The DOGE Chaos

      From the New York Times (emphasis added):

At the height of its power, the Department of Government Efficiency was operating out of headquarters that had become a haphazard scene of armed guards, makeshift bedrooms, children’s toys and windows obscured with garbage bags, according to a new report from Senate Democrats that accuses President Trump’s federal cost-cutting operation of putting Americans’ data security at risk. 

Staff members for Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, reported that young DOGE aides living and working on the sixth floor of the General Services Administration building sat at workstations eight or 10 laptops deep, where they were able to operate on Starlink networks that could have allowed them to work without being tracked. … 

In one instance, the report cites whistle-blower disclosures alleging that Jon Koval, a former DOGE employee at the Social Security Administration, asked about the possibility of uploading data to the cloud so that it could be retrieved by the Department of Homeland Security, but was rebuffed. One whistle-blower also said that data from Social Security’s numerical identification system, called Numident, did show up at the Homeland Security Department in a strange format, suggesting that it was not shared via a normal interagency process. …

    And from the report itself:

... An internal SSA risk assessment determined that the likelihood of a data breach with “catastrophic adverse effect” is between 35 and 65 percent. ...

During agency site visits, staff observed each DOGE workspace cordoned off with armed guards, providing an unusual layer of protection to their activities. Staff were not provided clear reasons why this was needed. Beyond security, DOGE workspaces were either completely or largely empty as their staff were able to work remotely at their discretion (despite strict in-office requirements for regular federal employees, in many cases without adequate office space).  ...