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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.”
