First Amendment, 403 Forbidden
Thanks for a successful January for Arachne. I appreciate all of the feedback that this newsletter generates, and I hope to keep the momentum up.
Today tips a little bit more in the politics direction than the tech/culture direction, but I think it's extremely important that people are aware of some disruptive changes related to power and technology in the US government.
Last Saturday, reporting from The New York Times revealed that the new Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, had granted access to Elon Musk (and "employees" of his) for an important Treasury department tool used to disburse payments from the department.
Since then, the story has gotten wilder and more upsetting, but I want to provide some context around just the information I wrote above to help you understand what is happening here. So let's breakdown the people, places, and things involved.
Who is Scott Bessent?
Bessent is a career investor/hedge fund guy with sorta an odd path to being entrusted with Trump's Treasury. As other names were being floated for this role, some analysts were surprised at the selection. While we shouldn't necessarily take the votes from confirmation hearings as a barometer for a nominee's cross-aisle appeal, Bessent was confirmed with a 68 to 29 vote, meaning 15 Democrats voted with all the Republicans to confirm him. He has been seen as a level-headed, "adult in the room" type, especially when compared with other Trump cabinet members (Hegseth and Noem) and nominees (Kash Patel, RFK Jr). Also, he's gay!
Who is Elon Musk?
Since you're on this email list I presume I don't need to write that much here. Would "insecure supremacist loser with a desire to be seen as a savant-like genius despite his general inadequacy in many areas of human life, including the love of one's children" suffice? He's also on a bad faith crusade to cut down on government waste and spending under a made up banner called the Department of Government Efficiency.
What's the Treasury Department?
It might be obvious to some, but it certainly has not always been obvious to me what the Treasury actually does. Essentially, they are the country's bank. Federal taxes get collected here, money gets minted, loans and bonds get disbursed, and payments get made. This last bit, for today's story, is the most important.
What is this "tool" that Bessent gave Musk access to?
Let's say you go out to dinner with your friends. Check comes. The place is cash only. You're the only person with cash! All of your friends take the receipt and tally up what to request from you and then you dole out the funds to pay for the meal.
The Treasury department has a tool for paying out things. When the EPA or the FDA or some other federal program needs to accept funding, they make a request of the Treasury, and the Treasury basically writes a big ol' check. It's probably not literally a big ol' check, but you get the idea. Typically it is the job of the requesting department to do the auditing to make sure they are requesting the appropriate sum.
If you are someone interested in curbing government spending, you might position yourself at the front of the Really Big Pipe-O-Money I'm sure that the Treasury has, and you might decide to turn off the spigot to this program or that program. If you hate healthcare for federal prisoners or hate the distribution of malaria drugs in Africa or hate providing veterans with housing, you might turn off those spigots.
Hmm. Who else receives payments from the federal government? Try millions of Americans who receive Social Security benefits. These are individual people who have provided the government their physical addresses and/or their bank information for direct deposits. In order to track fraud, send correct payments, and just generally stay organized, the Treasury has to have a database. That database likely includes millions of first and last names, home addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, bank routing/account numbers, birth dates, Social Security numbers, and in many cases, death dates.
I know I tend to pull a lot of metaphor and analogy out when addressing real world issues. But I want you to imagine for a moment that at the company for which you work, an outside, non-hired person shows up. The CFO hands that person the admin login information for whatever employee management software your company uses. They could, say, make it so that you don't receive your next direct deposit. They could, say, stop making payments to the outside marketing firm your company uses. This is essentially what is happening here.
Elon Musk, not just an unelected man, but a man who hasn't been confirmed to any position in the federal government by elected officials, has been given the Venmo of the US government, and can see all of its transactions. Elon Musk, owner of SpaceX, is a government contractor that has received payments from the very system he was just granted access to. If he wants to stop the flow of payments to his competitors in aerospace, he could. If he wanted to decide that so and so's grandma actually isn't entitled to retirement benefits, or so and so's buddy isn't actually disabled "enough" to receive disability benefits, he could.
Flatly and plainly: this is corruption. Under false pretenses of "curbing government spending," the Treasury Secretary just handed Elon and the president the handles of probably one of the most powerful corruption tools that exists on the planet. It does not matter if he has done anything particularly corrupt since Saturday, it is the very fact that he can at all is catastrophic.
This is just the latest catastrophe, there will be more.
But wait! It gets worse!
Vittoria Elliott
Sunday, Wired reported that 6 boys, appearing to be between 19 and 24, are part of Musk's shadow front of unelected and unvetted private citizens who have been given access to these tools.
These boys, whose ideologies seem to align with Musk's, are bright young people who, yes, are ostensibly adults who can make their own decisions, but who are also caught in the sway of the world's richest man. Not to express too much empathy for a group whose ranks include a guy who wrote about how "the Deep State" thwarted unrepentant sludge puddle Matt Gaetz, but I do not envy the fact that they will now be the targets of state-level disruption from adversaries looking to, I don't know, gain access to the United States' means of funding itself.
You may find yourself wondering why the world's richest man has to rely on teenage boys to help him get things done, even in the federal government. I think there are a few reasons, including that they probably admire him like a hero or that they provide a sense of validation to him that he does not receive from his own family. I think the most Occam's razoriest answer though is simply that he can exploit their labor, pay them nothing, claim the credit for the actually hard stuff, and dispose of them without much recourse when they are no longer useful to him.
Isn't this a tech/society/media/culture newsletter? This feels like a lotta politics!
Yes. Thank you for reminding me. You know what would have really helped in a situation like this? Any kind of federal data privacy law. A law that prevents the government or third parties from gaining access to your data without explicit consent. Or, I don't know, a law that simply prevents non-government officials from gaining access to civilian data?
Let's sprinkle a little bit more tech stuff in here.
Warning: This is about to get preeeeetty weedsy for the average reader. If you don't care about CMS's or web management, this might be boring. Long story short, the Trump administration doesn't really know wtf it's doing with all these sites, and it could be illegal. It definitely should be illegal.
One thing I've been following is this story about content being removed from government sites. As you can see in the article above, thousands of pages have been removed. With my understanding of the relationship between content management systems and legal departments, I can say confidently that the site admins in control of these removals are not going through any sort of rigorous process of review and removal. While I worked with a consumer allergy medication company, we even had to get legal approval to remove pieces of information from the site, including minor details in images, captions, and ALT text.
What appears to be happening is Trump appointed or Trump loyal users are gaining site admin status for each department, practically doing a CMD-F shortcut to find any mentions of vaccines, women, minorities, gender, or sexuality, and hitting a trash icon in their backend content management system. It would be my guess that each department or office has their own CMS, which means going into every single .gov website and ham-fistedly deleting things. It is a cumbersome, tedious process, and not one that a person who maybe had spent time building these sites would really love doing.
I want to draw your attention to one site I have been checking in on since last week. This is the page for the federal government's Small Business Administration. Perhaps you've heard of SBA loans, but the department also provides resources and mentorship to small business upstarts.
The site includes pages of resources for the following groups: women, Native Americans, veterans, military spouses, LGBTQ people, rural business owners, and minority business owners. Considering the Trump administration and the Republicans at best ignore these groups and at worst wish to stamp them out of society, I am surprised these resources are still up. My guess, for right now, is that they simply haven't gotten to them, but this runs counter to another detail I dug up while investigating the site.
Using the Wayback Machine, I was able to find the page for the former Office of Diversity, Inclusion and Civil Rights at SBA. Right now, that page displays a 403 error; the site recognizes the request, it just won't fulfill it. Plus when going to the bio pages for Zina Sutch and Gaye Walker, the two people who ran this office, you get the following message:
These details tell me a few things. One, these site removals are not being done through real site managers, who would see to it that going to these pages provided redirects, even to just the homepage of the site. That's basic practice. Two, the content from these pages is not gone so much as it is hidden. To the end user, these states are basically interchangeable, but on the backend there's a big difference. It tells me that the content of those pages is still sitting in whatever instance of their CMS they are using. But why? Why not just truly go for it and delete it?
Finally, this runs counter to my guess that lackeys haven't gotten to those pages yet because, well, if these other pages were removed, it would have been fairly easy to remove the ones I mentioned above.
I can't draw many meaningful conclusions from all of this that wouldn't be wildly speculative, but what it tells me is that the bad faith actors operating in the Trump administration are not some wildly brilliant super villains. They are clumsy, hyperactive marks. They are beatable and they are ready to be out maneuvered.
That's all for today folks. Shout out the First Amendment for Constitutionally protecting what you just read. Thanks so much for reading. On Thursday, I'll have a piece out I've been meaning to do for sometime. I'll be talking through my own personal AI beliefs, and outline some general practices I try to adhere to. See you then.
