steve k (spooky)
steve k (spooky)
@stevekovacs.com
Your boy in government (former). USDS VA ED NPS. Tech policy, gov systems, public lands, public everything. Distorted bass, mild pro wrestling experience. Gently, cautiously: Go Bills.
418 followers929 following193 posts
steve k (spooky) reposted
Me and the rest of the Warriors taking down a half price orca platter at Old Ebbitt before heading out into the night to do battle with the Penn Quarter Furious Mimes and the Kalorama Killer Llamas and so on and so forth
Trump on DC: "Nobody wanted to eat out. They were afraid. Even if you were in the restaurant, people would walk in and like the Wild West, 'Hold it up!' Everybody is standing there. Can you imagine? A fancy restaurant. They were robbing the whole restaurant. It's crazy."
steve k (spooky) reposted
Hey a gov colleague of mine made a thing where you can put in an amount of pre-tax income and see line by line where your federal tax dollars are going. taxpayerreceipt.com
steve k (spooky) reposted
steve k (spooky) reposted
Skip the Sunday morning political shows. Forget the 15 articles you’ve saved. Instead, spend 76 minutes understanding how Trump’s World Liberty Financial actually works. The foreign money, the private dollar, the companies, the bank, & who’s getting paid. One year of investigation. One film.
steve k (spooky) reposted
JUST POSTED: Today at The NYT we are publishing a major investigation into how President Trump used his executive powers to expose millions of Americans to greater cancer risks. A six month-long investigation built on more than 10,000 pages of FOIA records. Read it www.nytimes.com/2026/10/24/c...
Childish is right; seems like this era of speculative capital was built by men for men adept at mining and reifying their interior adolescent psychopathologies. Hence my next military tech startup, a wearable AI sword which makes a really cool shhhhnnnnk sound when drawn from its AI scabbard.
As a former DOI-NPS WASO employee let me just say that if you want to do obsessive libbed-out newsposting you can just do it under your own name. Promoting some elaborate fantasy that there are a bunch of GS-12s hunched over a laptop by candlelight in Yosemite doing article reacts is weird AF.
As we approach the midterms, remember that the Alt National Park Service is a merch sales operation claiming without evidence to be a group of federal employees, and is not a genuine source of news about elections of any kind. Please get your election info from a local, reputable source.
steve k (spooky) reposted
The root cause of Elon Musk’s ascent to de facto defense secretary is the federal government’s roughly 45-year practice of contracting out the work it had formerly done itself. buff.ly/IzfaSAa
The PHP CVEs are particularly acute in gov, which uses Drupal and WP extensively. The public-facing VA app, eg, is a RoR backend supporting a headless Drupal CMS writing to a React front. Up until a few weeks ago, the entire stack was open source on VA's Github; now not, so remediation isn't public.
Sad three letter agency folks who need a spiritually buoying side hustle apply now to usher at the one of the best-named national parks (nothing beats Black Canyon of the Gunnison), it's a good gig: www.nps.gov/wotr/learn/m...
Plenty of victories like this over the past 2 years, if you're looking for good news. Advocacy groups and nonprofits (in this case, the National Council of Nonprofits) have been routinely winning in court and beating back the worst of this administration's excesses.
The Justice Department dropped its appeals of two court rulings that struck down the Trump administration’s restrictions on the popular student-loan forgiveness program for public servants.
steve k (spooky) reposted
steve k (spooky) reposted
steve k (spooky) reposted
I spoke with both candidates running in NY-21. Anthony Constantino talked to me about his music album 'Thank you President Trump.' Blake Gendebien spoke with me about affordability issues and the impact rising costs are having on the working class in the district www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...
Here's my Sunday contribution to the Sports App, the best app for sports in the appverse: really appreciate this analysis from WIVB's Carl Jones on the BUF secondary. I too am optimistic about IGB and look forward to more frequent man press covers. www.youtube.com/watch?v=bopH...
"This case will be critical in holding DOGE accountable for not just the utter destruction it caused within the U.S. government, but in setting a clear precedent for how U.S. presidents can or cannot bypass federal disclosure laws." slate.com/news-and-pol...
steve k (spooky) reposted
This week a white nationalist tried to assassinate a member of Congress and you probably didn’t even hear about it—and a reminder that being an elementary school student in the US is more deadly than being an ICE officer: www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/three-shoo...
Broke: The State forces me to pay an annual pittance to fund essential services Bespoke: The State forces my ingrate no-contact children to visit me in a prison van every Sunday to listen to my one act play the Bootstrap Monologues
“I’m old. I’ve paid my home off,” said Ray Warner, a 72-year-old Akron resident. “Why would I pay property tax?” Across the country, homeowners are asking the same question and revolting against property taxes at a scale not seen in a half century.
steve k (spooky) reposted
steve k (spooky) reposted
in all the breadth of this absolutely breathtaking essay, I am struck most by the observation that India knows what is is to be colonised by a company. www.equator.org/articles/aru...