What Could DOGE Do With Federal Data?

The Atlantic

21-02-2025

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When the Department of Government Efficiency stormed the federal government, it had a clear objective—to remake the government, one must remake the civil service. And in particular, the team of Elon Musk acolytes 'focused on accessing the terminals, uncovering the button pushers, and taking control,' Michael Scherer, Ashley Parker, Shane Harris, and I wrote this week in an investigation into the DOGE takeover. Computers, they figured, run the government.
DOGE members and new political appointees have sought access to data and IT systems across the government—at the Treasury Department, IRS, Department of Health and Human Services, and more. Government technologists have speculated that DOGE's next step will be to centralize those data and feed them into AI systems, making bureaucratic processes more efficient while also identifying fraud and waste, or perhaps simply uncovering further targets to dismantle. Musk's team has reportedly already fed Department of Education data into an AI system, and Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer recently appointed to the General Services Administration, has repeatedly spoken with staff about an AI strategy, mentioning using the technology to develop coding agents and analyze federal contracts.
No matter DOGE's goal, putting so much information in one place and under the control of a small group of people with little government experience has raised substantial security concerns. As one recently departed federal technology official wrote in draft testimony for lawmakers, which we obtained, 'DOGE is one romance scam away from a national security emergency.'
This Is What Happens When the DOGE Guys Take Over
By Michael Scherer, Ashley Parker, Matteo Wong and Shane Harris
They arrived casually dressed and extremely confident—a self-styled super force of bureaucratic disrupters, mostly young men with engineering backgrounds on a mission from the president of the United States, under the command of the world's wealthiest online troll.
On February 7, five Department of Government Efficiency representatives made it to the fourth floor of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau headquarters, where the executive suites are located. They were interrupted while trying the handles of locked office doors.
'Hey, can I help you?' asked an employee of the agency that was soon to be forced into bureaucratic limbo. The DOGE crew offered no clear answer.
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DOGE and new Trump appointees' access to federal data and computer systems is growing in both breadth and depth. Defense technologies, Americans' sensitive personal and health data, dangerous biological research, and more are in reach. Within at least one agency, USAID, they have achieved 'God mode,' according to an employee in senior leadership—meaning Elon Musk's team has 'total control over systems that Americans working in conflict zones rely on, the ability to see and manipulate financial systems that have historically awarded tens of billions of dollars, and perhaps much more,' Charlie Warzel, Ian Bogost, and I reported this week. With this level of control, the USAID staffer feared, DOGE could terminate federal workers in 'a conflict zone like Ukraine, Sudan, or Ethiopia.'
In the coming weeks, we reported, 'the team is expected to enter IT systems at the CDC and Federal Aviation Administration.' Just how far Musk and his team can go is uncertain; they face various lawsuits, which have thus far had varying success. The team may be trying to improve the government's inner workings, as is its stated purpose. 'But in the offices where the team is reaching internal IT systems,' Charlie, Ian, and I wrote, 'some are beginning to worry that [Musk] might prefer to destroy' the government, 'to take it over, or just to loot its vaults for himself.'