READ: Is DOGE using AI to spy on you?

A bombshell whistleblower complaint hits D.C. — and stokes fears that the White House is building a "super database" of Americans' personal data.

This week, a government whistleblower made a stunning disclosure.

The data chief at the Social Security Administration revealed that Trump’s minions in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) basically did a “copy-paste” of the sensitive personal data of almost every single American — without proper oversight or security protocols — and put it in a cloud database for unknown purposes.

The data of more than 300 million people (including Social Security numbers, dates of birth, citizenship status, addresses, and even the names of our parents) was reportedly taken by DOGE and put in a digital vault, albeit with the door wide open.

What makes this revelation even more troubling is that it’s still unclear what the information is even being used for — and whether DOGE might have effectively created a “super database” that could be used to surveil U.S. citizens.

Indeed, the same DOGE team that took the Social Security data was also embedded across multiple federal agencies, and they demanded direct data pipelines from across the executive branch. Financial transactions. Government worker emails. Private contracts. Education data. They were reportedly putting all of it in the cloud and using AI tools to analyze it.

You can’t overstate the national security risks of consolidating this much information. As DHS chief of staff, I would have gone to jail for trying to do something like this.

Indeed, such a super database would be a gold mine for any foreign adversary or criminal group looking to steal from Americans. In the hands of a lawless White House, it could also become a potent instrument of political persecution.

We still don’t have answers to even the most basic questions, which astounds me.

What information was collected and from which agencies? Was it all centralized into one system? Who had access to it — and who has access now? What cybersecurity protections were applied, if any? Were there attempts to breach the system by foreign entities? What is the data being used for? What AI tools are being used to analyze the data? With what safeguards?

These are not abstract questions. They go to the very heart of our constitutional system and the line between government oversight and individual liberty.

A bombshell whistleblower disclosure raises questions about why DOGE is creating a super database of Americans’ info — and telling no one about it.

For years after 9/11, Americans debated whether we should create centralized surveillance capabilities capable of collecting massive amounts of personal information. I was deep inside those debates. Civil liberties advocates warned of a slippery slope toward Orwellian overreach. The Bush, Obama, and even early Trump administrations — despite their differences — all largely refrained from building a domestic data dragnet on this scale.

That debate appears to have ended without any public vote.

In a matter of months, and with virtually no congressional oversight, DOGE has seemingly done what previous presidents refused to do: created the closest thing the United States has ever had to a single, centralized, government-controlled database of its citizens’ most sensitive information … used artificial intelligence to mine it … and, evidently, exposed it to grave security vulnerabilities in the process.

We’re talking about the type of authoritarian data infrastructure that fiction writers warned about for a century or more. What’s more, this would have been almost impossible to do — at this speed — without violating a vast array of privacy laws, cybersecurity regulations, and civil liberties protections.

You don’t need much imagination to foresee how it could be misused.

The Trump administration has already launched a sweeping campaign of retribution against perceived enemies, targeting them over past infractions that seem to have conveniently and almost magically popped up since the president retook office.

We must consider the possibility that the DOGE database is being used — or at least could be used — to power that revenge campaign.

If that were the case, it would represent one of the most historic abuses of presidential power. Ever. And it would vindicate the worst fears of privacy advocates who, for decades, have warned that centralizing sensitive personal information in government hands could be turned inward and weaponized against the American people, particularly when supercharged by artificial intelligence.

Either way, we have a national security crisis on our hands. DOGE has been hoarding data from across the government into a reported super database and no one really knows why.

If Congress changes hands, this should be at the top of their investigative docket.