The Brooklyn Rail

It has become increasingly clear that the purpose of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency never had anything to with efficiency or ferreting out “waste, fraud, and abuse” in government spending. Instead, its goal has been to collect massive amounts of personal information on US residents. Although the initial concerted use of this information has been the tracking and targeting of migrants for mass deportation,¹ this appears to be only the first step in a much broader surveillance regime.

The US government has collected a staggering amount of personal information from residents and citizens in recent decades, but this information has been siloed into the separate secure databases of various departments, including the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, the Department of Treasury, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the National Labor Relations Board, among many others. DOGE operatives swarmed into these separate governmental agencies in the first 100 days of the Trump administration and stole sensitive data in order to compile a master database and facilitate the building of individual dossiers on every American resident and citizen. Surveillance has always been one of the principal places where technology and autocracy come together.

On April 24, historian Heather Cox Richardson speculated about how Musk and DOGE might use the data they’ve been collecting:

[Musk] is scooping up data from various government agencies about individuals in the US, a treasure trove that he could use for shaping society, garnering government contracts, or raising money either by selling it or by blackmailing people with it. 

And she reported that even Steve Bannon is raising the alarm about who might benefit from this unprecedented trove of information:

Trump ally Steve Bannon warned about Musk’s true interests: “We have to have a full accounting that makes sure any government data—classified or not—and any personal financial data, people’s tax returns, and their health records, have not gone to any entity not controlled by the Trump administration or the US government.”²

The giant technology corporations have long compiled such files on individuals, but government records include much more sensitive information: money spent, voting data, health records, sensitive biometric data, imaging, etc. The use of such data could go a long way toward consolidating power in the hands of a few, as it has done in China, Russia, and Turkey. China’s surveillance state has grown to immense proportions, infiltrating the private lives of all of its citizens. The US has been notoriously slow to institute measures to ensure the security of the data they collect, and DOGE has seized on this vulnerability.

Reuters reported on April 8 that officials in the Trump administration told some US government employees that DOGE is using AI to quickly sift through at least one federal agency’s communications, looking for instances of hostility to President Trump and his agenda or Musk and his.³ Others have reported that DOGE has used AI across agencies to monitor the political sentiments of workers and examine staff communications for signs of perceived disloyalty to Trump and Musk.

As we have seen with the recent actions of the Department of Homeland Security and ICE, false or incomplete information often finds its way into these databases, causing enforcement mayhem if the information is relied upon too slavishly, without cross-checking.

Many observers have raised concerns about the long-term effects of DOGE’s tactics, and the inability of the government to respond in the current climate. In her guest essay in the New York Times on April 30, Julia Angwin pointed out that the US is

the only country in the 38-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development without a data protection agency to enforce comprehensive privacy laws. In the European Union, each country has a dedicated data protection authority that can conduct investigations, write rules, issue fines and even demand a halt to data processing.

Without a privacy cop on the beat, Americans can submit a Privacy Act request to try to find out what data DOGE is holding about them or hope that judges side with them in one of the dozens of lawsuits winding their way through court. Still, DOGE continues going from agency to agency grabbing data.⁴

Angwin says the US urgently needs to create “a federal data protection agency with robust investigative powers.” In the meantime, she says, Congress should defund DOGE, rescind the Executive Order that created it, and upgrade the Federal Privacy Act of 1974 to include real fines and criminal penalties for what DOGE is doing.

In terms of the cover story for the whole DOGE operation, DOGE insists it has saved taxpayers $160 billion, but they’ve only shown receipts for $58 billion, and a nonpartisan nonprofit that focuses on the federal workforce estimated that DOGE has cost taxpayers more than $135 billion in paid leave, re-hiring mistakenly fired workers, and lost productivity. And that figure does not include the cost of defending the many lawsuits challenging DOGE’s actions or lost tax collections due to staff cuts at the IRS. And it certainly doesn’t include the economic loss of cuts to funding of health and science research.⁵ In the end, DOGE will almost certainly have cost much more than it saved. But the more significant costs are the depredations of the New Surveillance State.

Elon Musk now says that his involvement with DOGE “will drop significantly” beginning in May, and the DOGE project was originally set to end on July 4, 2026, but it now looks like it may continue to the end of Trump’s term. As Musk steps back, he leaves behind more than 100 DOGE employees (and the AI tools they use) that will remain embedded in federal departments for the foreseeable future, and they will presumably continue to assert greater and greater control, until Congress, or the courts, or the People stop them.