White House Senior Advisor to the President, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk arrives for a meeting with Senate Republicans at the U.S. Capitol on March 05, 2025 in Washington, DC. Musk is scheduled to meet with Republican lawmakers to coordinate his ongoing federal government cost cutting plan. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

While the role and actions of the Elon Musk-headed Department of Government Efficiency remain somewhat murky, data privacy experts have been tracking the group’s moves and documenting potential violations of federal privacy protections.

Before President Donald Trump took office in January, he characterized DOGE as an advisory body, saying it would “provide advice and guidance from outside of government” in partnership with the White House and Office of Management and Budget in order to eliminate fraud and waste from government spending.

But on Inauguration day, Trump’s executive order establishing the group said Musk would have “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems and IT systems.”

In the nine weeks since its formation, DOGE has been able to access sensitive information from the Treasury Department payment system, information about the headcount and budget of an intelligence agency and Americans’ Social Security numbers, health information and other demographic data. Musk and department staffers are also using artificial intelligence in their analysis of department cuts.

Though the Trump administration has not provided transparency around what the collected data is being used for, several federal agencies have laid off tens of thousands of workers, under the direction of DOGE, in the past two months. Thousands have been cut from the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Education, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Treasury this month.

Frank Torres, senior AI and privacy adviser for The Leadership Conference’s Center for Civil Rights and Technology, which researches the intersection of civil rights and technology, said his organization partnered with the Center for Democracy and Technology, which researches and works with legislators on tech topics, to sort out what DOGE was doing. The organizations published a resource sheet documenting DOGE’s actions, the data privacy violations they are concerned about and the lawsuits that several federal agencies have filed over DOGE’s actions. 

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Torres said. “I mean, there are processes and procedures and protections in place that are put in place for a reason, and it doesn’t appear that DOGE is following any of that, which is alarming.”

The organizations outlined potential violations of federal privacy protections, like the Privacy Act of 1974, which prohibits the disclosure of information without written consent, and substantive due process under the Fifth Amendment, which protects privacy from government interference.

White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Harrison Fields would not say if DOGE planned to provide more insight into its plans for the data it is accessing.

“Waste, fraud and abuse have been deeply entrenched in our broken system for far too long,” Fields told States Newsroom in an emailed statement. “It takes direct access to the system to identify and fix it. DOGE will continue to shine a light on the fraud they uncover as the American people deserve to know what their government has been spending their hard earned tax dollars on.”

The lack of transparency concerns U.S. Reps. Gerald E. Connolly, (D-Virginia) and  Jamie Raskin, (D-Maryland), who filed a Freedom of Information Act request this month requesting DOGE provide clear answers about its operations.

The request asks for details on who is in charge at DOGE, the scope of its authority to close federal agencies and lay off federal employees, the extent of its access to sensitive government sensitive databases and for Musk to outline how collected data may benefit his own companies and his foreign customers. They also questioned the feeding of sensitive information into AI systems, which DOGE touted last month.

“DOGE employees, including teenage and twenty-something computer programmers from Mr. Musk’s own companies, have been unleashed on the government’s most sensitive databases — from those containing national security and classified information to those containing the personal financial information of all Americans to those containing the trade secrets and sensitive commercial data of Mr. Musk’s competitors,” the representatives wrote in the request.

Most Americans have indeed submitted data to the federal government which can now be accessed by DOGE, said Elizabeth Laird, the director of equity in civic technology for the Center for Democracy and Technology — whether it be via a tax filing, student loan or Social Security. Laird said the two organizations see huge security concerns with how DOGE is collecting data and what it may be doing with the information. In the first few weeks of its existence, a coder discovered that anyone could access the database that posted updates to the DOGE.gov website.

“We’re talking about Social Security numbers, we’re talking about income, we’re talking about, you know, major life events, like whether you had a baby or got married,” Laird said. “We’re talking about if you’ve ever filed bankruptcy — like very sensitive stuff, and we’re talking about it for tens of millions of people.”

With that level of sensitive information, the business need should justify the level of risk, Laird said.

DOGE’s use of AI to comb through and categorize Americans’ data is concerning to Laird and Torres, as AI algorithms can produce inaccurate responses, pose security risks themselves and can have biases that lead to discrimination against marginalized groups.

While Torres, Laird and their teams plan to continue tracking DOGE’s actions and their potential privacy violations, they published the first resource sheet to start bringing awareness to the information that is already at risk. The data collection they’ve seen so far in an effort to cut federal spending is concerning, but both said they fear Americans’ data could end up being used in ways we don’t yet know about.

“The government has a wealth of data on all of us, and I would say data that’s probably very valuable on the open market,” Torres said. “It’s almost like a dossier on us from birth to death.”

Musk fired back at critics in an interview with Fox News published Thursday.

“They’ll say what we’re doing is somehow unconstitutional or illegal or whatever,” he said. “We’re like, ‘Well, which line of the cost savings do you disagree with?’ And they can’t point to any.”

Billionaire Elon Musk arrives for a meeting with Senate Republicans at the U.S. Capitol on March 5, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Education, Office of Personnel Management and Treasury Department were temporarily barred by a federal judge on Monday from disclosing the “personally identifiable information” of a lawsuit’s plaintiffs and organization members to Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service.

U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman, who issued the preliminary injunction, wrote in her opinion that “no matter how important or urgent the President’s DOGE agenda may be, federal agencies must execute it in accordance with the law” and “that likely did not happen in this case.”

The Maryland federal judge had earlier issued a temporary restraining order in the case, though she declined to include the Treasury Department in that due to a federal judge in New York granting a preliminary injunction that blocked DOGE from accessing that department’s payment systems.

DOGE access

The American Federation of Teachers, as well as a group of labor unions, membership organizations and several U.S. military veterans, filed a lawsuit in February over allegations that the three government entities gave the Department of Government Efficiency access to systems with sensitive and private data, in violation of the Privacy Act.

According to the Justice Department, the 1974 law “establishes a code of fair information practices that governs the collection, maintenance, use, and dissemination of information about individuals that is maintained in systems of records by federal agencies.” 

The Department of Government Efficiency — which is not an actual department — has sought to drastically reduce federal government spending and go after what its staffers see as waste.

“The plaintiffs have shown that Education, OPM, and Treasury likely violated the APA by granting DOGE affiliates sweeping access to their sensitive personal information in defiance of the Privacy Act,” Boardman wrote in her opinion.

She asked both parties to submit a joint status report by close of business on March 31 after meeting to discuss “whether the government intends to file a notice of appeal or whether the Court should enter a scheduling order.”

‘Running roughshod’

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said “Musk’s operatives have been running roughshod over Americans’ privacy, and today the court correctly decided to uphold the firewall between their activities and the personal data of tens of millions of people” in a Monday statement.

Weingarten, who leads one of the country’s largest teachers unions, added that “Musk and DOGE must be held to account, and this preliminary injunction is a significant and important step forward.”

Meanwhile, the Education Department continues to see drastic changes.

Last week, President Donald Trump directed Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” of the department to the maximum extent that is legally permissible.

The agency also announced that it would be cutting more than 1,300 employees through a “reduction in force” process.

“Waste, fraud, and abuse have been deeply entrenched in our broken system for far too long. It takes direct access to the system to identify and fix it,” Harrison Fields, White House principal deputy press secretary, said in a statement to States Newsroom.

“DOGE will continue to shine a light on the fraud they uncover as the American people deserve to know what their government has been spending their hard earned tax dollars on,” Fields said.