and his cancelling of foreign aid at the same time
I don't think Trump nor President Musk understand how much power the US weilds, just purely on foreign aid. By gutting all of it, we removed a large portion of the US's foreign power (Which, IMO, is a pretty good result).
And then it gets restored from backup 20 minutes later while you look incompetent to your peers and supervisors.
Oh damned.... for some reason the last 4 backups failed... Crap.
Regardless, it's 20 minutes of outage. And sure, you look incompetent to your peers and supers, who hopefully, would be on your side, anyways. Or, they are Fascist Toadies, and it's best you look incompetent. How can someone incompetent sabotage anything?
That requires destruction of govt property (up to 20 years in jail).
No, it doesn't. It requires a few days of not checking a misconfigured backup job. And the misconfiguration is just an "oops", easily explained away.
but these are civil servants who inherently believe in the rule of law by default. That programming in itself makes it hard to go against this lifelong belief in doing things by the book.
Most simple sabotage is doing things EXACTLY by the book... Civil servants often take shortcuts to expedite things. They should take ZERO shortcuts.
Elon toadie asks for a set of creds. Demand Toadie get all appropriate forms completed, first, and then demand documented procedure for obtaining those creds are followed TO THE LETTER. No rush jobs. No prodding the ticket holder for updates. Just exactly like the book says to do it.
Just an example.
Well, that changes, the more people do it. And I am not going to brag here about what I've done, but at least once a day, I do something to put a wrench in a cog.
There are myriad ways to take something offline, which is easily plausible as an "oops" moment. There are also myriad tarpits to send requests to.
My old job, if I wanted to totally de-rail a project? I'd push it over to the project management office, and then to the infosec office. Almost guaranteed, the project would fail, because of those two tarpits.
Get a special request? Schedule a meeting for 4 business days out. Spend 1/3 of the meeting catching up and socializing. Spend 1/3 pre-planning the next meeting. Spend 1/3 laying out all the issues needing to be solved, and "circle back" when we get "scheduling lined up"...
No, I mean crashes if the Whitehouse web sites.... or breaking the auth systems for Trump officials... or delaying fleet vehicle reservations for motorcades so they come up short, or have to cancel....
The only way these things can happen so fast is by civil servants just doing what they are told.
Their actions? How else do websites vanish? Whiy aren't we getting livetracks on Elon's location, or his toadies? Where are the server crashes?
Actually, a Trump type person has been predicted for the last 25 years. The rise of populism was evident clearly for all to see in 2007, and only got stronger.
Have you been passing around copies of "Simple Sabotage" and applying those tactics?
If no, why not?
We know. What we don't know is why are all civil servants just rolling over, instead of applying simple sabotage.
And then Biden, for some god awful reason, picked him as AG to slow walk any judicial proceedings against the felon Trump.
It slows them down. Which is what we can hope for, until people get a bit more organized into other forms of resistance.