Democratic lawmakers question DOGE access to IRS and tax return information
By Ashley Murray for States Newsroom
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WASHINGTON — Two Democratic senators are demanding the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) answer questions on whether, and to what extent, billionaire Elon Musk’s personnel can access tax information, particularly during filing season.
Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Ron Wyden of Oregon wrote a letter Monday to IRS Acting Commissioner Douglas O’Donnell requesting immediate disclosure of the “full extent of the potential access to IRS systems and data” granted to the U.S. DOGE Service.
The U.S. DOGE Service, formerly the U.S. Digital Service, houses the 18-month Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project, established by President Donald Trump via executive order. The executive branch entity, which is not an actual federal department, is led by Trump’s top campaign donor, Musk.
The wealthy entrepreneur, who owns Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, Neurolink and X, has been dispatching a crew of software engineers to penetrate computer networks and data at numerous federal agencies.
Lawsuits filed by labor unions and former and current government employees have piled up in the wake of Musk’s dismantling of several agencies.
Access To IRS Systems
“According to public reports, the White House is pressuring the IRS to agree to a memorandum of understanding which would give software engineers working for Elon Musk at DOGE broad access to IRS systems, property and datasets which include the private tax return information of hundreds of millions of American citizens and businesses,” Warren and Wyden wrote.
The letter later continued: “No executive order requiring agency heads to provide DOGE personnel access to IRS records or information technology systems supersedes the federal tax code.”
Musk’s software engineers have “no right to hoover up taxpayer data and send that data back to any other part of the federal government and may be breaking the law if they are doing so,” the senators said.
States Newsroom requested a copy of the memorandum the senators referred to in the letter, but the White House did not provide it.
A White House spokesperson defended Musk’s access in a written statement. “Waste, fraud, and abuse have been deeply entrenched in our broken system for far too long. It takes direct access to the system to identify and fix it,” said Harrison Fields, principal deputy press secretary.
“DOGE will continue to shine a light on the fraud they uncover as the American people deserve to know what their government has been spending their hard earned tax dollars on,” he said.
The Department of Treasury and IRS did not respond to an email or a voicemail message.
Lawsuit Filed
Two large unions and two advocacy groups representing small business owners and taxpayers sued the IRS, Treasury and DOGE late Monday, alleging the Trump administration and DOGE are violating several federal privacy laws.
The Center for Taxpayer Rights, Main Street Alliance, the National Federation of Federal Employees and Communications Workers of America filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
The organizations, represented by the legal advocacy group Democracy Forward, requested the court, among other actions, to block the “wrongful provision of access, inspection, and disclosure of return information and other personal information in the IRS system to members of DOGE.”
The case has been assigned to Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who was appointed by former President Bill Clinton in 1997.
Giving our private information to Co-President Musk (aka, the Space Nazi) and his group of young hackers? Gee, what could go wrong?