zzrrt

I think my understanding of the paperwork and authority has grown, and I can agree with some of what you're saying, but I think there's still a story here.

> But there is no rule that says someone must be an employee of an agency to assist in shutting down the agency under delegated authority from the cabinet official that oversees the agency.

So the delegated authority from Rubio is what made it legal for him to shut things down? He wasn't appointed and delegated until March 18th. He started there on January 28th. Sometime around January 30th he participated in ordering the acting administrator to shut down communications systems and terminate top officials. He was working there for 7 weeks as a non-employee, non-appointee, non-delegate, forcing the hand of the administrator who is supposed to be Senate-confirmed.

Even if you fall back on his detailing from GSA, it's dated Feb 14th and is "contingent upon the Detailee’s successful adjudication and receipt of... pre-employment screening required by USAID" -- the screening he did not complete.

Do you consider shutting down the agency a special activity, distinct from working within it at any other time? It seems a strange qualification to put on. Are the requirements for staffing looser if the official intends to close the agency?

> if he was transferred within the department from vice into homicide

Then he'd still be an authorized police officer, I presume. You argued based on explicitly delegated authority from the USAID administrator or cabinet official, not that being a GSA employee meant he could go to any agency without further authority. Per above, he wasn't immediately given the delegated authority, and even his detailing seems on shaky grounds.

> doing a search is a potential impingement on individual rights

Well, yes, but it's also explicitly in the law that there are procedures to authorize a search, same as the law says there are procedures to change staff, spend or not spend funds, or shut down an agency. If anything, the thousands of fired USAID employees and tens of thousands of USAID beneficiaries had their individual rights impinged by the "internal reorganization" (but I admit, probably not Constitutionally-guaranteed rights.)

Why do 2/3 of the law professors quoted say he should have been Senate-confirmed? Maybe they're biased or were fed the story and reacted without much research. It's at least a flaw of the article that it doesn't clearly explain why a COO would need to be confirmed. Maybe the professors consider Rubio's delegation to be making Lewin the de facto administrator without the required confirmation.

Anyway, he probably became fully authorized on March 18th. I don't know if he actually succeeded at anything notable before then, but he was trying to shut things down and coerce the legal administrator while, at best, a provisional detailee. I think that should be as disturbingly sloppy as sending out a police officer with inadequate legal certification on file, or performing a search with only an unrecorded verbal assent from a judge. In some hand-wavy way, any of these cases are "authorized" (e.g. I presume Rubio or Trump would have approved of anything he did), but we should expect a stricter documented standard in full compliance with best-practice procedures. For 7 weeks he was below even your bar of "delegated authority from the cabinet official", let alone some experts' claims that he should have been confirmed.

P.S. I think rayiner doesn't oppose Jack Smith's appointment, but I assume anyone else defending this also supports Smith's appointment and opposes the court meddling with it... if a president doesn't need anyone's permission to staff his branch however he likes.

> on March 20, two days after Rubio placed Lewin atop the USAID hierarchy

> By March 26, the emails show, Lewin still hadn’t accepted the job offer, and had not filed his OF-306, the federal government's standard pre-employment background screening form; without this document, a federal agency cannot lawfully issue a final job offer or consummate an appointment

> A detailing agreement between the GSA and USAID dated February 14—two weeks after Lewin says he began at USAID—specifes that “commencement of the detail is contingent upon the Detailee’s successful adjudication and receipt of any necessary security clearances and other pre-employment screening required by USAID.

More serious issues than "HR" should have barred him from working, for at least some of the time he did.

Even if it was legal for Trump or Rubio to shut it down, they still have to do it through authorized agents and legal processes. If a "police officer" conducted a search without paperwork on file that establishes their authority to search, it would be illegal, right?

If border control let them in, they're not "illegals." (Nor did they illegally overstay a visa, since they were given legal status to stay.)

> They didn't copy the texts per-se

> they cannot unscramble the egg without starting over

I would bet they do have copies on their hard-drives (which would probably be legal for them to possess for their own use, if the originals were obtained legally), and that they could simply omit them from their next training run that they probably do at major updates anyway.

When things get allegedly autopenned under Biden's administration: THE PRESIDENT'S AUTHORITY IS BEING HIJACKED!

When undocumented temporary-employee friends of Trump allies do whatever they want: This is fine.

The original story about not handling criticism well was someone crying after a kind question, not merely saying something was a bridge too far. (FWIW if I saw someone cry once, I would consider it might be a one-off due to stress at home etc, not necessarily a constant personality trait I'll have to deal with regularly.)

Out of curiosity, where did he say that? FWIW I ran the first half through Pangram (truncated to use free credits) and it said 73% AI, evenly interspersed. (I have no idea how much truncation breaks their algorithm.)

If you believe Amazon and trust there is no way that this IOMMU protection can be disabled or bypassed, I guess this is mitigation against some attacks. Seems like mostly just trusting the AWS brand name, which would be more trustworthy than fly-by-night providers even without IOMMU.

Lol at the thought of Steve Bannon speaking at DEFCON (last link).

I'm not fully on-board with trans ideas, but here's a stab at an argument: Marriage is not, I don't know, "romance-affirming care." That's the difference. It is not considered critical to a young person's identity to be married, while gender-affirming care is.

The "Lindsay Clancy defense", AKA not guilty by reason of insanity, has roots going back thousands of years, and was used as early as 1844 in the US in the murder trial of Abner Rogers, Jr. In 1982, John Hinckley, Jr. used it after shooting at the president. Others have used it even after the post-Hinckley reforms. Yet society hasn't crumbled.

Saying "He had no free will" doesn't mean "The state has no right to confine him away from people he might hurt."

I can't tell if you're accusing the state of waste and bribes no matter who is at the helm. You did specifically call out socialists, but the anti-socialists aren't improving that situation either.

> buying votes with tax dollars

This was more convincing of an attack on "Socialist politicians" before Sept. 9, when Trump did it more openly than they ever have. I guess you could believe his claims it won't come from tax dollars. But if the government has $1 trillion lying around for this and chooses not to unconditionally lower taxes for everybody, is it any different?

The head of the anti-socialist, anti-wasteful-spending party is spending billions on a more impressive Air Force One, golf days, family vacations, vanity renovations, DHS ads starring a POTUS wannabe, DOGE effectively paying people not to work, etc.

Virtually nobody is a professional walker or firestarter, so those are different.

And to the extent they do exist (athletes and survivalists) they might agree there is no "point" except the joy they derive from doing it themselves.

The problem is that formerly there was more alignment between the joy of solving problems with a human's mind and the business need to have problems solved.