> On June 4, 2026, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce issued a directive (DAO 216-26)
> DAO-216-26 bans differential privacy and other modern (and not so modern) techniques. It restricts disclosure avoidance techniques to “coarsening,”
> DAO-216-26 forbids “noise infusion”, described as “methods that involve modifying a dataset by adding random values, or noise.”
> By forbidding noise infusion, the directive bans the disclosure avoidance techniques at the core of dozens of data releases over the last three decades.
> Civil servants will do their best to comply with this order while still following the laws that require them to protect the confidentiality of respondents’ data. To balance these competing mandates, they may seek to produce less data or coarsen data so much that it is unusable. Or they might be pushed by political actors to publish data that can be easily unmasked...
I have a very low opinion of the current US administration, which might be a blindspot when they do something both horrible and not caveman-like in its sophistication. I’m genuinely surprised they would look into differential privacy (again: this sounds judgmental, but I’m just trying to confess my prejudice).
I’m more surprised that they were able to look into it and come to the conclusion that they should get rid of it… What could be the logic here?
> The acting force behind this order is political interest, not scientific merit. DAO 216-26 bypassed legally required administrative procedures. It fulfills a promise made by the architects of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and reflects both the rhetoric and misunderstandings of representatives of the Center for Renewing America (CRA), an organization founded by OMB Director Russell Vought. CRA’s explainer on the use of differential privacy in the 2020 Census is up-front about the stakes: “Even if the citizenship question is added to the Census, it will be impossible to ascertain the status of individuals so long as differential privacy is used.”
So from its supporters own statements, because it makes it harder to identify non citizens in statistics.
Making it harder to identify non-citizens sounds like it’s easy to fit into the amorphous bucket of things they don’t like of “wokeness”.
The other thing to consider is the current administration has plenty of chaos and snap decisions at its top level but at its mid level and among its backers are plenty of people able to take a more long term view of what they want and how to get there.
It is not cursed. It is actively trying to cement its own power like the authoritarian fascists they are. And some of you still pretend if they just cheer enough for dear leader the tide will turn for them as well. As if this all was just a sports game where you have to cheer for your team even if they actively break the rules.
Coursening is not as elegant as differential privacy. But using coursening is not a "privacy emergency", it is a very-slightly-less-accurate census. And no one knows what the actual economic impacts of this level of accuracy difference are.
I would love to see the more elegant techniques used, and also have the intuition that this is bad policy, but I don't see the "emergency" here. Labeling it as such just histrionic to me.
The article presents two possible methods to protect privacy in a dataset. It then attacks a theoretical weakness in a contrived scenario in the old method, which intends to incline us to choose the other, newer solution. The article does not describe in detail the newer solution beyond its name. I have have questions that the article doesn't cover in enough detail: 1) Has the coarsening failed in the way described in the article in practice which leaked information? 2) How does the 'other' solution we're expected to desire work? 3) What is an example of the difference in level of detail offered by the newer solution that was not possible when the data needed to be coarsened in practice?
(2) By adding carefully tuned Gaussian noise. In the last 6 years we have also figured out how to add much less Gaussian noise: "The 2020 Census Disclosure Avoidance System TopDown Algorithm" https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.08986
(3) This one is harder to answer, since the Census Bureau aimed to release the same style of statistics as in previous decades. So the goal of 2020 was to release the same statistics with the same error bounds. Evidence suggests they succeeded in doing this. "Evaluating Bias and Noise Induced by the U.S. Census Bureau's Privacy Protection Methods" http://arxiv.org/abs/2306.07521, "Evaluating the Impacts of Swapping on the US Decennial Census" http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.01320
Probably related to things like "The Nazis utilized data from routine censuses, tax returns, and municipal police registrations. In Germany, and in occupied countries like the Netherlands, this information was systematically organized. In some instances, IBM technology (via Dehomag punch card machines) was used to tabulate and sort census data to identify individuals of Jewish descent."
The people currently in power want every single byte of data they can get on people who reside in this country so they can divide them up by arbitrary criteria and do with those groups as they please. Depending on the person, that might mean imprisonment, it might mean deportation, it might mean something worse.
Imprisonment? deportation? these are petty things.
The serious danger is polarization and radicalization, turning people against each other, suppressing voices of reason. The ensuing chaos could help pull off another January 6th, only successful. Gerrymandering is one approach, but with more detailed data more interesting things may become possible.
Alternative take that was expressed in the other post on this: census data users found DP extremely hard to work with, and viewed it as an imposed solution from the ivory tower. I wonder if any user could chime in on this.
> so they can divide them up by arbitrary criteria and do with those groups as they please
You mean like by race, gender, and sexual orientation, and using statistical analysis to portray a group of oppressors vs. oppressed, perpetrators and victims? Exactly what was happening via official public policy for the last 4 years while the progressives cheered it on?
> If followed, this order will destroy the Commerce public data our nation relies on for important decisions, such as where to build necessary services for our community’s well-being
So this is not about privacy. Scott sounds like a computer scientist forced (by the American ecosystem) to become a bombastic talker.
Can’t release data sets if they can’t be sufficiently anonymized so as to avoid Privacy Act/other non-disclosure statutes. Can’t anonymize data sets sufficiently if you’re banned from using the techniques data people use when anonymizing data sets. Not that difficult to follow.
One of my favorite recently learned facts about Congress:
Federally mandated parental leave (paternity and maternity leave) polls at about 80% in favor with the US adult population. This is regardless of political affiliation, by the way. Democrat and Republican voters both support it.
Upon reading this, you might be surprised as to why it's NOT federally mandated given how popular it is.
One group it's NOT popular with is corporations. And corporations donate a lot of money to politicians. And it's cheaper to donate to politicians who are against parental leave than it is to pay people for that parental leave.
I enjoy sharing this b/c it's a reminder that there are groups who spend a lot of time and money to get their way. At first, that might feel overwhelming. You might be surprised to know that when you call your local congressperson, those calls gets tallied b/c they want to know what their constituents care about. So give them a call and let them know.
I only-kinda-jokingly say that I'd be willing to be the sacrifice and get a second mortgage on my house if it could buy the entire nation some new rights.
Our politicians routinely sell out smaller issues for "downpayment in a coastal metro" level of money. It's just about within reach of a middle-class urban adult to directly fund with some personal sacrifices.
I feel like we like to imagine that these corporations are budgeting big-bucks to bribe/lobby politicians, because they have more money than most humans can actually mentally picture, but their budgets are often closer to a small team of software engineers' salary. Meta spend ~$25M on all lobbying last year - and they're the top corporate spender. That's under 1 hours of revenue for them.
It's important to remember that rights cannot be received, or bought. Privileges can. Equally easily privileges can be taken away again.
But rights can only be won in a fight.
Sadly, they also require a constant readiness to fight for keeping them; in civilized societies this happens in courtrooms, but escalations to the worse happen periodically.
Are politicians really so beholden to an anonymous donor that makes a single $50k donation? Or even a single $500k one?
Or is it the real knowledge that said known regular donors will continue indefinitely as long as things go their way (and indefinitely support the opposition otherwise) …?
The pessimistic part of me wonders if a grassroots campaign that raised $10M would even be able drive any change with it.
Watch out though because many of those revelations are bogus and only look at how much money people lobbying for a position donated to some member of Congress who voted for that position. They fail to look up how much money people lobbying against that position donated to that same member of Congress.
Often times it is about the same amount, which means you cannot infer that the money influenced the vote.
Some do it right, but enough do not that unless you know you are getting the information from one of the ones who does it right you really need to check for yourself.
In that case, maybe it would make sense for regular people to create their own PACs. Like a privacy PAC. Pay for lobbyists who are more persuasive than our angry emails.
This gets it a bit backwards, the money is a reward for playing along within the system, not a straight cash-for-policy transaction.
If you don't play along with the elite line, they throw $50 million into a primary election to get you out of power. That's where you start to get into enough money to make a political difference, and even then the money is only part of the equation.
From the responses I've gotten from my representatives when I've written them, my impression is they care a lot more about their corporate sponsors and the party line than they do about their constituents.
Well, if you think money in politics or corporations buying politicians is bad now, it is going to get exponentially worse in the USA. The Supreme Court recently gave a decision that allows the rich oligarchy to give unlimited amounts of money[1] to their favorite puppets... excuse me, politicians.
If we had voter referendums at the federal level, most “hot button” partisan issues would be solved because there is consensus across 70-75% of the population, even if weighted by state somehow
This has been studied, famously by Princeton [1]. The chance of any given bill passing is roughly 30% and any amount of public support from 0% to 100% has almost zero impact on that 30%.
Elected offices have become fiefdoms to enrich oneself and maintain the status quo. Anyone who bucks this trend has historically rarely gotten into office or been chased out once they do. This could be from funding another candidate, simply starving an existing candidate of campaign funds or in some cases by redistricting somebody out of a seat.
And look at the reelection rates for Congress [2]. They tend to hover between 90% and 95%.
Free housing, free food, free health care, and free income are also wildly popular with the US adult population. The problem is that those things are not really "free" because somebody else needs to pay for them.
You’re confusing free to the user with free to the government. Those are all great examples of things which make huge differences in the lives of the people who need them while having no meaningful impact on taxpayers (forget Jeff Bezos, none of us would significantly change our lives if we paid for childcare or housing out of general fund revenue, and that’s before you factor in how much money we’d save getting better treatment with universal healthcare — every time I’ve done the math comparing us with Denmark, it’s been roughly even once you factor in how much we pay for insurance).
Part of how you can tell it’s not the cost motivating opposition is that this concern is never applied to defense spending.
There are infinity dollars in the Federal Reserve. Pay-for requirements are a concern troll bludgeon used against only politically disfavored spending. Taxation (on the federal level) does not pay for services, but merely counteracts the inflationary effect of their provision in an indirect way. It's indirect enough that those who disregard it are not politically punished.
Exactly. Giving people free stuff is extremely popular. If people actually want those things, we can collective open our wallets and pay for it. But that changes people's opinions quite radically.
Does it? I'm skeptical. In fact, we apparently have more than enough money for it because we suddenly have billions to spend on war in the Middle East.
On the healthcare front it’s not even a question. We are already paying via insurance and deductibles and copays etc. W2s don’t see most of the cost because their company pays it.
It might come as a shock to you then that running government or military or any government service requires “somebody else needs to pay for them”. Let’s get rid of those too. Long live anarchy.
Fact is people who spout this nonsense are simply selfish people with “F you, got mine” mindset. They hide their selfishness in garb and call others socialist.
This is such a straw man argument. Consider health care.
The US spends by far the most per-capita on health care of any OECD country [1]. It's roughly 50% more than the number 2 on the list, which is Switzerland, a notoriously expensive country. Yet (almost?) every other country on that list has universal healthcare. Yet life expectancy is lower than Costa Rica [2] and generally health outcomes are worse in the US than most OECD nations.
So providing universal healthcare would actually be cheaper overall but it would destroy a health insurance companies, which are nothing more than parasitic rent-seekers. There would be less spending per capita but a lot of that spending would be made by the government rather than companies. So you'd need to tax to cover that cost, which would be significant, but it would be overall cheaper.
Now consider housing. We treat it as a speculative investment rather than something to provide shelter. There is absolutely no reason for it to be as expensive as it is. All we're doing is a massive wealth transfer from the young and poor to the old and rich. Yet we, as a society, choose to prioritize landlord and speculator profits over people, quite literally, dying in the street.
Food? We produce an abundance of food, more than we can eat. There is absolutely no reason anyone should go hungry in any OECD nation, ever. We destroy food to protect profits.
As for income, people generally want to be paid enough to live on, something that's becomign increasingly difficult. And again, we choose minting billionaires at a stupendous rate (and now trillionaires) over paying people a living wage.
The problem with attempting to provide universal healthcare in the united states is that, despite health professionals attesting to the necessity and validity of certain health related topics, the current administration in particular is very keen about stripping away access to these forms of care, as far as they legally can (medicare/medicaid, VA, federal funding).
UHC requires the removal of politicians from qualified input, and this country's politicians love nothing more than to get overly involved in things they know nothing about.
if DSA gets enough people in, that might go through?
pretty directly within the realms of what their candidates support, and they have a pretty good purity test to tell who to support or not with the genocide question
Yeah, calling your legislators is going to do precisely nothing [1], just like data centers are almost universally opposed by the communities and the negative externalities are way more real and direct. Yet they keep getting approved anyway.
The true crisis here is in the captured political system.
In the 1990s in Australia a racist, white supremacist party arose called One Nation through a very weird confluence of events that led a racist fish and chip shop owner by the name of Pauline Hanson to become a member of parliament. It was almost 30 years ago she gave her now famous miaden speech to Parliament [2].
After some scandals, One Nation kind of disappeared for awhile, in part because the conservative coalition (of the Liberals and Nationals) basically adopted the racist platform in the early 2000s where asylum seekers were effectively scapegoated. But weirdly she's back now. Anyway, that part isn't the point.
Australia has a preferential voting system, what tends to be called ranked choice voting in the US. You generally have two options on how to vote: you can individually number candidates yourself or you can use the registered preferences for a given party. In this case you put a "1" in Australian Labor Party, Australian Greens or whatever. A lot of people do this so preferences matter. Anyway, One Nation had a strategy of voting gainst the incumbent with preferences. So if it was a Liberal seat, the preference went to Labor and vice versa. This scared the bejsus out of the political establishment such that the opposing political parties gave preferences to each other over One Nation, leading to One Nation getting no seats in Parliament despite getting 10%+ (at its original peak) of the popular vote.
My point here is that too many politicians and political parties view their seat as something that belongs to them. In the US primaries are treated largely as a formality by the parties for their anointed candidates. Re-election rates in Congress have sat at 95%+ for decades.
What's interesting is that the Demoratic Party is almost in open revolt currently and over the past few weeks, several long-term (10-30 years) incumbents have been primaried by insurgent candidates.
Here's a funf act I learned this week. It's been ~18 years since Citizens United basically got rid of campaign spending limits. A third of all the money spent since then has been spent this year on primaries. Thomas Massie has $35M+ spent against him in his primary, making it the most expensive in US history. Many others are in the millions. It's estimated that the total spending for the Senate seat in Maine will push $400M. For one Senate seat.
All of this is a long way of saying that the only thing that will work is making these legislators fear they'll lose their cushy positions. And really if somebody has sat in office for 30 years and has nothing really to show for it, it's time for them to go.
Heya, fellow Aussie here. Have you ever tried contacting your local MP?
I was cynical at first like you, thinking why bother. But when I tried it, turned out I was wrong and I actually had a pretty good experience!
The way I see it now, is that MPs aren't always in a good position to get close to the facts, so when you get in touch and tell them what you think.. you're actually giving them a huge gift.
It can actually be pretty effective, especially for state/local issues. For federal stuff, sure, might not be as good, but you'll at least get some satisfaction from getting an acknowledgement from their chief of staff or secretary.
Yes, contacting your MP and senators can be very useful, including for federal stuff.
It's harder to actually get meetings with Federal members (they spend a lot of time in Canberra) but still worth trying.
Also it is very effective to vote for independent senators. You need to pay careful attention to make sure they aren't secretly insane but senators like David Pocock and Jacqui Lambie are very effective (Lambie seems crazy sometimes but she is surprisingly willing to change her mind on issues).
Pocock is a blight on the senate. The guy is just a seppo complaint repeating station. I swear he is more in touch with the democrat party than any Australian.
I contact MP's, I make submissions to parliament and I email media companies. I have done since 2017. You used to be able to google my name and get a bunch of hits for pdf submissions on aph.
Its done exactly squat.
>MPs aren't always in a good position to get close to the facts,
Pocock was repeating data centre noise concerns, but refuses to simply hold a press conference on the street outside of his local to demonstrate them. Facts are not desirable for parliamentarians, they routinely get in the way of business.
Ranked choice voting would go a long way, the two-party system is an intentionally forced false dichotomy like when parents give their kids the choice to eat broccoli or carrots so they’ll think it was their decision. Both parties are controlled by the investor class.
You could even just have straight proportional voting if you wanted, and that's be better than the current system. You got 3 votes? Great, you have a 3/100M chance to win.
Agreed: sure, call your representative. If they're cagey or noncommittal, do what you can to get their ass primaried. Every "moderate" will absolutely sell you into a Panopticon.
There has been debate among statisticians and political scientists about using differential privacy for census data. 2020 was actually the first Decennial Census that used differential privacy. This is the mandated census done every 10 years that counts population and is used for apportionment. Some have criticized the use of differential privacy.[1][2] But others have argued that coarsening does not protect privacy sufficiently and that differential privacy does not distort apportionment.
The political context is unclear. There are lawsuits about whether differential privacy is constitutional. There is also the possibility that citizenship status can be inferred by using multiple census products put together. It's also possible redistricting is at stake although it's unclear to me how getting rid of differential privacy benefits any one party.
I'd like to emphasize that coarsening is not just theoretically non-private, a number of attacks that lead to leaking personally identifiable data were demonstrated on the 2010 census. So it's not really a he-said/she-said situation.
That's not what I said or implied it is. I said there has been criticism of using differential privacy and linked to it. I also mentioned the reconstruction attacks on coarsening. Those two things can be true at the same time.
> On June 4, 2026, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce issued a directive (DAO 216-26)
> DAO-216-26 bans differential privacy and other modern (and not so modern) techniques. It restricts disclosure avoidance techniques to “coarsening,”
> DAO-216-26 forbids “noise infusion”, described as “methods that involve modifying a dataset by adding random values, or noise.”
> By forbidding noise infusion, the directive bans the disclosure avoidance techniques at the core of dozens of data releases over the last three decades.
> Civil servants will do their best to comply with this order while still following the laws that require them to protect the confidentiality of respondents’ data. To balance these competing mandates, they may seek to produce less data or coarsen data so much that it is unusable. Or they might be pushed by political actors to publish data that can be easily unmasked...
This current administration is cursed.
I have a very low opinion of the current US administration, which might be a blindspot when they do something both horrible and not caveman-like in its sophistication. I’m genuinely surprised they would look into differential privacy (again: this sounds judgmental, but I’m just trying to confess my prejudice).
I’m more surprised that they were able to look into it and come to the conclusion that they should get rid of it… What could be the logic here?
The administration will almost anything if asked, so long as the person asking is willing want to offer tribute.
> The acting force behind this order is political interest, not scientific merit. DAO 216-26 bypassed legally required administrative procedures. It fulfills a promise made by the architects of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and reflects both the rhetoric and misunderstandings of representatives of the Center for Renewing America (CRA), an organization founded by OMB Director Russell Vought. CRA’s explainer on the use of differential privacy in the 2020 Census is up-front about the stakes: “Even if the citizenship question is added to the Census, it will be impossible to ascertain the status of individuals so long as differential privacy is used.”
So from its supporters own statements, because it makes it harder to identify non citizens in statistics.
Making it harder to identify non-citizens sounds like it’s easy to fit into the amorphous bucket of things they don’t like of “wokeness”.
The other thing to consider is the current administration has plenty of chaos and snap decisions at its top level but at its mid level and among its backers are plenty of people able to take a more long term view of what they want and how to get there.
It is not cursed. It is actively trying to cement its own power like the authoritarian fascists they are. And some of you still pretend if they just cheer enough for dear leader the tide will turn for them as well. As if this all was just a sports game where you have to cheer for your team even if they actively break the rules.
the previous and next administration won’t be any better than this one in this context
Coursening is not as elegant as differential privacy. But using coursening is not a "privacy emergency", it is a very-slightly-less-accurate census. And no one knows what the actual economic impacts of this level of accuracy difference are.
I would love to see the more elegant techniques used, and also have the intuition that this is bad policy, but I don't see the "emergency" here. Labeling it as such just histrionic to me.
This post's call to action is talking to your legislators, but it's missing a link to do so. Find yours here: https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member
The article presents two possible methods to protect privacy in a dataset. It then attacks a theoretical weakness in a contrived scenario in the old method, which intends to incline us to choose the other, newer solution. The article does not describe in detail the newer solution beyond its name. I have have questions that the article doesn't cover in enough detail: 1) Has the coarsening failed in the way described in the article in practice which leaked information? 2) How does the 'other' solution we're expected to desire work? 3) What is an example of the difference in level of detail offered by the newer solution that was not possible when the data needed to be coarsened in practice?
(1) "A Simulated Reconstruction and Reidentification Attack on the 2010 U.S. Census" https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.11283
(2) By adding carefully tuned Gaussian noise. In the last 6 years we have also figured out how to add much less Gaussian noise: "The 2020 Census Disclosure Avoidance System TopDown Algorithm" https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.08986
(3) This one is harder to answer, since the Census Bureau aimed to release the same style of statistics as in previous decades. So the goal of 2020 was to release the same statistics with the same error bounds. Evidence suggests they succeeded in doing this. "Evaluating Bias and Noise Induced by the U.S. Census Bureau's Privacy Protection Methods" http://arxiv.org/abs/2306.07521, "Evaluating the Impacts of Swapping on the US Decennial Census" http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.01320
Can anyone explain me why the Heritage foundation targeted these statistical techniques? What's the political motive behind it?
Probably related to things like "The Nazis utilized data from routine censuses, tax returns, and municipal police registrations. In Germany, and in occupied countries like the Netherlands, this information was systematically organized. In some instances, IBM technology (via Dehomag punch card machines) was used to tabulate and sort census data to identify individuals of Jewish descent."
What is the political goal behind this directive? I assume there is some completely non-subtle purpose, but I can't tell what it is.
The people currently in power want every single byte of data they can get on people who reside in this country so they can divide them up by arbitrary criteria and do with those groups as they please. Depending on the person, that might mean imprisonment, it might mean deportation, it might mean something worse.
Imprisonment? deportation? these are petty things.
The serious danger is polarization and radicalization, turning people against each other, suppressing voices of reason. The ensuing chaos could help pull off another January 6th, only successful. Gerrymandering is one approach, but with more detailed data more interesting things may become possible.
Alternative take that was expressed in the other post on this: census data users found DP extremely hard to work with, and viewed it as an imposed solution from the ivory tower. I wonder if any user could chime in on this.
> so they can divide them up by arbitrary criteria and do with those groups as they please
You mean like by race, gender, and sexual orientation, and using statistical analysis to portray a group of oppressors vs. oppressed, perpetrators and victims? Exactly what was happening via official public policy for the last 4 years while the progressives cheered it on?
You won't convince anyone with "angry Facebook grandpa" style comments.
Please explain to us in great detail how exactly "official public policy" did that, including the laws and changes that were pushed to do so.
And explain why, if that were the case, conservatives are doing nothing to stop that.
Why would anyone continue to do something bad, just because the people you hate started it?
> If followed, this order will destroy the Commerce public data our nation relies on for important decisions, such as where to build necessary services for our community’s well-being
So this is not about privacy. Scott sounds like a computer scientist forced (by the American ecosystem) to become a bombastic talker.
Can’t release data sets if they can’t be sufficiently anonymized so as to avoid Privacy Act/other non-disclosure statutes. Can’t anonymize data sets sufficiently if you’re banned from using the techniques data people use when anonymizing data sets. Not that difficult to follow.
This is guest post by Cynthia Dwork; that's Dwork's writing, not Aaronson's.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48517377
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48517377
It's too bad this has become political.
I do differential privacy work for GDPR compliance and it's an interesting technology.
> I do differential privacy work for GDPR compliance and it's an interesting technology.
You mean legislation?
No?
We do GDPR-compliant reporting by using differential privacy to provably remove PII.
"PII" in the context of GDPR...?
>> remove PII
PII isn't a GDPR term
Personal data is though, and the two terms have relatively similar meanings.
Your sentence reads weird, like if you're missing some key words or context.
"Differential privacy" is the technology they are referring to. Their English is fine, you're the one missing something.
One of my favorite recently learned facts about Congress:
Federally mandated parental leave (paternity and maternity leave) polls at about 80% in favor with the US adult population. This is regardless of political affiliation, by the way. Democrat and Republican voters both support it.
Upon reading this, you might be surprised as to why it's NOT federally mandated given how popular it is.
One group it's NOT popular with is corporations. And corporations donate a lot of money to politicians. And it's cheaper to donate to politicians who are against parental leave than it is to pay people for that parental leave.
I enjoy sharing this b/c it's a reminder that there are groups who spend a lot of time and money to get their way. At first, that might feel overwhelming. You might be surprised to know that when you call your local congressperson, those calls gets tallied b/c they want to know what their constituents care about. So give them a call and let them know.
One of the things I have found so alarming about a lot of recent revelations is just how cheap congress goes for.
I only-kinda-jokingly say that I'd be willing to be the sacrifice and get a second mortgage on my house if it could buy the entire nation some new rights.
Our politicians routinely sell out smaller issues for "downpayment in a coastal metro" level of money. It's just about within reach of a middle-class urban adult to directly fund with some personal sacrifices.
I feel like we like to imagine that these corporations are budgeting big-bucks to bribe/lobby politicians, because they have more money than most humans can actually mentally picture, but their budgets are often closer to a small team of software engineers' salary. Meta spend ~$25M on all lobbying last year - and they're the top corporate spender. That's under 1 hours of revenue for them.
> could buy the entire nation some new rights
It's important to remember that rights cannot be received, or bought. Privileges can. Equally easily privileges can be taken away again.
But rights can only be won in a fight.
Sadly, they also require a constant readiness to fight for keeping them; in civilized societies this happens in courtrooms, but escalations to the worse happen periodically.
Always wondered about this…
Are politicians really so beholden to an anonymous donor that makes a single $50k donation? Or even a single $500k one?
Or is it the real knowledge that said known regular donors will continue indefinitely as long as things go their way (and indefinitely support the opposition otherwise) …?
The pessimistic part of me wonders if a grassroots campaign that raised $10M would even be able drive any change with it.
I think it is more that corps select which politician gets ahead than that they are beholden to them.
50k USD is a an awful lot of money for a lower level politician to run an election campaign with.
Watch out though because many of those revelations are bogus and only look at how much money people lobbying for a position donated to some member of Congress who voted for that position. They fail to look up how much money people lobbying against that position donated to that same member of Congress.
Often times it is about the same amount, which means you cannot infer that the money influenced the vote.
Some do it right, but enough do not that unless you know you are getting the information from one of the ones who does it right you really need to check for yourself.
In that case, maybe it would make sense for regular people to create their own PACs. Like a privacy PAC. Pay for lobbyists who are more persuasive than our angry emails.
As they say, freedom ain’t free.
https://theonion.com/american-people-hire-high-powered-lobby...
This gets it a bit backwards, the money is a reward for playing along within the system, not a straight cash-for-policy transaction.
If you don't play along with the elite line, they throw $50 million into a primary election to get you out of power. That's where you start to get into enough money to make a political difference, and even then the money is only part of the equation.
> One of the things I have found so alarming about a lot of recent revelations is just how cheap congress goes for.
The executive branch is also available for relatively bargain basement prices!
Ask us about our unlimited pardoning power for federal offenses!
#Ad #WorldLibertyFinancial
I believe $50-100k
You're off by 10.
Absolutely not.
From the responses I've gotten from my representatives when I've written them, my impression is they care a lot more about their corporate sponsors and the party line than they do about their constituents.
Well, if you think money in politics or corporations buying politicians is bad now, it is going to get exponentially worse in the USA. The Supreme Court recently gave a decision that allows the rich oligarchy to give unlimited amounts of money[1] to their favorite puppets... excuse me, politicians.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2026/06/30/nx-s1-5827039/supreme-court-c...
If we had voter referendums at the federal level, most “hot button” partisan issues would be solved because there is consensus across 70-75% of the population, even if weighted by state somehow
This has been studied, famously by Princeton [1]. The chance of any given bill passing is roughly 30% and any amount of public support from 0% to 100% has almost zero impact on that 30%.
Elected offices have become fiefdoms to enrich oneself and maintain the status quo. Anyone who bucks this trend has historically rarely gotten into office or been chased out once they do. This could be from funding another candidate, simply starving an existing candidate of campaign funds or in some cases by redistricting somebody out of a seat.
And look at the reelection rates for Congress [2]. They tend to hover between 90% and 95%.
[1]: https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba
[2]: https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/reelection-ra...
Free housing, free food, free health care, and free income are also wildly popular with the US adult population. The problem is that those things are not really "free" because somebody else needs to pay for them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority
Better to spend money on helping our neighbors than going around the world murdering people
You’re confusing free to the user with free to the government. Those are all great examples of things which make huge differences in the lives of the people who need them while having no meaningful impact on taxpayers (forget Jeff Bezos, none of us would significantly change our lives if we paid for childcare or housing out of general fund revenue, and that’s before you factor in how much money we’d save getting better treatment with universal healthcare — every time I’ve done the math comparing us with Denmark, it’s been roughly even once you factor in how much we pay for insurance).
Part of how you can tell it’s not the cost motivating opposition is that this concern is never applied to defense spending.
> The problem is that those things are not really "free" because somebody else needs to pay for them.
This line of thinking is exactly why America is sliding backwards.
It is not a problem to pay for things provide a net benefit to society.
Yet we apparently have money for military parades and wars and ballrooms. Go figure.
There are infinity dollars in the Federal Reserve. Pay-for requirements are a concern troll bludgeon used against only politically disfavored spending. Taxation (on the federal level) does not pay for services, but merely counteracts the inflationary effect of their provision in an indirect way. It's indirect enough that those who disregard it are not politically punished.
Exactly. Giving people free stuff is extremely popular. If people actually want those things, we can collective open our wallets and pay for it. But that changes people's opinions quite radically.
Does it? I'm skeptical. In fact, we apparently have more than enough money for it because we suddenly have billions to spend on war in the Middle East.
*hundreds to thousands of billions
I mean, the republicans constantly pay for things nobody wants, so uh, what's the issue here?
"It costs money, therefore it's impossible."
You think social democrats never heard of a balanced budget? I don't know how you "fiscal conservatives" take yourselves seriously.
On the healthcare front it’s not even a question. We are already paying via insurance and deductibles and copays etc. W2s don’t see most of the cost because their company pays it.
"Somebody else needs to pay for" warmongering, too, yet there's nowhere near as much hand-wringing about how "somebody else needs to pay for them".
It might come as a shock to you then that running government or military or any government service requires “somebody else needs to pay for them”. Let’s get rid of those too. Long live anarchy.
Fact is people who spout this nonsense are simply selfish people with “F you, got mine” mindset. They hide their selfishness in garb and call others socialist.
This is such a straw man argument. Consider health care.
The US spends by far the most per-capita on health care of any OECD country [1]. It's roughly 50% more than the number 2 on the list, which is Switzerland, a notoriously expensive country. Yet (almost?) every other country on that list has universal healthcare. Yet life expectancy is lower than Costa Rica [2] and generally health outcomes are worse in the US than most OECD nations.
So providing universal healthcare would actually be cheaper overall but it would destroy a health insurance companies, which are nothing more than parasitic rent-seekers. There would be less spending per capita but a lot of that spending would be made by the government rather than companies. So you'd need to tax to cover that cost, which would be significant, but it would be overall cheaper.
Now consider housing. We treat it as a speculative investment rather than something to provide shelter. There is absolutely no reason for it to be as expensive as it is. All we're doing is a massive wealth transfer from the young and poor to the old and rich. Yet we, as a society, choose to prioritize landlord and speculator profits over people, quite literally, dying in the street.
Food? We produce an abundance of food, more than we can eat. There is absolutely no reason anyone should go hungry in any OECD nation, ever. We destroy food to protect profits.
As for income, people generally want to be paid enough to live on, something that's becomign increasingly difficult. And again, we choose minting billionaires at a stupendous rate (and now trillionaires) over paying people a living wage.
[1]: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/11/health-at-a-gla...
[2]: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/11/health-at-a-gla...
The problem with attempting to provide universal healthcare in the united states is that, despite health professionals attesting to the necessity and validity of certain health related topics, the current administration in particular is very keen about stripping away access to these forms of care, as far as they legally can (medicare/medicaid, VA, federal funding).
UHC requires the removal of politicians from qualified input, and this country's politicians love nothing more than to get overly involved in things they know nothing about.
That's broken as well, yes, but that shouldn't stop us from fixing things incrementally.
If a million people want it and it is worth $100 to them they could create a superpac for this with $100m funding?
Yes, apparently there are crowdfunded superpacs exactly for this purpose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayday_PAC
if DSA gets enough people in, that might go through?
pretty directly within the realms of what their candidates support, and they have a pretty good purity test to tell who to support or not with the genocide question
DSA?
Communists
Yeah, calling your legislators is going to do precisely nothing [1], just like data centers are almost universally opposed by the communities and the negative externalities are way more real and direct. Yet they keep getting approved anyway.
The true crisis here is in the captured political system.
In the 1990s in Australia a racist, white supremacist party arose called One Nation through a very weird confluence of events that led a racist fish and chip shop owner by the name of Pauline Hanson to become a member of parliament. It was almost 30 years ago she gave her now famous miaden speech to Parliament [2].
After some scandals, One Nation kind of disappeared for awhile, in part because the conservative coalition (of the Liberals and Nationals) basically adopted the racist platform in the early 2000s where asylum seekers were effectively scapegoated. But weirdly she's back now. Anyway, that part isn't the point.
Australia has a preferential voting system, what tends to be called ranked choice voting in the US. You generally have two options on how to vote: you can individually number candidates yourself or you can use the registered preferences for a given party. In this case you put a "1" in Australian Labor Party, Australian Greens or whatever. A lot of people do this so preferences matter. Anyway, One Nation had a strategy of voting gainst the incumbent with preferences. So if it was a Liberal seat, the preference went to Labor and vice versa. This scared the bejsus out of the political establishment such that the opposing political parties gave preferences to each other over One Nation, leading to One Nation getting no seats in Parliament despite getting 10%+ (at its original peak) of the popular vote.
My point here is that too many politicians and political parties view their seat as something that belongs to them. In the US primaries are treated largely as a formality by the parties for their anointed candidates. Re-election rates in Congress have sat at 95%+ for decades.
What's interesting is that the Demoratic Party is almost in open revolt currently and over the past few weeks, several long-term (10-30 years) incumbents have been primaried by insurgent candidates.
Here's a funf act I learned this week. It's been ~18 years since Citizens United basically got rid of campaign spending limits. A third of all the money spent since then has been spent this year on primaries. Thomas Massie has $35M+ spent against him in his primary, making it the most expensive in US history. Many others are in the millions. It's estimated that the total spending for the Senate seat in Maine will push $400M. For one Senate seat.
All of this is a long way of saying that the only thing that will work is making these legislators fear they'll lose their cushy positions. And really if somebody has sat in office for 30 years and has nothing really to show for it, it's time for them to go.
[1]: https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2ypTX9ntTQ
Heya, fellow Aussie here. Have you ever tried contacting your local MP?
I was cynical at first like you, thinking why bother. But when I tried it, turned out I was wrong and I actually had a pretty good experience!
The way I see it now, is that MPs aren't always in a good position to get close to the facts, so when you get in touch and tell them what you think.. you're actually giving them a huge gift.
It can actually be pretty effective, especially for state/local issues. For federal stuff, sure, might not be as good, but you'll at least get some satisfaction from getting an acknowledgement from their chief of staff or secretary.
Another Australian here too.
Yes, contacting your MP and senators can be very useful, including for federal stuff.
It's harder to actually get meetings with Federal members (they spend a lot of time in Canberra) but still worth trying.
Also it is very effective to vote for independent senators. You need to pay careful attention to make sure they aren't secretly insane but senators like David Pocock and Jacqui Lambie are very effective (Lambie seems crazy sometimes but she is surprisingly willing to change her mind on issues).
>David Pocock
Pocock is a blight on the senate. The guy is just a seppo complaint repeating station. I swear he is more in touch with the democrat party than any Australian.
I contact MP's, I make submissions to parliament and I email media companies. I have done since 2017. You used to be able to google my name and get a bunch of hits for pdf submissions on aph.
Its done exactly squat.
>MPs aren't always in a good position to get close to the facts,
Pocock was repeating data centre noise concerns, but refuses to simply hold a press conference on the street outside of his local to demonstrate them. Facts are not desirable for parliamentarians, they routinely get in the way of business.
Ranked choice voting would go a long way, the two-party system is an intentionally forced false dichotomy like when parents give their kids the choice to eat broccoli or carrots so they’ll think it was their decision. Both parties are controlled by the investor class.
You could even just have straight proportional voting if you wanted, and that's be better than the current system. You got 3 votes? Great, you have a 3/100M chance to win.
Agreed: sure, call your representative. If they're cagey or noncommittal, do what you can to get their ass primaried. Every "moderate" will absolutely sell you into a Panopticon.
ask tom s. in california if all that spend guarantees anything.
more urgent is to repair the broken election process especially in california where it now takes 30+ days to "count" the votes.
There has been debate among statisticians and political scientists about using differential privacy for census data. 2020 was actually the first Decennial Census that used differential privacy. This is the mandated census done every 10 years that counts population and is used for apportionment. Some have criticized the use of differential privacy.[1][2] But others have argued that coarsening does not protect privacy sufficiently and that differential privacy does not distort apportionment.
The political context is unclear. There are lawsuits about whether differential privacy is constitutional. There is also the possibility that citizenship status can be inferred by using multiple census products put together. It's also possible redistricting is at stake although it's unclear to me how getting rid of differential privacy benefits any one party.
[1]: https://apnews.com/article/business-census-2020-technology-e...
[2]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abk3283
I'd like to emphasize that coarsening is not just theoretically non-private, a number of attacks that lead to leaking personally identifiable data were demonstrated on the 2010 census. So it's not really a he-said/she-said situation.
That's not what I said or implied it is. I said there has been criticism of using differential privacy and linked to it. I also mentioned the reconstruction attacks on coarsening. Those two things can be true at the same time.