Government Waste and Corruption thread

[BloodStripe]

GSA owns and operates a website called SAM.gov. It’s where the Government posts all solicitations and award notices to. The jobs that ran the site were eliminated under DOGE. The website is currently down with no known fix time. Guess you can’t spend money if you can’t post in accordance with law.

 

[AWP]

GSA owns and operates a website called SAM.gov. It’s where the Government posts all solicitations and award notices to. The jobs that ran the site were eliminated under DOGE. The website is currently down with no known fix time. Guess you can’t spend money if you can’t post in accordance with law.

I'm in the site right now or is some functionality disabled?

Home | SAM.gov

 

[BloodStripe]

I'm in the site right now or is some functionality disabled?

Home | SAM.gov

It’s back up. It wouldn’t allow you to log in. The site would load but when you went to further than that, nothing.

 

[BloodStripe]

Is the Easter Egg hunt on the White House lawn considered essential? People are being RIF’d and yet here we are seeing sign ups for it.

 

[BloodStripe]

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/slicing-pizza-musks-infamous-email-153945200.html

They have not been happy about this.

"Ours is a system built on democracy, safeguards, and protections provided by contracts that must be respected," Bombardieri told the Times.“

I rewrote that to say what they actually do and think.

"Ours is a system built on laziness, nepotism, and protections provided by threats of going outside the chain of command," Bombardieri told the Times.

 

[Florida173]

GSA owns and operates a website called SAM.gov. It’s where the Government posts all solicitations and award notices to. The jobs that ran the site were eliminated under DOGE. The website is currently down with no known fix time. Guess you can’t spend money if you can’t post in accordance with law.

Up now? So not really much of a disaster I suppose. Wonder how it got back up if they eliminated all the jobs that were running the site..

 

[BloodStripe]

Up now? So not really much of a disaster I suppose. Wonder how it got back up if they eliminated all the jobs that were running the site..

I mean it was down 7 hours. How they solved it? Not sure. Don’t care really. Like you said it came back.

The point remains though that this administration hasn’t really thought anything beyond step one. Looking at just the DOD how many follow on “guidance” or “updates” has the SECDEF had to send because hasty decisions were made in the name of great political theater? I have a guy living in his house whose HHG was already picked up to PCS only to be told less than a week before moving there’s a hiring freeze and now he can’t travel. Now he’s sleeping on an air mattress for almost a month and has had to go buy a bunch of random shit like cooking things. If he got his stuff back he’d be on the hook to pay for it.

I want to be clear, I agree we need cuts. But this is the largest business in the US. It’s not going out of business tomorrow if you take today to properly plan which hasn’t happened. Instead we are left with disasters all over where the mess needs picked up and additional guidance needs sent.

The 7 p’s - Prior proper planning prevents piss poor performance.

 

[Florida173]

The point remains though that this administration hasn’t really thought anything beyond step one. Looking at just the DOD how many follow on “guidance” or “updates” has the SECDEF had to send because hasty decisions were made in the name of great political theater? I have a guy living in his house whose HHG was already picked up to PCS only to be told less than a week before moving there’s a hiring freeze and now he can’t travel. Now he’s sleeping on an air mattress for almost a month and has had to go buy a bunch of random shit like cooking things. If he got his stuff back he’d be on the hook to pay for it.

These are all independent moving parts though. So Administration can take responsibility, sure, but when it comes to the actual execution of anything it's still these same systems that we're trying to make more efficient failing to deliver as always.

Your guy with the hiring freeze is a thing that happens completely independent of this. I was one of a lot of people that were effected by the CENTCOM hiring freeze way back in the day. Exact same thing you described happened to a friend of mine as she was half way completely moved. I was local to Tampa already and just ended up going to SOCOM instead, so definitely worked out for me. It sucks, and not saying the recent things are a direct result for his current predicament, just that it isn't a thing that doesn't happen anyway.

 

[BloodStripe]

I’m not following how a guy who accepted a job, got PCS orders, shipped HHG (luckily not his car yet) is independent of these rash decisions that are being made? If there’s history of bad decision in the hiring freeze process you would think someone would say hey learn from our failure. It is one example of many that I can easily pull from personal experience where clearly no thought went into any planning beyond what sounds good for Twitter or Truth.

 

[Florida173]

If there’s history of bad decision in the hiring freeze process you would think someone would say hey learn from our failure.

I feel like we're working for different governments

 

[BloodStripe]

I feel like we're working for different governments

Maybe I must felt like being a glass half full type of person tonight.

 

[Muppet]

 

[Locksteady]

Wow.

DOGE whistleblower says he was stalked and threatened after raising alarm

And to think, this is what one person discovered, in just one agency, during DOGE's government-wide strong-arming of access to and control of federal agencies' protected networking systems.

Not a good sign for what they may have been up to in the rest of the agencies that didn't have any folks like this one putting their careers on the line to check their activity and call them out.

Daniel J. Berulis, an employee at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), came forward against recent activity by Elon Musk's DOGE because he said he was concerned its work at NLRB "resulted in a significant cybersecurity breach that likely has and continues to expose our government to foreign intelligence and our nation's adversaries."
Berulis' lawyer, Andrew P. Bakaj from Whistleblower Aid, disclosed: "While my client and my team were preparing this disclosure, someone physically taped a threatening note to Mr. Berulis' home door with photographs—taken via a drone—of him walking in his neighborhood.
The threatening note made clear reference to this very disclosure he was preparing for you, as the proper oversight authority. While we do not know specifically who did this, we can only speculate that it involved someone with the ability to access NLRB systems."

Berulis then said the DOGE staffers requested "the highest level of access and unrestricted access to internal systems" and were given "tenant owner" level accounts allowing them "essentially unrestricted permission to read, copy, and alter data." Berulis' team were told to "stay out of DOGE's way entirely."

He said that their access to these accounts "was not open to discussion."

On March 10, Berulis found that controls to prevent insecure or unauthorized mobile devices from logging into "our tenant" were disabled and that internal alerting, monitoring systems, and multi-factor authentication systems were also changed. He said he then saw a spike in "what appeared to be sensitive data leaving the secured location it is meant to be stored...that kind of spike is extremely unusual because data almost never directly leaves NLRB's databases."

On March 11, Berulis and his team noticed a login attempt from an IP in Primorskiy Krai, Russia. He said the Russian IP address was using a correct NLRB username and password and was coming from a newly created account used for other DOGE-related activity.

Berulis said there were more than 20 log-in attempts to this account, many of which occurred within 15 minutes of the account being created by DOGE engineers.

 

[RackMaster]

As soon as there's "whistleblower" and "Russia", call me skeptical.

 

[AWP]

I'm not saying Russia isn't hoovering up data with DOGE's aid...I have zero proof and so does everyone else.

So...if all of this is happening, all of this bad stuff, you're telling me these concerned citizens didn't take a screen grab, pull out a phone for an illegal* photo, save a log file or two, an email...? Nothing?

Again, maybe it is happening, but we'll never know unless someone starts producing evidence. Which no one is or has to date unless I missed it.

* - if I photograph my empty desk I'm in violation of command policy. That's where I'm going that statement. "Not allowed" if you prefer, or whatever.

 

[Locksteady]

I'm not saying Russia isn't hoovering up data with DOGE's aid...I have zero proof and so does everyone else.

So...if all of this is happening, all of this bad stuff, you're telling me these concerned citizens didn't take a screen grab, pull out a phone for an illegal* photo, save a log file or two, an email...? Nothing?

Not saying that at all, my friend.

Berulis Disclosure to Congress

 

[RackMaster]

There's a lot of possibilities and 1 of them, is all that was fabricated. I hope it's thoroughly investigated and not by a biased witch hunt.

 

[Locksteady]

There's a lot of possibilities and 1 of them, is all that was fabricated. I hope it's thoroughly investigated and not by a biased witch hunt.

I have no doubt that is what he is hoping for, too.

 

[RackMaster]

I have no doubt that is what he is hoping for, too.

Or, here me out... further the Russian collusion hoax, hamper DOGE and the administration from completing their goals. This is an easy attempt compared to those in the past.

Until it's replicated on a different workstation with multiple witnesses. I will doubt the individual. Not my country, I don't have skin in the game.