DOGE Is Planning a Hackathon at the IRS. It Wants Easier Access to Taxpayer Data

[LiberalArkie]

APR 5, 2025 12:03 PM

Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has plans to stage a “hackathon” next week in Washington, DC. The goal is to create a single “mega API”—a bridge that lets software systems talk to one another—for accessing IRS data, sources tell WIRED. The agency is expected to partner with a third-party vendor to manage certain aspects of the data project. Palantir, a software company cofounded by billionaire and Musk associate Peter Thiel, has been brought up consistently by DOGE representatives as a possible candidate, sources tell WIRED.

Two top DOGE operatives at the IRS, Sam Corcos and Gavin Kliger, are helping to orchestrate the hackathon, sources tell WIRED. Corcos is a health-tech CEO with ties to Musk’s SpaceX. Kliger attended UC Berkeley until 2020 and worked at the AI company Databricks before joining DOGE as a special adviser to the director at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Corcos is also a special adviser to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Since joining Musk’s DOGE, Corcos has told IRS workers that he wants to pause all engineering work and cancel current attempts to modernize the agency’s systems, according to sources with direct knowledge who spoke with WIRED. He has also spoken about some aspects of these cuts publicly: "We've so far stopped work and cut about $1.5 billion from the modernization budget. Mostly projects that were going to continue to put us down the death spiral of complexity in our code base," Corcos told Laura Ingraham on Fox News in March.

Corcos has discussed plans for DOGE to build “one new API to rule them all,” making IRS data more easily accessible for cloud platforms, sources say. APIs, or application programming interfaces, enable different applications to exchange data, and could be used to move IRS data into the cloud. The cloud platform could become the “read center of all IRS systems,” a source with direct knowledge tells WIRED, meaning anyone with access could view and possibly manipulate all IRS data in one place.

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https://www.wired.com/story/doge-hackathon-irs-data-palantir/

[Aviation Pro]

1. API

Automated Program Interface.

[AZJonnie]

2. Application Programming Interface

Of course, AI's can write API code no problem.

I have a feeling the "Cloud Platform" it all goes onto will be one a proprietary one built by a joint venture of Musk and Thiel. They'll basically steal all the data and then make the government pay them to access it/do their work, and maintain the power to alter any of the data in any way they want. IRS data will then be correlated to other data mining operations (like X and Facebook, where people tend to give away their political stances) to determine which taxpayers are not fans of their regime, and target them for audits, refuse to put them on payback schedules, and even arrest them for things people don't usually get arrested for (see: Biden, Hunter).

[LiberalArkie]

3. Or Application Programming Interface is what I remember from the days