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Its broad mandate across government, seemingly nonexistent oversight, and the apparent lack of operational competence of its employees have demonstrated that DOGE could create conditions that are ideal for cybersecurity or data privacy incidents that affect the entire nation.

These include systems that process all federal payments, including Social Security, Medicare and the congressionally appropriated funds that run the government and its contracting operations.

DOGE has given conflicting information about what data it has accessed, who has that access, and most importantly — why.

In one order last week blocking DOGE's access to Social Security data, U.S. District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander of Maryland said the government "never identified or articulated even a single reason for which the DOGE Team needs unlimited access to SSA's entire record systems, thereby exposing personal, confidential, sensitive, and private information that millions of Americans entrusted to their government."

On Monday, a federal judge in Maryland temporarily halted DOGE from accessing data of millions of union members in a lawsuit against the Office of Personnel Management, the Treasury Department and Education Department after finding the agencies shared private information with DOGE affiliates "who had no need to know the vast amount of sensitive personal information to which they were granted access."

In the Social Security Administration lawsuit, Hollander found several DOGE staffers "were granted access to SSA systems before their background checks were completed or their inter-agency detail agreements were finalized." One of those is Bobba, who was given access to the master data warehouse at SSA that includes the Master Beneficiary Record, Supplemental Security Record and Numident files containing "extensive information about anyone with a social security number," according to filings in the case.

Not even lawyers for the government can account for when and how DOGE staffers received access to sensitive databases. In a Labor Department lawsuit, Judge John D. Bates notes that "defendants themselves acknowledge inconsistencies across their evidence" regarding DOGE

sent an email with a spreadsheet containing PII to two United States General Services Administration officials," according to an audit of his email account submitted in one court filing.

"a real possibility exists that sensitive information has already been shared outside of the Treasury Department, in potential violation of federal law."

Officials were given hours to fire hundreds of employees, and workers were shut out of email as termination notices arrived. The terminations were part of a broader group of dismissals at the Department of Energy, where reportedly more than a thousand federal workers were terminated.

civilian agency that conducts a wide variety of nuclear security missions, including servicing the nation's nuclear weapons when they're not on missiles and bombers, and making extensive safety and security upgrades of the warheads.

Some workers were responsible for making sure emergency response plans were in place at sites like a giant facility in Texas, where thousands of dismantled warheads are stored. Others worked to prevent terrorists and rogue nations from acquiring weapons-grade plutonium or uranium. Many had "Q" clearances, the highest level security clearance at the Department of Energy.

In the final days leading up to the firings, managers drew up lists of essential workers and pleaded to keep them.

Multiple current and former employees at the agency told NPR that scores of people were notified verbally they were fired. Many had to clear out their desks on the spot. "It broke my heart," says one employee who was among those who left the agency's Washington, D.C., headquarters.

The NNSA termination letter did not appear to make any specific reference to the highly-classified nuclear mission conducted by the agency.

But others at the agency who were told they were terminated never received written notification.

Nuclear security is highly specialized, high-pressure work, but it's not particularly well paid, one employee told NPR. Given what's unfolded over the past 24 hours, "why would anybody want to take these jobs?" they asked.

Despite having the words "National" and "Security" in its title, it was not getting an exemption for national security, managers at the agency were told last Friday, according to an employee at NNSA

Just days before, officials in leadership had scrambled to write descriptions for the roughly 300 probationary employees at the agency who had joined the federal workforce less than two years ago.

Managers were given just 200 characters to explain why the jobs these workers did mattered.

"Per OPM [Office of Personnel Management] instructions, DOE finds that your further employment would not be in the public interest,"

information will go into an LLM (Large Language Model), an advanced AI system that looks at huge amounts of text data to understand, generate, and process human language, the sources said. The AI system will determine whether someone’s work is mission-critical or not

reason the email requested no links or attachments was because of the plan to send the information to the AI system, the sources said.

Washington Post reported in February that DOGE was using artificial intelligence to analyze spending at the Education Department, citing two people familiar with the project.