Lambert here: Long interview on the payments system debacle as the story broke, well worth a read.
[ADLER-BOLTON:] The Trump administration, through DOGE, is actively reshaping the machinery of the federal government in ways that could cause cascading crises, not just for the so-called economy, but for anyone or thing or industry who relies on the state for survival. And it’s worth saying explicitly from the top, the “waste, fraud and abuse” framework is a cover. Just like we’ve said before, “waste, fraud and abuse” is never about waste. It’s about pretext. It’s about using the language of reform to mask a project of racialized austerity and authoritarian consolidation.
[TANKUS:] So it’s not clear exactly what this means, but the interpretation at the time was that this was the ability to read the code and write the code, and so that they could — and read these systems and just look through these systems, and they could restructure them however they wanted. And that’s enormously dangerous, because you can imagine, there’s the further layer, these are 20-something programmers, they don’t particularly have familiar[ity] with the underlying programming language, which is called COBOL, which was introduced literally in like the early 60s.
But most importantly, forget the language, because there’s all this BS, beyond the BS of like, oh, well, you can get an AI thing to write the code or whatever, it’s that specifically, there’s what’s called business logic. And the concept of business logic is that there’s like specific things that have been written into the system. So for example, you might have a programming language or just abstract English, but in Death Panel — actually, this is a great example. The phrase “death panel,” the kind of business logic within Death Panel, the Death Panel community, is that Death Panel is the name of the podcast. It is the name of the podcast. The phrase “death panel,” the words “death panel” don’t inherently mean podcast. I mean, when you read it, the reference you’re making with that is the Obamacare era debates over quote unquote death panels, and how, for example, insurance companies, as we know, have their own death panels essentially, but without the specific context, without — you can kind of call it the business logic of the Death Panel podcast, you don’t know that Death Panel refers to a podcast.
And this is kind of a simple, silly example, but it’s really the fundamental issue is that there’s a thousand different things, of this means that, this means that, if this then that, that are not inherent to the language, they’re not inherent to the English language, and they’re not inherent to any programming language, and they’re not inherent to COBOL, but they are relevant in the specific systems. And these systems have been constructed, with some updates, but fundamentally throughout the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000, to this day, and they’ve been changed at various points to do different things.
And the documentation, quote unquote, of how these systems work are the people themselves, are the long-standing, as people like to say, the graybeards, who understand these systems, who know how to program them. And to have some 20-somethings who are going to come in and say, oh, we’re going to do a whole bunch of stuff and we’re going to launch up Deep Seek or whatever, and have it start changing code for us, is fundamentally terrifying. We’ll get into this more, but the reporting that I did, that Wired did, the others did, essentially came to like the quote unquote graybeards, the people with expertise in this system, were helping DOGE do what they wanted to do out of terror that DOGE would just go ahead and do what they wanted to do on their own and break these systems. So it seemed over time, but absolutely was not clear in the moment, February 3rd, that the people there were taking the lesser evil of helping them — kind of helping them do what they wanted to do, just so they wouldn’t fundamentally break the systems.
So there’s that fundamental danger, but it’s also just these are very complicated systems, and to try to rush through changes that usually take months and years of testing, of running systems concurrently, it’s an absolute nightmare. And so the idea that one of these people would have direct ability to read and write, and not to mention read and write, also the interpretation being that they could download all the data, that they could change data, go into those systems and change data, which could have all sorts of deleterious effects on people’s lives, was fundamentally terrifying.
And over that weekend, people started — you know, people within the administration started kind of having a very vague concept that there were issues here, and that people were freaked out about what they were doing. And so they started anonymously leaking to these mainstream journalists that, oh, don’t worry, they only had read access, not write access. Now the issue there is, first of all, you can read the code and come up with ways to change it with read access. And if you’ve already gotten rid of someone like Lebryk, there’s no protection that the code isn’t just going to be changed at your direction, and that seems to be precisely what happened.
But also, read access is still the ability to go and download the data. It’s just not the ability to change it in the system itself, or at least it could be without much more detailed understanding and reporting on exactly what people mean by these terms.
And of course, you know, the mainstream journals don’t really have a sense. They’re going by what sources are telling them, and those sources are manipulating them and lying to them. So it’s still a fundamentally dangerous situation, but the second layer was Wired says actually, it’s read and write access, this sort of anonymous source thing that it’s just read access isn’t true. And my sources that had come overnight confirmed the same thing.
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