Politics & National Security
NewsOnScale Staff
October 26, 2026
The Department of Government Efficiency launched on January 20, 2025. In the weeks that followed its operatives barnstormed federal agencies, demanding and obtaining access to some of the most sensitive databases in the United States government.
Treasury Department payment systems. Social Security Administration records. IRS tax data. Department of Education systems. Veterans Affairs databases. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The Office of Personnel Management — which holds the personnel files, security clearance records, and personal information of every current and former federal employee in America.
They copied data to private servers. They fed sensitive federal data into AI systems. Then DOGE dissolved on July 4, 2026.
Nobody has fully accounted for where the data went.
Who was doing the accessing
DOGE was run by Elon Musk — the owner of X, SpaceX, xAI, Tesla, and Starlink. Trump insisted Musk headed DOGE. The White House simultaneously claimed Musk had no official role to shield the operation from oversight requirements.
The staffers DOGE sent into federal agencies were not career government officials. They were young technologists — many of them recruited directly from Musk's own companies.
One DOGE staffer at the Treasury Department was Marko Elez. His work experience prior to DOGE was exclusively within Elon Musk's companies. He was sent to the Treasury Department where he copied and downloaded USAID files from the federal payment database to his personal laptop before his access was revoked on February 5, 2025. He resigned from DOGE the following day.
At the Federal Aviation Administration SpaceX employees were given government email addresses — creating a direct conduit between a federal agency and Musk's private space company.
A DOGE staffer who was simultaneously employed at SpaceX created an AI assistant for DOGE staff powered by Musk's own xAI Grok-2 model. The model was not hosted on a secure government server. It was hosted on a subdomain of the staffer's personal website.
Federal employee data. Federal payment data. Federal tax data. Being processed through a model owned by the man who ran the operation accessing it.
What data they accessed
DOGE obtained access to at least seven sensitive federal databases according to documented reporting. The full list has never been publicly confirmed because the agencies withheld records from the Government Accountability Office's investigation.
What is confirmed: Treasury Department payment systems controlling the flow of money in and out of the federal government. Social Security Administration records covering hundreds of millions of Americans. IRS tax return data. Department of Education systems. Veterans Affairs databases. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's internal systems. The Office of Personnel Management — which holds security clearance files and personnel records for every person who has ever held a federal job.
Congressional Democrats raised the alarm in writing. A letter to the administration stated: "We are specifically concerned about reports of Elon Musk and DOGE's monitoring and sharing of federal employee and non-public federal data using AI tools, and reports of intentions to use sensitive data to train private AI models."
The White House press secretary said government data was not being used to train Musk's AI models.
The DOGE staffer running federal data through Musk's xAI Grok-2 model on his personal website suggests otherwise.
What the GAO found — and couldn't find
The Government Accountability Office — Congress's independent watchdog — reviewed DOGE's data access across six federal agencies. Its September 2026 report found that it could not determine the full extent of DOGE's access because the agencies withheld information.
The Small Business Administration and Department of Veterans Affairs did not provide the information GAO requested to identify which systems DOGE had accessed or the level of access granted. Two agencies challenged the GAO's authority to investigate at all.
At the agencies that did cooperate, the findings were significant. Treasury missed security controls when granting DOGE system access. A DOGE employee with access to three payment systems left the department without completing the post-employment documentation required of anyone with access to sensitive payment systems.
The breadth of DOGE's access, the GAO noted, "has led to concerns by members of Congress and others that agency systems and their sensitive information and data may have been vulnerable to unauthorized disclosure or modification."
Six months after DOGE dissolved, the full extent of what was accessed, copied, and transmitted remains unknown.
The private server question
DOGE copied data to private servers. This is documented. The question of whose private servers has never been fully answered.
The operational architecture of DOGE makes the answer obvious. The staffers were employed by Musk's companies. The AI being used to process federal data was Musk's xAI model. The DOGE operation was directed by Musk. SpaceX employees had government email addresses at federal agencies.
If the private servers receiving copied federal data belong to Musk's companies — and the documented dual employment, the xAI model usage, and the SpaceX FAA infrastructure strongly imply they do — then Elon Musk may hold the personal data of hundreds of millions of Americans acquired through a government operation he directed.
Social Security numbers. Tax returns. Federal payment records. Security clearance files. Personnel records. All of it potentially sitting on servers owned by a man who simultaneously holds billions in government defense contracts, owns the primary platform of American political communication, has a formal government role, and is a co-defendant in active federal civil litigation.
The AI training question
The most consequential potential use of this data has received the least public attention.
An AI model trained on IRS tax data would understand American financial behavior at a level no private company has ever achieved. An AI model trained on Social Security records would understand demographic patterns, family structures, and benefit dependencies across the entire American population. An AI model trained on OPM security clearance files would have detailed psychological profiles, foreign contacts, and financial histories of everyone who has ever held a security clearance.
Musk's xAI is competing directly with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic for dominance in artificial intelligence. The competitive advantage of training on this data would be incalculable.
The White House denied it. The GAO couldn't confirm or deny it because the agencies withheld the records. The DOGE staffer running federal data through Grok-2 on his personal website suggests the denial deserves scrutiny.
What happened after DOGE dissolved
DOGE dissolved on July 4, 2026. Months later a cybersecurity startup called Cathedral — founded by former DOGE staffers — announced it had penetrated Anthropic's internal systems in under 12 hours using AI agents.
One Cathedral founder was involved in the Pentagon's legal fight with Anthropic over how Claude could be used by the military. Cathedral violated Anthropic's bug bounty program rules by failing to disclose the full extent of their activity.
Ex-government operatives with demonstrated access to federal AI and data systems forming a private cybersecurity company and immediately demonstrating aggressive penetration capabilities is a pattern worth watching.
What nobody has answered
Where is the data that was copied to private servers?
Has any of it been used to train private AI models?
What exit procedures were followed when DOGE staffers with access to sensitive payment systems, tax records, and security clearance files returned to private employment at Musk's companies?
What happened to the federal data processed through xAI's Grok-2 model on a DOGE staffer's personal website?
The GAO tried to find out. Six agencies withheld the records. Two challenged the investigation's authority entirely.
DOGE dissolved on July 4, 2026. The data it accessed did not dissolve with it.
The American people funded the collection of this data over decades. They were not consulted about its transfer to private servers. They have not been told where it is. They have not been told whether it is being used.
They are waiting for answers that have not come.
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