Another day, another opportunity for Elon Musk to open a potential Pandora’s box of IT security risks inside the federal government.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a Trump administration initiative effectively run by the tech billionaire, has now reportedly accessed internal federal payrolls affecting around 276,000 people working at dozens of agencies, according to the New York Times. DOGE staffers are now able to access reams of sensitive employee information, including Social Security numbers. The new access has raised concerns about an expanding threat surface for vital information and operations. Erie Meyer, former chief technologist at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, told NPR in mid-March why she doesn’t trust DOGE.
“Part of what is unnerving and is scary both to companies whose data is involved and also Americans whose most sensitive financial information is at risk, is that we don’t know what they’re doing,” Meyer, who resigned in February, said.
DOGE’s new access to sensitive information comes as the group has already drawn criticism for its impact on federal IT systems—prompting an investigation from the Office of Personnel Management’s Office of the Inspector General—and its effort to centralize federal IT payment systems, a move some experts warned IT Brew would result in acting as a target for threat actors.
Top insights for IT pros
From cybersecurity and big data to cloud computing, IT Brew covers the latest trends shaping business tech in our 4x weekly newsletter, virtual events with industry experts, and digital guides.
Let me in. According to NYT, DOGE staffers had pushed for around two weeks to get into the payroll program, but were stopped by officials in the Department of the Interior (DOI). That changed on March 29, when two of the staffers preventing DOGE access were put on administrative leave.
Those staffers, the agency’s CIO and CISO, were also placed under investigation for “workplace behavior.”
An internal DOI memo from a few days prior to the incident warned that allowing untrained DOGE employees unfettered access to the system risked the possibility that “the department may experience significant failure because of operator error.”
“Such elevated access to critical high-value asset systems is rare with respect to individual systems and no single DOI official presently has access to all HR, payroll, and credentialing systems,” the memo said.
The memo was given to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum on Friday in hopes that he would, as head of the department, sign off on it, and give the argument added legal and authoritative weight. He did not sign it, and on Saturday the DOI’s Acting Assistant Secretary of Policy Tyler Hassen—who recently worked for DOGE—intervened and placed the staffers on leave.