I haven't looked into this in detail, and I'm not actually sure how unique a situation this is. But, it updated me on "institutional changes to the US that might be quite bad^[1]", and it seemed good if LessWrong folk did some sort of Orient Step on it.

(Please generally be cautious on LessWrong talking about politics. I am interested in people commenting here who have read the LessWrong Political Prerequisites sequence. I'll be deleting or at least unhesitatingly strong downvoting comments that seem to be doing unreflective partisan dunking)

((But, that's not meant to mean "don't talk about political actions." If this is as big a deal as it sounds, I want to be able to talk about "what to do do?". But I want that talking-about-it to feel more like practically thinking through an action space, than blindly getting sucked into a political egregore))

A 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who previously worked for two Elon Musk companies, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the US government, three sources tell WIRED.

Two of those sources say that Elez’s privileges include the ability not just to read but to write code on two of the most sensitive systems in the US government: the Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). Housed on a secure mainframe, these systems control, on a granular level, government payments that in their totality amount to more than a fifth of the US economy.

Despite reporting that suggests that Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task force has access to these Treasury systems on a “read-only” level, sources say Elez, who has visited a Kansas City office housing BFS systems, has many administrator-level privileges. Typically, those admin privileges could give someone the power to log in to servers through secure shell access, navigate the entire file system, change user permissions, and delete or modify critical files. That could allow someone to bypass the security measures of, and potentially cause irreversible changes to, the very systems they have access to.

“You could do anything with these privileges,” says one source with knowledge of the system, who adds that they cannot conceive of a reason that anyone would need them for purposes of simply hunting down fraudulent payments or analyzing disbursement flow.

"Technically I don't see why this couldn't happen," a federal IT worker tells WIRED in a phone call late on Monday night, referring to the possibility of a DOGE employee being granted elevated access to a government server. "If you would have asked me a week ago, I'd have told you that this kind of thing would never in a million years happen. But now, who the fuck knows."

1. ^{^}

   I currently am more anticipating things like "institutional decay / general corruption / loss-of-trust" than "dictatorial takeover." But mostly I'm like "seems like weird and alarming things are happening and it's worth paying attention to with some scout mindset."