The Further Depredations of DOGE

Morning Dispatch

Sociopaths cannot create, they can only destroy.

Anybody paying attention knows that DOGE, the acronym for the wildly misnamed Department of Governmental Efficiency, has been a disaster since the day this illegal, unconstitutional agency was created out of whole cloth without Congress's approval.

Thanks to a revelatory report from a whistleblower, Daniel Berulis we're starting to see just how many treacherous and potentially illegal actions the people at DOGE are committing.

Yesterday morning, NPR released a deep dive into the shady practices revealed Doge's by Berulis which include the theft of sensitive government data.

Here's how Jake Tapper summarized the allegations on CNN:

[A] whistleblower is coming forward with claims that Doge not only accessed data from his agency but also took a substantial amount of sensitive data with them. According to a disclosure shared with Congress: ‘around 10 gigabytes of data,’ or ‘the equivalent of a full stack of encyclopedias’ worth if someone printed these files as hard copy documents.

I want to break down what's been happening at the rogue agency.

In early March, the DOGE team—led by Elon Musk and his hand-picked and inexperienced minions—essentially entered the headquarters of the National Labor Relations Board with a mission to access its database.

Once they gained accessed, NLRB employees noticed a large spike in data leaving the agency, which we can see in this chart here:

The NLRB itself is an independent agency that investigates and adjudicates complaints about unfair labor practices. It stores potentially sensitive data—from confidential information on employees who want to form unions to proprietary business information, ongoing legal cases, and corporate secrets. Labor law experts told NPR that these kind of data should almost never leave the NLRB; and they have absolutely nothing to do with making the government more “efficient,” or reducing government spending.

Donald and Elon Musk—two of the most incompetent and disreputable business people in modern times—now have access to these incredibly sensitive data.

At this point it’s clear that Americans’ financial data are in the hands of people who have no business doing the work they’ve been assigned by Musk to do. They are not elected; they have not been vetted; they have not been confirmed by Congress. They are literally Musk's minions hired to do his bidding.

According to the report, DOGE employees demanded the highest level of access to these data—a level of access that gives them virtually unrestricted permission to read, copy, and alter these data. Controls that would prevent unauthorized mobile devices from logging onto the system without proper security settings were unaccountably disabled. Internal alerting and monitoring systems were found to be manually turned off. Multi-factor authentication was also disabled.

Shortly after these changes were made, employees started detecting suspicious login attempts from a device in Russia.

Andrew Bakage, representative for Daniel Berulis, explained the situation this way:

The first thing Dan witnessed was that within 15 minutes of Doge's employees creating user accounts—usernames and passwords—within 15 minutes of those accounts being created, somebody or something from Russia tried to log in with the right usernames and right passwords. That is to say, the right credentials. And that happened over 20 times.

There is no evidence that DOGE has any interest in fulfilling its stated mission to tackle “waste, fraud, and abuse,” which at this point is simply code for stealing from the American people.

DOGE was created for one reason and one reason only: to make sure Elon Musk and Donald Trump have access to our information in a way that makes them both incredibly powerful and beyond the reach of accountability while endangering our personal safety and financial security.

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DOGE seems to be taking the whistleblower complaints seriously as evidenced by the fact that after Berulis attempted to raise concerns within the NLRB, someone "physically tap[ed] a threatening note” to his door, that included sensitive personal information as well as overhead photos of him walking his dog which appeared to have been taken with a drone.

Musk's companies are also currently involved in multiple ongoing cases with the NLRB. A group of former SpaceX employees lodged a complaint against the company with the NLRB, and in retaliation, lawyers representing SpaceX filed a lawsuit against the NLRB, arguing that the agency’s structure is unconstitutional.

Just a coincidence, no doubt.

It turns out that the Republicans’ new mantra “Waste, fraud, and abuse” is simply a catchall for anything Donald Trump and Musk don’t think is worth spending money on. This is what happens when the executive seems to believe that the U.S. treasury belongs to him in which case every penny the United States uses to pay for something feels to him like it’s coming out of his own pocket. By the same token, any money saved is his as well as far as he’s concerned.

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DOGE has also gained access to other government databases at agencies like the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Social Security Administration, and the IRS, which, among other things, contain private information about where immigrants work and live, all of which data Immigrants of all status submitted voluntarily.

DOGE is now reportedly using HUD data to identify undocumented immigrants and then sharing those data with the Department of Homeland Security.

Similarly, the Social Security Office used their data to let officials revoke more than 6,300 undocumented immigrants’ status that had allowed them to work in the hopes that the move would encourage others to self-deport.

The IRS has agreed to share tax information related to undocumented immigrants with ICE. The agency could then use that information to locate anyone they suspect of being in the country illegally—or anybody they want to remove without cause.

Natanya Broer, who is a senior counsel for health and economic justice policy at the National Immigration Law Center, told the Post:

It’s not only about one subgroup of people. It’s really about all of us. Everyone cares about their privacy. Nobody wants their healthcare information or tax information broadcast and used to go after us.

No. None of us wants that.

And here's the slippery slope that we all seem to be on now—because these same processes are unfolding with regards to due process and the rule of law as well.

DOGE is not just wreaking havoc for our immigrants—they’re also about to make every American suffer financially while putting our civil liberties at risk.

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The Hill released an opinion piece yesterday, written by the president of the union representing IRS employees and the executive director of the largest tax fairness coalition, stating that DOGE’s IRS cuts will cost the average American a fortune.

The agency has laid off thousands of people which means taxpayers expecting prompt refunds will suddenly experience delays in getting those refunds for the first time.

In addition to delayed refunds, the reduction in IRS employees means fewer answered calls and longer wait times for help. The IRS also plans to shut over a hundred taxpayer assistance centers across the country, meaning that many taxpayers will be unable to get in-person help with any of their tax issues.

Now here’s an incredible statistic:

As damaging as the cuts are to every federal agency, cuts to the IRS are different in one important respect: they could cost us a fortune in lost revenue. Roughly 70% of the personnel cuts thus far have been in enforcement, which will make it easier to avoid detection for the millionaire and billionaire tax cheats who evade an estimated $150 billion in taxes every year. It is estimated that every dollar cut from enforcement costs $5 to $10 in revenue. So if Musk tries to cut $10 billion from IRS enforcement spending, he will be risking $50 to $90 billion in lost revenue each year. That’s a strange strategy for someone who claims he wants to make the government more cost-efficient.

It’s not exactly shocking that a man who has been allowed to acquire a fortune approaching half a trillion dollars wants to make tax evasion easier for the wealthy.

Part of the problem here is that a strong enough case was never made for the reasons we needed to spend significant amounts of money to update the IRS.

Yes—for every dollar we don’t spend on enforcement, it costs us, but there’s a better way to frame it: for every dollar we do spend, we bring in more money from the richest among us who already have a lot of help getting out of paying their taxes. Lack of enforcement makes it so much easier for them to rip us off.

We pay taxes—city, state, and federal taxes—so that our government can work for us in ways that we don’t even have to think about.

We have sanitation; we have public education; we have fire and police departments; we have mental health agencies. We have access to all sorts of services that we often take for granted because they are paid for with our taxes. But that’s what it means to be a member of a community. That’s what I mean when I say the government is us. And it is for us.

The government is not an alien entity out to get us—as Republicans from Ronald Reagan on down would have us believe. The government is our attempt to determine how to live together in a way that works for all of us.

The Trump regime in general and DOGE in particular are antithetical to that goal.