Trump's Government Demands to Know What You Read, Watch and Believe

When Donald Trump first returned to the White House last year, one of the first things he did was appoint Elon Musk to sell DOGE as a crusade against waste. Trump and Musk told Americans that it was about rooting out fraud, smashing bureaucracy, and making government work better. The language was always a disguise. What DOGE has actually done is deeply dangerous: it has helped turn the federal government into a data-harvesting machine aimed at immigrants first and everyone else next.

This may be the most explosive development legacy media has steadfastly ignored.

Exactly two months after his second inauguration, Trump signed an executive order called “Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos.” The title sounds harmless — even virtuous — but it was anything but. The order directed agency heads to provide designated officials with “full and prompt access” to unclassified agency records, data, software systems, and information technology systems and to remove barriers to interagency sharing of that information. It also ordered agencies to provide the federal government with “unfettered access” to comprehensive data from state programs that receive federal funding.

Although federal courts did their best to prevent this unprecedented power grab, they were no match for Trump’s handpicked Supreme Court. A lower court had blocked DOGE access to sensitive Social Security data but the Supreme Court stayed that injunction last June, allowing the Social Security Administration to give DOGE team members access to the records while the case proceeded. Justice Jackson’s dissent in Social Security Administration v. AFSCME. described the result bluntly: the Court allowed SSA to hand DOGE staffers “the highly sensitive data of millions of Americans” before courts had fully decided whether the access was lawful.

https://saltypolitics.substack.com/p/trumps-government-demands-to-know