The title here is poor. Its not that Slack is subject to FOIA and other systems are not - its that the org structure of DOGE is being transition from being under OMB to directly under the executive office. If they use Slack there it would be presumably not be subject to FOIA.
Practically, this probably doesn't make a difference. FOIA relies on at least one person in the department to not be antagonistic towards the process. Otherwise they can just make up excuses. That's the standard experience for people sending requests.
I don't think anyone from the new DOGE would actually be helpful in responses anyway.
They're all subject to FOIA...
BOYCOTT TESLA, TWITTER, SPACEX. SELL YOUR $TSLA STOCK. Do it for America. And for the world. The rest of the planet is watching. America, get your shit together!!
> Employees working for the agency now known as DOGE have been ordered to stop using Slack while government lawyers attempt to transition the agency to one that is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act,
> The messages indicate that, under Elon Musk’s leadership, DOGE is actively taking steps to make sure its communications and records are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act,
> This would make DOGE a Presidential Records Act entity, meaning records it creates are not FOIAble until years after a president leaves office rather than a Federal Records Act entity, which would make its records FOIAble now.
Regardless of where you stand on the topic of cutting federal budgets, the lack of transparency should be alarming to everyone.
Broad actions like this should have the utmost transparency, not a team of lawyers doing their best legal maneuvering to keep it out of the public's reach.
Oh they want to eliminate the possibility of public filing a FOIA request. Democracy died in Darkness.
Man I’d hate to work in such a volatile environment.
Avoiding FOIA is one thing. Why do organizations that handle sensitive information use Slack in the first place?
Salesforce gets all the Slack data and can do whatever it likes. This is utter incompetence.
I don't have an opinion on the political aspects of this, but I find the choice of uploading all your data to a central server by default an insane choice, and I hate that this is the default in the modern world.
Why can't software come in a box, like it used to - then it can run on a machine that I control, and only talk to machines that I control too.
Then it's not a matter of belief and blind trust and hoping against hope that nobody's spying on me - it's the matter of basic common sense and due diligence.
This seems to me that there can be only two outcomes here. Either gov gets completely neutered and stops existing in conventional form. Or this ends in treason charges.
Lots of Elon apologists in this thread, yeesh.
They should be ordered directly to prison.
This has nothing to do with FOIA, the article just made up that explanation for engagement.
I can see the Founders of the US now, one of the things they did when setting up the government was organise it so a South African billionaire should be able to take over and reorganise it with zero accountability.
I thought the whole point was transparency and auditing? Are you telling me Musk was lying!?!
So who watches the Watchmen?
Ah ha ha like dogcoin
What?
Why are you protecting Slack business?
Even at my company I was in charge to replace Slack because is damn expensive in comparison to other options like Teams or Rocket Chat.
> used by journalists and lawyers to hold government accountable.
The journalists from Politico have just been ousted by DOGE has having had received $8 million in annual funding from USAID (another Government-run institution that has been ousted by the same DOGE), so I can understand how come Musk would want to keep DOGE's dealing away from journalists that might see this agency as very antithetic to their (the journalists') material well-being.
DOGE is obviously a completely illegal operation, and I really do hope it will be get reined in before they can cause an issue so big that _even trump's croniest cronies_ have to admit what is going on.
For someone who claims to love freedom of speech, Elon is pretty quick to determine who can say what, and how much access to _his_ data people have.