The Elon Musk Government Department (DOGE) has accessed “a payroll system that deals with wages of around 276,000 federal employees in dozens of agencies”, despite the “superior IT staff who feared that this would compromise very sensitive information to government staff” and lead to cyber attacks, reported the New York Times today.
The interior department system gives DOGE “visibility in employee sensitive information, such as social security numbers, and the ability to hire and pump workers more easily,” the NYT wrote, citing people familiar with the problem. Doge’s workers have been trying to access federal staff and the pay system for about two weeks and succeeded this weekend, according to the report.
“The dispute reached its head on Saturday, while the Doge Workers obtained access and then placed two of the IT managers who had resisted them on administrative and investigation, people said,” the NYT report. The agency’s IOC and CISO would have been investigated for their “behavior at work”.
When contacted by ARS today, the Interior Department said: “We are working to execute the president’s directive to reduce costs and make government more effective for the American people and have taken action to implement the executive orders of President Trump.”
DOGE access to federal systems continues to grow despite the judicial decisions that have ordered the government to cut Doge of specific files, such as those held by the Social Security Administration, the Treasury Department, the Ministry of Education and the Staff Management Office.
