DOGE and the Purpose Behind It

by Lilly Gioia

The Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE was invented by President Trump supposedly to root out waste, fraud and abuse. Its true purpose is to create a vast central data base holding the personal information of every American.

Recently a Social Security whistle-blower exposed how DOGE has secretly relocated the files of 73 million beneficiaries to an unsecured cloud platform that only they have access to. This unsecured cloud could be hacked by identity thieves around the globe. Outraged Social Security advocates are demanding that Senator Mike Crapo, chair of the Senate Finance Committee institute an immediate investigation and hold public hearings, which so far, he hasn’t done. If this troubles you, you may want to call Senator Crapo and demand he act, as I’ve done.

The issue of protecting our private information held by government agencies goes far beyond Social Security. The Trump Justice Department is also demanding every state surrender its data bases to the federal government, under the pretext of assuring election security. Thus far Governor Shapiro and Secretary of State Al Schmidt have refused, asserting that such a federal mandate is illegal. 

Last week the national League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, along with five individual plaintiffs, filed a class action lawsuit. They are challenging the unlawful creation of massive government data bases that consolidate sensitive and legally-protected personal information on millions of people to unlawfully open investigations and purge voter rolls.

The coalition is represented by Democracy Forward, Citizens for Responsibility & Ethics in Washington (CREW) and Fair Elections Center. The
lawsuit charges DOGE and the Department of Homeland Security have secretly merged personal data from across the federal government into centralized “Interagency Databases” in direct violation of the Privacy Act of 1974 and the U.S. Constitution.

Records from the IRS, Social Security, US Department of Health & Human Services, U.S. Labor Department, and state voter registration databases—containing Social Security numbers, tax information, medical records, biometric data and children’s case files—being secretly and unlawfully collected and consolidated is a “clear example of the constitutional crisis we are living through,” League of Women Voters CEO Celina Stewart said. “Our federal government is abusing its power to access American’s personal information, and several states are using that private data to harm voters and our individual right to privacy.”

John Davisson at Electronic Privacy stressed that “This country was founded on the principle that the government has no business arbitrarily intruding in our private affairs. Yet this administration is trampling on our privacy at the grandest scale, illegally hoarding our sensitive personal information and threatening our most cherished rights. The law is clear: no national data bank. Together we’ll put a stop to this in court.” The lawsuit is LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS V. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY.