'Maximum transparency': Musk wants access to your tax data, yet his finances are still secret

Elon Musk, required by federal law to file financial disclosures as he rampages across government, doesn't want anybody else looking at this tax returns. Neither does Donald Trump, the first president or presidential candidate in decades who refused to reveal his tax returns.

But they don't feel the same way about your tax returns, or mine, or the private financial and banking information of hundreds of millions of other Americans. The billionaire and his president are now demanding that the Internal Revenue Service provide access to its highly confidential data systems for Musk's unvetted aides in the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, according to reports in the Washington Post and the New York Times. The DOGE bros supposedly require this unprecedented capacity to invade Americans' privacy in order to curb IRS "waste."

Both newspapers also report that the specific DOGE employee assigned to the IRS is an engineer named Gavin Kliger, who recently gained a measure of infamy when a Reuters article revealed his social media posts endorsing racist and antisemite Nick Fuentes and misogynist and accused rapist Andrew Tate. His Substack account is full of rants about "bureaucracy," COVID-19 restrictions and his heroic decision to join DOGE to "fix" the government. (When the media first revealed his identity as a DOGE employee, Kliger immediately attempted to raise his Substack's subscription price to $1000.)

Naturally IRS officials and independent experts have expressed profound alarm at the notion that Kliger, his boss Musk and others of their ilk would have free-ranging access to innocent citizens' IRS accounts and all the data stored in them -- which is supposed to be kept safe from such malign actors. Those same experts fear that the personal data of millions of Americans may have been compromised already by DOGE employees who gained access to Treasury Department systems that disburse federal funds.

Nina Olson, who served as the IRS internal consumer watchdog for 18 years, offered this warning to the Post: “The information that the IRS has is incredibly personal. Someone with access to it could use it and make it public in a way, or do something with it, or share it with someone else who shares it with someone else, and your rights get violated."

The reckless Musk has already demonstrated on X, the social media platform he owns and controls, that he will misuse personal information for his own vindictive purposes. Last fall, he identified an employee of the US International Development Finance Corporation who works on climate issues, naming her and questioning whether she deserved a federal job. “So many fake jobs,” he wrote, insulting her and provoking an avalanche of abuse after 33 million views. In January, as wildfires raged in Los Angeles, Musk blamed minority and female firefighters for the failure to stop them, posting their names and photographs.

There was no law requiring Trump to disclose his taxes, although some returns were revealed against his will (and showed how he escaped paying his share). At the moment, Musk and the Trump White House are relying on an apparent loophole in federal ethics law that may exempt a "special government employee" like him from its disclosure requirements.

If so, that loophole needs to be closed. Public interest groups and state attorneys general should file litigation to force Musk -- who constantly barks about "maximum transparency" in government -- to disgorge his data. Whatever is good for the ordinary taxpayer should be good for the tax-dodging billionaires too.