Elon Musk’s DOGE Wants to Seize Your Private Tax Data

Elon Musk and DOGE are trying to get their hands on some of the most sensitive information the Internal Revenue Service has to offer: data on every single taxpayer, business, and nonprofit, according to The Washington Post. The request has put IRS officials on high alert.

The Trump administration sent the IRS a memorandum of understanding that would allow DOGE employees to infiltrate IRS programs like the Integrated Data Retrieval System, or IRDS, which gives IRS employees access to bank information and personal identification numbers. DOGE also plans to send its own software engineer, Gavin Kliger, to the IRS for 120 days to “provide engineering assistance and IT modernization consulting.”

The memo requires Kliger to keep tax return information confidential and to destroy the information he collects once his 120 days are up. He is expected to be given access “imminently,” an unnamed source told CNN.

“The information that the IRS has is incredibly personal,” former internal IRS watchdog Nina Olson told the Post. “Someone with access to it could use it and make it public in a way, or do something with it, or share it with someone else who shares it with someone else, and your rights get violated.”

While the IRS’s systems could certainly use upgrades, allowing private citizens full-fledged access to millions of Americans’ sensitive financial information does not seem like the safest or most ethical way of going about it, especially without congressional authorization.

Elon Musk is pushing for a massive crackdown on free speech, by taking up the rusty rapier that is Donald Trump’s pitiable crusade against CBS’s 60 Minutes.

The president has been fuming about Kamala Harris’s interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes since it first aired in September, and claimed that the show had “defrauded the public” by airing different portions of Harris’s answer to a question about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on different days. A transcript of the original interview released by the Federal Communications Commission earlier this month found that both answers were part of the same extended response.

“60 Minutes are the biggest liars in the world!” Musk wrote in a post on X Sunday. “They engaged in deliberate deception to interfere with the last election. They deserve a long prison sentence.”

Musk’s fascist threat to imprison journalists was a deflection written in response to a post from 60 Minutes that criticized his efforts to gut USAID.

“President Trump says USAID is rife with fraud. But Andrew Natsios, a Republican former administrator of USAID, calls that ‘utter nonsense.’ Natsios says USAID is ‘the most accountable aid agency in the world,’” read the post from 60 Minutes.

Musk’s outrageous threat feels all the more prescient after the Trump administration last week moved to indefinitely ban the Associated Press from the White House and Air Force One, over its refusal to use the fake name Trump came up with for the Gulf of Mexico.

The Washington Post—owned by billionaire and Trump inauguration attendee Jeff Bezos—spiked a print ad critical of Elon Musk and his increased influence on the federal government.

The watchdog group Common Cause, in cooperation with the Southern Poverty Law Center, had agreed to pay the Post $115,000 for one ad placement on the front and back of Tuesday’s print edition, and another similar full-page ad on the inside of the paper.

The ad shows a laughing Musk positioned over the White House with the question “Who’s running this country: Donald Trump or Elon Musk?” in large bold letters.

“Since day one, Elon has created chaos and confusion and put our livelihoods at risk. And he is accountable to no one but himself,” smaller print below reads. “The Constitution only allows for one president at a time. Call your senators and tell them it’s time Donald Trump fire Elon Musk.”

The ad includes a link and QR code for FireMusk.org at the bottom of the page. It was approved by the Post, all set to be delivered to subscribers at the Capitol, Pentagon, and the White House.

“We submitted the artwork back on Tuesday of last week. I’m assuming it went through a legal department or other kind of review. They said, ‘You can have something inside the paper but you can’t do the wrap.’ We said thanks, no thanks because we had a lot of questions,” Common Cause President Virginia Kase Solomón said to The Hill on Sunday.

On Friday, Common Cause learned the wrap ad would not be running, according to Kase Solomón.

“Is it because we’re critical of what’s happening with Elon Musk? Is it only ok to run things in the Post now that won’t anger the president or won’t have him calling Jeff Bezos asking why this was allowed?” Kase Solomón asked.

A spokesperson for the Post declined to comment to The Hill, citing the newspaper’s policy of keeping silent about internal decisions about specific advertising campaigns.

Donald Trump’s administration has begun indiscriminately culling scores of people who keep air travel safe, despite four deadly plane crashes during his first two months as president.

In a statement published Saturday, David Spero, the president of the AFL-CIO’s Professional Aviation Safety Specialists (PASS), said that several hundred employees represented by the organization had been fired “without cause nor based on performance or conduct.”

The notices, sent from an “exec order” Microsoft email address, began arriving Friday evening, according to the statement. “It is possible that others will be notified over the weekend or literally barred from entering FAA buildings on Tuesday, February 18,” Spero said in the statement

“These are not nameless, faceless bureaucrats. They are our family, friends and neighbors. They contribute to our communities. Many military veterans are among them. It is shameful to toss aside dedicated public servants who have chosen to work on behalf of their fellow Americans,” Spero said.

Last month, Trump baselessly blamed the Federal Aviation Administration’s diversity, equity, and inclusion policies for the deadly incident that killed 67 people aboard two aircrafts at the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. The FAA shortly after released a statement indicating that the air traffic control tower might have been understaffed at the time of the collision. Still, the Trump administration seems intent to assert that excess is the issue.

So far in 2025, there have been four deadly plane crashes in the United States. Before then, the most recent deadly commercial aircraft accident was in 2009.

“Staffing decisions should be based on an individual agency’s mission-critical needs,” said Spero, according to CNN. “To do otherwise is dangerous when it comes to public safety. And it is especially unconscionable in the aftermath of three deadly aircraft accidents in the past month.”

The move is part of a wider push from the Trump administration targeting probationary workers in the federal government, who have been employed for less than a year, and therefore lack the job protections of their colleagues. While they are the easiest to get rid of, they will undoubtedly prove difficult to live without.

Elon Musk’s overhaul of the federal government seems to have hit a snag: His Department of Government Efficiency posted classified information on its website. 

Musk’s team posted information about the staff and size of a U.S. intelligence agency on their new website, HuffPost reports. DOGE has been criticized for the level of access into sensitive government departments, including the Treasury Department, but how they got the classified information isn’t clear. 

DOGE.gov was launched Wednesday claiming to give Americans the ability to “trace your tax dollars through the bureaucracy.” The feature allows users the ability to see data from all federal offices and agencies including head counts, budgets, and the average age of staff. But, the website was supposed to exclude data from U.S. intelligence agencies, according to the fine print at the bottom of its main page.  

The young whiz kids at DOGE appear to have forgotten that part and included information about the National Reconnaissance Office, which is tasked with creating and maintaining satellites for U.S. intelligence. Much of the agency’s activities, including its budget and head count, are classified and aren’t supposed to be available to the public. Plus, how did Musk’s team get access to that information, anyway? Does it have something to do with Musk’s company SpaceX having a $1.8 billion contract to build satellites for the NRO?

Members of the intelligence community would like to know the answer to these questions. One Defense Intelligence Agency employee told HuffPost anonymously that “DOGE just posted secret [Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals] info on their website about [intelligence community] headcount, so currently people are scrambling to check if their info has been accessed.”

While the NRO is the only intelligence agency that DOGE appears to have exposed, this incident doesn’t speak well of the pseudo-agency’s security procedures. The website has already been hacked by Thursday evening thanks to coding vulnerabilities. And since DOGE has gotten into all kinds of sensitive data, every American could be at risk.