From COBOL to chaos: Elon Musk, DOGE, and the Evil Housekeeper Problem
1 min read
Summary
Dan Hon, a technology developer with experience troubleshooting and modernising government systems in California and the federal government, has highlighted what he terms the ‘Evil Housekeeper Problem’ in relation to the current Elon Musk and President Trump’s Dogecoin (DOGE) situation.
The principle of the ‘Evil Housekeeper Problem’ is that anyone who has made their way inside and wants to wreck a system will most likely be successful.
This is due to government systems being built to be stable, and therefore mostly unchanged, but alarms being raised if there is a significant external threat.
However, Hon states that current political agendas, especially from within the current administration, are creating such threats both from the outside and the inside, and are consequently not being addressed.
Furthermore, those changes that are deemed important enough to implement are frequently too risky or too expensive to undertake, due to the potential to cause lasting damage to systems that are simply required to keep society functioning on a basic level.
Therefore, Hon is calling for preventative measures to be put into place to deal with what-if scenarios before it is too late.