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As a reporter for The Upshot, a section of The New York Times that specializes in explanatory and analytical journalism, Emily Badger is used to weeding through decades of data to discover insights. She has unearthed numbers on topics like federal worker resignations and how air-conditioning conquered the United States.
She knew the U.S. government collected a lot of data about Americans. But she was surprised to discover how intimate that information could be. Your personal bank account number, for example. The date of your divorce. Whether you are estranged from your parents.
This information has long been stored in disconnected government data systems. But the Trump administration is now trying to link those systems and consolidate the data under Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency. Doing so raises major privacy and security concerns, experts say.
Ms. Badger, along with Sheera Frenkel, a Times technology reporter, recently spent about a month and a half compiling and analyzing information about the vast trove of data the U.S. government keeps on Americans.
“We had the idea to publish an extremely long list of everything the government potentially knows about you,” Ms. Badger said in a recent interview. That is exactly what they did. In an article published this month, Ms. Badger and Ms. Frenkel outlined the hundreds of pieces of demographic and identifying personal information the government might know about you, and explored how that information may be at risk if consolidated.
They discussed their reporting over a video call. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
What led you to pursue this article?
EMILY BADGER About a month and a half ago, we started to see stories of DOGE going into agencies and trying to get access to sensitive data systems. We teamed up with The Times’s D.C. bureau, which had already begun to build a spreadsheet of data systems that their reporters had seen that DOGE was starting to access. I reached out to Sheera, who has written extensively about data privacy.
What were your primary reporting challenges?
BADGER There were three. The first was identifying these data systems. It’s one thing to read a story that says DOGE is trying to access sensitive financial information at the Treasury Department, but what we really needed to know was what data system they were trying to access — was it the Payment Automation Manager system, for example?
The second was trying to figure out what was contained in these systems, with as much specificity as we could. We didn’t want to just say “financial data”; we wanted to say if it was your bank account number, and whether it was a checking account or a savings account.
How did you determine what data was in the systems?
BADGER I learned from a source that all government data systems that contain personal information are required by law to produce documents called privacy impact assessments. In them, an agency spells out the purpose of a data system, how the data is protected and who can access it. I felt like I’d stumbled across a cheat code for exactly what we were looking for.
Along with Sheera and one of our colleagues, Aaron Krolik, I started looking for documents associated with these different systems.
The third reporting challenge was trying to determine: If the government already has this data, what’s the big deal if it’s going to start trying to link it across different agencies?
Why is that a problem?
SHEERA FRENKEL We asked people in the national security establishment and lawyers filing lawsuits: What’s going to be done with this data? We discovered that there’s a great deal of concern among the national security establishment as to whether we’re creating a one-stop shop for foreign hackers.
What are the strongest arguments for how a consolidated data trove could be useful, as well as for how it could be misused?
BADGER Advocates on the left have argued in the past that if we link administrative data that the government holds, we can make a well-oiled social safety net that isn’t so difficult for people to access. For instance, we could link these different data systems so that, when you’re applying for food stamps, a flag goes up that says, “You also qualify for housing assistance.”
But what is becoming much clearer is that you would also be creating something ripe for misuse. You could create a system in which the White House says, “These are my political opponents, and I want all of them to get really rigorous audits by the I.R.S.” Or a system that says, “We are trying to round up immigrants whom we want to deport, and we know their addresses because when their children applied for student loans, their parents’ names and tax ID numbers were listed on those forms.”
FRENKEL There’s always been this sense that, if the government could just make it easier, if there could be one condensed list of information on Americans, that would help the government give people the aid they need. But most privacy and security experts said there’s no way to do this safely.
How does the U.S. government’s data consolidation under DOGE compare with the systems in other countries?
FRENKEL It’s what we see a lot of authoritarian regimes do when they want to control a population, when they want to try and root out political dissidents or suppress members of the opposition.
Is there a way to opt out?
FRENKEL No. Ultimately, the government’s going to collect data on its citizens. What’s really concerning is that, right now in America, some people who are immigrants, who might be undocumented, are not applying for government services because they’re worried about data collection. Emily and I have spoken to immigration lawyers who say they’re seeing people pull their kids out of public schools, move homes or not apply for welfare benefits.
What questions do you still hope to answer?
FRENKEL What the government is going to do with all this data is a really important next question for us.
BADGER There is a raft of lawsuits that have been filed arguing that DOGE is not allowed to do what it is doing. How are the courts going to handle that? The legal plotline is an open one that we’ll continue to follow.
Sarah Bahr writes about culture and style for The Times.
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