DOGE Is About to Get DOGE’d

Whereas it typically appears that nobody is watching the watchmen below the Trump administration, a brand new report from Wired suggests there’s no less than one company nonetheless preserving tabs on the Division of Authorities Effectivity and its seemingly unfettered reach into the guts of government.  The publication, citing authorities data and sources, revealed that the Authorities Accountability Workplace (GAO) launched an investigation again in March into how Elon Musk’s pseudo-agency has been dealing with information within the workplaces that it has pried its approach into.

In response to the report, the GAO has requested info from plenty of companies the place DOGE has dug in its claws, together with the Social Safety Administration, the Departments of Training, Well being and Human Companies, Homeland Safety, Labor, and the Treasury. Included within the requests are any incident studies on “potential or precise misuse of company methods or information,” in addition to data of methods that DOGE has accessed, amongst different particulars.

The audit, which comes from an company that operates below the legislative department, marks the primary vital problem to DOGE’s operations that has not come from the courts. Per Wired, the investigation—which is scheduled to wrap up by the tip of spring and can produce a publicly accessible report of its findings—will focus totally on DOGE’s adherence to privateness and information safety legal guidelines and rules. The probe was reportedly spurred by requests from a number of companies, that means there are doubtless nonetheless folks throughout the workforce who’re no less than a little bit skeptical of what Musk and the DOGE workforce are as much as.

Whereas we’ll have to attend and see what precisely the GAO report says, there’s little query that DOGE is working on the “transfer quick and break issues” precept and appears anxious to achieve entry to as a lot info as it will probably. Earlier this month, it was revealed Musk’s group was planning on trying to hack together a system that may make it simpler to entry taxpayer information. DOGE has seemingly been on a mission to gain access to as much personal information as it can whereas it digs round in authorities methods. The New York Times recently published a take a look at simply what data DOGE might have been in a position to accumulate from completely different companies, and it’s quite a bit—no less than 314 completely different factors of information, together with issues like medical notes, credit score historical past, and biometric identifiers, simply to call a number of.

Makes an attempt to restrict DOGE’s attain have had middling success to date. Whereas a number of courts have issued temporary blockages stopping DOGE from accessing sure info, increased courts have given it the go-ahead to move forward, and there isn’t a complete lot of hope that the Supreme Court docket would step in and cease it. Maybe the GAO report will discover proof of malfeasance or reckless disregard for the principles that may present sufficient cause to hit the brakes, but it surely looks like the practice has already left the station, and it’s going to be exhausting to get it to come back again.