Bait and Switch

The fine print of a sweeping executive order seemingly grants Elon Musk — the wealthiest and arguably most powerful unelected figure in the world — and his associates at the somehow-still-real Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) access to all unclassified data held by US government agencies, according to Wired.

Since the evening of his inauguration, president Donald Trump has been busy signing a still-growing wave of sweeping executive actions. Among them was the establishment of the unfortunately-named DOGE, which per the order will be tasked with "modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity."

When DOGE was announced late last year, it was widely believed that the "department" would operate as a federal advisory committee, a type of consultative group subject to fairly strict transparency rules.

But as flagged by Wired, under the executive order, the Trump Administration didn't create a new federal advisory committee. It instead repurposed the United States Digital Service (USDS), an existing government organization with sweeping access to vast caches of data across government agencies, including the sensitive information of US citizens, as the "United States DOGE Service" — a move that seemingly opens the door for Musk and his operatives to access a massive amount of data without much transparency oversight.

"It's quite a clever way of integrating DOGE into the federal government that I think will work," George Washington University law professor Richard Pierce told Wired, "in the sense of giving it a platform for surveillance and recommendations."

Inside Out

A former USDS employee told Wired that the rebranding of the organization was an "A+ bureaucratic jiu-jitsu move" — and warned of dystopian, surveillance-driven outcomes that access to USDS-held data could foster.

"Is this technical talent going to be pointed toward using data from the federal government to track down opponents?" they told Wired. "To track down particular populations of interest to this administration for the purposes of either targeting them or singling them out or whatever it might end up being?" (That in mind: reporting from NextGov this week revealed that USDS workers are already being re-interviewed for their jobs, in part to gauge their perceived loyalty to the new president.)

As Wired notes, DOGE could still face some headaches regarding the complexities of inter-agency information sharing and the accessing of certain sensitive data, particularly in cases where department members lack certain clearances. Even so, according to experts, our federal government is wading into muddy, unknown waters.

"It could be a bipartisan effort to make government technology work better. It could be an oligarch extracting resources from the government," University of Michigan public policy Don Moynihan told Wired. "We just really don't know."

More on DOGE: DOGE.gov Website Launches With Mangled, AI-Generated American Flag

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Trump Gives Elon Musk Access to All Unclassified Data in the US Government