When the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was unveiled with great fanfare on January 20, 2025, it was pitched as a bold initiative to streamline federal bureaucracy and root out waste. Created by President Trump and initially helmed by Elon Musk—who had invested over $250 million to help secure Trump’s election—DOGE promised to inject Silicon Valley-style disruption into the machinery of government. But as the months have unfolded, the picture that’s emerged is anything but straightforward, with revelations of sweeping privacy violations, internal power struggles, and a campaign to radically reshape the federal state.
On September 29, 2025, Senator Gary Peters, the ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, released a minority staff report that landed like a thunderclap in Washington. The report, built on whistleblower disclosures and oversight visits, accused DOGE of bypassing cybersecurity protections, evading oversight, and putting Americans’ most sensitive information at risk. “DOGE isn’t making government more efficient – it’s putting Americans’ sensitive information in the hands of completely unqualified and untrustworthy individuals,” Peters declared, as reported by Biometric Update.
At the heart of the Senate report is the Social Security Administration’s Numerical Identification Files—known as NUMIDENT—the very backbone of identity verification for Social Security, Medicare, and much of the U.S. economy. Whistleblowers told committee staff that DOGE personnel uploaded a live copy of NUMIDENT into a cloud environment with administrator-level access, but without verified security controls or standard agency visibility. In practical terms, this meant DOGE employees could manipulate, delete, or export records at will—an unprecedented breach of the guardrails that typically protect such data.
The internal risk assessment at SSA was chilling: without new controls, there was a 35 to 65 percent chance of a breach with “catastrophic adverse effect.” The possible consequences? “Widespread PII [personally identifiable information] disclosure or loss of data,” and even the potential need to reissue Social Security numbers to the entire U.S. population—an event that would dwarf the 2015 OPM breach and paralyze everything from banking to benefit payments. As of August 2025, over 548.3 million Social Security numbers had been issued, underscoring the magnitude of the risk.
But the report’s findings went well beyond the SSA. DOGE’s reach extended to the General Services Administration (GSA), the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and, according to parallel media reporting, even the Department of State and Department of Treasury. At GSA headquarters, Senate staff found programmers working behind blacked-out windows and stacks of laptops, with officials barring photos and blocking access to at least six locked rooms. Most eyebrow-raising was the installation of a Starlink satellite Internet system—raising fears that DOGE could move data outside the secure federal IT perimeter, evading required monitoring and privacy impact assessments.
Within these agencies, a culture of secrecy had taken hold. Armed guards, locked rooms, and an opaque chain of command made it nearly impossible for oversight officials to determine what DOGE teams were actually doing, who supervised them, or what data they could access. In some cases, information provided at briefings contradicted court filings and whistleblower accounts. Formally, Amy Gleason was named as DOGE’s administrator, but staffers described her as a powerless figurehead. The White House and agency leaders, the report concluded, had lost track of who was really in charge.
It wasn’t just technical safeguards that were missing. The Senate staff concluded that DOGE’s actions violated the Privacy Act of 1974 and the E-Government Act of 2002, both of which set strict limits on how agencies can collect, combine, and share PII. The pooling of SSA data in a DOGE-managed cloud, and attempts to combine records across agencies, appeared to run afoul of these statutes and related Office of Management and Budget guidance. The report warned that adversaries such as Russia, China, and Iran—who regularly probe U.S. networks—would view the NUMIDENT cloud environment as an intelligence “prize of extraordinary value.”
Meanwhile, the political drama surrounding DOGE was playing out against a backdrop of internal White House rivalry. As reported by The New York Times, Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, was preparing the Trump administration’s 2026 budget proposal when Musk’s DOGE team began axing items Vought had intended to keep. Vought, a veteran of Trump’s first term and the architect of a conservative comeback plan to expand presidential authority, was reportedly frustrated. “We’re going to let DOGE break things, and we’ll pick up the pieces later,” Vought told his staff, according to three sources cited by the Times. (His spokeswoman denied the comment.)
Vought’s vision was sweeping: to enable the president to cut off spending, fire employees, control independent agencies, and deregulate the economy. He had spent years in the policy wilderness, carefully mapping out how to achieve a presidency with unprecedented control over the executive branch. But Musk, with his celebrity and access to the president, wielded an influence Vought could only envy—at least until a falling-out led to Musk’s diminished role and Vought’s resurgence.
By late September, the government was hurtling toward a shutdown, and Vought was leveraging the moment to threaten mass firings unless Congress struck a funding deal. He had already pressured lawmakers to cancel $9 billion in foreign aid and public broadcasting, resulting in the death of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and helped pass Trump’s domestic policy law slashing Medicaid and food stamp spending. Vought boasted of 245 deregulatory initiatives in 2025, and asserted White House power over independent agencies, including the Federal Reserve.
Yet, for all the rhetoric about “efficiency” and “modernization,” the Senate report and Vought’s maneuvers have prompted alarm from legal experts and lawmakers across the spectrum. Senator Susan Collins, chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, called the administration’s latest attempt to cancel $4.9 billion in foreign aid without congressional approval “illegal.” Eloise Pasachoff, a law professor at Georgetown, warned, “If the executive branch isn’t controlled by the power of the purse, then there is very little that will control the President.”
Vought, for his part, has made no secret of his aims. In a recent speech, he likened the federal bureaucracy to a “cartel working behind closed doors,” adding, “We have now been embarked on deconstructing this administrative state.” He has called for the abolition of the Education Department, attacked the Federal Reserve and State Department, and argued that federal agencies should be “in trauma” to prevent them from reconstituting in future administrations.
The Senate staff report calls for a series of immediate containment actions: shutting down the DOGE cloud environment housing NUMIDENT, revoking DOGE access to PII until compliance with federal law is certified, suspending DOGE operations government-wide, and conducting comprehensive audits of access to sensitive systems. It also urges agencies to release data-access privileges for DOGE personnel and publish the identities and roles of all staff involved in DOGE-related executive orders.
Whether these recommendations will be heeded remains an open question. Agencies, according to the report, failed to answer even basic follow-up questions about roles and security frameworks. If left unchecked, what began as a drive for efficiency could morph into a shadow government with extraordinary privileges and minimal accountability—embedded in the very agencies that hold the keys to Americans’ identities and livelihoods.
In the weeks ahead, Congress, the courts, and the public face a stark choice: Will they reassert the basic guardrails of transparency and statutory authority, or allow this experiment in government “efficiency” to spiral into a lasting threat to privacy and democratic oversight?
