Data production, stewardship, and privacy

Kleptocrats suppress or hide data that might reveal poor performance, acts of corruption, or support opposing viewpoints. Over the last quarter-century, Russia's autocratic leader Vladimir Putin has made masterful use of this strategy, dismissing credible experts and staffing statistical agencies with apparatchiks in order to stifle any negative information related to military setbacks, economic downturns, the misuse of public funds, electoral fraud, brutal repression, or environmental damage. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, Russia under-reported its official death tolls by half.

Kleptocrats do not stop at taking control of official data. They also work to control your data. Knowing the who, what, when, where and how of personal lives allows them to establish a surveillance state that can be used to control the public and suppress dissent. In China, personal data is harvested by the state to assess and regulate the trustworthiness of citizens as a "social credit score" that could potentially be used to determine employment, travel opportunities, finance access and the ability to enter into contracts.

On both fronts—controlling official data and your data—the Trump Administration’s actions are deeply troubling.

An opinion piece in The Washington Post suggests that the Trump administration is “reshaping reality” in a manner typical of kleptocracies. Basic steps include (a) gathering available data, (b) “disappearing” the taxpayer-funded data the administration does not like, and (c) replacing that data with something else. Government data has been “disappeared” regarding climate change, sexual orientation and gender, natural hazards, crime, and health. In addition, DOGE employees have been blocking or suppressing new data collection by cancelling contracts for data gathering for the missions of the Social Security Administration and the Department of Education, among other agencies.

Manipulating key economic data

ACTION 101 | Promoting false or misleading statistics to inflate performance

In addition to eliminating official data, Trump and his administration have also published misleading “statistics", such as total savings achieved through DOGE efforts. Examples so far include misleading data on the number of immigrants entering the United States illegally, the number of Social Security recipients over 100 years old (i.e., “dead people"), and other misrepresentations made by Trump and his cabinet. This is consistent with Trump’s statements in his first term regarding the pandemic, when he attempted to downplay the severity of the national health crisis by challenging the data on infection rates. At the time, he stated, "if we stop testing right now, we'd have very few cases, if any." (Last updated 4/21/25)

ACTION 102 | Cooking the books on key employment data

Data provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on everything from employment to inflation shapes how the public, policymakers, and investors perceive the economy. President Trump has been a vocal critic of BLS, alleging—without evidence—that Democratic administrations manipulated data in their favor. The March 2025 appearance of DOGE at the Department of Labor raised concerns that BLS reporting will be politicized to the detriment of the data’s accuracy and credibility. Erica Groshen, a former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has raised serious concerns, saying "If people don't trust the data, then you might as well not produce it." (Last updated 03/21/25)

ACTION 103 | Manipulating the census

We can also look at President Trump’s prior attempts to influence data reporting to understand what might be in store in the coming years. In the run-up to the 2020 census, the Trump administration attempted to influence the count through a variety of tactics, including: amending the criteria on who gets counted; ending the counting before it was completed; modifying the methodology employed to reduce survey bias; and sabotaging efforts of local officials to improve response rates. Though this battle may sound technocratic, the political stakes could not be higher. Census data is used to determine the number of House seats apportioned to each state as well as federal funding levels for over 300 programs. The day after his inauguration, Trump signed an executive order rescinding a Biden-era order issued in response to Trump's attempt during the national census in 2020 to exclude millions of US residents without legal status.

ACTION 104 | Fixing economic accounting data

As Trump's economic policies begin to impact Americans' lives, we have seen more recent efforts to influence standard economic statistics. For example, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick recently announced plans to change the methodology for calculating the Gross National Product (GDP) by stripping out all government spending. As reported by the AP, "GDP reports include extensive details on government spending, offering a level of transparency for economists." By excluding government spending from the GDP, The Nation reports that the Trump administration "could downplay the economic damage of firing thousands of federal workers and slashing billions from the federal budget" and could "gaslight the public into believing that the economy is doing better than it actually is, which could come in handy if economic conditions continue to deteriorate.”

The Trump Administration also recently justified its tariff increases by manipulating analysis of relative trade deficits, over-inflating the impact of trade deficits by a factor of four, making "the tariff rates massively higher than they should have been to achieve the goals the administration sought." The method used to calculate the trade deficit has been overwhelmingly rejected by economists.

But the impacts of these moves could be long-lasting and damaging for our economy. After the Trump administration dissolved the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee (FESAC), which serves as a nonpartisan group of independent experts providing statistical advice to the BLS, its former chairman David Wilcox warned that the “transparency, the integrity, the independence of these data is itself a national asset. If that national asset is damaged by calling into question the independence of the data, that’s an action that’s very hard to reverse, because trust can be destroyed in a flash, but it takes a long time to rebuild.”

Data Security and Risks to Privacy

The government holds an incredible amount of data on individuals and organizations throughout the country. Protecting this data is an essential part of the government’s mission as good stewards of such data. There are limitations on data access, data sharing between agencies, and restrictions on how such data is used. By all appearances, these restrictions seem to have disappeared, as DOGE has been able to access, and potentially copy, massive amounts of federal data. This is an evolving story, but never in US history has unrestricted access been given to a political actor like Elon Musk. The risks, especially if they are defying the law, present numerous problems from potential for surveillance, blackmail, and many other issues.

ACTION 105 | DOGE risks one of the largest data breaches in US history

DOGE staffers are undertaking one of the most significant data operations—or potentially breach of US data—in all of history. It is not only that its staffers can read the data. They may also be able to download or copy data, write new code, grant themselves long-term access, or delete the data without a trace. On February 19, 2025, The Atlantic reported that DOGE had absolute access to USAID’s documentation. Sources quoted in the same report stated that DOGE would soon have similar access to data at the Federal Aviation Administration, the General Services Administration, and NASA. Access to treasury accounts would allow full access to view Americans’ names, Social Security numbers, and financial information such as bank accounts and routing numbers. (Last updated 4/21/25)

ACTION 106 | DOGE compromises core government systems

The Washington Post reported in February 2025 that nearly two dozen professionals from the former US Digital Service—a technology unit housed within the President's Executive Office that has now been rebranded as DOGE—resigned in protest. In an open letter they addressed to the Susie Wiles, the White House Chief of Staff, they raised critical concerns: “We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services.” (Last updated 4/21/25)

ACTION 107 | Risks to national security

National security risks materialized in February 2025 as DOGE published staffing and budget numbers for the National Reconnaissance Agency, which manages the nation’s spy satellites. As with so many of Musk’s moves, there is a potential conflict of interest. According to Reuters:

SpaceX, Musk's rocket and space equipment company, has a multi-billion dollar spy satellite network contract with the NRO, signed in 2021. Reuters reported on February 7 that NRO Inspector General Terrence Edwards investigated whether Troy Meink, President Donald Trump's nominee as Air Force Secretary and a senior NRO official, arranged the contract solicitation in a way that favored SpaceX.

(Last updated 4/21/25)

ACTION 108 | Risks to privacy

The most significant privacy risks would come with access to the Internal Revenue Service’s IRS’s Integrated Data Retrieval System, or IDRS. This system includes data on bank accounts, payment balances, Social Security and other personal identification numbers, and, in some instances, medical information. It includes information for every individual, business, and nonprofit in the country. There are typically restrictions on any one person accessing all of this data at once. DOGE has sought access to this data, but it is unclear if they have yet gained access.

Similar concerns have been raised around access to Medicare and Medicaid data as well as access to federal employee records, which includes former government employees as well. Fortunately, some legal action is being taken to stop this potentially harmful vacuuming up of data.

DOGE Actions and Federal Law

Civil society organizations have expressed concerns that the DOGE efforts may have violated privacy laws by allowing unrestricted access to highly sensitive data, inadvertently publishing other data (including top secret information), weakening data access security protocols, and using Artificial Intelligence (AI) for data mining and analysis.

ACTION 109 | Courts move to block DOGE's access to data

In one order blocking DOGE access to Social Security data, the U.S. District Court judge stated that “the government never identified or articulated a single reason for which the DOGE team needs unlimited access to SSA’s entire record systems, thereby exposing personal, confidential, sensitive, and private information that millions of Americans entrusted to their government.”

Further, a federal judge in Maryland temporarily halted DOGE from accessing data on “millions of union members” after finding that federal agencies shared private information with DOGE affiliates “who had no need to know the vast amount of sensitive personal information to which they were granted access.” In another ruling that blocked access to Treasury systems, a federal judge determined that a “real possibility exists that sensitive information has already been shared outside of the Treasury Department, in potential violation of federal law.” While a divided federal appeals court put on hold an injunction that blocked Musk and DOGE from accessing Americans' private data, oral arguments in the case brought by five labor groups and six military veterans were scheduled for May 5, 2025, so the final determination on DOGE access is still pending.

ACTION 110 | Surveillance of federal employee communications

There have been other accusations that DOGE team members are using AI to surveil federal employee communications for hostility to Trump and his agenda in order to identify “expressions of perceived disloyalty” by individuals.