Remember DOGE? The good idea to find government efficiency and reduce spending was so poorly executed that it undermined the case for scaling back the size of government. Yet a little-noticed bit of news out of the Justice Department in recent days suggests that some in the organization were not just incompetent but malicious.
The Justice Department quietly acknowledged in a formal notice to a judge that members of the “government efficiency” commission shared data through an unsanctioned server, which the government previously denied. That’s not the worst part, though.
For a group that was meant to root out waste, DOGE officials were shockingly unfocused on their main goal. One person was apparently more interested in relitigating election results than making government more efficient.
That person allegedly devised a secret agreement to share sensitive Social Security Administration (SSA) data with an unidentified political advocacy group that aimed to challenge state election results. Fortunately, the filing says that “SSA has not yet seen evidence that SSA data were shared with the advocacy group.” That it was even discussed remains troubling.
Even if the data was never shared externally, the apparent mishandling on a third-party server constitutes a gross violation of Americans’ privacy, which is protected by federal law. (A Justice Department official told The Post that DOGE is not currently being investigated.)
Ultimately, the effort neither overturned an election nor reduced spending all that much. Instead of making meaningful improvements to how the government operates, the short-lived DOGE experiment will forever be associated with chaos and abuse.
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