On the one hand government systems should be up to date and convenient, but on the other hand if they are then they'll inevitably abuse the fuck out of it.
I find it extremely bizarre that out of one side of his face he's talking about digitizing things and streamlining, while simultaneously essentially axing the government credit card system and requiring POs for everything. I don't know if anyone here has been responsible for procurement, but if I had to do a PO every time my shop ran out of shit tickets I'd be pissed. There's no reason they shouldn't just have stricter requirements for receipts for credit cards, it's literally the industry standard.
Additionally, I don't particularly like the idea of taking all of these deep storage documents and digitizing them (with the obvious intent to terminate the leases of the deep storage sites and destroy the originals). The United States desperately needs to invest in civil defense, not remove our failsafes.
There's an excellent book called "The Day after WWIII," which was published in 1984, and meticulously detailed the (publicly available) civil defense plans of the United States, and how even seemingly obsolete and cumbersome civil defense plans could be vital for COG and winning a nuclear war. These deep storage sites are part of those old school plans to help rebuild America after a national disaster. I have similar issues with the plan to integrate Starlink while divesting ourselves of things like landlines.
Back in the day there was this network called a "contact chain" or "accountability chain," which was basically a failsafe for organizing members of government agencies and private companies working with the government. It was stupid simple, you were given a person to contact. It was your job to, in the event of a national emergency, to contact your designated person and relay pertinent information to them. You would be required to contact them at all costs, even if it means physically driving or walking to their home and banging on the door. That person would then contact the next person in the chain, so on and so forth, until the entire organization was informed of the nature of the emergency and the action plan. It is a beautifully simple, low tech solution to the problem of "how do we ensure the survival of our organization and the fulfillment of our mission even if all conventional and even unconventional means of communication have been blocked?" What is the equivalent today? We're divesting ourselves of landlines, physical media, and deep storage. We're making ourselves more vulnerable to a failure cascade in the event of a real shooting war, or even limited first strike.
