Law professor details potential 'harm' from DOGE’s 'staggering and unprecedented breach' of data
On Saturday, February 8, U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer issued an emergency order blocking the Trump Administration and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by billionaire SpaceX/Tesla/X.com CEO Elon Musk, from having access to U.S. Treasury Department payment systems. Engelmayer also ordered DOGE to destroy any data it had already accessed.
The following day on X, Musk attacked Engelmayer as "a corrupt judge protecting corruption," adding, "He needs to be impeached NOW!"
But Ray Brescia, a professor at Albany Law School in Upstate New York, applauds Engelmayer's ruling an op-ed published by MSNBC on February 12. And Brescia emphasizes that DOGE's access to sensitive data at the U.S. Treasury Department and other federal government agencies risks a dangerous security breach.
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"Even if no one on the DOGE team has already exploited this extracted information in any way, there is a harm to Americans knowing that someone, somewhere, most likely operating outside the law, knows their private financial information — like Social Security numbers and private banking information like routing and account numbers — and maybe a lot more," Brescia warns. "We also do not know if they have the ability to halt payments to individuals and businesses who rely on government support for things like their federal pensions, Social Security payments and disability assistance, as well as the contracts to provide important services to the government and the American people."
The law professor adds, "What we do know, however, is that many of those making the decisions will be unqualified teenagers and early twentysomethings deployed by Musk to oversee spending affecting every American…. This should worry every individual American taxpayer, who might wake up one day to find bank accounts frozen or drained or the lifeline of retirement or veterans' benefits halted, perhaps just because of a computer glitch caused by individuals with little experience with government processes or systems."
DOGE's access to sensitive data, according to Brescia, raises major "right to privacy" concerns.
"By allowing this staggering and unprecedented breach of financial privacy," Brescia argues, "the Trump Administration has already set itself on a course where individuals and businesses aren't free to organize their lives under principles of fair competition and equality; instead, there is a grave risk that these extractive practices will harm not just economic rights, but political rights as well."
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Ray Brescia's full op-ed for MSNBC is available at this link.
