You know vaguely, if you're like me, about the DOGEboys who have been uploading huge amounts of data from the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, and voter data from some states, and dumping it all into a "data lake" of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Servces at the Department of Homeland Security, where they keep records of interactions between immigrants and the USCIS, information that agencies like ICE, if they wanted to commit serious violations of the governments's privacy rules, could put together and use (for one thing) to geolocate undocumented immigrants and hunt them down, and you've probably heard vaguely about this week's whistleblower complaint from Charles Borges, chief information officer of the SSA, documenting how Social Security data had been illegally uploaded to a cloud server where it could possibly be hacked by who knows what kind of reprobates, though not necessarily any more malign than the Boys who are seemingly authorized to collect it.
Borges has now resigned, and it was his letter that got my attention; it was an "involuntary resignation", he said:
After reporting internally to management and externally to regulators serious data security and integrity concerns impacting our citizens' most sensitive personal data, I have suffered exclusion, isolation, internal strife, and a culture of fear, creating a hostile work environment and making work conditions intolerable....I have been made aware of several projects and incidents which may constitute violations of federal statutes or regulations, involve the potential safety and security of high value data assets in the cloud, possibly provided unauthorized or inappropriate access to agency enterprise data storage solutions, and may involve unauthorized data exchange with other agencies. As these events evolved, newly installed leadership in IT and executive offices created a culture of panic and dread, with minimal information sharing, frequent discussions on employee termination, and general organizational dysfunction. Executives and employees are afraid to share information or concerns on questionable activities for fear of retribution or termination, and repeated requests by me for visibility into these events have been rebuffed or ignored by agency leadership, with some employees directed not to reply to my queries.
We've seen bunches of resignation letters showing up on social media in recent years, in a pretty regular format ("it has been my honor..."). I've never seen anything like this before. This is the trauma Christian nationalist Russell Vought said last year he wanted to inflict on "the bureaucrats"
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in a video revealed by ProPublica and the research group Documented in October. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma.”
and which he is now overseeing as head of the Office of Management and Budget and Elon Musk's replacement as unofficial leader of DOGE; he and the Boys are the newly installed leadership to which the letter refers, along with whoever he has managed to hire in the quest formerly known as Schedule F to replace qualified civil servants with certified Trump loyalists—
The Trump administration plan includes new essay questions that require job applicants for any GS-5 position or higher to explain how they would implement Trump’s policy priorities, which federal workers fear will lead to further politicization of hiring.“How would you help advance the President’s Executive Orders and policy priorities in this role?” asks one prompt. “Identify one or two relevant Executive Orders or policy initiatives that are significant to you, and explain how you would help implement them if hired.”
—People like
Leland Dudek, whom Trump installed as SSA commissioner earlier this month after the agency's former head resigned following a clash with Elon Musk's deputies over their attempts to access highly sensitive personal data. At the time he was elevated to the helm of SSA, Dudek was under investigation for allegedly sharing information with Musk's team improperly.
or Nick Perrine, the SSA spokesman, who comes to the agency from 13 years as director of executive operations of the National Rifle Association (according to his LinkedIn page), and whose wife Erin was Trump's 2020 press communications director (the two of them met working on Ron Johnson's 2010 Senate campaign), and who told Wired, on the subject of the whistleblower report,
that the data Borges’ complaint references is “walled off from the internet.”
“SSA stores all personal data in secure environments that have robust safeguards in place to protect vital information,” Perrine said. “The data referenced in the complaint is stored in a long-standing environment used by SSA and walled off from the internet. High-level career SSA officials have administrative access to this system with oversight by SSA’s information security team.”
Wired doesn't say whether they think you can believe him or not. It's an Amazon Web Services server, controlled by SSA. Did I mention that the main Dogeboy involved with the project is Mr. Edward "Big Balls" Coristine?
Anyway this has been a little closeup of how Project 2025 is working so far at one agency, pretty much as planned. A lot of the government is like this now, obviously the Justice Department, and the Department of Defense War, and the Directory of National Intelligence, and the Department of Education, and the Department of Health and Human Services is so much worse, if that's humanly possible.
| Nest of vipers, 1896 engraving by Science Photo Library. |
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