DOGE's Access Data Risks US Finances   02/11 06:14

   

   WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Department of Government Efficiency's embed into the 
federal government has raised a host of concerns, transforming a debate over 
how to cut government waste into a confrontation over privacy rights and the 
nation's financial standing in the world.

   DOGE, spearheaded by billionaire Donald Trump donor Elon Musk, has rapidly 
burrowed deep into federal agencies and taken drastic actions to cut spending. 
This includes trying to get rid of thousands of federal workers, shuttering the 
U.S. Agency for International Development and accessing the Treasury 
Department's enormous payment systems.

   Advocacy groups and labor unions have filed lawsuits in an attempt to save 
agencies and federal worker jobs, and five former treasury secretaries are 
sounding the alarm on the risks associated with Musk's DOGE accessing sensitive 
Treasury Department payment systems and potentially stopping congressionally 
authorized payments.

   "Any hint of the selective suspension of congressionally authorized payments 
will be a breach of trust and ultimately, a form of default. And our 
credibility, once lost, will prove difficult to regain," said former treasury 
secretaries Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner, Jacob Lew and Janet 
Yellen in an op-ed in The New York Times on Monday.

   They warn about the risks of "arbitrary and capricious political control of 
federal payments, which would be unlawful and corrosive to our democracy."

   Musk said on his social media platform X on Monday that "we need to stop 
government spending like a drunken sailor on fraud & waste or America is gonna 
go bankrupt. That does mean a lot of grifters will lose their grift and 
complain loudly about it. Too bad. Deal with it."

   Experts in the financial and digital privacy worlds warn that the U.S. 
financial system is delicate and complicated and could be harmed by unilateral 
moves. They also say that Americans' personal information could be compromised 
by the unsafe handling of sensitive data.

   Andrew Metrick, director of the Yale Program on Financial Stability, says 
DOGE's actions as a "go fast and break things group" pose a danger to the U.S. 
financial system and the U.S. dollar's standing as the world's reserve currency.

   On the issue of cutting government programs or potentially undermining U.S. 
democratic norms, DOGE is "not going to care, but they should care about 
harming the dollar and harming the safety of U.S. government debt," Metrick 
said.

   Crossing the Rubicon of danger would be something perceived as a default 
event on bonds, Metrick said, especially as the U.S. runs very close to its 
statutory debt limit.

   "We maintain a complicated financial system -- a few wrong actions and the 
world loses confidence in our ability to manage that system."

   On cybersecurity issues, the public has no idea what safeguards or policies, 
if any, Musk and his staffers used to protect the sensitive data they accessed, 
according to John Davisson, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy 
Information Center, a Washington-based nonprofit that advocates for digital 
privacy. Davisson called DOGE's access "the largest data breach and most 
consequential data breach in U.S. history."

   The Treasury Department's databases include information about individual and 
business taxes, medical records, Social Security payments and numbers, and 
government payments, as well as a long list of other personal data, such as 
birthdates, home addresses and phone numbers, military records and disability 
information, Davisson said.

   Typically, government employees who handle the data are subject to training 
requirements and myriad rules to ensure the data isn't mishandled, leaked or 
breached. Often, data is kept segregated in different systems to ensure no one 
person has easy access to all the information. What may look like inefficiency, 
Davisson said, is actually a means of securing sensitive data.

   It was an "imperfect but quite robust" system, Davisson said, and without 
it, Americans could be at greater risk of identity theft, stalking or other 
crimes. Personal information could be sold to online data brokers, who could 
use the data to gain an even more accurate portrait of Americans and their 
habits.

   Davisson said he doesn't accept arguments from Musk and Trump that the data 
access is about finding efficiencies in government.

   "This is about control. There are ways to improve efficiency in government. 
... They involve legislation, they involve regulation, they involve trained 
personnel and experts," he said. "This is about establishing control over 
databases and thereby establishing control over federal agencies."

   In one of several disputes over DOGE's access to the Treasury Department, 
labor unions and advocacy groups have sued to block the payments system review 
from proceeding because of concerns about its legality. U.S. District Judge 
Colleen Kollar-Kotelly on Thursday restricted DOGE's read-only access of 
Treasury's payment systems to two workers, one of them Tom Krause, who now 
appears on the Treasury Department website as performing the functions of 
fiscal assistant secretary.

   Saturday's court ruling in favor of 19 Democratic attorneys general who sued 
to block DOGE from accessing sensitive Treasury Department records shows 
Americans aren't powerless to stop Musk, said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of 
Public Citizen, one of the groups that has sued the government over DOGE's 
access. She said her group and other advocacy organizations will work to ensure 
the new administration follows the law -- and that court orders are followed.

   "This is really clear law. Our federal records have personal information in 
them. They're protected," she said. "They are moving fast and doing things that 
normal governments wouldn't try, and the courts are responding appropriately."

   Trump told Fox News on Sunday that Musk is "not gaining anything" from his 
role in DOGE. "We're going to find billions, hundreds of billions, of dollars 
of fraud and abuse and, you know, the people elected me on that," Trump said.

   Metrick said: "I am nervous they have a hammer and the whole government 
looks like a nail to them, but Treasury is a thumb."