President Donald Trump is giving Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency team access to sensitive tax return information for millions of Americans, opening up the potential for a major violation of personal privacy.
The New York Times reports that after entering the system, Musk will also have access to banking data, Social Security numbers, and employment information when he gets into the system maintained by the IRS. The Integrated Data Retrieval System in question would allow DOGE to manipulate transaction data as well as harvest sensitive information for millions.
NBC News confirmed that as of Monday, Musk’s team has now accessed the system.
Trump previewed the upcoming data breach in a fundraising email to supporters sent out on Saturday night. “Are you sick of being targeted and harassed by the I.R.S.? Well maybe it’s time that somebody audited them for a change!” Trump wrote.
Musk has already been posting misinterpreted data that he has apparently accessed from inside the Social Security system.
“According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE! Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security,” he wrote.
Musk previously claimed his DOGE team had uncovered multiple scandals within the USAID system when Trump gave them access to internal information, but those were lies.
Gavin Kliger is reportedly the DOGE team member who will lead the IRS intrusion and has been linked to the USAID shutdown. Kliger is a software engineer who graduated from University of California–Berkley in 2020 and has written on his Substack account about his belief in right-wing conspiracy theories about the government censoring conservatives.
Kliger has described the restrictions put in place to stop the spread of COVID-19 as bureaucratic nonsense and argued that “it was never about public health,” but “about power”—sentiment echoing conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones.
Now he will be able to access private information that millions of people once believed was secure when they paid their taxes and contributed to their Social Security funds.
Musk, who is in charge of the DOGE team, pays very little in taxes. According to a 2021 ProPublica examination of IRS data, Musk paid no federal income taxes in 2018 despite being the richest person on the planet and reporting an income of $1.52 billion that year.
Despite this delinquency, he has effectively been put in charge of the IRS by Trump and is overseeing layoffs of the people empowered by taxpayers to ensure taxes are collected.
Musk has a track record of misusing private data to further his political vendettas. When he took over Twitter, he released private internal communications as part of a series of releases called “the Twitter Files.” Musk and a group of right-wing “journalists” sympathetic to his complaints mischaracterized these internal discussions as evidence of a conspiracy to suppress conservative speech online.
Both Trump and Musk have repeatedly shown interest in pursuing a vendetta against their adversaries, now they have access to some of the most private and sensitive data held by the U.S. government to pursue this agenda.
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