Since late January, Elon Musk and the staff of his Department of Government Efficiency task force, or DOGE, have systematically accessed the digital networks and information databases that power the federal government.
Among their first targets were the Treasury’s payment system and the government’s human resources department, known as the Office of Personnel Management, which maintains information on millions of federal employees. DOGE staff have also reportedly accessed payment and contracting systems for Medicare and Medicaid, as well as similar databases for the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Musk is the CEO of companies with billion-dollar government contracts as well as a political operative. Last year, he spent more than $290 million to help elect President Trump and other Republicans. He claims that DOGE’s activities are purely aimed at identifying waste and fraud.
But political experts say that the systems and data potentially available to Musk also give him unprecedented power over his allies, enemies, business competitors, and the American people. One expert on authoritarianism, historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, called his actions a “new kind of coup.” Many of Musk’s actions appear to violate federal law, according to The Washington Post.
Georgetown University Prof. Abraham L. Newman told Mashable that the information Musk and DOGE have reportedly accessed “basically tells you everything about our society.”
When this data is maintained by neutral civil servants to execute core government functions, like issuing Social Security payments to beneficiaries, that digital infrastructure is simply part of making “the trains run on time.”
And yet “when they start to be used for other purposes, for political purposes, then they can be extremely extremely dangerous,” and used to “achieve political objectives,” says Newman, author of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.
What data do Musk and DOGE have?
The information Musk has access to now, even if in a read-only format as one Treasury official insisted, may include Social Security numbers, federal employee health and personnel records, as well as federal student loan data.
Speaking anonymously to The Atlantic, one federal contractor with experience working on classified government information-security systems called the situation “The largest data breach and the largest IT security breach in our country’s history — at least that’s publicly known.”
Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren said this week that Musk may be able to view Americans’ payment history and bank account numbers, among other types of personal data.
“Elon now has the power to suck out all of that information for his own use,” she said.
Musk may also be able to view federal contracts held by companies that may or may not be competitors to Musk’s own businesses, which include Tesla, SpaceX, and the social media platform X.
Musk has yet to publicly produce an ethics waiver for his work with DOGE, as required by government employees who have conflicts of interest, nor has he publicly divested himself from his companies.
An attempt by Congressional Democrats to subpoena Musk over DOGE’s recent actions failed.
What could Musk do with the digital power he now possesses?
1) Stop government payments.
Though the Treasury Department says DOGE has read-only access to its payment system, WIRED reported that one engineer linked to Musk had gained administrative privileges over the software that controls Social Security payments and tax returns, among other critical payments made by the federal government.
That DOGE employee resigned Thursday, after the Wall Street Journal identified his previous social media posts that promoted racism and eugenics. By Friday, Musk was lobbying for him to return via a poll on X.
While the Justice Department has limited DOGE’s access to the payment system for now, any renewed administrative privileges could be used by Musk to stop payments he deemed fraudulent or wasteful, Newman says.
Indeed, CNN has reported that Musk’s associates at the Treasury Department asked its acting secretary to cease all U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) payments via the department’s own processing system.
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The agency, which Musk succeeded in gutting this week, provides food, disaster relief, and medical assistance to some of poorest people in the world.
University of Michigan professor Elizabeth Popp Berman, in a recent Liberal Currents essay called “Personal Discretion Over the Treasury’s Payments System Means the End of Democracy,” outlined the stakes of Musk’s control over the government’s payment systems, particularly if courts do not restrain him.
“Having a president — or, even more so, an unelected billionaire — hold direct, granular control of nearly seven trillion dollars is power beyond the Founders’ wildest dreams,” Berman wrote.
2) Reward allies and punish enemies.
Newman says that Musk could use administrative power over payments systems to divert resources to allies and target people or entities that he, or President Trump, doesn’t like.
Both men are known to attack their enemies on social media and in public. Trump, for example, said those involved with the House committee that investigated the January 6 attack “should go to jail.” On his social media platform X, Musk recently accused Treasury officials of “breaking the law,” without providing evidence.
3) Gain a massive competitive advantage over other business leaders.
Since there seems to be no firewall between Musk’s activity as a special government employee and his role as a CEO, Newman says people in business should be particularly alarmed by his access to federal data.
A rival company could never outcompete a Musk enterprise that understood the government’s inner workings, contracts and payment systems, Newman says. He adds that such a dynamic has the potential to undermine fair and free markets in the U.S.
In the midst of DOGE’s digital government takeover, Musk’s social media company X announced that it was partnering with Visa to let users connect their checking and debit accounts in order to transfer funds to their X account.
Musk has long wanted to transform X into a payment system for “everything.” It’s possible that DOGE’s scouring of the federal government’s own payment system could also benefit Musk’s business aspirations, and would create conflicts of interest for any business leader in that position.
4) Use AI to analyze federal spending and contracts.
Musk plans to use some form of artificial intelligence to analyze federal spending and contracts, according to the New York Times. It’s unclear whether this would be an AI system that Musk owns, or AI programs that the federal government already uses.
The Washington Post reported on new DOGE efforts to analyze spending at the Department of Education, using AI software accessible via Microsoft’s cloud computing service Azure. That service offers access to a number of AI tools. DOGE and Microsoft declined to comment on the details to the Post. Azure did recently add the Chinese AI platform DeepSeek to its suite of tools, according to Reuters.
At this moment, there’s no clarity on the risks of the AI software DOGE is using — or the safeguards in place to prevent it from making mistakes or committing hallucinations.
5) Consolidate and centralize power over the government’s basic functions.
Up until a few weeks ago, America’s basic but vital bureaucratic functions were managed by career civil servants with background clearances, all of whom took an oath to serve the United States Constitution. Those civil servants didn’t have access to a centralized system they could command on their own.
As Musk gains entry to multiple vital systems across the government, it may be possible for him to consolidate and centralize those powers so that only a handful of Trump loyalists can control them.
Potential consequences of Musk’s new digital power for you
1) The government’s digital infrastructure breaks.
As DOGE engineers work, at apparent breakneck speed, to access and analyze key systems, Newman says that there’s a very real chance they may unintentionally break them.
For example, unapproved software changes could hobble systems that distribute Social Security and Medicare payments, Newman says.
“Mucking about with systems that are built on sixty-year-old code could be deeply disruptive to vital government functions, shutting down the Social Security payments many rely on or cutting off payments to small businesses that depend on government contracts for survival,” Berman wrote in her essay.
2) Bad actors breach Americans’ data.
The fact that Musk and DOGE have collected vast amounts of Americans’ data in ways that may not comply with the government’s security practices is likely of interest to foreign governments and bad actors, says Newman. That information is highly valuable to anyone who can steal it.
The Atlantic reported that some of the government’s databases requiring a security clearance — including those for the Department of Justice and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — can include sensitive personal information, such as sexual history or mental health records.
For many of us, data breaches have become a mundane fact of life. But as Newman notes, the scale and scope of this case make it unique. One person — Musk — has the potential to know something about everybody in the U.S., and that person works for the government.
As the situation unfolds, Newman encourages Americans to consider the fate of the country’s digital bureaucracy as key to democracy.
“I think we should be very cognizant of the fact that these things that seem boring, and often have boring names, are often the place where power lies,” he says.
