from Hacker News

Onlookers freak out as 25-year-old set loose on Treasury computer system

by brohee on 2/4/25, 6:18 PM with 133 comments

• by dang on 2/4/25, 8:04 PM

  Recent and related:

  The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42910910 - Feb 2025 (2691 comments)

• by ActionHank on 2/4/25, 7:00 PM

  I think it's less about "25-year-old" and more about unvetted stranger with no clearance given unfettered read-write access to the money of a country apparently not run by a dictator, but elected officials(none of which were involved).

• by Kelvin506 on 2/5/25, 1:33 AM

  The thing I find most worrisome is that Musk, as part of SpaceX, was denied security clearance because of his extensive foreign ties. Now he has effectively-unsupervised access to the entire federal system.

• by emsign on 2/4/25, 7:01 PM

  When Americans voted for crazy, did they expect anything less than crazy? I don't understand how you can be shocked.

• by philk10 on 2/4/25, 7:00 PM

  If a 55 year old with no knowledge of the system was set loose I'd still be freaking out

• by imglorp on 2/4/25, 7:23 PM

  > the ability to change code for the purposes of rooting out fraudulent payments or analyzing disbursement flow

  Or making and hiding fraudulent payments.

• by nikisweeting on 2/4/25, 7:01 PM

  Why do people keep harping on the age. I don't care about how old they are, I know plenty of cracked teenagers. I care that they have no constitutional authority.

• by brohee on 2/4/25, 6:19 PM

  I had to truncate the title a bit from:

  'Go haywire': Onlookers freak out as 25-year-old set loose on Treasury computer system

• by bublyboi on 2/5/25, 4:27 AM

  Having RW permissions doesn’t mean this kid is different from the other engineers working on the project, or that he can circumvent check-in policies regarding code reviews and signoff.

• by cozzyd on 2/4/25, 7:10 PM

  If it's the person with the obviously named GitHub account (age seems plausibly matching), someone should tell Trump he's working on (well, at least cloned) a DeepSeek-related project. (The picture, now taken down but still available in caches, also matches the picture shown in various media, though I can't verify that the media has the right picture, so I won't link to the account).

  Unsurprisingly, they have a YOLO badge.

  edit: ok, based on Wired reporting, https://github.com/markoelez must be him...

• by zingababba on 2/4/25, 7:11 PM

  He should be using H1-Bs

• by Workaccount2 on 2/4/25, 7:12 PM

  Story and politics aside, we shouldn't allow partisan blogs that larp as news media to be posted here. These guys and their conservative counterparts are the lifeblood of the misinformation war dividing the country.

• by astroid on 2/4/25, 9:22 PM

  I quite literally don't believe this. I fully believe he has 'read' access, but extraordinary claims require some evidence.

  I just read the article and they go to great pains to make it -seem- like they have first party confirmation and not hearsay, but it was breaking my brain trying to determine with certainty.

  I just asked copilot to review the article looking for 1st party witnesses, and it said there weren't any.

  Then I asked it to summarize each 'witness' from the article, whether they are first party, and if not what degree of sepearatoin they have. This is what it said:

  Sure, let's break down the key witnesses and their claims:

  David Lebryk: Former acting Deputy Secretary of the Treasury. He resigned after resisting granting DOGE access to the Treasury data1. His claim is based on his direct experience and position within the Treasury Department, making him a first party witness.

  Ron Wyden: The highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee. He expressed concerns about the potential misuse of the data by DOGE1. Wyden is a second party witness, as he is commenting on the situation based on his oversight role but not direct involvement.

  Anonymous AP Sources: Two people familiar with the situation spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. They claim that DOGE has gained access to sensitive Treasury data1. These sources are second party witnesses, as they have indirect knowledge of the situation.

  X User (@rayinsideout): Revealed names of alleged DOGE employees who accessed the Treasury payment system. Musk accused this user of committing a crime by sharing private information2. This user is a third party witness, as they are relaying information they claim to have obtained from other sources.

  Scott Bessent: Treasury Secretary who granted DOGE access to the data. His actions are central to the claims, but he hasn't made public statements about the specifics of the access3. Bessent is a first party witness due to his direct involvement in the decision.

  So it sounds like all of this is based of David Lebryk's claims, and the media contorting themselves to make this a 'thing'.

  I am willing to hear actual evidence, but this list doesn't sway me and this feels a lot like "things people want to believe" more than "things that happened".

  Time will tell I guess.

• by cynicalsecurity on 2/4/25, 7:00 PM

  People voted for this, didn't they?

• by erulabs on 2/4/25, 7:05 PM

  The "code that directs Social Security payments, tax returns and other payments owed to Americans" is "COBOL and ... it has been such a struggle to maintain it [because it was] developed for decades with very little documentation"

  But having a SpaceX engineer start a rewrite is... bad?

  I freak out when some minor component of my company becomes abandonware. When no one can or wants to read or work on the codebase, it's _time for it to die_. Either this good news, or you have no experience maintaining existing critical software infrastructure.

  As for the "unelected" argument... Did anyone ever elect any of the software engineers who worked on this codebase? It has always been federal employees appointed by federal agencies. Some acronyms changed.

• by michaeljx on 2/4/25, 7:01 PM

  Having a young optimistic uncynical person, untainted by years of painful lessons and bitterness, attempt to fix these systems with raw speed and brute urgency, might be the exact shock a system like the public sector needs.

  People complain about Facebook's move fast and break things philosophy whenever something bad happens, completely ignoring the fact that they are a trillion dollar corporation that 20 years ago did not exist.

  Sometime you just have to get rid of the guardrails and YOLO it