Donald Trump signed an executive order that would in effect establish a one-stop shop of sensitive data on millions of Americans, able to be accessed or sold to anyone he wants.
In Trump’s March 20 executive order, he called for “eliminating information silos” across the government. Within 30 days, the order states, “agency heads shall, to the maximum extent consistent with law, rescind or modify all agency guidance that serves as a barrier to the inter- or intra-agency sharing of unclassified information.”
Intimate details about the personal lives of people who live in the United States are held in separate data systems across the federal government — some at the Treasury, some at the Social Security Administration and some at the Department of Education, among other agencies.
Your bank account number. Place of birth. Income from gambling. Mother’s maiden name. How much alimony you’ve paid. In all, the federal government wants to combine more than 310 categories of private information into one large database, in an effort led by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The executive order does not specify who would have access to this information, other than those “designated by the president or agency heads.”
Critics such as privacy groups, public employee unions and immigrant rights associations who have sued to block the group’s data access warn that so much accumulated information could be used for far more than detecting fraud — and would be illegal.
This assembled data, they say, would give the government too much power, including potentially to punish critics and police immigrants. It would create a national security vulnerability that could be targeted by hostile nation states. And it would break a longstanding covenant between the federal government and the U.S. public rooted in privacy laws — that Americans who share their personal data with official agencies can trust that it will be secured and used only for narrow purposes.
It remains to be seen whether the courts will ultimately permit the administration’s efforts, some of which appear to run counter to the Privacy Act and other laws.
The Privacy Act, enacted in 1974, prohibits agencies from disclosing personal information without your consent. Agencies also generally aren’t supposed to share data across the government for a purpose unrelated to why it was originally collected.
The New York Times
SOURCES
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/09/us/politics/trump-musk-data-access.html
