Trump Gives Elon Musk Access to All Unclassified Data in the US Government
Jan 25, 12:45 PM EST
byMaggie Harrison Dupré
Money buys you this.
Bait and Switch
The fine print of a sweeping executive order seemingly grants Elon Musk — the wealthiest and arguably most powerful unelected figure in the world — and his associates at the somehow-still-real Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) access to all unclassified data held by US government agencies, according to Wired.
Since the evening of his inauguration, president Donald Trump has been busy signing a still-growing wave of sweeping executive actions. Among them was the establishment of the unfortunately-named DOGE, which per the order will be tasked with "modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity."
When DOGE was announced late last year, it was widely believed that the "department" would operate as a federal advisory committee, a type of consultative group subject to fairly strict transparency rules.
But as flagged by Wired, under the executive order, the Trump Administration didn't create a new federal advisory committee. It instead repurposed the United States Digital Service (USDS), an existing government organization with sweeping access to vast caches of data across government agencies, including the sensitive information of US citizens, as the "United States DOGE Service" — a move that seemingly opens the door for Musk and his operatives to access a massive amount of data without much transparency oversight.
"It's quite a clever way of integrating DOGE into the federal government that I think will work," George Washington University law professor Richard Pierce told Wired, "in the sense of giving it a platform for surveillance and recommendations."
More:
https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-data-us-government
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