, the latter reportedly being overseen by a former Doge engineer who moved to the studio.

The NDS has also apparently built a copy of vote.gov, the federal voter-registration site that by law belongs to an independent bipartisan commission inside a website site only accessible with a White House login.

A federal voter-registration system run from inside the White House, with iden y and citizenship checks routed through systems the administration controls, could let an in bent see who is registering, or check their registration, in the weeks before an election.

Public ownership records maintained by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) list the executive office of the president as the registrant of the studio’s sites, including passports.gov and the vote.gov copy, meaning that the office controls the domains. Questions remain about the sort of access that this could give the White House to voter registration data.

John Davisson, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), said the studio’s approach risked creating a second version “a whole sort of second skunk-works version of the federal government with all these shady tracking technologies and outside of the parameters of normal federal privacy laws”.

A skunk works is a figurative term for an experimental department within a larger organization with freedom to operate outside normal procedure.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...eillance-fears

[Winehole23]

Corporate donations to government, as one does now

The Trump administration has spoken with SpaceX about donating stock to the children’s savings accounts known as Trump Accounts that are expected to launch next week, a person familiar with the matter said.


Any donation would cement the ongoing reconciliation between Elon Musk and President Donald Trump following the implosion of their relationship last year. The billionaire was an early ally and donor to the president, but left acrimoniously after a four-month stint as a special government employee running the contentious budget-slashing effort known as DOGE.


It’s unclear whether Musk has agreed to contribute any SpaceX stock to Trump Accounts, which officials are expected to bring online as soon as next Monday, or how a contribution might be structured. The Treasury Department has partnered with Bank of New York Mellon and Robinhood on the rollout, in progress since Congress passed the GOP legislation that established them last summer.
Spokespeople for SpaceX, the White House and the Treasury Department, which oversees the Trump Accounts, did not comment.

https://www.semafor.com/article/06/2...trump-accounts

[Winehole23]

DOGE crapified your weather forecast

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was among several agencies gutted by the Trump Administration’s Department of Government Efficiency in 2025. That February, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management abruptly fired 880 NOAA employees. Two months later, NOAA approved over 1,000 deferred resignations or buyouts. These sweeping staff cuts forced the National Weather Service (NWS), the forecasting arm of NOAA, to halt or reduce weather balloon launches at 11 locations.

“We’re going to lose data because of this staffing,” Michael Morgan, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and former NOAA administrator, said at the time. “And that loss of data then translates into less precise forecasts, more uncertainties in the forecast.”

https://gizmodo.com/heres-why-weather-forecasts-have-seemed-so-inaccurate-lately-2000779436

[Blake]

DOGE crapified your weather forecast

https://gizmodo.com/heres-why-weather-forecasts-have-seemed-so-inaccurate-lately-2000779436

WHY DOES THE PUBLIC NEED NOAA TO TELL THEM A HURRICANE IS COMING. WE CAN ALL JUST LOOK OUT OUR WINDOWS AND SEE IT.

[Winehole23]

claiming that shuttering USAID saved lives

El0n is shook

[Winehole23]

DOGE deleted to cover data privacy crimes possibly including exfiltration of sensitive private information

On April 14, 2025, a federal IT staffer filed a whistleblower complaint with Congress alleging that members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had accessed and possibly exfiltrated sensitive information from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

Just days after filing the complaint, Dan Berulis, the whistleblower, found the brakes on his car had been cut after getting into a minor accident near his home. The complaint, which went public in an NPR story the day after it was filed, caused an outcry, with members of Congresscalling for an investigation. The following month, in May 2025, FedScoop reported that the NLRB’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) opened an investigation. It remains ongoing.

Just days after filing the complaint, Dan Berulis, the whistleblower, found the brakes on his car had been cut after getting into a minor accident near his home. The complaint, which went public in an NPR story the day after it was filed, caused an outcry, with members of Congress calling for an investigation. The following month, in May 2025, FedScoop reported that the NLRB’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) opened an investigation. It remains ongoing.




In April 2026, though, the Government Accountability Office (GAO)—a federal agency within the legislative branch that performs audits and investigations for Congress— published its own report about DOGE’s access to the NLRB’s systems, led “National Labor Relations Board Detailees Did Not Access IT Systems Between April 16 and July 25, 2025.” The report con uously only covers the time period immediately following Berulis’ complaint, and does not address any DOGE activity before that point.

https://www.wired.com/story/federal-...-were-deleted/