Young engineers deployed across the US government as part of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency have triggered alarm throughout Washington's security establishment.

Never before has a group of unvetted and inexperienced outsiders gained such access to the nerve center of the US government, according to security experts.

The campaign, led by Musk's DOGE team, began at the Treasury Department when they took control of the US government's payment system -- a move justified as monitoring public spending.

From there, it expanded into an unprecedented cost-cutting initiative, with software engineers spreading across federal agencies, taking control of computer systems.

They have disrupted and in some cases effectively shuttered organizations such the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Department of Education, and the General Services Administration (GSA), which manages much of the government's infrastructure and building portfolio.

"In the span of just weeks, the US government has experienced what may be the most consequential security breach in its history," wrote Bruce Schneier, a security technologist at the Harvard Kennedy School, and Davi Ottenheimer of Inrupt, a data infrastructure company,........

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