“I see DOGE actively destroying cybersecurity barriers within government in a way that endangers the privacy of American citizens,” says Jonathan Kamens, who oversaw cybersecurity for VA.com until February, when he was let go. “That makes it easier for bad actors to gain access.”
The Department of Veterans Affairs stores the bank accounts and credit card numbers of millions of veterans who receive benefits and services. The department also collects medical data, social security numbers, and the names of relatives and caregivers, says Kamens, who says he was the only federal employee at the agency with an engineering technical background overseeing cybersecurity for VA.gov.
Kamens says he was hired in 2023 in part to improve “several specific security issues” for the site, which he declined to name due to confidentiality reasons. Now, he says, hackers could take advantage of those unresolved issues to learn potentially compromising information about veterans, and then target them with phishing campaigns.
Erie Meyer, former chief technologist at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), resigned in February after DOGE members showed up at the agency’s offices requesting data privileges. Her role focused on safeguarding the CFPB’s sensitive data, including transaction records from credit reporting agencies, complaints filed by citizens, and information from Big Tech companies under investigation. “There are a bunch of careful protections in place that layer on to each other to make sure that no one could exploit that information,” Meyer says.
But DOGE slashed many of those efforts, including the regular upkeep of audit and event logs which showed how and when employees were accessing that information. “The software we had in place tracking what was being done was turned off,” she says. This means that DOGE employees could now have access to financial data with no oversight as to how or why they are accessing it, Meyer says.
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