The young tech whizzes recruited by billionaire Elon Musk to dig into U.S. government computer files – which include sensitive details about the lives of millions of Americans – are corroding U.S. democratic norms, some experts warn, and potentially unleashing a “national security nightmare.”
This team’s ostensible marching orders are to help the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) modernize networks and slash federal spending. But its operations are shrouded in secrecy that seems in some cases designed to elude meaningful oversight.
What is clear is that new DOGE hires have gained access to, among other U.S. government networks, the Department of the Treasury, which disburses 90% of all federal payments, including billions of dollars in Social Security benefits, federal wages, veterans benefits, and tax refunds.
Why We Wrote This
The efficiency team assembled by Elon Musk is moving at breakneck speed to modernize the U.S. government and slash spending. National security experts warn that rapid changes invite risk.
Connecticut Attorney General William Tong called it “the largest data breach in American history” in a statement Friday, by “an unlawfully constituted band of renegade tech bros combing through confidential records, sensitive data and critical payment systems.”
Mr. Tong is one of 19 Democratic attorneys general suing President Donald Trump, alleging that DOGE is breaking the law by, among other moves, blocking federal funds “from reaching beneficiaries who do not align with the President’s political agenda.”
A federal judge on Saturday temporarily blocked Mr. Musk’s team from accessing Treasury records containing sensitive data, citing risks of “irreparable harm.” Other lawsuits involving DOGE are ongoing. In the days and weeks to come, they are likely to prove a vital test of American rule of law and, analysts add, of safeguards designed to protect U.S. national security.
“It’s generally pretty disturbing, the sort of casual way in which these people have gained access to all these systems without the normal checks that you would expect to be in place,” says Benjamin Friedman, policy director at the conservative Defense Priorities think tank in Washington.
The operations, more broadly, point to another national security threat: shifting oversight away from lawmakers on Capitol Hill who should, in the American tradition of checks and balances, have the power of the purse. It’s an “egregious White House power grab,” Mr. Friedman adds.
The White House says that Mr. Musk and his team are operating in “full compliance with federal law” and with “appropriate security clearances.”
Applying business practices to government
Trump administration allies have accused “those entrenched in the federal bureaucracy” of overreacting, resisting change, and “hemming and hawing,” as Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina put it last week.
While acknowledging that Mr. Trump’s moves run “afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense,” Senator Tillis said that “It’s not uncommon for presidents to flex a little bit. … Nobody should bellyache about that.” Naysayers, he suggested, “just don’t understand business practices that we’re trying to apply to government that have never been applied” before.
There’s a reason the federal government is different, critics contend: These unprecedented DOGE operations are potentially creating vulnerabilities that, at the direr end of the spectrum, could be used to piece together American secrets, such as the names of its spies.
One former CIA officer told The New York Times that a White House order to send over an unclassified email listing recently hired U.S. agents was a “counterintelligence disaster.” The request was reportedly part of the effort to shrink the federal workforce by targeting those still in their probationary (and thus easy-to-fire) period.
The lack of transparency surrounding DOGE has not helped to allay the concerns of critics. Some of Mr. Musk’s new hires reportedly refused to provide their last names to their department co-workers. Investigative journalists revealing the identities of those new DOGE hires should be punished, Mr. Musk has said.
The Wall Street Journal discovered that one DOGE employee, Marko Elez, wrote under a pseudonym on the social platform X last year, “I was racist before it was cool.” After Mr. Elez resigned, Mr. Musk said he would reinstate him.
Another young aide was fired from a 2022 internship after “an internal investigation into the leaking of proprietary company information,” the company said in a statement Friday following an investigative report by Bloomberg.
These revelations reinforce concerns raised by five former secretaries of the Treasury, who warned Monday in an op-ed in The New York Times that information gleaned by DOGE hires could be weaponized for ideological gain or seized upon by eager foreign adversaries.
U.S. critical cyber infrastructure “is at risk of failure if the code that underwrites it is not handled with due care,” they added.
“A huge no-no”
Indeed, the speed with which DOGE engineers have been operating in federal computer systems raises considerable “red flags” in cybersecurity, says Richard Forno, assistant director of the Cybersecurity Institute at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, which has received Department of Defense research funding for his work.
“These may be awesome programmers,” but they appear to be “steamrolling across best practices and federal laws and standards, and that’s a huge problem,” he says.
DOGE has reportedly installed its own email servers to facilitate direct communication outside official channels, Professor Forno says, amounting to a “shadow email system.” DOGE hires also appear to have brought their own laptops from the outside and plugged them directly into government networks, he adds, “without any sort of government validation of their security, which is a huge no-no.”
The White House has said that the DOGE hires have “read-only” access to these federal computer files, meaning that they cannot change or delete them. But there are concerns that in some cases, the engineers are being given the ability to write code in payment systems that account for a massive portion of the U.S. economy.
“They’re kind of treating the federal government as a Silicon Valley garage startup,” Professor Forno says. He wonders who is checking the servers to ensure they’re configured correctly and not exposed to hacking from China or Russia. “There’s apparently very little, if any, due diligence.”
There are possibilities, too, that DOGE is installing artificial intelligence analysis tools on the systems, a potentially promising development, “because there are probably ways that it could help our government be more efficient and catch weird anomalies,” says Emily Harding, director of the Intelligence, National Security, and Technology Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“But it needs to be done carefully, because it’s untested.”
National security “grenade”
As she was drafting an article for Foreign Affairs on DOGE’s operations in the federal government, Elizabeth Saunders and her co-author, James Goldgeier, both close students of political science and international relations, found that their piece kept getting overtaken by near-hourly DOGE developments.
They realized, however, that there were some basics that hold true to make Mr. Musk’s activities a “national security nightmare,” even in the unlikely event that President Trump puts a quick end to DOGE’s work.
“They may have nefarious plans for this stuff. They may have completely innocuous plans. They may want to complete it like a forensic accounting kind of operation,” says Professor Saunders, who teaches at Columbia University.
Yet what DOGE has already done, murky specifics aside, is to inject enough uncertainty into U.S. government operations that it amounts to “throwing a grenade into the center of the national security apparatus,” Professors Goldgeier and Saunders conclude in their article. That’s because not only has DOGE’s work made U.S. allies nervous about whether their secrets are safe and whether U.S. leaders can be trusted, but it’s also affecting vital calculations of America’s adversaries.
Despite the desire that unfriendly governments may have to sabotage or steal from America, U.S. officials still maintain something akin to a working relationship with them – and it’s an important one, Professor Saunders says.
Particularly in times of crisis, “You want the adversary to have a phone number and know it’s going to be picked up by someone who speaks with authority as the U.S. government, and that whatever they tell you is true,” she notes.
Regardless of Mr. Musk and his tech specialists’ intent, they are “messing around with the infrastructure” of this key process and undermining it, Professor Saunders contends.
As wires get crossed, intent is more likely to get misread. “It could be something to do with China. It could be something to do with Russia. Maybe there is an inadvertent or malicious leak that causes a major counterintelligence breakdown. We won’t necessarily know what that is until China exploits it somehow,” and the grenade – which currently has a pin in it, she adds – explodes.
“It could go off in a lot of different ways,” Professor Saunders says. “It’s a ticking time bomb.”
Editor’s note: This story, originally published on Feb. 12, has been updated to correct the first name of Elizabeth Saunders.
