Musk's DOGE agents access sensitive personnel data, alarming security officials
Source: Washington Post
Musk's DOGE agents access sensitive personnel data, alarming security officials
The highly restricted data includes personally identifiable information for millions of federal employees maintained by the Office of Personnel Management.
February 6, 2025 at 7:52 a.m. EST
The headquarters of the Office of Personnel Management in D.C. on Monday. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
By Isaac Stanley-Becker, Greg Miller, Hannah Natanson and Joseph Menn
Agents of billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency have gained access to highly restricted government records on millions of federal employees -- including Treasury and State Department officials in sensitive security positions -- as part of a broader effort to wrest control over the government's main personnel agency, according to four U.S. officials with knowledge of the developments. ... The officials, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, expressed alarm about potential breaches or abuses of such records by members of an administration whose senior-most officials, including President Donald Trump, have threatened to retaliate against federal workers accused of disloyalty.
The records maintained by the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM, amount to a repository of sensitive information about employees of most federal agencies -- including addresses, demographic profiles, salary details and disciplinary histories. The moves at the OPM by members of Musk's pseudo-governmental DOGE have coincided with similar efforts to gain access to sensitive systems at other agencies, including a Treasury Department system responsible for processing trillions of dollars in U.S. government payments -- a development reported last week by The Washington Post.
Records obtained by The Post show that several members of Musk's DOGE team -- some of whom are in their early 20s and come from positions at his private companies -- were given "administrative" access to OPM computer systems within days of Trump's inauguration last month. That gives them sweeping authority to install and modify software on government-supplied equipment and, according to two OPM officials, to alter internal documentation of their own activities.
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A former senior U.S. security official said foreign adversaries see the disruption caused by DOGE as an opportunity. ... “If I were the Russians or Chinese or Iranians and I saw this DOGE operation getting formed, I would be seeding people into this operation like crazy,” the former official said. “Either people they’ve already seeded into these companies or people they can recruit quickly and put forward. I can’t believe the DOGE operation was itself carefully vetting everybody prepared to work for it.”
Miller reported from London and Menn from San Francisco. Alice Crites, Emily Davies, Ellen Nakashima, Razzan Nakhlawi and Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/02/06/elon-musk-doge-access-personnel-data-opm-security/