Elon Musk’s headlong rush to take control of crucial federal agencies and functions — and to dismantle some of them virtually overnight — has stoked widespread alarm in Washington about the aims of his Donald Trump-backed mission.
The opaque office’s early moves have violated the Privacy Act and cybersecurity laws, according to legal experts, and triggered a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s assault on government bureaucracy.
Legal and security experts are particularly exercised by Musk’s move to shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development and take control of the Treasury Department’s central payments database.
“The scale here is unprecedented in terms of the risk to sensitive personal and financial information,” said Alan Butler of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “It’s an absolute nightmare.”
The Musk-led effort to gain entry into Treasury’s huge payment database drew a lawsuit Monday from two major federal employee unions and left some lawyers who specialize in regulation of such data nearly apoplectic.
Mary Ellen Callahan, former Chief Privacy Officer at the Department of Homeland Security, called DOGE’s access “a data breach of exponential proportions.” “If we lose control of that data, we’ve lost control forever,” she said.
The suit filed in federal court in Washington on Monday by the American Federation of Government Employees and the Service Employees International Union argues that the Trump administration is breaching the Privacy Act of 1974 by sharing payment information with members of the DOGE team.
Other lawyers said DOGE’s access could also violate cybersecurity-related laws, like the Federal Information Security Modernization Act of 2002….