To start, a quick refresher on what exactly the acronym SCIF stands for and why it is incredibly important to what is happening agency by agency currently as the DOGE under-30s marauders push themselves into our government's agencies and insist they have an absolute right to all the information the agencies protect.
First, SCIF stands for Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. These safe rooms are everywhere, in the House, in the Senate, in our various agencies, and they are there to protect the most important information the government has---"stuff" that if released could do great harm to individuals, programs, security protocols, and so much more.
The reason this piqued my interest is that I heard just a three-second mention of it--that the SCIF at USAID had been breached by the DOGE guys a few weeks ago, and it was the very first time I'd heard this. I caught this throwaway line just this morning, 2/18/25, while I was washing the dishes and fending off my two dogs as they were insisting it was breakfast time, never mind it wasn't. They've been fed and now, curiosity on alert, I began to look into this.
Here's what I found. Yep, the DOGE “kids” did indeed get into the USAID SCIF. According to various stories on this, they were not given access to classified information. Okay, but we're supposed to believe this? After what was reportedly a great deal of strong arming and threats to call in the US Marshals and have anyone arrested who wouldn't allow them into this secure room? As I've been noted to say more than a time or two, if you believe this, that they didn't access classified information, then, shoot, I have oceanfront property to sell you in Nebraska.
Never mind of course, that just the fact that these guys, different reports mention three or four of them, got into a SCIF is a security breach of the highest order regardless of what they grabbed up while in the room. Because? There is no evidence that any of them have the requisite security clearances to so much as turn the doorknob, let alone get into this room. Which supposedly secure room is, by the way, located on the second floor of the Reagan building in DC.
As Bob Marley said, "Ya gots to know ya history." And this is what chilled me to the bone this morning when I went in search of information on this part of the USAID story. During the standoff before they'd been given access to the SCIF, they had threatened folks with calling the US Marshals as I've already written. But the escalation started before this threat: these guys were rampaging through offices, looking through individual desks and personal effects of USAID employees who weren't there and couldn't even defend themselves. With no concern for what they were grabbing up, what they were perhaps damaging, what they were gaining access to that could be used against innocent employees at USAID, and this is truly scary. The first thought I had when I found this information was that this is pretty much how Hitler's Gestapo aided and abetted his drive to consolidate power.
And these purges are only just beginning. Today we are learning that DOGE is demanding access to all of our IRS tax information, including bank info; and everything they want access to from Social Security, which oversees handling sending out the monthly checks for over 70 million Americans, with approximately 40% of these Americans who receive Social Security living solely on these checks. I'm not being a smartass here--this is a legitimate question: "What could go wrong? And more so, how is any of this to be protected from going off the rails and harming millions and millions of us?" The concern today is that there may be nothing safe--these lunatics with a power they were never given by the Congress or the American people may succeed in upending an entire democracy that stood strong even through a Civil War. And then what?
In case you’d like to read more, here’s just one of the articles I read. There are others but this one is quite informative:
