This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

What would you do if you found out a stranger accessed a federal database then walked away with your Social Security number? What if this person also walked away with your place and date of birth, citizenship status, race, ethnicity, the names of your parents — and all of their information too? You might ask how the stranger got access, why he stole your information and, ultimately, what pernicious plans he may have in store. Above all, you’d be outraged by the prospect of your data being passed around like trading cards.

Unfortunately, we’re past the hypothetical stage. Recent reporting from the Washington Post  detailed a whistleblower’s complaint that a DOGE staffer left the Social Security Administration (SSA) in possession of two highly restricted databases of U.S. citizen information. While the Post has not independently confirmed the accusations in the complaint, they’re being investigated by the SSA’s internal watchdog, and follow other claims of fishy activity by DOGE at SSA. If the claims are true, the sensitive information on 500 million living and dead Americans is at risk of exposure.

Even the federal government’s own analysts rang alarm bells following DOGE’s intrusion into federal agencies last year, warning about the safety of sensitive government data, especially as the unvetted and untrained individuals constituting billionaire Elon Musk’s personal tech army gained access to federal systems, exposing them to unsecure cloud servers and AI chatbots. What’s more frightening is that these new vulnerabilities are developing alongside widespread criminal adoption of AI and crypto tools and weakened enforcement against digital lawbreaking under the Trump administration. So while ordinary Americans are struggling to contend with this heyday of identity theft and financial fraud, the Trump administration is cutting off resources that could help them.

It’s noteworthy that the DOGE staffer who allegedly took the SSA databases reportedly claimed to be sanitizing the data before supposedly using it at his new employer. Government data, locked in restricted databases and protected by federal law, is among the most valuable commodities in the AI industry. The large language models powering AI tools are only as good as the data they train on, and AI companies have been exhausting publicly available data for years. Access to the deep reservoirs of........

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