It’s April and the United States is experiencing a self-foul trade war and a constitutional crisis against immigration. a lot of. This is enough to make you forget what Elon Musk calls the government efficiency department for a while. You shouldn’t.
What is obvious is: Doge is still there, occupying the foundation of government infrastructure. Perhaps slightly obvious is that the Doge project has recently entered a new stage. The elimination of federal workers and contracts will continue, where anything remains. But from here on, it’s all about data.
If any entity in the world has almost no sensitive data as much as the United States. From the beginning, Doge has wanted as much as he can, and through a series of resignations, shootings and court cases, most of them are in trouble.
In many cases, it is still unclear what the Doge engineers do or intend to use that data. Despite Elon Musk’s protests against the contrary, Doge is as opaque as Vantablack. But the latest reports from cable and elsewhere start to fill in pictures: For Doge, data is a tool. This is also a weapon.
Starting with in-house tax services, Doge Associates last week put the agency’s best, smartest professional engineer in a room with Palantir residents for a few days. As Wired previously reported, their mission is to build a “large API” that will make it easier to view previously divided data across the IRS from one place.
Isolated may not sound shocking. But theoretically, the API of all IRS data will make it possible for any institution or any external party with the right permission to access the most personalized and valuable data the U.S. government holds for its citizens. The blur of the Doge task begins to focus. More importantly, because we know the IRS has shared its data in a way that has never been possible: the agency recently signed a deal with the Department of Homeland Security that provides sensitive information about undocumented immigration.
It was the synergy of black companies that poured taxpayer data into President Donald Trump’s deportation crusade.
It also surpasses the IRS. The Washington Post reported this week that Doge representatives across government agencies, from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to the Bureau of Social Security, are putting normally blocked data to identify undocumented immigrants. As Wired reported last Friday, at the Labor Department, Dooger has obtained sensitive data on immigrants and farm workers.
This is just the data left in the government itself. NPR reported this week that a whistleblower from the National Labor and Industrial Relations Commission claimed that staff observed data in data after Doge accessed its system, with the destination unknown. The whistleblower further claimed that Doge Agents appeared to have taken steps to “cover their tracks” to turn off or evade surveillance tools to keep who is performing operations inside the computer system. (A spokesperson for NLRB rejected NPR, and Doge could use the agency’s system.)
