*If you are in the position to support my work, I have a [patreon](https://www.patreon.com/RusticGorilla),...
This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/keep_track by /u/rusticgorilla on 2025-04-16 11:20:34+00:00.

If you are in the position to support my work, I have a patreon, venmo, and a paypal set up. Just three dollars a month makes a huge difference! These posts will never be paywalled.

Subscribe to Keep Track’s Substack (RSS link) or monthly digest. Also on Bluesky.

Last month, President Donald Trump issued a little-noticed executive order that directs agencies to eliminate “information silos”—data compartmentalized within one system that only certain qualified individuals can access. “Removing unnecessary barriers to Federal employees accessing Government data and promoting inter‑agency data sharing,” the order claimed, “are important steps toward eliminating bureaucratic duplication and inefficiency while enhancing the Government’s ability to detect overpayments and fraud.” However, these silos are actually a necessary—and often, statutorily required—layer of protection to shield confidential data from unlawful disclosure and potential abuse. Ordering these safeguards removed will allow unvetted officials (like Elon Musk) to access our information and use it for their own political and personal ends.

Take the IRS, for instance. Confidential taxpayer data is stored in the Integrated Data Retrieval System (IDRS), which is so sensitive that access is limited even for agency employees. Without this silo, an unauthorized official could look up any taxpayer in the country and view their income, address, banking and brokerage account numbers, marital status, assets and liabilities, whether they had significant medical expenses, and the name of their employer and tax preparer.

Or the Social Security Administration, which stores data including your name, Social Security number, date and place of birth, gender, addresses, marital and parental status, your parents’ names, lifetime earnings, bank account information, immigration and work authorization status, health conditions if you apply for disability benefits, and use of Medicare after a certain age.

Nearly every agency in the federal government has databases like these containing private information on people living in America, and Trump is trying to access all of them. As one of his first acts in office, Trump signed an executive order granting DOGE access to “all unclassified agency records,” which excludes national security secrets but includes over 300 separate fields of data on virtually everyone in the country.

Allowing the unlimited sharing of this data between agencies and political appointees risks bad actors weaponizing it for their own ends. With the information compiled from just a few government databases, dossiers could be assembled on every person in America, including those who transitioned to a different gender, had an abortion, are undocumented, work for nonprofits and ‘uncooperative’ companies (maybe they refused to drop equality initiatives or stop selling Pride merch), or donated to Democratic or anti-Trump causes. The resulting list of dissenters and disfavored groups could be used to target retaliatory government actions, from audits to prosecution, deportation, and imprisonment.

IRS

DOGE employees have sought access to the IDRS, but, amid public outcry and Democratic pushback, the White House claimed to limit DOGE to read-only access of anonymized tax data.

However, according to new reporting, DOGE is working with Peter Thiel’s Palantir to build a “mega API” for accessing Internal Revenue Service records:

APIs are application programming interfaces, which enable different applications to exchange data and could be used to move IRS data to the cloud and access it there. DOGE has expressed an interest in the API project possibly touching all IRS data, which includes taxpayer names, addresses, social security numbers, tax returns, and employment data. The IRS API layer could also allow someone to compare IRS data against interoperable datasets from other agencies.

Should this project move forward to completion, DOGE wants Palantir’s Foundry software to become the “read center of all IRS systems,” a source with direct knowledge tells WIRED, meaning anyone with access could view and have the ability to possibly alter all IRS data in one place. It’s not currently clear who would have access to this system.

Foundry is a Palantir platform that can organize, build apps, or run AI models on the underlying data. Once the data is organized and structured, Foundry’s “ontology” layer can generate APIs for faster connections and machine learning models. This would allow users to quickly query the software using artificial intelligence to sort through agency data, which would require the AI system to have access to this sensitive information.

Thiel’s involvement in building a pan-governmental database should worry everyone, given his clear fascist personal beliefs, his monetary support and platforming of neoreactionaries like Curtis Yarvin, and his business interests in genocide and dystopian state surveillance.

Last week, the Trump administration filed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the IRS and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that allows the tax agency to share information on taxpayers under “investigation that may lead to [judicial or administrative] proceedings.” Contrary to most mainstream reporting that the data-sharing agreement applies only to undocumented immigrants, the MOU states explicitly that the Department of Homeland Security (the parent agency of ICE) can seek information from the IRS on anyone “under criminal investigation for violations of one or more specifically designated Federal criminal statutes (not involving tax administration).”

  • Like most of the immigration-targeted measures in this post, the terms of the MOU can clearly be abused to investigate and potentially prosecute a wide swath of people in America. The fact that the administration completely redacted the list of information the IRS will disclose to ICE should be a giant red flag.
  • Acting IRS Commissioner Melanie Krause is resigning over concerns about the ethics and legality of the MOU. For decades, the IRS has promised undocumented immigrants and their employers that in exchange for paying taxes (filed using individual taxpayer identification numbers, or ITINs), their information would be kept private and only used for tax-collecting purposes. By encouraging compliance with the law, federal, state, and local governments have collected nearly $100 billion a year in taxes from undocumented immigrants, who can’t even use the programs (like social security) they are paying into. Now, the government is going back on its promise and weaponizing their data against them.

Treasury

The Department of the Treasury encounters personal data similar to the IRS, as the Department’s Bureau of Fiscal Services (BFS) is in charge of effectuating financial transactions like federal tax returns, social security retirement and disability payments, veterans’ benefits, Medicare customer payments, and salaries for federal workers.

DOGE employees first…

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/Keep_Track/comments/1k0hxys/trump_and_musk_are_building_an_aidriven/