It was a tip to Washington Post that gives us an indication of what’s really happening with DOGE.
Musk’s claims of changing code and stopping payments was nothing more than a distraction, a way of keeping our focus on what one hand is doing while the other operates freely.
Trump’s blathering out developing Gaza, or the photogenic migrant raids and talk of El Salvador prisons—while heinous and shocking to see and hear from a US President—also serve to distract us fom what DOGE is really doing.
They’re siphoning up all our data, every bit of it. They may be running it through AI systems, true, but that’s not the problem: the problem is all that data is leaving federal systems and being transferred to cloud systems and computers that Musk controls, not us.
Microsoft Azure is a cloud-based platform. This means all that data is being moved outside of strict federal protections and into privately held accounts on Microsoft’s cloud system.
We thought we had stopped them in court, but even that was a distraction. How Musk must have laughed when lawyers out to protect our data inadvertently gave DOGE permission to do what they really wanted to do in the first place: get the data.
As Wired notes:
Speaking of data: They want that, too. DOGE agents are installed at or have visited the Treasury Department, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Small Business Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Labor. Probably more. They’ve demanded data, sensitive data, payments data, and in many cases they’ve gotten it—the pursuit of data as an end unto itself but also data that could easily be used as a competitive edge, as a weapon, if you care to wield it.
The tip was about the Department of Education, but we’ve heard about DOGE people in the Treasury and Medicare/Medicaid systems. We know they’ve already grabbed data related to USAID. And Musk has bragged about accessing all government systems—ostensibly to improve them, but in actuality, to get the data. All that data.
All the information about student loans, all the information about grants, all Medicare and Medicaid payments—and the procedures, diagnoses, and treatments related to those payments.
All of our tax filings, our social security payments and records, any government expenditure, FEMA claims…all of it being siphoned off and sent to the cloud. Not only data about government employees, but data about us.
All corporate data, including taxes, government fees and fines, confidential decisions and actions related to farm and factory.
Data from and about banks and financial institutions, including payment details if we have direct deposit.
And once it’s out there, there’s nothing we can do to grab it back and keep it safe.
We are witnessing the greatest data breach in history, and it’s happening not because of hackers from China or Russia, but from agents in our own federal government. Agents put there by Musk with President Trump’s approval.
What a profound betrayal of the people of this country.