Toxic Work Atmosphere

You know vaguely, if you're like me, about the DOGEboys who have been uploading huge amounts of data from the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, and voter data from some states, and dumping it all into a "data lake" of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Servces at the Department of Homeland Security, where they keep records of interactions between immigrants and the USCIS, information that agencies like ICE, if they wanted to commit serious violations of the governments's privacy rules, could put together and use (for one thing) to geolocate undocumented immigrants and hunt them down, and you've probably heard vaguely about this week's whistleblower complaint from Charles Borges, chief information officer of the SSA, documenting how Social Security data had been illegally uploaded to a cloud server where it could possibly be hacked by who knows what kind of reprobates, though not necessarily any more malign than the Boys who are seemingly authorized to collect it.

Borges has now resigned, and it was his letter that got my attention; it was an "involuntary resignation", he said:

After reporting internally to management and externally to regulators serious data security and integrity concerns impacting our citizens' most sensitive personal data, I have suffered exclusion, isolation, internal strife, and a culture of fear, creating a hostile work environment and making work conditions intolerable....

I have been made aware of several projects and incidents which may constitute violations of federal statutes or regulations, involve the potential safety and security of high value data assets in the cloud, possibly provided unauthorized or inappropriate access to agency enterprise data storage solutions, and may involve unauthorized data exchange with other agencies. As these events evolved, newly installed leadership in IT and executive offices created a culture of panic and dread, with minimal information sharing, frequent discussions on employee termination, and general organizational dysfunction. Executives and employees are afraid to share information or concerns on questionable activities for fear of retribution or termination, and repeated requests by me for visibility into these events have been rebuffed or ignored by agency leadership, with some employees directed not to reply to my queries.

We've seen bunches of resignation letters showing up on social media in recent years, in a pretty regular format ("it has been my honor..."). I've never seen anything like this before. This is the trauma Christian nationalist Russell Vought said last year he wanted to inflict on "the bureaucrats" 

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in a video revealed by ProPublica and the research group Documented in October. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma.”

and which he is now overseeing as head of the Office of Management and Budget and Elon Musk's replacement as unofficial leader of DOGE; he and the Boys are the newly installed leadership to which the letter refers, along with whoever he has managed to hire in the quest formerly known as Schedule F to replace qualified civil servants with certified Trump loyalists—

For the Record: Just in case they delete the OP

Just to be clear, I am not opposed to the safety and security of US borders. I just think we've got that, and have had it since 1815. This is not a security issue. No terrorist has ever made it into our territory from Mexico (McCain kept insisting 9/11 hijackers entered from Canada, but he was wrong). They've all come by plane. Dangerous drugs, which often used to be snuck across in the desert or sent across wall barriers by catapult, now pass mostly through designated border control posts in legitimate-looking cars or arrive via the postal service. It might help our national security to have more immigrants to preserve our vital fruit and vegetable crops before we start having to import all our tomatoes and cucumbers, and ensure the avocado toast supply. It would help our national security to have more immigrants, period. Who's going to pay the payroll tax to keep us all alive when we're really too old to work? Don't talk to me about a few thousand people running away from gang violence in El Salvador, tell me about social security!

What Trump wants isn't for "the citizens of our country" or he'd pay some attention to the security of the thousands whose jobs depend on imported steel. All he wants ("We wants it!") is more excitement.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Tom, this is not really helping

By Directioner via WeHeartIt.

Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, Mystax Contrarianisticus, has a fun take:

Thank God for WikiLeaks.

After all these months of nailbiting over what kind of monstrous evil Hillary might be revealed by the transcripts of her secret meetings with the employees of the Goldman Sachs firms, now that WikiLeaks has published them it turns out she's nothing but a left-deviationist Friedmanite! Exactly what the mustache ordered!

I confess, I was starting to wonder about what the real Hillary Clinton — the one you never get to see behind closed doors — really stood for. 

Right, how come the Clinton we see behind closed doors is never the real one? Wait what?

Poseur or prophet? Potentially pwned putz?

They're already giving young Paul Ryan a hard time for wanting to gut the Social Security system although when he was a teenager and his father died he collected Social Security survivor benefits himself, and he didn't even need the money. Like it's ironic or something. This is unfair on just a massive series of levels, and somebody really needs to speak out about it.

In the first place, Ryan has never wanted to gut the Social Security system. To the contrary he wants it to live forever. He just doesn't want it to turn over all its money to a bunch of stupid old people!

He believes, as perhaps Congress's number one expert in cranky-person economics,  that it should have a more legitimately financial-type purpose, like providing a constant supply [jump]

From CoinNews.

What Atrios said

I mean, sometimes there isn't really anything to add.

The smart bet in this country for decades has been to find new and creative ways to siphon taxpayer money into your pockets. That's what education privatization is about. That's what social security privatization is about.

Except all the other stuff—prisons, mail, health care, defense services, diplomatic protection, tax refund processing... Granted, once you get started it could keep you up all night...