The Trump revolution and the Deep State's fightback - light versus darkness

 

Over the weekend, an article by Eko titled simply "Override" went viral across social media - and deservedly so.  It's one of the best analyses and expositions of what President Trump's administration has done in the three weeks that it's been in office.  Here's a brief excerpt from a long, complex article.

In Treasury's basement, fluorescent lights hummed above four young coders. Their screens cast blue light across government-issue desks, illuminating energy drink cans and agency badges. As their algorithms crawled through decades of payment data, one number kept growing: $17 billion in redundant programs. And counting.

"We're in," Akash Bobba messaged the team. "All of it."

Edward Coristine's code had already mapped three subsystems. Luke Farritor's algorithms were tracing payment flows across agencies. Ethan Shaotran's analysis revealed patterns that career officials didn't even know existed. By dawn, they would understand more about Treasury's operations than people who had worked there for decades.

This wasn't a hack. This wasn't a breach. This was authorized disruption.

While career bureaucrats prepared orientation packets and welcome memos, DOGE's team was already deep inside the payment systems. No committees. No approvals. No red tape. Just four coders with unprecedented access and algorithms ready to run.

"The beautiful thing about payment systems," noted a transition official watching their screens, "is that they don't lie. You can spin policy all day long, but money leaves a trail."

That trail led to staggering discoveries. Programs marked as independent revealed coordinated funding streams. Grants labeled as humanitarian aid showed curious detours through complex networks. Black budgets once shrouded in secrecy began to unravel under algorithmic scrutiny.

By 6 AM, Treasury's career officials began arriving for work. They found systems they thought impenetrable already mapped. Networks they believed hidden already exposed. Power structures built over decades revealed in hours.

Their traditional defenses—slow-walking decisions, leaking damaging stories, stonewalling requests—proved useless against an opponent moving faster than their systems could react. By the time they drafted their first memo objecting to this breach, three more systems had already been mapped.

"Pull this thread," a senior official warned, watching patterns emerge across DOGE's screens, "and the whole sweater unravels."

He wasn't wrong. But he misunderstood something crucial: That was exactly the point.

This wasn't just another transition. This wasn't just another reform effort. This was the start of something unprecedented: a revolution powered by preparation, presidential will, and technological precision.

The storm had arrived. And Treasury was just the beginning.

There's much more at the link, and it's all essential reading, IMHO.  I can't recommend it too highly.

Eko has just published a follow-up article, "The Machine Fights Back:  Inside Treasury's War Against Its Own Reformers".  Here's another short excerpt.

Here's what Treasury didn't want exposed:

Over $100 billion flowing annually to accounts without Social Security numbers. No temporary ID numbers. No verification. Nothing.

When Musk asked Treasury officials how much was "unequivocal and obvious fraud," the answer revealed decades of corruption: HALF

Let that sink in.

$50 billion per YEAR.

A billion dollars every SINGLE week disappearing into accounts that shouldn't exist.

The kind of fraud that would shut down any bank in America.

The kind that would land any business owner in federal prison.

But Treasury had perfected its system:

1. Process payments
2. Ignore controls
3. Keep the machine running

Yesterday, something shifted. A judge's order appeared, ex parte—meaning only one side could speak. No warning. No defense allowed. Just a wall erected between Treasury officials and their own department's data.

. . .

Think about what that means: The Secretary of the Treasury—effectively the CFO of the United States government—legally barred from seeing how money moves through his own department. The people's appointee blocked from viewing the people's accounts. Young coders mapping the missing controls ordered to stop looking.

The MACHINE (that’s what I’ll be calling the DS from now on) has judges. Has lawyers. Has media. Has entire states moving in coordination.

. . .

This isn't about spreadsheets anymore. This isn't about waste or controls or management. This is about who controls the machine.

Because when you find something like empty fields in Treasury's payment system, you're not just finding missing data. You're finding purpose. When basic controls sit blank while billions vanish weekly, that's not incompetence. That's design.

The machine is fighting back.

Again, more at the link, and also very important reading, IMHO.

This is essentially the conflict we're going to see across the Executive Branch going forward.  The bureaucrats who administer the US government have done so on their own terms, using mechanisms they've created to make their jobs easier, without informing the public (or, in many cases, their political masters).  Fraud and waste have been built into those mechanisms, because it's easier - less work for bureaucrats - to simply process payments rather than check on them line by line and expenditure by expenditure.  That ease has, in turn, fostered monumental corruption, because politicians (by tolerating such lax bureaucratic systems, and indeed encouraging them) have opened gateways through which they, and their favored causes and groups and individuals, can skim the cream off government (i.e. taxpayer) income and divert it to their favored projects (not least of which has all too often been themselves).

The way to undo such bureaucratic systems and shenanigans is to expose them:  to let the American people see what has been done in their name, and put it right through administrative and judicial means.  Those who created such systems, and profited from them, seek the opposite:  to keep them all hidden, to prevent them being exposed, so they can carry on grafting from the American people and enriching themselves and their favored causes and people.

The courts are going to have to do a lot of the work.  The judge who barred the Treasury Secretary from doing his job is clearly partisan and biased, by any rational, objective standard.  No judge has the right, in terms of the Constitution, to bar elected and/or duly appointed officials from simply doing their job (which by its very nature includes exposing and dealing with inefficiency, corruption and dishonesty).  That's basic to our system of government - but in this case, the judge has ignored that.  One hopes President Trump will ignore such unconstitutional court orders, or at least take them higher in the judicial system as quickly as possible.

Being a retired pastor and chaplain, I find a strong spiritual element in all this.  In the Bible, the first chapter of the First Letter of St. John contains these words:

This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.  If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.  But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.

If that applies to Christian believers and their relationship with God, how much more should it apply to politicians and bureaucrats and their relationship with the electorate?  The latter have done everything possible to avoid "walking in the light".  President Trump and the D.O.G.E. team are doing everything possible to drag them, kicking and screaming, into the light.  Only when they've succeeded in doing so will there be "fellowship" between Americans, mutual trust that neither side is trying to hoodwink or steal from the other.

Makes you think, doesn't it?

Peter