After controversially being granted access to the U.S. Treasury’s payments system, Elon Musk and his nongovernmental team of government spending slashers have now gotten their hands on a federal human resources database containing sensitive data on millions of federal employees.
According to a report by Musk Watch journalists Caleb Ecarma and Judd Legum, Musk’s associates at the Department of Government Efficiency have “illegally” installed a commercial server at the Office of Personnel Management.
In doing so, they’re now able to access and control a federal database that contains the names, addresses, Social Security numbers and medical histories of countless government employees, the report claims.
The decision to grant Musk access is likely to have been authorized by President Donald Trump himself. It’s extremely contentious given that most of his underlings on the DOGE team lack the security clearance that’s normally required to view such information.
The majority of the DOGE staffers are thought to be young and inexperienced, with ages ranging from just 19 to 24 years, Musk Watch reported. One was named as the 2022 high school graduate Edward Coristine, while another is reported to be the software engineer Akash Bobba, who is an undergraduate student at the University of California at Berkeley.
These individuals can now access the private data of every U.S. government employee, as well as information regarding people who applied but failed to secure federal jobs.
Among the services Musk’s team are able to access are the federal hiring website USAJOBS, where applicants typically enter personal data such as their home addresses, Social Security numbers, employment records and more. In addition, Musk’s team also has access to the Enterprise Human Resources Integration system, which contains the above data plus the dates of birth, salaries, job descriptions and disciplinary records of every federal staffer.
DOGE is not an official government department, but rather a special team within the Trump administration. It was created by Musk under the authority of Trump, and has been tasked with examining the budgets and employee base of every federal agency to try to cut costs and increase efficiency. It’s thought that the entire DOGE team was handpicked by Musk himself.
One OPM employee told Musk Watch that he believes the DOGE team members are scrutinizing people’s job descriptions to try to identify employees who can be removed from their positions.
“This is how they found all these DEI offices and had them removed — [by] reviewing position description level data,” the source said. He was referring to the hundreds of government diversity, equity and inclusion workers who were controversially put on leave last month after Trump issued an executive order that banned such programs.
Moreover, the DOGE team can also access additional systems pertaining to the job performance reviews, onboarding processes and healthcare records of government employees. Critics say their ability to access the latter records likely violates regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.
“What [Musk is] doing will put so many government employees at risk,” a former OPM director told Musk Watch. “It’s not at all what the office is intended for. I just can’t believe what I’m seeing.”
Trump’s decision to give Musk and his team unfettered access to such systems has attracted a lot of criticism. Cathy Gellis of TechDirt likens his takeover to a “cyberattack,” saying that even if Musk’s team is unable to block payments without authorization from above, they still have the ability to peruse sensitive information on America’s entire government workforce, including employees that work in foreign service.
“They know their names, they know their addresses, they know their backgrounds, careers, their spouses and dependents,” Gellis wrote. “They know absolutely every single detail about these people that would be captured in an HR system. And because OPM is involved with managing security clearances, they know plenty more private details about our nation’s public servants captured in the process of doing their background checks.”
Gellis argues that Musk’s underlings simply don’t have the clearance to access such information, having undergone no security checks themselves. She points out that they don’t even appear to have official government jobs, which is a key step in obtaining the required security clearances to view this kind of data, so the decision to give them access is likely illegal.
“It’s not something that becomes okay just because the President says it’s okay,” Gellis wrote. “There are laws that limit his ability to make delegations like this, and for just this sort of reason: to make sure the public remains protected from arbitrary exercises of executive power.”
No one is questioning the loyalties of Musk’s employees – yet – but there are serious concerns that their inexperience might make the sensitive information they’re able to access more vulnerable to hackers. According to Musk Watch, one of the new email lists created by Musk’s team has already been flooded with spam emails.
