Emily Badger and Sheera Frenkel
The federal government knows your mother’s maiden name and your bank account number. The student debt you hold. Your disability status. The company that employs you and the wages you earn there. And that’s just a start.
It may also know your …
- Active-duty military status
- Addiction treatment records
- Adjusted gross income
- Adopted child’s name
- Adverse credit history
- Alimony paid
- Business debts cance … and about 300 additional categories..
These intimate details about the personal lives of people who live in the United States are held in disconnected data systems across the federal government — some at the Treasury, some at the Social Security Administration and some at the Department of Education, among other agencies.
The Trump administration is now trying to connect the dots of that disparate information. Last month, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the “consolidation” of these segregated records, raising the prospect of creating a kind of data trove about Americans that the government has never had before, and that members of the president’s own party have historically opposed.
The effort is being driven by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and his lieutenants with the Department of Government Efficiency, who have sought access to dozens of databases as they have swept through agencies across the federal government. Along the way, they have elbowed past the objections of career staff, data security protocols, national security experts and legal privacy protections.
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