There are several laws, including the Privacy Act of 1974, that govern how the government collects and stores personal data. Strict rules limit when government agencies can share that data with each other.
Privacy advocates and unions are seeking to prevent Elon Musk’s DOGE team from gaining access to sensitive taxpayer information at the IRS. The law safeguarding the information was passed in the 1970s, in response to fears that Richard Nixon might weaponize tax information to protect friends and punish enemies.
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Privacy advocates file lawsuit to stop DOGE from peeking at IRS taxpayer data
Those limits are by design. “Everyone thinks the government already has this data” in a connected way, says one former federal worker who did not want to be named to preserve future job prospects. “But they really don’t, because it’s firewalled.”
Some current and former government workers fear that Musk’s plan is to bring huge amounts of government data together, to create deeply personal profiles on individual Americans.
One of them is Jonathan Kamens, who was overseeing cybersecurity for VA.gov until he was terminated last month alongside some 40 of his colleagues at the U.S. Digital Service, a little known government unit that Trump turned into DOGE. He points to authoritarian regimes that create dossiers used to control individuals.
Here’s an overview of a few federal agencies that hold data on large swaths of Americans – and where things stand with the DOGE team’s access.
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