Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.
Lisa Rein, Hannah Natanson and Elizabeth Dwoskin at WP:Retirees and disabled people are facing chronic website outages and other access problems as they attempt to log in to their online Social Security accounts, even as they are being directed to do more of their business with the agency online.
The website has crashed repeatedly in recent weeks, with outages lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to almost a day, according to six current and former officials with knowledge of the issues. Even when the site is back online, many customers have not been able to sign in to their accounts — or have logged in only to find information missing. For others, access to the system has been slow, requiring repeated tries to get in.
The problems come as the Trump administration’s cost-cutting team, led by Elon Musk, has imposed a downsizing that’s led to 7,000 job cuts and is preparing to push out thousands more employees at an agency that serves 73 million Americans. The new demands from Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service include a 50 percent cut to the technology division responsible for the website and other electronic access.
Alexandra Ulmer, Marisa Taylor, Jeffrey Dastin and Alexandra Alper at Reuters:
The use of AI and Signal reinforces concerns among cybersecurity experts and government ethicists that DOGE is operating with limited transparency and that billionaire Musk or the Trump administration could use information gathered with AI to further their own interests, or to go after political targets.
Kathleen Clark, a government ethics expert at Washington University in St. Louis, said DOGE’s use of privacy-focused Signal adds to growing concerns over data security practices after top Trump administration officials came under fire last month for the mistaken inclusion of a journalist in a group chat about high-level planning for military operations in Yemen.
“If they’re using Signal and not backing up every message to federal files, then they are acting unlawfully,” she said.
Reuters’ interviews with nearly 20 people with knowledge of DOGE’s operations – and an examination of hundreds of pages of court documents from lawsuits challenging DOGE's access to data – highlight its unorthodox usage of AI and other technology in federal government operations.
At the Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, some EPA managers were told by Trump appointees that Musk’s team is rolling out AI to monitor workers, including looking for language in communications considered hostile to Trump or Musk, the two people said.
