DOGE Was a Harbinger of Trump’s Assault on Decency and Privacy

Democrats will have to repair the damage

My first post after I brought this Substack back to life almost a year ago was about DOGE, the not-exactly-part-of-the-government organization, headed by Elon Musk, that Donald Trump was creating to save money by eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse.” DOGE would, I predicted, fail. And it did indeed fail, even more spectacularly than I expected: Although DOGE still has eight months left on its original charter, it has already been quietly disbanded.

But although DOGE is gone, its malign legacy endures. Arguably DOGE’s biggest “achievement” was shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development. And the dismantling of USAID has left a legacy of death. According to one recent study, closing the agency “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.”

Back at home, DOGE wreaked havoc on the U.S. government through a combination of arrogance, ignorance and sheer incompetence.

Readers may remember when DOGE staffers summarily fired hundreds of staffers at the National Nuclear Security Administration, which protects America’s nuclear weapons, then desperately scrambled to get them back when they realized what those workers do. You may also remember Musk’s claim that millions of dead people are receiving Social Security benefits, nonsense based on a misunderstanding of how the Social Security Administration’s databases work.

Musk is gone, at least for now, from the Trump administration. So are many of the young acolytes he parachuted into temporary positions of power in government agencies, although some have managed to worm their way into longer-term positions.

Although DOGE is no longer, the damage persists. In addition to the needless loss of hundreds of thousands of lives around the world and the trashing of America’s global reputation, all for some flashy headlines, DOGE also seriously compromised the functioning of the US government. Thousands of dedicated federal employees were pushed out, taking their expertise and institutional knowledge with them, while those who remain are demoralized. Future recruitment of high-quality government workers will be much more difficult given the way their predecessors were treated.

Less obvious, but arguably just as important, is DOGE’s misappropriation of Americans’ personal information along with the destruction of institutional norms on safeguarding that information.

Like any modern government, the U.S. federal government must collect information about the people it represents. A government can’t collect taxes or provide benefits without acquiring a lot of information about individuals’ incomes and their lives in general. It can’t supervise banks, mitigating the risk of financial crisis, without acquiring a lot of information about people’s finances. It can’t conduct essential surveys, like the surveys we use to track the economy and the Census, without finding out a lot about the people surveyed.

Historically, however, government agencies have followed rules designed to avoid putting all this information in one place, which would risk turning America into a surveillance state. Some of these rules are embodied in legislation, notably the Privacy Act of 1974. Others are norms or fall into a legal gray area. But there has been a general understanding that we want to respect privacy, on practical as well as moral grounds. For example, as the New York Times reports,

The I.R.S. has long encouraged undocumented migrants to file a tax return, and many tax lawyers and immigration activists had trusted the agency would not use tax information to deport people. In a report, the Yale Budget Lab estimates that in 2023, unauthorized immigrant workers paid $66 billion in federal taxes, with roughly $43 billion of that taking the form of the payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare.

But the Muskenjugend — people like 19-year-old Edward Coristine, aka Big Balls — got access to the databases of many government agencies through threats and intimidation. Their access to sensitive data was so much at variance with previous norms that a number of former DOGE staffers now reportedly fear that they may face criminal charges.

And they should be afraid. If Democrats regain power in 2028, which seems increasingly likely given Trump’s cratering popularity, they can’t do another Merrick Garland, repeating their past mistake of letting past lawbreaking go unpunished. Demanding accountability is the only way to restore faith in government.

Now, we don’t know everything Musk’s people did with this data, or whether they took some of the data — which are highly valuable to private businesses — with them when they left. We do know that DOGE sought to pool all federal data into a single database. And Trump signed an executive order “seeking to eliminate ‘information silos’ and promote inter-agency data sharing” — an executive order that is still in effect even though DOGE is gone. So DOGE was a harbinger of a major weakening of the standards that used to protect Americans’ privacy.

Why is this a problem? For one thing, it undermines effective government. As the Times reports, since Trump took office the I.R.S., breaking its past promises, has turned over more than a million taxpayers’ addresses to ICE, even though

Federal law tightly controls the use of taxpayer information, and several top I.R.S. officials quit this spring over concerns that giving tax records to ICE on a large scale could be illegal.

A few days ago a federal judge put a hold on this information sharing. But a great deal of damage has already been done.

Beyond that, breaking down the barriers that normally protect privacy opens the door to political abuse. Again, many readers are probably aware that the Trump administration has accused Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor, of mortgage fraud, and has leveled similar charges against Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, and Adam Schiff, senator from California.

The charges are completely spurious. But the weakness of the government’s cases aside, what’s striking is that Bill Pulte, the Trumpist director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, got access to individuals’ mortgage records and used them to engage in obviously political harassment. To do so, he bypassed the FHFA’s inspector general — who was fired last week as he was reportedly preparing to send a letter to Congress reporting that the agency was not cooperating with his office.

DOGE didn’t cause all of these abuses. But the organization’s rise was, as I said, a harbinger of a broad assault on privacy and growing political misuse of government data. And while DOGE is gone, the abuses will remain until and unless Democrats make sure that the abusers pay a steep price.

MUSICAL CODA