Over the first 100 days of his second administration, President Donald Trump, working in concert with Elon Musk’s DOGE proxy—which it still seems a stretch to consider a bona fide government agency—has unleashed an onslaught against both our foundational democratic concepts and the civil service erected on top. Still, one of the less-noticed attacks on our democracy has been the siloing and use-case restrictions on government-collected data.

Yes, I know. People are being sent to a foreign gulag without charge or evidence. RFK Jr. is chipping away at vaccine development. Trump is about to drive the economy off a cliff. Yet here I am talking about something that sounds like what you’d skim over in your annoying annual security training at work. Perhaps, then, it’d be useful for us to start referring to this more as Trump’s effort to collect a government dossier on nearly every person, nonprofit, and business in the country.

At this point, DOGE has either forced or tried to force access to IRS data systems, Social Security data, Selective Service records, Medicare data, Health and Human Services data, Securities and Exchange Commission data, National Labor Relations Board data, and Education Department student data, among other things, with the ultimate goal to make all these disparate information sources interoperable, either in one centralized system or in some other way that they can be compiled and searched together.

Once more, the notion of immigration enforcement and the amorphous blob of “national security”—which at this point seems to encompass more federal policy areas than it excludes—have been the tip of the spear for an expansion of government powers and the surveillance state. A good chunk of this collection thus far has been reportedly oriented toward the administration’s broader crackdown on immigration, which seems to have led a lot of people to tune it out. Plus, the government already has everyone’s data anyway, right? Who cares if one part of the government versus another gets access?

The problem, of course, is that you provided every piece of this data at different times, to different agencies, for different purposes. Think of it this way: You might give a friend a copy of the key to your apartment so that they can feed your cat while you’re away. That is an authorization for that person to use the key in the ways that you agreed upon for the time that you agreed upon. If they then use your key to set up a meth lab in your living room, no one can plausibly say that you signed off on it simply because they had under certain circumstances........

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