An incredibly expected, but alarming, Washington Post piece claims that Elon Musk’s group of Stasi programmers at DOGE are using artificial intelligence technologies to input extremely sensitive data from the Department of Education. The Post reports that DOGE is planning to implement the same strategy at all federal agencies.
According to reports, the DOGE goons are searching through Department of Education data, including “sensitive internal financial data” and personally identifiable information for people who oversee grants at the agency, using Microsoft’s cloud computing provider Azure. Two anonymous sources who aren’t named because of “fear of retaliation” are cited by The Post.
AI is being fed the data in an attempt to obtain a comprehensive picture of the agency, however AI is incredibly unreliable and frequently fabricates information. AI is a technology that can sound quite confident, effectively performing a magic trick by giving the impression that it is knowledgeable about its subject. That confidence, however, has persuaded individuals that it can be trusted when making choices.
Reliability apart, putting sensitive data through AI systems is a nightmare from a security perspective. That’s why many government entities have policies that forbid the use of AI. Additionally, if Musk’s associates are simply throwing everything into AI, who knows how many openings there might be for anyone to access financial details, from hostile foreign governments to random hackers.
According to the report, the White House allegedly pressured CIA to provide an unclassified email listing the identities of new employees employed in the last two years. This is just the most recent instance of the Trump administration compromising security. The data kept at the Department of Education is obviously of even less importance to these individuals than safeguarding the identities of the nation’s spies.
“Every dollar of money the department disburses, from contracts to grants to work trip expenses,” the Post stated, is among the Department of Education data that DOGE is allegedly pouring through AI. The Department of Education is to be “radically reduced in spending,” but President Donald Trump has pledged to do away with the institution completely. Trump is obviously indifferent to the fact that Congress alone has the power to establish and dismantle federal agencies.
The president has just been in office for three weeks, but already has fired more than a dozen inspectors general in an obviously unlawful attempt to choose loyalists to monitor over the administration and declared his intention to abolish USAID, among other actions.
Right now, DOGE is tearing through government departments, and the Department of Education is particularly vulnerable to being targeted by Trump’s thugs. “The personal information for millions who receive student loans from the government is among the highly sensitive data about federal student aid that the group of young miscreants has already accessed,” the Post reported.
The repercussions of this power grab are already being felt by those in the Department of education. Due reportedly to their participation in DEI projects, approximately 100 employees have been placed on leave. Trump signed an executive order that prohibited talking about DEI, and federal institutions like the CDC and NSF have been ordered to remove prohibited terms like “transgender” and “LGBT” from their websites and research reports. According to the Post, most of the staff members who were put on leave at the Department of Education are women and are not white.
An individual who spoke to the Post claimed that although DOGE is moving at “almost unbelievable speed,” some obstacles, such as lawsuits, have been placed in place to slow them down in recent days. Furthermore, it is evident that a resolute group of engineers working for the wealthy man in the world will not be deterred by even a few court orders.
The Trump administration, for instance, reportedly “agreed to restrict DOGE access to Treasury Department payment systems” late Wednesday. However, to fully understand that these “restrictions” meant little, you had to read farther into the story:
The order would allow exceptions for two special government employees at the Treasury — Tom Krause and Marko Elez — saying they are allowed access “as needed” to perform their duties, “provided that such access to payment records will be ‘read only.’”
Those two guys are currently in charge and are making things difficult for the agencies. It’s unclear who decides when they need access to do their jobs. Right now, they clearly think their job is to cut back the federal government, just like their boss says.
Madi Biedermann, who is the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Communications at the Department of Energy, made a comment to Gizmodo saying:
President Trump was chosen to make major changes to the federal civil service. DOGE is helping ED improve the civil service across the government. This includes bringing workers back to in-person jobs, making sure employees with decision-making power are held responsible, ensuring top executives are accountable, and changing the federal hiring process to prioritize merit.
The DOGE employees are federal employees. They are committed to improving the Department’s effectiveness, cost-efficiency, and accountability to taxpayers; they have been sworn in and have undergone the required background checks and clearances. There is nothing improper or nefarious happening.
