Centralizing data = centralizing power

Is DOGE doing something we haven't seen before?

I really hate asking a question for which I don’t have any sort of answer, but here we go:

Is Trump/Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) centralizing more government data on Americans than any other agency in history?

All without oversight, I might add - at least so far.

In recent weeks and days, we have found out that DOGE is looking to get the data of all Americans from:

• The IRS

• Social Security

• Federal spending through the Treasury Department

• The Education Department

Some of this is blocked or disputed at this current moment by the courts. But they want it.

I don’t know exactly how the federal government handled all of these different sets of data before, but my guess is that access was restricted to personnel in each department. Is this new that one department gets it all?

This would allow DOGE to build a dossier on each individual American of unparalleled detail - bigger even than services like Google have on each of us (through our search history, payments, passwords, etc.)

And where is oversight going to come from? Republicans are in charge of both houses of Congress, and they’ve made it clear that they don’t intend to challenge the Trump administration in any meaningful way.

One of the cleanest cuts in politics is to imagine how your political opposition would react under similar circumstances. Can you imagine Republican reactions if a Democratic president had asserted this kind of centralized authority over our personal data?

Good luck, America.