According to reports from media outlets, Elon Musk’s task force to streamline the US government is seeking access to troves of taxpayer data, which could raise concerns about privacy breaches and retribution against political rivals.
According to reports from The Associated Press, CNN, The New York Times, and the Washington Post, Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are pushing for access to the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS)-protected Integrated Data Retrieval System (IDRS), which is in its most recent phase of his extensive cost-cutting campaign.
The IDRS gives IRS employees access to sensitive taxpayer data belonging to millions of Americans, such as Social Security numbers, home addresses, property records and salary information.
Multiple media outlets reported that DOGE was still able to access the system as of Sunday evening.
According to Harrison Fields, a spokesman for the White House, “deeply ingrained” waste, fraud, and abuse needed to be directly identified with the IRS database.
The American people deserve to know how their government has been using their hard-earned tax dollars, according to Fields, and DOGE will continue to highlight the fraud they find.
In light of concerns that Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, is resuming control of sizable portions of the federal government with little oversight, the move has alarmed Democratic lawmakers and other critics of US President Donald Trump’s administration.
Democratic Senators Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren expressed concern about Musk’s use of the tax system to extort US citizens and businesses as part of a political agenda in a letter to the IRS on Monday.
According to Wyden and Warren, “The IRS must immediately disclose to the Senate Committee on Finance the full scope of the potential access to IRS systems and data to ensure that the Committee can address any efforts by DOGE personnel to access taxpayer records at the IRS, which may constitute criminal breaches of federal privacy laws.”
In a post on his social media platform X on Monday, Musk made an apparent indication that he would use taxpayer data to attack Trump’s political rivals.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO shared the post with an emoji of an index finger pointing downward in response to Democratic Senator Adam Schiff, who had previously said that Musk wanted to “snoop around” the finances of the California lawmaker and not members of the general public.
Meanwhile, a new X account called DOGE IRS asked members of the public to share “insights on finding and fixing waste, fraud and abuse” at the IRS.
Source: Aljazeera
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