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Suppose someone walked into your bank and demanded your personal and financial information.
Further suppose that the bank provided this person that confidential information. Would you be upset? Of course you would.
Last week operatives of Elon Musk’s illegitimate (because it’s never been approved by Congress) “Department” of Government Efficiency gained access to the personal financial records of millions of Americans through the cooperation of the Secretary of the Treasury. It is the largest data breach in US history.
Think of that: an unelected billionaire with a private army of 20-somethings now has access, through the IRS, to the financial information of every American that has filed income taxes. This is illegal under the Right to Financial Privacy Act of 1978.
What is DOGE going to do with this access?
We don’t know, but, if you’ve ever paid federal taxes with a credit card, DOGE now has access to your credit card information. Paid with a check? DOGE now has access to your bank account information. And since your Social Security number is on your tax returns, DOGE has access to that information, too.
This would be bad enough, but DOGE now has access to the financial records of members of Congress, the US Cabinet, the Vice President, President, and Supreme Court justices. The possibility of malfeasance is very real and it is staggering in scope.
You might think that our elected representatives would be up in arms about a private citizen bypassing the responsibilities of Congress to allocate and spend taxpayer money under the First Article of the Constitution. You would be mistaken.
Senators Tillis and Budd apparently are just fine with DOGE having unauthorized access to personal financial data (Tillis to the news outlet NOTUS – “These actions could be unconstitutional, but nobody should bellyache about that”) in spite of the fact that both swore an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution.
Another consequence of Elon Musk’s hostile takeover of the Federal Government is data integrity. DOGE now has control over the servers where Federal data is stored, and as such can easily manipulate the data to fit their worldview.
So, tariffs boosting inflation? We can switch out the poor economic data for our own data and make the problem disappear. Job numbers not looking so good? We can fix that. Egg prices too high? No problem.
And, given the fact that Musk and his fellow billionaires largely control the media landscape, any negative news is likely to be suppressed or ignored.
Small democratic government is based on the concept “of the people, by the people and for the people.” We have now devolved into a government “of the billionaires, by the billionaires and for the billionaires.”
Elon Musk and his illegal activities must be stopped. It is the responsibility of the Congress to do this. They must do their job, take control of the government away from billionaires, and return it to the people.
Thomas Lipe
Richfield