The Department of Government Efficiency is pushing to build a single centralized database to unify agency systems to advance Trump administration priorities, including tracking down and deporting undocumented immigrants and rooting out waste and fraud in government, according to government workers.
But critics of the plans say the database will include personal information about U.S. citizens and would violate privacy and security protections, reported The Washington Post on Wednesday.
The DOGE team, overseen by Elon Musk, has been collecting information from across the government, said multiple federal employees, including a former DOGE staffer, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisals.
Federal workers say DOGE is trying to merge databases that have been kept separate for years, such as with the Social Security Administration, where Musk lieutenant Steve Davis told staffers that DOGE will start linking sources of the agency’s data with the goal of “joining all data across government.”
Already, though, DOGE has removed some protections around sensitive information, including Social Security numbers, employment history, medical records and more, and security analysts say that forming a comprehensive database increases the risk that data could be exposed to hackers and adversaries.
Civil rights advocates also say the data that is being assembled could be used against political enemies or when making decisions on funding.
“Separation and segmentation is one of the core principles in sound cybersecurity,” Charles Henderson of security company Coalfire told the Post. “Putting all your eggs in one basket means I don’t need to go hunting for them — I can just steal the basket.”
But the White House is rejecting such concerns, with spokesman Harrison Fields commenting that “some of the brightest cybersecurity minds in the nation” are protecting DOGE’s processes.
“President [Donald] Trump is leading the charge to modernize the federal government and make it more efficient — and DOGE is playing a critical role in fulfilling that vision,” Fields said. “By advancing secure data-sharing across agencies, DOGE is enhancing accountability, eliminating fraud, and streamlining operations across the board.”
Meanwhile, the Social Security Administration has been sharing data with other government agencies for years to “calculate and ensure proper payment of benefits,” said acting Commissioner Leland Dudeck.
Sharing data with DOGE, he added, “is a matter of common sense and something the public rightly expects from the federal government to ensure responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars.”
Government records submitted in a lawsuit by the AFL-CIO against the Labor Department show, meanwhile, that five DOGE employees at the Department of Health and Human Services can see contractor and payment information as well as Social Security numbers, medical diagnoses, and phone numbers for Medicaid recipients.
Usually, sharing data involves several steps, including public notices and computer matching agreements between agencies.
“You want people to have the least amount of access that they absolutely need,” said Faith Williams, director of the Effective and Accountable Government Program at the Project on Government Oversight. “So if someone comes in and asks a question, it’s not, Here’s the master key.”
But staffers among 10 federal agencies said that Trump administration and DOGE officials have skipped normal data-sharing processes, including no longer creating records of who accessed or changed data.
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