We knew this was coming, but it doesn’t make it any less stupid. The road to the IRS’ Direct File program was long and hard-fought. We here at BestNetTech have been talking about, and advocating for, something like the Direct File program for at least 15 years. The concept behind the program is a simple one. For a class of citizens with very simple income and tax payments, the IRS already has all the information it needs to process a tax return. In those cases, the IRS can simply mail the information it has to a taxpayer, ask them to sign off verifying the information is complete and accurate, and then process the return. The problem with this is that it cuts out the tax-prep industry that absolutely adores preying on these very same people to milk them for tax-prep services they don’t actually need.
For decades, the industry did exactly that. Even as the government partnered with private tax preparation companies like Intuit to provide federally backed “free” tax-prep websites and platforms, those same companies did everything they could to hide those free services and, in lieu of that, try to sell add-on services to those who were supposed to be able to file for free. While this eventually led to massive FTC fines for Intuit, this was the Faustian bargain that came from years and years of lobbying: The government would work with private industry for free filing programs in exchange for those same companies getting the government to line vulnerable citizens up like cattle headed to slaughter.
The IRS’ Direct File program came directly in the aftermath of the shady shit companies like Intuit did. It piloted in 2023, was a resounding success, and went live in 12 states in 2024. In April of this year, reports of Trump’s plans to end the program filtered into the news, even as the reviews by users of Direct File were overwhelmingly positive. Then, in August, IRS Commissioner Billy Long, himself a tax-prep industry player, said the program would be gone.
And, if you were holding onto any hope that this administration would keep a program in place that citizens love and ultimately reduces the overhead on the IRS, consider your hopes dashed. The IRS has begun notifying the states that had Direct File programs that the program will not be available for 2026 tax filings.
In an email sent from the IRS to 25 states, the tax agency thanked them for collaborating and noted that “no launch date has been set for the future.”
“IRS Direct File will not be available in Filing Season 2026,” says the Monday email, obtained by Nextgov/FCW and confirmed by multiple sources. It follows reports that the program was ending and Trump’s former tax chief, Billy Long, remarking over the summer that the service was “gone.”
Instead, that whole big beautiful bill we have heard so much about contained directions for the IRS to once again partner with private industry in a Free File program. The exact situation we were in that led to so much outrage at the behavior of those private companies, which in turn led to the creation of Direct File to begin with. This is simply winding the clock backwards to something people hated and calling it “progress.”
“It’s not surprising since the Trump administration sabotaged Direct File all through this year’s filing season, at the urging of tax prep monopolies like TurboTax,” Adam Ruben, the vice president of the Economic Security Project, told Nextgov/FCW. “Trump’s billionaire friends get favors while honest hardworking Americans will pay more to file their taxes.”
This isn’t something that can even be argued, honestly. It’s exactly what is happening. And, frankly, actions like this put the lie to Donald Trump’s claim to be fighting for the “little guy”. It’s all a bullshit grift, you see, with middlemen who are as wealthy as they are needlessly having Americans queued up to be conned.
This was a good program. The people who used it liked it. No serious negative consequence was experienced in its use.
And Trump did away with it so that mega-corporations like Intuit can continue skimming money from citizens in order to tell the IRS what it already knows.
I actually wrote this article yesterday before the government shutdown happened so I don’t really discuss that, but it sounds like we may end up going through all this again if the Trump regime goes through with its plans to use the shutdown to fire a bunch more people who are important, but who no one in charge is smart enough to understand what they do.
Remember when Elon Musk and his merry band of DOGE vandals were going to revolutionize government by firing everyone and slashing everything? Yeah, about that. Turns out when you fire people who actually know how to do essential jobs, you eventually need to… hire them back. Who could have predicted this shocking turn of events? (Spoiler: literally everyone who was paying attention.)
The General Services Administration is now desperately begging hundreds of federal employees to come back after Musk’s cost-cutting blitz left the agency “broken and understaffed.” These are the same workers who were supposedly dead weight that needed to be eliminated to save taxpayer money. Funny how that worked out.
The General Services Administration has given the employees — who managed government workspaces — until the end of the week to accept or decline reinstatement, according to an internal memo obtained by The Associated Press.
Those who accept must report for duty on October 6 after what amounts to a seven-month paid vacation, during which time the GSA in some cases racked up high costs — passed along to taxpayers — to stay in dozens of properties whose leases it had slated for termination or were allowed to expire.
A seven-month paid vacation. Let’s pause to appreciate the stunning “efficiency” here. These workers got fired, kept getting paid, and now the government is begging them to come back because—surprise!—they actually knew what they were doing, were needed, and when they were suddenly cut loose it turned out to be an expensive mess that made it harder for the government to function. Meanwhile, taxpayers footed the bill for both their salaries and the mounting costs of properties that couldn’t be properly managed without them.
Of course, this was pretty much what a ton of actual experts warned would happen.
This is exactly what happens when a bunch of overconfident, under-informed Silicon Valley bros assume that complex government operations are just inefficient startups waiting to be “disrupted.” GSA wasn’t some bloated tech company with redundant product managers—it’s the agency that manages thousands of federal work spaces. You know, actual critical infrastructure that keeps the government functioning.
And, of course, GSA actually had a strong and incredibly effective team that worked on efficiency… and Musk fired them all.
“Ultimately, the outcome was the agency was left broken and understaffed,” said Chad Becker, a former GSA real estate official. “They didn’t have the people they needed to carry out basic functions.”
Becker, who represents owners with government leases at Arco Real Estate Solutions, said GSA has been in a “triage mode” for months. He said the sudden reversal of the downsizing reflects how Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency had gone too far, too fast.
“Too far, too fast” is a charitable way to describe what amounts to institutional vandalism. This wasn’t thoughtful government reform—it was pure destruction for the sake of destroying anything a bunch of ignorant, incurious idiots didn’t understand, on the assumption that if they didn’t understand it, it couldn’t be that important.
They were wrong, and now taxpayers are left footing the bill.
Also, we’re not just talking about GSA here. There’s a pattern here of institutional destruction masquerading as reform. The rehiring wave is spreading across multiple agencies as the reality of Musk’s “efficiency” vision crashes into the actual requirements of running a government:
Last month, the IRS said it would allow some employees who took a resignation offer to remain on the job. The Labor Department has also brought back some employees who took buyouts, while the National Park Service earlier reinstated a number of purged employees.
The scale of this backtracking is breathtaking. When you’re rehiring at the IRS, Labor Department, National Park Service, and GSA simultaneously, that’s not fine-tuning—that’s admitting your entire approach was fundamentally broken.
In the end, the massive job cuts that were supposed to save money have, instead, created expensive messes that cost way more than the original “inefficiencies” they were meant to fix:
The administration slashed GSA’s headquarters staff by 79%, its portfolio managers by 65% and facilities managers by 35%, according to a federal official briefed on the situation. The official, who was not authorized to speak to the media, provided the statistics on condition of anonymity.
As a result of the internal turmoil,131 leases expired without the government actually vacating the properties, the official said. The situation has exposed the agencies tosteep fees because property owners have not been able to rent outthose spaces to other tenants.
This is what happens when you mistake activity for achievement. DOGE fired nearly everyone who managed the government’s portfolio of real estate and then acted shocked when nobody was left to manage the portfolios. Now taxpayers are on the hook for “steep fees” because properties couldn’t be properly vacated. The government is paying rent on spaces it’s not using because the people who knew how to handle lease transitions were… fired to save money.
And now they’re desperately trying to hire them back so they won’t even save money on the decrease in salaries.
Even DOGE’s own metrics show how spectacularly this has backfired:
DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts,” which once boasted that the lease cancellations alone would save nearly $460 million, has since reduced that estimate to $140 million by the end of July, according to Becker, the former GSA real estate official.
From $460 million in supposed savings down to $140 million in actual savings—a 70% reduction in their own projections. This collapse in projected savings reveals the fundamental flaw in DOGE’s approach: they counted theoretical benefits from lease cancellations without accounting for the institutional knowledge required to execute those cancellations. The real number, factoring in transition costs, legal fees, and operational disruptions, is almost certainly negative. And that’s assuming you trust DOGE’s remaining figures. Which you probably shouldn’t.
This entire debacle perfectly illustrates the fundamental flaw in the “government is just a broken business” mentality. Government agencies exist to serve public functions that often don’t map neatly onto Silicon Valley efficiency models. When you fire the people who understand complex lease agreements, regulatory compliance, and interagency coordination, you don’t get innovation—you get extremely expensive chaos.
The particularly galling part is that these workers will now return to clean up the mess created by their own firing. They’ll spend months untangling lease complications, rebuilding institutional knowledge, and reestablishing relationships with contractors and other agencies. All of this remedial work will cost far more than their original salaries ever did.
The Government Accountability Office is now investigating this mess, which means taxpayers will also foot the bill for studying how badly DOGE screwed up:
The Government Accountability Office, an independent congressional watchdog, is examining the GSA’s management of its workforce, lease terminations and planned building disposals and expects to issue findings in the coming months, said David Marroni, a senior GAO official.
So we’re paying to study the costs of the effort that led to the cuts that didn’t save money but instead cost more money. It’s inefficiency all the way down.
This is what happens when you let tech bros cosplay as government reformers with no oversight or expertise. They mistake complexity for inefficiency, assume institutional knowledge is just bureaucratic dead weight, and believe that “disruption” is always improvement. The result is predictable: expensive chaos that requires the very expertise they dismissed to fix.
The federal employees now being begged to return have every right to negotiate better terms, demand back pay for the chaos they didn’t create, and insist on job security protections against future DOGE-style tantrums. They’re the ones who will clean up this mess, rebuild what was broken, and restore the basic functions that kept government working before Musk decided to reinvent the wheel as a square.
Rather than government efficiency we ended up with expensive performance art designed to satisfy the digitally-inspired fantasies of people who think running a government is like optimizing a social media algorithm. The only thing DOGE has efficiently accomplished is proving that some people’s expertise actually matters, even if—especially if—Silicon Valley billionaires don’t understand what that expertise does.
I am reminded of Rod Hilton’s viral Mastodon post from a few years back about Elon Musk:
If you can’t see that, it says:
He talked about electric cars. I don’t know anything about cars, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.
Then he talked about rockets. I don’t know anything about rockets, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.
Now he talks about software. I happen to know a lot about software & Elon Musk is saying the stupidest shit I’ve ever heard anyone say, so when people say he’s a genius I figure I should stay the hell away from his cars and rockets.
I get the feeling that a lot of government workers who previously thought he was a genius may also now choose to stay away from Musk’s cars and rockets. As they should.
For no less than 25 years now, BestNetTech has been writing about how the tax preparation industry, especially Intuit, has spent gobs of money bribing lobbying government to keep relatively low-earners from simple methods for filing their tax returns. The series of posts you can find in that link, particularly those in the last 5-10 years, will give you an idea of just how shady and shitty these companies have been to the public.
The short version goes something like this: the IRS partnered with large private tax prep companies to provide free online tax prep software for people making less than a certain dollar amount in exchange for the government not creating its own system for doing so. That’s it. The IRS didn’t pay these companies for their services. They just promised not to compete with them.
Now, why would these companies enter into such an arrangement? Is it because they wanted to help out lower income folks by offering free services? No, silly rabbit, they wanted to trick the public into paying for what they agreed to provide for free! And that’s exactly what companies like Intuit did, notoriously hiding its free services in every way it could and pushing qualified free-to-file applicants instead into paid tax prep services. The end result was fines from the FTC, Intuit attempting to hide refunds for the services it tricked the public into buying, and the discovery that it was tricking American veterans in the same manner, all the tune of $1 billion in income for Intuit alone.
Partially as a result of all of that above bullshit trickery, the government altered its deal with the tax prep industry and began offering its own Direct File program. For simple filers, the IRS piloted Direct File in 12 states in 2024, prepopulating a return for those that enroll, all based on information that the IRS already has, and asking participants to review it and either agree or dispute the information. Most overwhelmingly agree and the program was reviewed as “excellent or above average” by north of 90% of participants, which is of course why Trump and Elon Musk, back when they were besties, decided to fold the part of the government working on the program.
President Donald Trump’s massive spending and policy bill includes funding to research and “replace any direct e-file programs run by the Internal Revenue Service.” Already, the program is “gone,” Long said at a tax professional summit on July 28, Bloomberg Law reports.
“You’ve heard of Direct File, that’s gone,” Long said. “Big beautiful Billy wiped that out. I don’t care about Direct File. I care about direct audit.”
“Commissioner Billy Long is committed to modernizing the IRS and providing a taxpayer experience that meets today’s expectations, which includes giving taxpayers transparency into the status of their tax returns and audits,” an IRS spokesperson told CNBC Make It in an emailed statement.
That modernization effort reportedly is to rewind the clock several years and put us right back to where we were: a partnership between the IRS and the tax prep industry to offer free file programs. Modernization apparently means doing the thing we used to do that didn’t work.
The IRS has another free filing program where the agency partners with third-party tax preparation software companies to provide services to taxpayers, although there are varying eligibility requirements, including adjusted gross income and state of residence. You can use the IRS’ questionnaire tool to find an applicable partner.
There is literally no reason for any of this. Complaints from the GOP about how the program costs too much are obviously silly. The IRS has this information and the program should largely reduce the need for IRS audits and the like, since filers using it are using the IRS’ information. Complaints about conflicts of interest are also dumb, as the IRS is already the enforcer of taxation and participants have the option to dispute the information the IRS has. None of this makes sense…
…until you view it as a gift to the tax industry that has been lobbying against this program for decades before its creation. That’s all this is, a gift to the companies that lobbied for a favor.
And while Intuit exited the Free File program years ago, I’d be willing to bet my next tax return that they jump right back in now that they know the grift is back on.
The Internal Revenue Service is building a computer program that would give deportation officers unprecedented access to confidential tax data.
ProPublica has obtained a blueprint of the system, which would create an “on demand” process allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to obtain the home addresses of people it’s seeking to deport.
Last month, in a previously undisclosed dispute, the acting general counsel at the IRS, Andrew De Mello, refused to turn over the addresses of 7.3 million taxpayers sought by ICE. In an email obtained by ProPublica, De Mello said he had identified multiple legal “deficiencies” in the agency’s request.
Two days later, on June 27, De Mello was forced out of his job, people familiar with the dispute said. The addresses have not yet been released to ICE. De Mello did not respond to requests for comment, and the administration did not address questions sent by ProPublica about his departure.
The Department of Government Efficiency began pushing the IRS to provide taxpayer data to immigration agents soon after President Donald Trump took office. The tax agency’s acting general counsel refused and was replaced by De Mello, who Trump administration officials viewed as more willing to carry out the president’s agenda. Soon after, the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, and the IRS negotiated a “memorandum of understanding” that included specific legal guardrails to safeguard taxpayers’ private information.
In his email, De Mello said ICE’s request for millions of records did not meet those requirements, which include having a written assurance that each taxpayer whose address is being sought was under active criminal investigation.
“There’s just no way ICE has 7 million real criminal investigations, that’s a fantasy,” said a former senior IRS official who had been advising the agency on this issue. The demands from the DHS were “unprecedented,” the official added, saying the agency was pressing the IRS to do what amounted to “a big data dump.”
In the past, when law enforcement sought IRS data to support its investigations, agencies would give the IRS the full legal name of the target, an address on file and an explanation of why the information was relevant to a criminal inquiry. Such requests rarely involved more than a dozen people at a time, former IRS officials said.
Danny Werfel, IRS commissioner during the Biden administration, said the privacy laws allowing federal investigators to obtain taxpayer data have never “been read to open the door to the sharing of thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of tax records for a broad-based enforcement initiative.”
A spokesperson for the White House said the planned use of IRS data was legal and a means of fulfilling Trump’s campaign pledge to carry out mass deportations of “illegal criminal aliens.”
Taxpayer data is among the most confidential in the federal government and is protected by strict privacy laws, which have historically limited its transfer to law enforcement and other government agencies. Unauthorized disclosure of taxpayer return information is a felony that can carry a penalty of up to five years in prison.
The system that the IRS is now creating would give ICE automated access to home addresses en masse, limiting the ability of IRS officials to consider the legality of transfers. IRS insiders who reviewed a copy of the blueprint said it could result in immigration agents raiding wrong or outdated addresses.
“If this program is implemented in its current form, it’s extremely likely that incorrect addresses will be given to DHS and individuals will be wrongly targeted,” said an IRS engineer who examined the blueprints and who, like other officials, spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
The dispute that ended in De Mello’s ouster was the culmination of months of pressure on the IRS to turn over massive amounts of data in ways that would redefine the relationship between the agency and law enforcement and reduce taxpayers’ privacy, records and interviews show.
In one meeting in late March between senior IRS and DHS officials, a top ICE official made a suggestion: Why doesn’t Homeland Security simply provide the name and state of its targets and have the IRS return the addresses of everyone who matches that criteria?
The IRS lawyers were stunned. They feared they could face criminal liability if they handed over the addresses of individuals who were not under a criminal investigation. The conversation and news of deeper collaboration with ICE so disturbed career staff that it led to a series of departures in late March and early April across the IRS’ legal, IT and privacy offices.
They were “pushing the boundaries of the law,” one official said. “Everyone at IRS felt the same way.”
The Blueprint
The technical blueprint obtained by ProPublica shows that engineers at the agency are preparing to give DHS what it wants: a system that enables massive automated data sharing. The goal is to launch the new system before the end of July, two people familiar with the matter said.
The DHS effort to obtain IRS data comes as top immigration enforcement leaders face escalating White House pressure to deport some 3,000 people per day, according to reports.
One federal agent tasked with assisting ICE on deportations said recent operations have been hamstrung by outdated addresses. Better information could dramatically speed up arrests. “Some of the leads that they were giving us were old,” said the agent, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the press. “They’re like from two administrations ago.”
In early March, immigrants rights groups sued the IRS hoping to block the plan, arguing that the memorandum of understanding between DHS and the IRS is illegal. But a judge in early May ruled against them, saying the broader agreement complied with Section 6103, the existing law regulating IRS data sharing. That opened the door for engineers to begin building the system.
The judge did not address the technical blueprint, which didn’t exist at the time of the ruling. But the case is pending, which means the new system could still come under legal review.
Until now, little was known about the push and pull between the two agencies or the exact technical mechanics behind the arrangement.
The plan has been shrouded in secrecy even within the IRS, with details of its development withheld from regular communications. Several IRS engineers and lawyers have avoided working on the project out of concerns about personal legal risk.
Asked about the new system, a spokesperson for IRS parent agency the Treasury Department said the memorandum of understanding, often called an MOU, “has been litigated and determined to be a lawful application of Section 6103, which provides for information sharing by the IRS in precise circumstances associated with law enforcement requests.”
At a time when Trump is making threats to deport not only undocumented immigrants but also U.S. citizens, the scope of information-sharing with the IRS could continue to grow, according to documents reviewed by ProPublica and sources familiar with the matter: DHS has been looking for ways to expand the agreement that could allow Homeland Security officials to seek IRS data on Americans being investigated for various crimes.
Last month, an ICE attorney proposed updating the MOU to authorize new data requests on people “associated with criminal activities which may include United States citizens or lawful permanent residents,” according to a document seen by ProPublica. The status of this proposal is unclear. De Mello, at the time, rejected it and called for senior Treasury Department leadership to personally sign off on such a significant change.
The White House described DHS’ work with the IRS as a good-faith effort to identify and deport those who are living in the country illegally.
“ProPublica continues to degrade their already terrible reputation by suggesting we should turn a blind eye to criminal illegal aliens present in the United States for the sake of trying to collect tax payments from them,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement after receiving questions about the blueprint from ProPublica.
She pointed to the April MOU as giving the government the authority to create the new system and added, “This isn’t a surveillance system. … It’s part of President Trump’s promise to carry out the mass deportation of criminal illegal aliens — the promise that the American people elected him on and he is committed to fulfilling.”
In a separate statement, a senior DHS official also cited the court’s approval of the MOU, saying that it “outlines a process to ensure that sensitive taxpayer information is protected while allowing law enforcement to effectively pursue criminal violations.”
How the System Works
The new system would represent a sea change, allowing law enforcement to request enormous swaths of confidential data in bulk through an automated, computerized process.
The system, according to the blueprint and interviews with IRS engineers, would work like this:
First, DHS would send the IRS a spreadsheet containing the names and previous addresses of the people it’s targeting. The request would include the date of a final removal order, a relevant criminal statute ICE is using to investigate the individual, and the tax period for which information is sought. If DHS fails to include any of this information, the system would reject the request.
The system then attempts to match the information provided by the DHS to a specific taxpayer identification number, which is the primary method by which the IRS identifies an individual in its databases.
If the system makes a match, it accesses the individual’s associated tax file and pulls the address listed during the most recent tax period. Then the system would produce a new spreadsheet enriched with taxpayer data that contains DHS’ targets’ last known addresses. The spreadsheet would include a record of names rejected for lack of required information and names for which it could not make a match.
Tax and privacy experts say they worry about how such a powerful yet crude platform could make dangerous mistakes. Because the search starts with a name instead of a taxpayer identification number, it risks returning the address of an innocent person with the same name as or a similar address to that of one of ICE’s targets. The proposed system assumes the data provided by DHS is accurate and that each targeted individual is the subject of a valid criminal investigation. In effect, the IRS has no way to independently check the bases of these requests, experts told ProPublica.
In addition, the blueprint does not limit the amount of data that can be transferred or how often DHS can request it. The system could easily be expanded to acquire all the information the IRS holds on taxpayers, said technical experts and IRS engineers who reviewed the documents. By shifting a single parameter, the program could return more information than just a target’s address, said an engineer familiar with the plan, including employer and familial relationships.
Engineers based at IRS offices in Lanham, Maryland, and Dallas are developing the blueprint.
“Gone Back on Its Word”
For decades, the American government has encouraged everyone who makes an income in the U.S. to pay taxes — regardless of immigration status — with an implicit promise that their information would be protected. Now that same data may be used to locate and deport noncitizens.
“For years, the IRS has told immigrants that it only cares that they pay their taxes,” said Nandan Joshi, an attorney with the Public Citizen Litigation Group, which is seeking to block the data-sharing agreement in federal court. “By agreeing to share taxpayer data with ICE on a mass basis, the IRS has gone back on its word.”
The push to share IRS data with DHS emerged while Elon Musk’s DOGE reshaped the engineering staff of the IRS. Sam Corcos, a Silicon Valley startup founder with no government experience, pushed out more than 50 IRS engineers and restructured the agency’s engineering priorities while he was the senior DOGE official at the agency. He later became chief information officer at Treasury. He has also led a separate IRS effort to create a master database using products from Silicon Valley giant Palantir Technologies, enabling the government to link and search large swaths of data.
Corcos didn’t respond to a request for comment. The White House said DOGE is not part of the DHS-IRS pact.
Sen. Ron Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Finance, which oversees the IRS, told ProPublica the system being built was ripe for abuse. It “would allow an outside agency unprecedented access to IRS records for reasons that have nothing to do with tax administration, opening the door to endless fishing expeditions,” he said.
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the department’s internal watchdog, is already probing efforts by Trump and DOGEto obtain private taxpayer data and other sensitive information, ProPublica reported in April.
The Trump administration continues to add government agencies to its deportation drive.
DOGE and DHS are also working to build a national citizenship database, NPR reported last month. The database links information from the Social Security Administration and the DHS, ostensibly for the purpose of allowing state and local election officials to verify U.S. citizenship.
And in May, a senior Treasury Department official directed 250 IRS criminal investigative agents to help deportation operations, a significant shift for two agencies that historically have had separate missions.
Welcome to the expanded panopticon, American citizens. Thanks to a very small percentage of your fellow Americans, the president, whom a minority of the general public returned to power, is throwing millions at a private contractor to gather as much data on US citizens as possible for reasons it has left unstated.
That private contractor would be Palantir, which has never shied away from the role of villain since its inception. And it only makes sense this administration would choose Palantir, what with the company’s founder being such a huge fan of Trump, fascism, and censorship.
Nearly a billion dollars are headed Palantir’s way, even as DOGE continues to strip funding from nearly every government agency it has decided to meddle with. That’s not a coincidence, as the New York Times reports.
Palantir’s selection as a chief vendor for the project was driven by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, according to the government officials. At least three DOGE members formerly worked at Palantir, while two others had worked at companies funded by Peter Thiel, an investor and a founder of Palantir.
Just more insiders doing some (horse) trading. Palantir has already received more than $100 million from the Trump Administration since Trump took office in January. The Defense Department’s outlay dwarfs the $113 million already allocated towards this project. The DoD has awarded a $795 million contract to Palantir, but has yet to actually start spending that money.
It obviously will end up spending it. But the main concern is the addition of Palantir software to a bunch of agencies not normally considered to be part of the federal government’s domestic spyware programs.
The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.
The administration and its surveillance partner are also seeking to infect the IRS and Social Security Administration with Palantir’s tech, adding to the massive haystack the Trump administration can use for whatever purposes it wants.
Given how this administration has handled itself since returning to office, it’s not that much of a stretch to believe this massive data collection will be used to help Trump and his compatriots find targets for arrest, deportation, or unconstitutional executive orders.
Mr. Trump could potentially use such information to advance his political agenda by policing immigrants and punishing critics, Democratic lawmakers and critics have said.
That’s obviously the point of this massive data pile, which removes silos that were put there for a reason. Stripping away these separations creates an extremely enticing target for malicious hackers, who always appreciate government contractors doing the dirty work of amassing personally identifiable information for them.
The only open question is whether Palantir’s expanded data collection will be exploited by malicious hackers or malicious administration members first. Rest assured, it will be abused by someone, and any legal recourse after the fact isn’t going to be able to undo whatever harms have been inflicted on Americans by this intermingling of data from multiple federal agencies.
Palantir, of course, couldn’t care less. Its statement on this disturbing development merely says that it’s proud to be a hammer but it can’t control what the administration decides are nails.
“We act as a data processor, not a data controller,” it said. “Our software and services are used under direction from the organisations that license our products: these organisations define what can and cannot be done with their data; they control the Palantir accounts in which analysis is conducted.”
This is obviously true. A contractor can’t control what the government does with the tools it provides. However, it can decide whether or not to provide the tools. Palantir will never choose otherwise, no matter who’s in office. And if it’s willing to aid a president determined to do bad things with the data it provides, it’s certainly willing to sell to other autocrats and human rights abusers elsewhere in the world. Ethics are a luxury this multi-billion dollar company apparently can’t afford.
In an unprecedented move, the U.S. Department of Treasury and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently reached an agreement allowing the IRS to share with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) taxpayer information of certain immigrants. The redacted 15-page memorandum of understanding (MOU) was exposed in a court case, Centro de Trabajadores Unidos v. Bessent, which seeks to prevent the IRS from unauthorized disclosure of taxpayer information for immigration enforcement purposes. Weaponizing government data vital to the functioning and funding of public goods and services by repurposing it for law enforcement and surveillance is an affront to a democratic society. In addition to the human rights abuses this data-sharing agreement empowers, this move threatens to erode trust in public institutions in ways that could bear consequences for decades.
Specifically, the government justifies the MOU by citing Executive Order 14161, which was issued on January 20, 2025. The Executive Order directs the heads of several agencies, including DHS, to identify and remove individuals unlawfully present in the country. Making several leaps, the MOU states that DHS has identified “numerous” individuals who are unlawfully present and have final orders of removal, and that each of these individuals is “under criminal investigation” for violation of federal law—namely, “failure to depart” the country under 8 U.S.C. § 1253(a)(1). The MOU uses this basis for the IRS disclosing to ICE taxpayer information that is otherwise confidential under the tax code.
In practice, this new data-sharing process works like this: ICE makes a request for an individual’s name and address, taxable periods for which the return information pertains, the federal criminal statute being investigated, and reasons why disclosure of this information is relevant to the criminal investigation. Once the IRS receives this request from ICE, the agency reviews it to determine whether it falls under an exception to the statutory authority requiring confidentiality and provides an explanation if the request cannot be processed.
But there are two big reasons why this MOU fails to pass muster.
“While the MOU references criminal investigations, DHS recently reportedly told IRS officials that ‘they would hope to use tax information to help deport as many as seven million people.’ That is far more people than the government could plausibly investigate, or who are plausibly subject to criminal immigration penalties, and suggests DHS’s actual reason for pursuing the tax data is to locate people for civil deportation, making any ‘criminal investigation’ a false pretext to get around the law.”
Second, it’s unclear how the IRS would verify the accuracy of ICE’s requests. Recent events have demonstrated that ICE’s deportation mandate trumps all else—with ICE obfuscating, ignoring, or outright lying about how they conduct their operations and who they target. While ICE has fueled narratives about deporting “criminals” to a notorious El Salvador prison, reports have repeatedly shown that most of those deported had no criminal histories. ICE has even arrested U.S. citizens based on erroneous information and blatant racialprofiling. But ICE’s lack of accuracy isn’t new—in fact, a recent settlement in the case Gonzalez v. ICE bars ICE from relying on its network of erroneous databases to issue detainer requests. In that case, EFF filed an amicus brief identifying the dizzying array of ICE’s interconnected databases, many of which were out of date and incomplete and yet were still relied upon to deprive people of their liberty.
In the wake of the MOU’s signing, several top IRS officials have resigned. For decades, the agency expressed interest in only collecting tax revenue and promised to keep that information confidential. Undocumented immigrants were encouraged to file taxes, despite being unable to reap benefits like Social Security because of their status. Many did, often because any promise of a future pathway to legalizing their immigration status hinged on having fulfilled their tax obligations. Others did because as part of mixed-status families, they were able to claim certain tax benefits for their U.S. citizen children. The MOU weaponizes that trust and puts immigrants in an impossible situation—either fail to comply with tax law or risk facing deportation if their tax data ends up in ICE’s clutches.
This MOU is also sure to have a financial impact. In 2023, it was estimated that undocumented immigrants contributed $66 billion in federal and payroll taxes alone. Experts anticipate that due to the data-sharing agreement, fewer undocumented immigrants will file taxes, resulting in over $313 billion in lost tax revenue over 10 years.
This move by the federal government not only betrays taxpayers and erodes vital trust in necessary civic institutions—it also reminds us of how little we have learned from U.S. history. After all, it was a piece of legislation passed in a time of emergency, the Second War Powers Act, that included the provision that allowed once-protected census data to assist in the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. As the White House wrote in a report on big data in 2014, “At its core, public-sector use of big data heightens concerns about the balance of power between government and the individual. Once information about citizens is compiled for a defined purpose, the temptation to use it for other purposes can be considerable.” Rather than heeding this caution, this data-sharing agreement seeks to exploit it. This is yet another attempt by the current administration to sweep up and disclose large amounts of sensitive and confidential data. Courts must put a stop to these efforts to destroy data privacy, especially for vulnerable groups.
Remember the Lois Lerner scandal? For years, it was the Republican party’s Exhibit A of Obama administration overreach — proof that Democrats were weaponizing the IRS to target conservative groups. The outrage was endless. The GOP-led congressional investigations were relentless. The rhetoric about threats to democracy was breathless.
Funny thing about that: it turned out the IRS was actually investigating both conservative AND progressive groups equally. But never mind that — the principle was clear. Using the IRS to target organizations based on their viewpoints was an unconscionable abuse of power that undermined the very foundations of our system.
It should never, ever be allowed to happen.
Unless, apparently, you’re Donald Trump and you just… declare you’re going to strip Harvard of its tax-exempt status. Because you feel like it.
There’s some history here: if you want to set up a non-profit to help sick puppies, you set up a 501(c)(3) and you need to file detailed public reports and reveal all your donors. But if you want to set up a “social welfare” group that funnels unlimited dark money into political campaigns? Well, that’s what 501(c)(4)s are for. Sure, there are theoretical limits on their political activities. But in practice, after Citizens United, these groups became a favorite tool for moving vast sums of money through the political system while keeping donors anonymous. This isn’t all (c)(4)s, mind you, but after Citizens United, the market got flooded with new (c)(4)s whose purpose was almost certainly dark money laundering.
Thus, the IRS had a legitimate question on its hands: were these actually “social welfare” organizations, or just vehicles for campaign finance?
They began investigating whether or not they violated the laws that required them to (1) be for “social welfare” and (2) not engaged in excessive political activity. In dealing with the flood of new applications, some lower level employees started looking for keywords in reviewing applications. Some of those keywords were certainly coded to be about right-leaning organizations.
In the end, though, a non-partisan investigation found that the IRS equally targeted conservative and progressive startup non-profits during this time. It’s just that the GOP (as it’s been known to do) only talked about and focused on the searches that impacted conservative groups. There was a criminal investigation by the DOJ into Lerner, which closed with no charges being filed.
You would think that the Republicans who raised such a shitstorm about all that for years on end might have something to say about Donald Trump doing the same thing but actually doing it, and doing it out loud while making it entirely clear that it’s to punish organizations that are pushing back on his dictatorial authoritarianism?
President Donald Trump on Thursday ramped up his threats to scrutinize the tax-exempt status of groups and colleges he disagrees with, calling out a prominent organization that’s fighting some of his actions in court.
Trump told reporters “we’re looking at” Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a nonprofit watchdog group that has launched litigation against his executive actions and conducted investigations into what it alleges are his conflicts of interest.
“The only charity they had is going after Donald Trump. So we’re looking at that. We’re looking at a lot of things,” Trump said.
Again, federal law prohibits this (in theory). 26 USC 7217 says that the executive branch cannot influence IRS investigations. One problem, though, is that thanks to the Supreme Court’s ridiculous ruling in Trump v. United States, that law does not apply to Donald Trump as President, so long as he can make some claim to having done these things as part of his official responsibilities. It might not protect others within the administration, though.
Let’s parse this carefully:
The IRS under Obama looked for keywords to identify potentially illegal political activity
Republicans called this an unprecedented abuse of power
Trump is now explicitly saying he’ll strip tax-exempt status from groups that criticize him (not for actually violating the law)
So to recap: What the GOP spent years claiming Obama did (but didn’t actually do) is exactly what Trump is proudly announcing he’ll do. Except, unlike in the Obama administration which was cleared of any wrong doing, Trump appears to be actually quite directly violating the law. But, also unlike Obama, Trump actually has legal cover to do it thanks to John Roberts.
The truly wild thing here isn’t just the hypocrisy — though that’s breathtaking enough. It’s the complete inversion of reality: Some questionable keyword filtering by low-level IRS employees (applied to both conservative and progressive groups) triggered years of congressional investigations and demands for criminal prosecution. But when Trump explicitly announces plans to weaponize the IRS against his critics? Just another Thursday.
We’ve moved beyond simple double standards into a world where the same people who claimed that imperfect bureaucratic procedures were an existential threat to democracy are now actively cheering as their leader promises to do what they falsely accused Obama’s IRS of doing — but this time with explicit political targeting and presidential blessing.
Yes, that’s true of so much these days, but we should at least document these examples, for when this fog of bullshit and nonsense finally lifts and people ask “how did we get here?”
A Treasury Department inspector general is probing efforts by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to obtain private taxpayer data and other sensitive information, internal communications reviewed by ProPublica show.
The office of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration has sought a wide swath of information from IRS employees. In particular, the office is seeking any requests for taxpayer data from the president, the Executive Office of the President, DOGE or the president’s Office of Management and Budget.
The request, spelled out in a mid-April email obtained by ProPublica, comes as watchdogs and leading Democrats question whether DOGE has overstepped its bounds in seeking information about taxpayers, public employees or federal agencies that is typically highly restricted.
The review appears to be in its early stages — one document describes staffers as “beginning preplanning” — but the email directs the IRS to turn over specific documents by Thursday, April 24. It’s not clear if that happened.
The inspector general is seeking, for instance, “All requests for taxpayer or other protected information from the President or Executive Office of the President, OMB, or DOGE. Include any information on how the requestor plans to use the information requested, the IRS’s response to the request, and the legal basis for the IRS’s response,” the email says.
The inquiry also asks for information about requests for access to IRS systems from any agency in the executive branch, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration and DOGE.
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration office, known as TIGTA, is led by acting Inspector General Heather M. Hill. When Trump fired 17 inspectors general across a range of federal agencies in January, those working for the Treasury Department were not among the ones axed.
The White House, DOGE, OMB and Musk did not respond to requests for comment Friday.
Previously, the administration has said, “Those leading this mission with Elon Musk are doing so in full compliance with federal law, appropriate security clearances, and as employees of the relevant agencies, not as outside advisors or entities.”
A TIGTA spokesperson, Becky D’Ambrosio, said the agency “does not disclose specific details of ongoing work or timelines.” She said the office has received multiple requests from Congress. “When possible, we are incorporating these requests into our ongoing work providing independent oversight of IRS activities.”
The April 15 request follows concerns expressed by some within the IRS that DOGE employees under Musk’s direction have improperly accessed taxpayer information or shared it with other government agencies, said multiple people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
“Taxpayer data held by the IRS is, by design, subject to some of the strongest privacy protections under federal law, the violation of which can trigger civil and criminal sanctions,” the lawmakers wrote in their request.
In March, three senators said they were troubled by reports the IRS had entered into a sharing agreement to help the Department of Homeland Security “locate suspected undocumented immigrants.” Trump has promised deportations on a massive scale.
A spokesperson for Sen. Ron Wyden, one of the signees of both requests, declined to comment. DHS referred a request for comment from ProPublica to the Treasury Department, which did not respond.
The inspector general examination comes amid major upheaval at the Treasury Department and the IRS, as the administration moves to fire thousands of agency workers and DOGE digs deeper into IRS databases. Melanie Krause resigned as the acting commissioner of the IRS after the agency reached an agreement to share taxpayer data with the DHS.
A former senior official at TIGTA told ProPublica the review could lead to a criminal investigation if reviewers find evidence of lawbreaking. The same official said it’s possible those leading the review could face political repercussions, as have scores of prosecutors, FBI agents, law firms and others who have questioned Trump’s actions.
Emails from the inspector general to IRS employees earlier this month asked them to provide copies of any written agreements to share taxpayer data with entities including the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration, DOGE, the Office of Personnel Management or other agencies.
It also seeks a full list of non-IRS employees who are part of DOGE or its affiliates. This year, ProPublica has been profiling the figures working for DOGE.
Danielle Citron, a leading privacy legal scholar at the University of Virginia, said the email suggests that the inspector general may be probing for violations of the Privacy Act, which requires agencies to safeguard citizens’ information and only share it across the government in specific cases. The kind of blanket data-sharing agreement the Trump administration is seeking with the IRS, she said, is “exactly what the Privacy Act is designed to avoid.”
CNN and Wired have reported that DOGE is attempting to build a master database that combines information from the IRS, DHS, Social Security Administration and other agencies. The database would be used for immigration enforcement, the outlets reported.
This is not the first time Trump administration decisions at the IRS have prompted an inspector general inquiry.
As ProPublica reported, a senior IRS lawyer warned the agency’s leaders in late February that its plan to terminate nearly 7,000 probationary employees based on poor performance was untrue and a “fraud.” The IRS proceeded with the firings, which have since been challenged in federal court.
After the firings, the IRS inspector general began scrutinizing the mass terminations, said a person familiar with the effort who wasn’t authorized to speak with reporters. The status of the probe is not known.
When Trump officials want to censor speech, they don’t quite say “we want to censor speech” (after all, they pretend to be the party that “brought free speech back.”) Instead, they find ways to threaten organizations by pretending it’s got nothing to do with the content, even as they can’t hide their true intentions and motives. And so we have DC US Attorney Ed Martin, who has decided that the real problem with Wikipedia isn’t its content — it’s its tax status… based on its content.
But his attack on Wikipedia represents something even more dangerous: a federal prosecutor attempting to control how the internet’s largest collaborative knowledge platform manages its content.
The way this works is pretty straightforward: First, you find some pretext to investigate. Then you write a threatening letter. Then you leak that letter to a friendly media outlet. In this case, Martin sent his letter to The Free Press, a publication that has spent years warning about government censorship — at least when they pretend Democrats do it. The letter reads in part:
It has come to my attention that the Wikimedia Foundation, through its wholly owned subsidiary Wikipedia, is allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda to the American public. Wikipedia is permitting information manipulation on its platform, including the rewriting of key, historical events and biographical information of current and previous American leaders, as well as other matters implicating the national security and the interests of the United States. Masking propaganda that influences public opinion under the guise of providing informational material is antithetical to Wikimedia’s “educational” mission.
In addition, Wikipedia’s operations are directed by its board that is composed primarily of foreign nationals, subverting the interests of American taxpayers. Again, educational content is directionally neutral; but information received by my Office demonstrates that Wikipedia’s informational management policies benefit foreign powers
There’s more in there, including complaints about how AI tools train on Wikipedia, suggesting (ridiculously) that this might implicate Wikipedia if “foreign actors” are able to “launder information” into AI systems. And the letter threatens to revoke Wikpedia’s non-profit status (something the IRS would normally investigate, not the US Attorney for DC).
There are also demands to know details about Wikpedia’s editorial processes and how it handles trust & safety. Just imagine the freakout that would occur (probably led by The Free Press) if a US Attorney during the Biden admin had demanded to know Fox News’ editorial policies and standards and practices, while claiming that they were letting too much propaganda online. The screaming would never stop.
Indeed, what Martin is doing here represents exactly the kind of government interference in editorial decisions that free speech advocates have been warning about. But where are those voices now?
During the Biden administration, we were told over and over again by the MAGA faithful that literally any communication between an internet platform and federal law enforcement, especially regarding trust & safety practices, was the biggest threat to free speech ever.
To understand why this matters, we need to talk about Missouri v. Biden, a lawsuit that made it all the way to the Supreme Court (as Murthy v. Missouri). The case was basically about whether government officials could talk to social media companies about content moderation without violating the First Amendment. The summary, as the Supreme Court noted, affirming earlier cases, is that the government can absolutely talk to social media companies to share information. What it cannot do is threaten or coerce the platforms for their editorial decisions.
Which is exactly what Martin is doing here.
Even though the Supreme Court debunked all the lies in its ruling in the case, the MAGA universe (along with hangers-on like Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger) insisted that they were evidence of a huge attack on free speech: the Biden administration sometimes talking to social media companies about their content moderation practices.
The original district court ruling in the case, by (Trump-appointed) Judge Terry Doughty, had soaring language like the following:
Plaintiffs have put forth ample evidence regarding extensive federal censorship that restricts the free flow of information on social-media platforms used by millions of Missourians and Louisianians, and very substantial segments of the populations of Missouri, Louisiana, and every other State
That “extensive federal censorship” was based off of very weak claims of federal officials sometimes reaching out to social media platforms to highlight certain content or to ask if certain things violated their policies. And it was treated as a five-alarm fire. As the Supreme Court noted, the actions of the Biden White House did not appear at all coercive or threatening.
That’s very, very different from what’s happening here. Here we have the top DC prosecutor clearly threatening Wikipedia over editorial decisions — and, not even editorial decisions of its employees, but the site’s volunteer editors. In other words, Wikipedia is clearly protected under Section 230 for such edits.
It seems likely that Martin (or someone in his office) then leaked the letter to The Free Press, a publication that has built its brand on warning about government censorship. The same publication that ran breathless stories about the Biden administration’s supposedly coercive communications with social media platforms. The same outlet whose writer, Rupa Subramanya, dramatically testified to Congress’ subcommittee on the “weaponization” of the government, about the horrors of government censorship… in Canada.
Let’s look at her testimony, which Republican Jim Jordan gleefully presented as a warning about Democratic censorship:
I’d like all of you to think of me as a time traveler from the not too distant future coming back to the present to offer you a glimpse of what could lie ahead for America.
I live in a time in which, in the name of fairness, you can’t share the stories you write for my news publication on social media.
[….]
I live in a time in which, in the name of safety, youcan be arrested for exercising your right to peaceful protestif you happen to be protesting the wrong thing.
That dystopian future she warned about? It’s here. People are not just being arrested but actually deported for peaceful protests. And The Free Press’s response to this actual censorship? Crickets.
This fits a pattern that Peter Shamshiri recently documented in his analysis of The Free Press’s selective outrage. When it comes to actual censorship from the Trump administration, The Free Press has developed a curious case of writer’s block:
The problem they face is that their brand is predicated on directing overwrought skepticism toward the left and childlike credulousness toward the right. That may have worked in 2021, when it could be pitched as a sort of half-baked contrarianism. But now, with the Trump administration embracing overt authoritarianism, it’s a little embarrassing.
He notes that while they have a “Free Speech” section, almost none of it is covering the attacks on free speech from the Trump administration. Yes, The Free Press published this story, but it didn’t put it in the “Free Speech” section and doesn’t treat it as the massive First Amendment violation it absolutely is. It quotes a “person close to Martin” multiple times, suggesting that Martin’s office leaked this directly to Weiss, knowing The Free Press wouldn’t call out what bullshit it is.
Want to see this double standard in action? Let’s play a quick game of “spot the difference” between how The Free Press covers different types of government intervention. Here’s their headline for Martin’s Wikipedia threat:
And right before the election, the Free Press published a story about “Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Our Government Censors” about the case, claiming that Kamala Harris would definitely abuse her powers as President to censor people online and holding up Musk as an example of someone who would fight for free speech.
What are the chances that a President Kamala Harris would resist pressuring social media companies into censorship? Based on her record: Not great.
Looking over that author’s writings since Trump took office, she’s written excitedly and supportively about Trump trying to harm transgender youth and the movie When Harry Met Sally. The fact that the Trump administration has been issuing censorship decrees from almost all corners of the executive branch is apparently not worth mentioning.
So here’s where we are: A federal prosecutor is directly threatening Wikipedia’s editorial independence. This is not the information sharing found in the details of the Twitter Files and the Murthy case (which the Supreme Court just said was fine), but explicit threats about their tax status and demands about their editorial policies.
This is, quite literally, the exact kind of government censorship that The Free Press had been warning about. The kind they said would inevitably come from a Democratic administration. The kind they said justified extraordinary measures to “protect free speech.”
Yet their coverage reads like a press release from Martin’s office, repeatedly citing “a person close to Martin” (which is often how media will represent the person themselves, who asks the journalist not to quote them directly):
“Masking propaganda that influences public opinion under the guise of providing informational material is antithetical to Wikimedia’s ‘educational’ mission,” Martin wrote in the letter, claiming his office received information showing that Wikipedia’s “policies benefit foreign powers.” ….
The letter did not specify which foreign actors were manipulating information on Wikipedia and did not cite examples of alleged propaganda. However, a person close to Martin said he is concerned about “edits on Wikipedia as they relate to the Israel-Hamas conflict that are clearly targeted against Israel to benefit other countries.”
They even helpfully note that Wikipedia “fundraises in the district” — as if that somehow justifies a US Attorney threatening their First Amendment rights.
But what’s clear is that this is about one thing only: Wikipedia allowing content Martin doesn’t like.
Even if Wikipedia’s content was biased (it isn’t), even if every editor was actively trying to push an anti-Israel narrative (they aren’t), that would still be protected by the First Amendment. The government doesn’t get to threaten organizations over their editorial choices, no matter how much certain prosecutors or publications might dislike those choices.
The Free Press spent years insisting that mundane communications between the Biden administration and social media companies represented an existential threat to free speech. Now faced with actual government censorship — explicit threats from a federal prosecutor over editorial decisions — they’re treating it as just another political story.
Operatives from ElonMusk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are building a master database at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that could track and surveil undocumented immigrants, two sources with direct knowledge tell WIRED.
DOGE is knitting together immigration databases from across DHS and uploading data from outside agencies including the Social Security Administration (SSA), as well as voting records, sources say. This, experts tell WIRED, could create a system that could later be searched to identify and surveil immigrants.
That’s the opening of Makena Kelly and Vittoria Elliott’s report for Wired. Even before you get to the part that indicates this is just a conglomeration of bigots concocting a massive database solely for the purpose of finding foreigners to deport, there’s the fact that this will become one of the most enticing targets for state-sponsored hackers and criminals ever created. Imagine having all of this data in one place and knowing those included in the database are already highly leveraged by their increasingly tenuous living situations. Being merely scammed would be the best possible outcome. Extortion might end up being far more common.
But let’s get back to the, shall we say, more practical aspects of this mass surveillance database. This sort of thing has never been done before for obvious reasons. One of the reasons is listed above. Another reason is that certain information serves certain specific purposes. Putting it all together just makes it more difficult to perform these specific functions. Converting data silos into one giant haystack isn’t necessarily efficient. It’s just something that ignores all the practical reasons data like this is siloed because this current administration is too hateful and stupid to understand the underlying problems or care about the collateral damage.
This is a surveillance state that aspires to be a police state, all while under the nominal “leadership” of a racist billionaire and the terrible person who has now become president twice, despite clearly being unable to do the job the first time around.
While this might look like a cool new way to find brown people, rest assured it will be used to find anyone the Trump administration and its components dislike, as EFF staff attorney Victoria Noble explains in the Wired article:
“When you put all of an agency’s data into a central repository that everyone within an agency or even other agencies can access, you end up dramatically increasing the risk that this information will be accessed by people who don’t need it and are using it for improper reasons or repressive goals, to weaponize the information, use it against people they dislike, dissidents, surveil immigrants or other groups.”
Normal people see bugs. The GOP only sees a list of features. Even when the inevitable data breach occurs, the administration will shrug it off because it mostly affects people it doesn’t consider to be actual people. At best, they’re 3/5ths human and 2/5ths future El Salvadoran prison inmates.
The nastiest part of this “data lake” DOGE is recklessly creating is this: it will be used to find and deport immigrants who are doing everything the government asks them to do to stay on the path to citizenship.
DOGE wants to upload information to the data lake from myUSCIS, the online portal where immigrants can file petitions, communicate with USCIS, view their application history, and respond to requests for evidence supporting their case, two DHS sources with direct knowledge tell WIRED. In combination with IP address information from immigrants that sources tell WIRED that DOGE also wants, this data could be used to aid in geolocating undocumented immigrants, experts say.
This is from an administration that (dishonestly) claims it doesn’t have a problem with migrants who reside in this country legally. These actions say otherwise. This is the administration leveraging data and good faith efforts by immigrants to eject them before they can complete the citizenship process. This is on top of the now-routine revoking of perfectly legal visas and unilateral proclamations that the immigration/visa/temporary residency rules no longer apply.
Attempting to comply just puts immigrants on the DHS radar. A database like this fills in the missing info to allow ICE and others to eject people who are here legally or are doing everything they can to stay here as legal residents. And once this administration feels comfortable doing so, the same pool of information will be used to target immigration lawyers, pro-migrant advocates, and anyone else that has managed to cross-pollinate in the data lake. It might even go after you, Joe Taxpayer and lifetime US citizen.
“As part of their fixation on this conspiracy theory that undocumented people are voting, they’re also pulling in tens of thousands, millions of US citizens who did nothing more than vote or file for Social Security benefits,” Cody Venzke, a senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union focused on privacy and surveillance, tells WIRED.
It’s stupid and dangerous, which is unsurprising. That’s Trump’s brand. As long as it gives the government enough brown people to go after, Trump and his enablers will shrug off the collateral damage suffered by actual US citizens, much in the way they’ve shrugged off the gutting of social services and setting fire to people’s retirement accounts. In exchange, we’re getting a Gestapo of our own and the opportunity to be on the wrong side of history for the foreseeable future.
