Were I one of the judges whose decisions have aimed to stop Elon Musk’s lawless grab for Americans’ private information, I’d be angry to see him now reaching instead into the Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration. Lawsuits about those efforts will be forthcoming, but Musk and Donald Trump have elected to ignore the spirit of these court decisions.
As a Social Security recipient and a tax filer, I am furious. Given the record of sloppiness and misleading claims of fraud in Musk’s findings and pronouncements, I’m aware that one slip by his coders could wipe out our income or somehow ruin our tax filings. Musk has no business probing the very private tax and income records for you and me.
The headlines are about the sudden protest resignation of Michelle King as head of Social Security and the tussle with the IRS over resistance to opening the books rather than about exactly what Musk is seeking to learn that requires getting to individual records. A federal judge has extended court orders to block DOGE from access to Treasury Department computer payment systems. It seems clear that the same state attorneys general who sued for that stop will go after these.
The IRS already audits returns, presumably in search of fraud, and Social Security — which involves the money that you and I paid into this system over a lifetime of work, making it our money — has stringent financial reviews in place. Musk says that young coders in his so-called Department of Government Efficiency have found names on Social Security rolls who are 150 years old — though it turns out that a certain number of information-lacking names were identified with an 1800s birthdate as a flag for non-payment.
An audit produced by the Social Security Administration’s inspector general last year found that from 2015 to 2022, any overpayments amounted to less than 1 percent, including cases in which paperwork was wrong or missing. Do we need to find the same waste and fraud again?
I’d even understand if, Musk wanted to reevaluate the financing rules behind the systems at large, including raising Social Security eligibility by two years — a subject that seems to pop up every other year. But you don’t need access to individual records to do that.
The Information
Those IRS computer systems contain the private financial data tied to hundreds of millions of Americans, including Social Security numbers, addresses, banking details and employment information. Social Security serves 70 million individuals who are retired, disabled or in serious need.
Musk is a private citizen apparently without any national security clearance for his staffers, who are working on an agreement about how to protect any data they get. A software engineer named Gavin Kliger, not an auditor, is DOGE’s agent in the IRS; to boot, according to Reuters, Kliger has boosted white nationalism effort online.
Meanwhile, the same Musk was engineering the dismissal of thousands of IRS employees as part of wider worker reductions, singling out employees with less than two years, who have fewer protections. That alone says there could be delays in tax refunds and tax reviews — and seems at odds with a desire to look more deeply into taxpayer records. Over time, Donald Trump has attacked the IRS as overly aggressive and vowed to rescind added money and staff that Joe Biden had given to the agency.
For total absurdity, add in a legal filing by the Trump administration this week in which Joshua Fisher, director of the White House’s Office of Administration, said in a sworn affidavit that Musk is “not an employee” of DOGE, a claim that contradicts every Trump and Musk assertion. Instead, Musk is a special employee of the White House, as if that is different. The affidavit apparently was meant to blunt a legal challenge for access to records.
If you wanted to examine individual IRS records for “fraud,” you might start with corporations that proudly proclaim they pay nothing. Or Trump himself. Why exactly does Musk need to look at records, audits, and returns of 350 million Americans?
It’s hard to come up with a rationale. Why aren’t we forcing him to do so?
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