Letter to the editor: Trump, Musk chaos not the right path
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I get that people voted for Donald Trump for change. There is always room for improvement. But chaos usually isn’t the path to greatness.
Big change in big organizations has some rules. First, don’t break the law, and second, follow the time-tested rules for change control for large data systems. In layman’s terms, you use a systematic process. For big system changes, experts isolate changes, identify who is making the change and test it all before implementing. That ensures accountability and accuracy when the program goes live.
Today, Elon Musk’s acolytes are making uncontrolled changes to the code in the Treasury payments system. It’s the system that gets your Social Security or other payments to your bank account. They say they are doing it to add AI capability to catch fraud. But firing the civil servants and coding with intruders isn’t the way to do it. Musk wreaked havoc on Twitter when he took it over. But that was his company.
This is our government. We should not be OK with unelected, unauthorized people having uncontrolled access to personnel data and system code. How do you know that your SS payment won’t get diverted to their personal crypto account? You don’t.
Tell your senators and congresspeople to stop the chaos. And to hold Musk accountable for any data security breaches that occur because of his actions.
Bibiana Boerio
Unity