DOGE Is Not Here to Help With Your Taxes

The financial data of millions of Americans is at risk as Musk and his "team" bring their unlawful breaches of privacy to the IRS

By Alan Butler

One of the most alarming developments we have seen in the first month of President Donald Trump’s second term is a rapid push by Elon Musk and his team at the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) to gain illegal access to the data systems that hold highly sensitive personal information of Americans. This includes sensitive records on federal payments (including taxes) held by the Treasury Department, personnel records of current and former federal government workers held by the Office of Personnel Management, loan data and other sensitive records held by the Department of Education, and (most recently) tax return information held by the IRS.

The established pattern is that a DOGE “team” will come to an agency, demand admin or other high-level access to their data systems under the auspices of President Trump’s DOGE Order, and either fire or physically obstruct any agency employees who try to get in their way. Already a dozen lawsuits have been filed challenging the DOGE’s unlawful breach of private information in these databases.

The news last week that DOGE officials were seeking access to IRS databases gave cause for new and special alarm. Tax return information is some of the most sensitive data held by the federal government. The Internal Revenue Code, specifically part of the law referred to as Section 6103, tightly restricts who can access these systems, and it only provides narrow exceptions necessary for tax administration purposes.

It shouldn’t be surprising that tax return information is so closely guarded. Prior to the enactment of the Tax Reform Act of 1976, these files were open to inspection on the President’s order, and decades of corruption leading up to that point showed how such power could be weaponized against political enemies. This included the targeting of political enemies with audits by President Roosevelt, among others, as a method to discredit them in the public’s eye. The Watergate investigation brought such abuses to light and motivated Congress to get serious about protecting taxpayers’ rights.

The resulting privacy protections are important not only because they protect against improper political targeting via the IRS but also because they give taxpayers the confidence they need to provide their sensitive financial information to the government. We rely on voluntary tax filing in this country, and part of that arrangement is that we as citizens are entitled to strict protection of deeply personal data. When the privacy of our tax information is put at risk, it puts our entire political system and government funding system at risk.

None of what DOGE is doing is normal. There have been nine presidential transitions since the Privacy Act and the IRS tax privacy laws were enacted in the 1970s, and none of those transitions, until now, have seen an outright rejection of those vital reforms. We have systems in place to conduct audits, to investigate suspected waste, fraud, and abuse, and to modernize the IT used by federal agencies. None of them require giving unvetted political appointees high-level access to our most sensitive records.

If a private sector accounting or tax preparation firm behaved this way, they would (rightly) get dragged into court by their customers. It should be no different for federal agencies when they mishandle our data. Identity theft continues to be one of the top consumer complaints each year, and it costs us collectively over $40 Billion per year. There is no “efficiency” to be gained by exposing millions of Americans to potential data breaches. The U.S. Treasury Department is not a place where we should “move fast and break things.”

As the new cases challenging DOGE data breaches move forward in the courts, we are seeing a common thread among the responses offered by Justice Department attorneys—this is all business as usual, just agency employees accessing agency systems in routine ways, nothing to see here. But what representatives of this administration are saying in public contradicts those statements. These are not routine uses of data, which would be limited to what is strictly necessary to perform an audit or to carry out some upgrades. DOGE wants to feed our data into dubious (at best) AI systems to conduct an analysis that will provide a smokescreen for decimating the federal workforce and unlawfully shutting down congressionally-appropriated programs. It is all laid out in their so-called “AI-first” strategy.

None of this will make the government more efficient or save money for the United States. We know that there are improvements to be made, many of which have been identified in reports of the inspectors general and the Government Accountability Office. Firing thousands of workers at the IRS will not help. The US already loses $1 Trillion to unpaid taxes every year, according to estimates, and that problem will get worse with reduced capacity on the agency side. The President’s decision to conduct a mass purge of inspectors general won’t help either; these are the officials (many hired during the President’s first term) who are actually charged with rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse.

For the average American, this unlawful data grab by the DOGE is all risk with no upside. Hopefully courts will block these illegitimate intrusions. Our privacy laws are there for a reason—they protect Americans from the harms of a data breach, and they foster trust in our government. Any access to sensitive data systems must be limited, and those who are given access must be fully vetted. Uncovering waste, fraud, and abuse does not require the abuse of Americans’ personal data.

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Alan Butler is the Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (epic.org).