Buried in this NYT profile of Elon Musk’s latest PR offensive is the following paragraph:

It is unclear how many of Mr. Musk’s most prominent deputies will stay ensconced in their new government roles. Antonio Gracias, the billionaire investor, has transitioned from leading the DOGE team at the Social Security Administration to a role combing through federal databases to try to identify instances of foreign nationals voting illegally, according to people familiar with the effort.

This isn’t a new revelation (Rick blogged an NPR story on this a month and a half ago).  But the discussion here is weird for a few reasons.

First, it’s wholly unclear why anyone describing government personnel and ostensibly official government roles should need anonymity, so I really don’t understand the “sources familiar” anonymous sourcing.  Second, there are no federal databases that identify voters.  Third, if Gracias is actually a government official trying to match federal databases with state voting databases, there are specific legal requirements under the Privacy Act that he’d have a responsibility to follow before acquiring any of that data or doing that matching, and there’s no indication whatsoever that anyone’s taken those steps.  It’s important that these legal requirements apply because it’s the federal government: just because some voter files may be available to the public does NOT mean that they’re available to the federal government.  (Right or wrong, we’ve been antsier about the government having your data than about private individuals having your data, for a long time now.)  So if what these needlessly anonymous sources have said is actually true, even before getting to the logistics or results of the effort, there should have been a slew of follow-up questions.  And/but that’s where the paragraph ends.