Jonathan Kamens: A Technologist’s Warning

Plutopia News Network

Cybersecurity expert Jonathan Kamens, a longtime technologist with a background in software engineering and digital security, was dismissed from his role at the Department of Veterans Affairs by Elon Musk’s Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE). Kamens, who had joined the U.S. Digital Service to serve the public, criticized DOGE for pursuing three main goals: profiting Musk and his allies through government contract manipulation; dismantling the federal government to remove constraints on elite power; and centralizing Americans’ personal data to support authoritarian control. In a revealing conversation on the Plutopia News Network podcast, Kamens discussed his career roots in digital activism, his work on early internet FAQ archives, and his dismay at the dismantling of functional government institutions. He warned of growing threats to democracy, including loyalty vetting for government hires, data misuse, and Project 2025’s goals, while holding out faint hope that economic backlash from Trump’s tariffs could galvanize public resistance.

Jonathan Kamens:

Doge is trying to do three different things. I think it’s important to lift this out of the weeds and to look high level at what the three things they’re trying to do are. The first thing is grift, right? They’re trying to steal money to benefit people like Elon Musk. You know, Elon Musk wants to rig how contracts are awarded by the government so he and Donald Trump can control who gets the contracts. And guess what? Funnily enough, a lot of those contracts are coincidentally going to go to Elon Musk’s companies and his friends, right? So that’s number one. Number two is they’re trying to destroy the government. I’m just going to be frank here. I’m not going to beat around the bush. I’m not going to equivocate. What Trump and Project 2025 are trying to do is destroy the federal government. It was Grover Norquist who said many years ago that he wanted to shrink the government down to a size that was small enough that he could drown it in a bathtub. These folks do not believe that there should be a federal government which constrains rich white Christian men in any substantive way. And therefore they are trying to destroy every aspect of the federal government which constrains them or their actions, which is most of the government, right? The whole, you know. And then the third thing they’re trying to do is they’re trying to amass all of the data that the federal government has on Americans in one place.

Image background via Martin Grandjean. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA 3.0

Links

• USDS 2024 report
• Michael Lewis: The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy
• Michael Lewis: Who is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service
• Repository of Usenet FAQs
• Project 2025
• DOGE plan to rewrite SSA code
• Russell Vought
• Moshe Feinstein

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