DOGE is reportedly building a ‘master database’ of government information
In a letter to the Social Security Administration’s Inspector General’s office requesting an investigation into DOGE, Ranking Member Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-VA) alleged that the government entity created by Elon Musk supposedly to reduce the size of the federal government is now constructing a “cross-agency master database” of sensitive personal information.
Wired appeared to back up Connolly’s allegations on Friday, detailing an effort at DOGE to fold this database into the Department of Homeland Security, the counterterrorism agency founded after 9/11. Specifically, “mass amounts” of personal data harvested from the IRS, SSA, and voting records in Pennsylvania and Florida were recently uploaded into servers at the United States Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS), which processes immigration cases.
In politics, as with everything, a movement, moment, or event can be studied and understood in isolation, or it can be seen as a reaction to a previous action.
The amassing of private, personal data can be understood as an event unto itself, or it can be understood as a reaction to something else.
I believe this, and the last presidential election as a whole, is a reaction to the Democrat’s woeful inability to acknowledge immigration as an issue of importance to the American people, and thus I largely blame them for this mess of a situation we find ourselves in.
There are two kinds of political parties: those that take accountability for their own actions, and those that merely blame their opponents. The Republicans have long been the latter, and I thought the Democratic Party would eventually position itself as the antidote to them.
But over the last decade, this began to feel unlikely, and now it feels downright impossible. Democrats seem to have learned all the wrong lessons from Trump. In response to him, they became more like him, deflecting accountability rather than accepting responsibility for the mistakes they’ve made.
Democrats or Republicans, it now makes no difference. We are being governed by children.
That should be scary enough, but it’s made terrifying when one of those parties has autocratic aspirations.