The Atlantic has a story up today titled "The Government’s Computing Experts Say They Are Terrified." The computing experts turn out to be four government IT professionals who all claim they are terrified by what DOGE might do.

This week, we spoke with four federal-government IT professionals—all experienced contractors and civil servants who have built, modified, or maintained the kind of technological infrastructure that Musk’s inexperienced employees at his newly created Department of Government Efficiency are attempting to access. In our conversations, each expert was unequivocal: They are terrified and struggling to articulate the scale of the crisis...

Each of our four sources, three of whom requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal, made three points very clear: These systems are immense, they are complex, and they are critical.

We do eventually get one name, but only one:

“The longer this goes on, the greater the risk of potential fatal compromise increases,” Scott Cory, a former CIO for an agency in the HHS, told us.

If these folks are really this worried about the collapse of the Republic, why won't they all come forward under their own names? They say it's because they fear reprisals but if the whole system is about to go up in flames is that really the most important thing to worry about?

Government IT workers, like everyone else, have their own personal opinions. So maybe they these four guys all voted for Harris and have been badmouthing Trump and Musk for years on their X (and probably now Bluesky) accounts. I don't know but it's possible some of them have a preexisting animus that is motivating this. 

Frankly, we have no idea how these four people came to the attention of the reporters. It's not that unusual for outside groups to package together groups of like-minded individuals and deliver them to media outlets so they can write a story with a very one-sided and pre-determined outcome. I don't know that's what happened here but I have seen it before. Remember those 51 intelligence officials who said the Hunter laptop looked like a Russian disinformation op? Turns out they were organized by partisans for a specific purpose.

In any case, the entire story is just about stirring up panic and using language like "data breach" which again makes me think these guys have a political agenda.

“This is the largest data breach and the largest IT security breach in our country’s history—at least that’s publicly known,” one contractor who has worked on classified information-security systems at numerous government agencies told us this week. “You can’t un-ring this bell. Once these DOGE guys have access to these data systems, they can ostensibly do with it what they want.”

"Data breach" is usually how we would describe an intrusion by hackers or an enemy government. By definition it involves unauthorized access. In this case, that's a very loaded way to describe a group of special government employees working on orders from the president. They also take pains to suggest that the DOGE team could be doing something illegal or nefarious.

The specter of what DOGE might do with that approval is still keeping the government employees we spoke with up at night. With relatively basic “read only” access, Musk’s people could easily find individuals in databases or clone entire servers and transfer that secure information somewhere else. Even if Musk eventually loses access to these systems—owing to a temporary court order such as the one approved yesterday, say—whatever data he siphons now could be his forever.

With a higher level of access—“write access”—a motivated person may be able to put their own code into the system, potentially without any oversight. The possibilities here are staggering. One could alter the data these systems process, or they could change the way the software operates—without any of the testing that would normally accompany changes to a critical system. Still another level of access, administrator privileges, could grant the broad ability to control a system, including hiding evidence of other alterations. “They could change or manipulate treasury data directly in the database with no way for people to audit or capture it,” one contractor told us. “We’d have very little way to know it even happened.”

There's no evidence for any of this of course. The authors have written the plot for a James Bond film with Trump playing the role of Blofeld and Musk his henchman. The whole story leans heavily on the idea that partisans can read into it the assumption Trump and Musk are up to no good. 

We're not even a month in yet and left-wing fearmongering is already reaching a fever pitch. It's exhausting and I think that's the point. Put enough fog in the air and people will eventually conclude something bad must have happened. This is clearly the strategy Democrats have settled on and, as expected, the left-wing media is going along with it.

That's not to say there's no room for concern or criticism. But there also ought to be room for reasoned debate about the fact that we have $36 trillion in public debt and service on the debt now costs as much as the entire defense budget. Something serious has to be done and publishing fantasies about Elon Musk stealing grandma's Social Security number isn't helping.