What's your opinion/take on the efforts of DOGE?

The evidence keeps coming out. American taxpayers paid for the impeachment of Donald Trump with laundered USAID money
Jesse Watters “You have this new piece on Substack that the USAID and the CIA helped orchestrate Trump's impeachment?”
Michael Shellenberger “It's a crazy story — The House of Representatives impeached, president Trump in December of 2019. Many people may may not remember that it was a CIA analyst who was left over from the Obama White House who wrote the memo that led to the impeachment. It was all based on hearsay.
The person had not actually been in the room with Trump. Nonetheless, this memo that he wrote relied heavily on a report done by an organization funded by USAID. In fact, its initial founding funding I mean, now it's $10s of millions of dollars had gone into this group called the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a name that's not very memorable, OCCRP, but it was basically created as an extension of the state department and then of USAID
— It was a kind of public facing part you know, regime change operation like CIA, but not covert, more overt — They were doing this sort of thing abroad, creating a predicate essentially for Trump's impeachment.”
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Trumps New IT Department Head Is Taking Control.
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Katie Arrington, the Defense Department’s acting chief information officer, has little sympathy for contractors complaining about the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification.

After all, she was the lead ambassador for the launch of the defense industrial base's new cyber and supply chain security standard during the first Trump administration.

The Biden Administration made changes in the approach for CMMC, but the requirement is essentially the same – contractors need to certify how they are following a set of standards for securing government information on their systems.

That mostly refers to 800-171 from the National Institute of Standards and Technology on controlled unclassified information.

Arrington is now back at DOD following Trump’s election in November and CMMC is her responsibility again.

“If you go on LinkedIn one more time and tell me how hard CMMC is, I’m going to beat you,” she said Wednesday at an AFCEA DC luncheon. “That ship sailed in 2014.”

Contractors have been required for more than a decade to comply with NIST Standard 800-171, which has 110 controls for protecting CUI. Contractors have been self-certifying their compliance during that time.

But with CMMC now final, companies must now go through a third-party audit.

“You are telling me over 11 years later how hard it is?” she said.

Complaining now only puts a target on the backs of companies for the Defense Contract Management Agency to come in and audit their cyber posture, Arrington said.

“Do you think the government isn’t watching?” she said. “Do you think China’s is backing off?”

CMMC and zero trust architectures are part of a culture shift at DOD toward a trust but verify posture, Arrington said.

“It’s not a framework. It never was," she added.

Every system DOD fields must start with security and that starts with the acquisition process, she said.

On acquiring software, Arrington said she is developing a software fast-track process to be called SWIFT. The intent is to speed up the authority-to-operate process.

A request for information will be released to look for third-party vendors that can help in risk assessment, she said.

Software will be assessed on 12 characteristics of risk such as financial, foreign ownership and cyber. Arrington also wants artificial intelligence to help review the findings instead of waiting for a human to do it.

“I’m blowing up the risk management assessment framework. I’m blowing up the ATOs,” she said. “I only have five things I really care about: How do you develop what you’re doing that’s secure by design? How do I validate that? Are you working with Zero Trust? How do I validate that? What’s more important – an ATO or continuous monitoring? Continuous monitoring. How do I do that?”

She is planning a meeting for May that will have all of DOD’s component CIOs to work on a plan going forward.

“We have to get away from the way we’ve done business to the way we need to do business,” Arrington said.
 
JDMeister said:
Trumps New IT Department Head Is Taking Control.
++++++++++++++++


Katie Arrington, the Defense Department’s acting chief information officer, has little sympathy for contractors complaining about the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification.

After all, she was the lead ambassador for the launch of the defense industrial base's new cyber and supply chain security standard during the first Trump administration.

The Biden Administration made changes in the approach for CMMC, but the requirement is essentially the same – contractors need to certify how they are following a set of standards for securing government information on their systems.

That mostly refers to 800-171 from the National Institute of Standards and Technology on controlled unclassified information.

Arrington is now back at DOD following Trump’s election in November and CMMC is her responsibility again.

“If you go on LinkedIn one more time and tell me how hard CMMC is, I’m going to beat you,” she said Wednesday at an AFCEA DC luncheon. “That ship sailed in 2014.”

Contractors have been required for more than a decade to comply with NIST Standard 800-171, which has 110 controls for protecting CUI. Contractors have been self-certifying their compliance during that time.

But with CMMC now final, companies must now go through a third-party audit.

“You are telling me over 11 years later how hard it is?” she said.

Complaining now only puts a target on the backs of companies for the Defense Contract Management Agency to come in and audit their cyber posture, Arrington said.

“Do you think the government isn’t watching?” she said. “Do you think China’s is backing off?”

CMMC and zero trust architectures are part of a culture shift at DOD toward a trust but verify posture, Arrington said.

“It’s not a framework. It never was," she added.

Every system DOD fields must start with security and that starts with the acquisition process, she said.

On acquiring software, Arrington said she is developing a software fast-track process to be called SWIFT. The intent is to speed up the authority-to-operate process.

A request for information will be released to look for third-party vendors that can help in risk assessment, she said.

Software will be assessed on 12 characteristics of risk such as financial, foreign ownership and cyber. Arrington also wants artificial intelligence to help review the findings instead of waiting for a human to do it.

“I’m blowing up the risk management assessment framework. I’m blowing up the ATOs,” she said. “I only have five things I really care about: How do you develop what you’re doing that’s secure by design? How do I validate that? Are you working with Zero Trust? How do I validate that? What’s more important – an ATO or continuous monitoring? Continuous monitoring. How do I do that?”

She is planning a meeting for May that will have all of DOD’s component CIOs to work on a plan going forward.

“We have to get away from the way we’ve done business to the way we need to do business,” Arrington said.
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I deal with this daily and am in the middle between our government and our small businesses. It’s not really the dod contractors that can’t comply. It’s all the small businesses that those contractors buy from that have to comply. It’s not a cheap thing to get certified and many small businesses can’t afford it. Focus should be on how to protect critical information but to make it easier for our small businesses to do so as well as being affordable for them to get fully certified to the NIST standards.
 
JDMeister said:
California Is Still Fighting.
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WTF are they thinking?
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View attachment 143552
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But some Democrats are concerned overall about how the stiffer penalties and automatic felony could impact the LGBTQ community, people of color and older teens in relationships with younger minors.
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chicken-spongebob.gif
 
You can't win without the other half of the country...
This country is so divided that even the independents are 50/50...


Fox news poll

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1HasBeen said:
Too many pussies not willing to gut it out.
Click to expand...
I think too many uninformed people. If you get your information from the MSN.....you are doomed. Even the local news stations are shit now, infested with liberals. They can't even present a simple news issue without some type of BS spin. That's why MOST of America doesn't trust them or the Demorats.
 

Direct from the Feds Web site.
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The IRS has shed more than 20% of its workforce since President Donald Trump took office, wiping away the Biden administration’s highly touted hiring gains. Those cuts have yet to factor in widespread layoffs, which are still forthcoming and expected to bring the tax agency’s workforce down to numbers not seen in at least 45 years.

“The roll back of wasteful Biden-era hiring surges, and consolidation of critical support functions are vital to improve both efficiency and quality of service,” a senior Treasury official told Nextgov/FCW in a statement. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent “is committed to ensuring that efficiency is realized while providing the collections, privacy, and customer service the American people deserve.”

Under the Biden administration, the IRS went on a hiring spree with funding provided by Congress in the Inflation Reduction Act to close the tax gap, modernize technology and improve customer service. Republicans have since pushed to strip away much of that funding boost.

“The Biden Administration grew the IRS from 79,431 to 102,309 personnel. Under new leadership, approximately the same number of employees have left the IRS, with a vast majority leaving voluntarily through the Deferred Resignation Program,” the official said.

So far, more than 20,000 IRS employees have been approved for the DRP, which enables employees to take paid leave through September before they must leave the government. That figure includes both resignation offers from Treasury, according to data from the IRS inspector general and an employee briefed on the most up-to-date information. An additional 1,600 have taken early retirement or buyout incentives.

IRS has also sought to fire 7,300 probationary employees, but they are, for now, back at the agency under a now-defunct court order.

An additional 7,000 IRS employees have signed up for the deferred resignation, but their requests are still pending approval. The agency has promised widespread layoffs but has so far implemented those only on a small scale. More widespread reductions in force have been delayed but are still expected, according to an employee briefed on the plans and internal documentation obtained by Nextgov/FCW.

If the pending DRP applications go through and the probationary employees are once again removed, the IRS workforce would sit at around 66,000 employees. Additional RIFs would likely bring the agency to below 60,000 workers.

“The ability to upload more documents, the more functionality in the individual taxpayer account and business tax account, more technology in the call center and the 1000s of customer service reps that were hired for both the phone and in the walk-in centers proved resilient and enabled what appears to have been a successful 2025 filing season,” said Danny Werfel, former IRS commissioner who stepped down in January after Trump announced that he would install a replacement.

“To describe those hires as wasteful really is counterintuitive given it’s been reported that the administration protected those particular hires from being laid off,” he noted.

The staffing reductions have indeed hit the agency unevenly. The number of revenue agents that do audits has declined by about 31%, and the number of revenue officers that collect delinquent taxes has shrunk by 18%, according to the recent TIGTA report. The size of the contact representative workforce at the tax agency, meanwhile, has only shrunk by 10%.

The IRS will see further cuts to its workforce as it pursues layoffs, some of which have already started. The IRS put 48 IT employees on administrative leave in March, and announced in April that it was starting a reduction in force in several offices, including its Taxpayer Experience Office.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told lawmakers on Tuesday that smarter technology and the use of artificial intelligence can enhance the agency’s collection activities moving forward.

Still, 2,000 technology-focused employees alone at the IRS have opted into the deferred resignation program, IRS CTO Kaschit Pandya told employees Wednesday in a meeting, a recording of which was obtained by Nextgov/FCW. And that number could go up, as people over the age of 40 have more time to decide, he said. Already, the 2,000 departures marks an exodus of about one-quarter of the IRS IT workforce.

“We need to start thinking about, ‘What does a leaner IT organization look like, and how we will center it around core functions?’” Pandya said.

Since January, IRS has seen many top leadership changes as it's made headlines over sharing taxpayer data with immigration enforcement officials, a major shift in policy. Many of the agency’s C-suite executives, including its chief information officer, have also departed the IRS, which announced a pause of its technology modernization work in March.

“Until technology solutions are up and running and proven effective, eliminating staff responsible for collections damages the government's financial bottom line,” Werfel said.
 
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