Department of Government Efficiency chief Elon Musk and his team have been given access to vital financial information for a slew of additional federal agencies following a court win on Tuesday, as a member of the DOGE squad also prepares to receive data on Internal Revenue Service operations.
“The I.R.S. is preparing to give Gavin Kliger, a young software engineer working with [DOGE], access to sensitive taxpayer information as a senior adviser to the I.R.S.’s acting commissioner. The I.R.S. is still working out the terms of his assignment,” The New York Times reported.
Critics have expressed concerns that such actions would grant Musk and his operation unprecedented oversight. Lily Batchelder, a Treasury Department official during the Biden administration, noted on X that she could not recall political appointees ever having access to the IRS database, the outlet continued.
A major worry is the potential for using this access to target political opponents or leak private citizens’ data. Batchelder warned that such a move could violate federal laws prohibiting executive branch interference in taxpayer audits. Meanwhile, Democratic Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts have demanded further details on the extent of access granted, The Times added.
While Democrats and their allies in the legacy media continue to claim — so far without any evidence — that Musk and his DOGE team will be “accessing sensitive taxpayer information” and could leak it, The Times report did note that actually happened recently — to Musk. His 2014-2018 tax returns, along with those of other billionaires the left doesn’t like, were leaked by an IRS official to the outlet ProPublica in 2021.
President Donald Trump, who appointed Musk to his role, remains fully committed to the billionaire Tesla and SpaceX founder’s mission.
“Waste, fraud and abuse have been deeply entrenched in our broken system for far too long,” Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said in a statement. “It takes direct access to the system to identify and fix it.”
Meanwhile, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan on Tuesday rejected a request from 14 Democratic state attorneys general to immediately impose broad restrictions on Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
