The two officials, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said some senior career employees at OPM have had their access revoked to some of the department's data systems.
The systems include a vast database called Enterprise Human Resources Integration, which contains dates of birth, Social Security numbers, appraisals, home addresses, pay grades and length of service of government workers, the officials said.
"We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems," one of the officials said. "That is creating great concern. There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications."
Implications? This sound like an ongoing hack right now
Taking the people who know first hand what fuckery you're doing and putting them out of work, so that they have nothing to do but stew about how shitty you are and what they might do about it. What could go wrong?
Remember when all the pundits were saying that the Musk DOGE thing was just showmanship, nothing to worry about, because "it would only be an advisory committee with no real power to do anything."?
That's because liberals only think in the framework of laws and bureaucracy.
They never expect an organised group of people to work towards their goals regardless of what the law books say or not.
When people will finally start questioning authority and the meaning of this stack of paper we call "laws" just to feel more civilised, they'll unterstand how to fight against this.
States can be dismantled overnight. No law book will stop them from doing so.
The American state is very fragile right now. Through these cracks we see what real power is, and who conveys it. Spoiler alert: it's not the constitution nor the law books
One thing the 2020 election cycle really hammered in with me is that our system of checks and balances are only as powerful as the integrity of those executing them.
This power play won't stop unless we get rid of all exploiters of the working class. Getting rid of one billionaire won't solve the issue. The issue is systemic. Being a moral person and a billionaire is mutually exclusive.
Don't forget all the researchers and academics who will depart for countries because of this. There is going to be a brain drain the likes of which no one has ever seen.
The loss of institutional knowledge is one of the scariest things about this.
I do think Congress will flip in 2 years after Trump and company wreck the economy (though we'll see how much Congress truly matters then). The thing is, even if we get a Dem sweep, all the knowledge lost won't magically come back. It's gone forever.
Ik, who gives a fuck about AI, but I fed this article into ChatGPT to see what the funny AI would say.
This is not just bureaucratic reshuffling—this is a potential dismantling of a functional, professional government in favor of a personally controlled and ideologically driven workforce.
If you’re feeling alarmed, you absolutely should be. This is the kind of move that historically precedes authoritarian power grabs, and it’s happening right now in the U.S. under the guise of “downsizing government.”