Elon Musk’s team of Stasi programmers at DOGE are feeding highly sensitive data from the Department of Education through artificial intelligence tools, according to an extremely predictable, yet still shocking, report from the Washington Post. The plan, according to the Post, is for DOGE to do the same thing at every federal agency.
The DOGE goons are reportedly using Microsoft’s cloud computing service Azure to sift through the data at the Department of Education, which includes personally identifiable information for those who manage grants at the agency, as well as “sensitive internal financial data.” The Post cites two unnamed sources who aren’t identified for “fear of retaliation.”
The data is being fed to AI in an effort to get a complete picture of the agency, but AI is extremely unreliable and often just makes things up. AI is a tool that can sound very confident, essentially pulling off a magic trick by making humans think it knows what it’s talking about. But that confidence has convinced people it can be relied upon to make decisions.
Reliability aside, putting sensitive information through AI tools is also a nightmare from a security standpoint. Many government agencies have rules prohibiting the use of AI for precisely that reason. And if Musk’s cronies are just dumping everything into AI, who knows how many vulnerabilities there may be for anyone from adversarial foreign governments to just random hackers who may want access to financial records.
The CIA was reportedly forced by the White House to send an unclassified email with the names of new staff hired in the past two years, according to the New York Times, just the latest example of the Trump regime playing fast and loose with security. If these guys don’t care about protecting the identity of the country’s spies, they clearly care even less about the data housed at the Department of Education.
DOGE is reportedly pumping Department of Education information through AI that includes “every dollar of money the department disburses, from contracts to grants to work trip expenses,” according to the Post. The stated goal is to “radically reduce spending” at the Department of Education, but President Donald Trump has promised to abolish the agency altogether. Congress has the sole authority to create and abolish federal agencies, but Trump clearly doesn’t care.
The president hasn’t even been on the job for a full three weeks yet and has already fired over a dozen inspectors general in a blatantly illegal effort to install loyalists as government watchdogs, and said he’s going to get rid of USAID, among a host of other acts.
DOGE is currently rampaging through federal agencies, and the Department of Education is highly vulnerable right now as a target for Trump’s goons. The group of young miscreants has already accessed highly sensitive data about federal student aid, according to the Post, “including the personal information for millions who receive student loans from the government.”
And people within the Department of Education are already seeing the consequences of this power grab. About 100 staff have been placed on leave, apparently for their involvement in DEI initiatives. Trump issued an executive order forbidding the discussion of DEI, and federal agencies have been forced to scrub their website and research reports of forbidden words like “transgender” and “LGBT” at places like the CDC and NSF. Most of the staff put on leave at the Department of Education are women and not white, according to the Post.
Some roadblocks have been put in place to hinder DOGE in recent days, including lawsuits to slow them down, but they’re working at, “almost unbelievable speed,” according to an insider who spoke with the Post. And even some court orders clearly aren’t going to stop a determined team of engineers working for the most wealthy man in the world.
For example, NBC News reported late Wednesday that the Trump administration had “agreed to restrict DOGE access to Treasury Department payment systems.” But you had to read further down into the story to get the full picture that these “restrictions” didn’t mean much:
The order would allow exceptions for two special government employees at the Treasury — Tom Krause and Marko Elez — saying they are permitted access “as needed” to perform their duties, “provided that such access to payment records will be ‘read only.’”
Those two guys are the ones running roughshod over the agencies right now, and it’s not clear who determines when access is “needed” to “perform their duties.” As it stands now, they clearly believe their duties include taking a chainsaw to the federal government, based on the way their boss talks about it.
Neither the Department of Education nor Elon Musk’s representatives immediately responded to questions emailed Thursday. Gizmodo will update this post if we hear back.
In a statement sent to Gizmodo, Madi Biedermann, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Communications at the DOE said:
President Trump was elected to enact unprecedented reform to the federal civil service. DOGE is supporting ED in implementing government-wide civil service reform focused on return to in-person work, restoring accountability for employees who have policy-making authority, restoring accountability for senior career executives, and reforming the federal hiring process to focus on merit.
The DOGE employees are federal employees. They have been sworn in, have the necessary background checks and clearances, and are focused on making the Department more cost-efficient, effective, and accountable to the taxpayers. There is nothing inappropriate or nefarious going on.