Trump and Musk are building an AI-driven surveillance state. This doesn't end well.
Last month, President Donald Trump issued a little-noticed executive order that directs agencies to eliminate “information silos”— data compartmentalized within one system that only certain qualified individuals can access. “Removing unnecessary barriers to Federal employees accessing Government data and promoting inter‑agency data sharing,” the order claimed, “are important steps toward eliminating bureaucratic duplication and inefficiency while enhancing the Government’s ability to detect overpayments and fraud.” However, these silos are actually a necessary—and often, statutorily required—layer of protection to shield confidential data from unlawful disclosure and potential abuse. Ordering these safeguards removed will allow unvetted officials (like Elon Musk) to access our information and use it for their own political and personal ends.
Take the IRS, for instance. Confidential taxpayer data is stored in the Integrated Data Retrieval System (IDRS), which is so sensitive that access is limited even for agency employees. Without this silo, an unauthorized official could look up any taxpayer in the country and view their income, address, banking and brokerage account numbers, marital status, assets and liabilities, whether they had significant medical expenses, and the name of their employer and tax preparer.
Or the Social Security Administration, which stores data including your name, Social Security number, date and place of birth, gender, addresses, marital and parental status, your parents’ names, lifetime earnings, bank account information, immigration and work authorization status, health conditions if you apply for disability benefits, and use of Medicare after a certain age.
Nearly every agency in the federal government has databases like these containing private information on people living in America, and Trump is trying to access all of them. As one of his first acts in office, Trump signed an executive order granting DOGE access to “all unclassified agency records,” which excludes national security secrets but includes over 300 separate fields of data on virtually everyone in the country:
Allowing the unlimited sharing of this data between agencies and political appointees risks bad actors weaponizing it for their own ends. With the information compiled from just a few government databases, dossiers could be assembled on every person in America, including those who transitioned to a different gender, had an abortion, are undocumented, work for nonprofits and ‘uncooperative’ companies (maybe they refused to drop equality initiatives or stop selling Pride merch), or donated to Democratic or anti-Trump causes. The resulting list of dissenters and disfavored groups could be used to target retaliatory government actions, from audits to prosecution, deportation, and imprisonment.
Note: Nearly all of the data access and data-sharing in this post is illegal under a combination of the Privacy Act, Social Security Act, Tax Reform Act of 1976, Taxpayer Browsing Protection Act, and Federal Information Security Modernization Act.
IRS
DOGE employees have sought access to the IDRS, but, amid public outcry and Democratic pushback, the White House claimed to limit DOGE to read-only access of anonymized tax data.
However, according to new reporting, DOGE is working with Peter Thiel’s Palantir to build a “mega API” for accessing Internal Revenue Service records:
APIs are application programming interfaces, which enable different applications to exchange data and could be used to move IRS data to the cloud and access it there. DOGE has expressed an interest in the API project possibly touching all IRS data, which includes taxpayer names, addresses, social security numbers, tax returns, and employment data. The IRS API layer could also allow someone to compare IRS data against interoperable datasets from other agencies.
Should this project move forward to completion, DOGE wants Palantir’s Foundry software to become the “read center of all IRS systems,” a source with direct knowledge tells WIRED, meaning anyone with access could view and have the ability to possibly alter all IRS data in one place. It’s not currently clear who would have access to this system.
Foundry is a Palantir platform that can organize, build apps, or run AI models on the underlying data. Once the data is organized and structured, Foundry’s “ontology” layer can generate APIs for faster connections and machine learning models. This would allow users to quickly query the software using artificial intelligence to sort through agency data, which would require the AI system to have access to this sensitive information.
Thiel’s involvement in building a pan-governmental database should worry everyone, given his clear fascist personal beliefs, his monetary support and platforming of neoreactionaries like Curtis Yarvin, and his business interests in genocide and dystopian state surveillance.
Last week, the Trump administration filed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the IRS and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that allows the tax agency to share information on taxpayers under “investigation that may lead to [judicial or administrative] proceedings.” Contrary to most mainstream reporting that the data-sharing agreement applies only to undocumented immigrants, the MOU states explicitly that the Department of Homeland Security (the parent agency of ICE) can seek information from the IRS on anyone “under criminal investigation for violations of one or more specifically designated Federal criminal statutes (not involving tax administration).”
Like most of the immigration-targeted measures in this post, the terms of the MOU can clearly be abused to investigate and potentially prosecute a wide swath of people in America. The fact that the administration completely redacted the list of information the IRS will disclose to ICE should be a giant red flag.
Acting IRS Commissioner Melanie Krause is resigning over concerns about the ethics and legality of the MOU. For decades, the IRS has promised undocumented immigrants and their employers that in exchange for paying taxes (filed using individual taxpayer identification numbers, or ITINs), their information would be kept private and only used for tax-collecting purposes. By encouraging compliance with the law, federal, state, and local governments have collected nearly $100 billion a year in taxes from undocumented immigrants, who can’t even use the programs (like social security) they are paying into. Now, the government is going back on its promise and weaponizing their data against them.
Treasury
The Department of the Treasury encounters personal data similar to the IRS, as the Department’s Bureau of Fiscal Services (BFS) is in charge of effectuating financial transactions like federal tax returns, social security retirement and disability payments, veterans’ benefits, Medicare customer payments, and salaries for federal workers.
DOGE employees first tried to gain access to the BFS after Trump’s inauguration but were rebuffed by acting Treasury Secretary David Lebryk, who was forced out for opposing DOGE. Current Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent granted DOGE access to the Treasury’s most sensitive systems within days of being confirmed by the Senate (including 16 Democrats). DOGE employee Marko Elez was given read/write access to BFS systems and proceeded to violate Treasury Dept. policy by transmitting unencrypted personal information to other people in the Trump administration.
Two different district court judges issued orders blocking DOGE access to the BFS in February, but both have since lifted or relaxed their bans.
Crucially, access to the BFS system allows more than just data collection; DOGE employees can unilaterally cut off any federal payments from within the system. According to a report by Wired, DOGE employees used this ability to halt USAID payments in early February:
DOGE operatives, including Luke Farritor, a young member, had gained “super administrator” access to USAID’s systems, according to ProPublica. Farritor, who had also been at the Department of Health and Human Services as well as the General Services Administration (GSA), was reportedly going through USAID’s payment system manually, shutting off agency funding, according to The Washington Post. Elez was in the midst of a similar operation in Kansas City: According to that Treasury official’s affidavit, the engineer began to manually identify and review the foreign aid payment files that had been sequestered in the folder Garber outlined in that late January email.
An executive order Trump signed last month further centralizes control of government accounts by consolidating decision-making about payments from other agencies under Secretary Bessent. In other words, Bessent (and presumably, his DOGE assistants) will have the ability to unilaterally cancel disbursements by non-Treasury offices.
Social Security
Like at the Treasury, the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) acting commissioner was forced out in February for refusing DOGE access to sensitive databases. Trump replaced her with a mid-level SSA employee named Leland Dudek, who collaborated with DOGE staffers without agency leadership’s permission as early as December 2024. Dudek granted DOGE access to the SSA Enterprise Data Warehouse—a centralized database that includes records on individuals who have been issued a Social Security number—within days of his elevation.
District Judge Ellen Hollander issued a temporary restraining order in March blocking all DOGE employees from further access to SSA systems that contain personally identifiable information and requiring DOGE personnel to “disgorge and delete” all previously obtained data. The Trump administration could not offer up a single legitimate reason to give DOGE control of the confidential information of hundreds of millions of Americans, Hollander wrote:
The DOGE Team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA…To facilitate the expedition, SSA provided members of the SSA DOGE Team with unbridled access to the personal and private data of millions of Americans, including but not limited to Social Security numbers, medical records, mental health records, hospitalization records, drivers’ license numbers, bank and credit card information, tax information, income history, work history, birth and marriage certificates, and home and work addresses. Yet, defendants, with so called experts on the DOGE Team, never identified or articulated even a single reason for which the DOGE Team needs unlimited access to SSA’s entire record systems, thereby exposing personal, confidential, sensitive, and private information that millions of Americans entrusted to their government.
Since then, mounting evidence suggests that the SSA and DOGE are not complying with the court’s order. First, Dudek replaced the Chief Information Officer of the SSA with Scott Coulter, a DOGE staffer, transforming him into an SSA employee on paper. In this position, Coulter can access sensitive SSA data for DOGE projects while claiming to comply with the restraining order. Then, DOGE employee Antonio Gracias admitted on “Fox and Friends” that he is comparing people’s social security data to voter roll information in a search for “illegals” collecting benefits and voting in elections. Garcias should not have access to that data under the court order.
Most recently, DOGE employee Aram Moghaddassi sent Dudek a list of over 6,300 immigrants to be declared “dead” in SSA’s “death master file,” violating the portion of the court’s order that barred DOGE involvement in SSA projects. The effort is targeted at legal immigrants with temporary legal status (e.g., Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans granted humanitarian parole) who the administration claims are convicted criminals and “suspected terrorists,” but officials told the New York Times it could eventually include a broader range of immigrants. By marking someone as “dead” in the SSA’s database, the person will be cut off from financial services like bank accounts and credit cards and can be denied employment.
Other agencies
DOGE staffers extracted sensitive data from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which stores a plethora of information on existing unions, employees who want to form unions, ongoing legal cases, and corporate secrets. An NLRB whistleblower who attempted to solicit assistance from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in investigating DOGE was anonymously left a threatening letter with “overhead pictures of him walking his dog.”
The Department of Housing and Urban Development announced a data-sharing agreement with DHS last month, allowing DOGE to identify undocumented immigrants living in public housing or receiving housing assistance. The administration is reportedly working on a rule that would ban mixed-status households, in which some members have legal status and some do not, from public housing.
DOGE has obtained access to naturalization-related IT systems at a time when the administration is plotting to denaturalize U.S. citizens.
DOGE accessed Department of Education data, including the federal student loan portfolio, in January. A district judge issued a preliminary injunction, but a 4th Circuit Court of Appeals panel (made up of a Trump appointee, a G.W. Bush appointee, and a Biden appointee) stayed the injunction last week, allowing DOGE to resume accessing students’ data.
DOGE is attempting to access data at the Securities and Exchange Commission, including staff emails, personnel data, contracts, and payments systems.
DOGE has reportedly been given some level of access to data at the Federal Trade Commission, leading ousted Democratic commissioners to warn about the risks of market-moving information being used for personal gain.
Top career officials at the Department of the Interior were placed on leave last month after declining to give DOGE access to the Federal Personnel and Payroll System (which processes paychecks to hundreds of thousands of federal employees, including the Supreme Court justices). According to Wired, DOGE operatives were eventually given access to the system.
The tools employed by the Trump administration to advance its fascist regime are based in the erosion of constitutional rights that we all have consented to. The American people allowed the government to build Orwellian state apparatuses to persecute brown people in the name of national security, and it is only a matter of time until the Trump administration turns that power against the nation.
Just look at what is happening: The State Department is using artificial intelligence to scour the social media accounts of international students to deport those who have committed thought crimes; the Department of Homeland Security is using a Palantir-powered database to identify and locate people based on tattoos, scars, license plate reader data, driver’s license status, bankruptcy filings, and more; and ICE is using Clearview AI’s facial recognition software, backed by a database of billions of images scraped off the internet and social media, to profile and target immigrants.
Our data, collated from public and law enforcement sources, is actively being used right now to facilitate secret police abductions of foreign-born students. And since they are not American citizens, and may have endorsed views uncommon among the majority of Americans, the administration is betting that few enough people will care until it is too late. As President Trump told Salvadoran President Bukele on Monday, American citizens are next. Once combined with the exhaustive repository of federal data, these AI-infused surveillance systems built to oppress “the other” will be supercharged to target anyone in America for any invented crime, and used to force compliance with the administration’s fascist agenda.
Scary AF. My head is spinning.
The founding fathers are throwing up in their graves right now