Trump knocks down barriers around personal data, raising alarm

The Hill

18 hours ago

The Trump administration is shattering norms around the handling of Americans' personal, and sometimes private, information — dismantling barriers around data in the name of government efficiency and rooting out fraud.
Privacy experts say the moves bring the country closer to a surveillance state, increase the government's vulnerability to cyber-attacks and risk pushing people away from public services.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has sought — and almost always received — access to social security numbers, addresses, medical histories, tax histories, welfare benefits, bank accounts, immigration statuses and federal employee databases.
These moves have shattered walls that have long kept data within the agencies that collect it.
John Ackerly, a former technology policy adviser under former President George W. Bush and founder of data security firm Virtru, said government agencies need to strike a balance in handling data.
'Foundationally, more information being shared more widely can provide greater insight,' he said.
'Bureaucracy shuts down access to information,' he added. 'But that does not mean that there should be unfettered access.'
Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) see the risk of abuse as outweighing any potential gains.
'We should be limiting federal agencies to access data about us only to the extent they need to perform their duties for the American people,' said Cody Venzke, senior policy counsel on surveillance, privacy and technology at the ACLU.
'There's no reason why these data silos need to be broken down,' he added.
Despite outrage from Democrats and some pushback from the courts, the Trump administration has charged ahead.
'President Trump signed an executive order keeping his promise to eliminate information silos and streamline data collection across all agencies to increase government efficiency and save hard-earned taxpayer dollars,' Taylor Rogers, a White House assistant press secretary, said in a statement.
Trump's executive order in late March gave agency heads 30 days to rescind or modify guidance that served as a barrier to inter-agency sharing of non-classified information. That included federally funded state program data such as Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and block grants.
On May 6, the U.S. Department of Agriculture asked states to hand over the data of 42 million people receiving SNAP benefits, including their names, dates of birth, social security numbers and addresses. This request is currently paused amid legal challenges.
Data sharing has also been a divisive part of Trump's hardline immigration agenda.
On June 13, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services handed over personal data of millions of Medicaid enrollees in sanctuary states and cities — including California, Washington state, Illinois and Washington, D.C. — to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), in a statement at the time, called the move 'potentially unlawful, particularly given numerous headlines highlighting potential improper federal use of personal information and federal actions to target the personal information of Americans.'
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and DHS also struck a deal in April that enables the IRS to share the current addresses of migrants who have been ordered removed from the country within the past 90 days. In May, a judge gave the deal a green light.
'To summarize, the IRS must disclose limited taxpayer identity information (e.g., the taxpayer's name and address) to assist another agency in criminal investigations and proceedings, if the agency has satisfied the statutory prerequisites in its written request,' U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich wrote, ruling on a lawsuit filed by four immigration organizations.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has also begun to increase its social media surveillance, particularly of posts they deem 'anti-American,' according to the Associated Press.
In another win for the administration, the Supreme Court on June 6 overturned a lower court injunction that temporarily limited DOGE's access to highly personal Social Security Administration (SSA) data. The decision was unsigned, decided in a 6-3 split along party lines.
This overturns decades of precedent on the Privacy Act of 1974, which requires written consent from an individual to share identifiable information. The liberal judges dissented, arguing DOGE failed to justify its need to access SSA data.
The SSA stores data on social security numbers, bank accounts, retirement benefits, work authorization status, income histories, medical records and more. In 2025, it served 69 million people.
Critics of the Trump administration's expanded data sharing say the moves present a range of risks, from government overreach to higher stakes for cyber defense and pushing people away from accessing public services.
Noah Chauvin, an assistant law professor at Widener University, said the elimination of data silos will bring an 'enormous' amount of information under one umbrella, raising concerns about who can access it, and for what purposes.
'When the government has unchecked surveillance powers, they inevitably are abused to target people who have disfavorable political views or are otherwise disliked by people holding power,' he said.
The New York Times reported that Palantir, a data analytics and AI firm founded by Alex Karp and Peter Thiel, has been contracted to centralize and organize data, exacerbating concerns about who gets access to these troves of personal information. Palantir issued a rebuttal to these allegations, saying they are dedicated to 'privacy and civil liberties.'
A single, centralized repository of personal data could also be a goldmine for hackers, either within the country or from adversaries like China and Russia. In 2023, federal agencies were targeted by roughly 32,000 cyberattacks, according to the Office of Management and Budget.
'The issue ultimately is that the federal government, in plain defense, has to win every time,' said Venzke of the ACLU. 'A hacker, especially with a single centralized database, only needs to win one time.'
Some immigrant rights and privacy experts are also concerned that fears around the privacy of sensitive information will discourage people from using government services or engaging with public officials, whether that means calling the police, seeking healthcare or filing taxes.
Cristobal Cavazos, executive director of Immigrant Solidarity DuPage, one of the plaintiffs in the case, said these moves were creating a 'framework of fear.'
'These databases have all your information, right? 'We're watching you. We're monitoring you. We're Big Brother,'' he said.
The historical practice of keeping sensitive information segregated between federal agencies has also helped encourage civil functions like tax compliance, according to Glenn Gerstell, former general counsel for the National Security Agency.
'One of the reasons we have fairly high compliance with our tax rules is that people feel that their tax data, their salary, their deductions, you could learn a lot about someone from their medical deductions, their personal expenses, etc, is kept private by the IRS,' he said.
'If that feeling of privacy and sanctity is eroded, that's going to hurt tax collections,' Gerstell said. 'Could be self-defeating.'
Ackerly, the former Bush adviser, acknowledges potential privacy abuses, but said a rethink is overdue on how data-sharing can help root out fraud, reduce spending and boost efficiency in government.
'I do think that there needs to be a fresh look at how these agencies are performing services to Americans and at the end of the day data is what can help to unpack that,' he said.