'Pitchforks and torches': Farmers in peril after DOGE worms into secret dataset

Elon Musk may have left the federal government, but his lackeys could make ruinous changes to government payments and loans that farmers and ranchers rely on to survive.

A source working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture provided evidence to NPR showing an individual from the DOGE team had high-level access to the National Payment Service, in violation of normal protocols, that allows them to view and modify data entries inside the system, gain access to sensitive personal information and even cancel loans.

"When we talk about farm loan application records, there is no more personal information anywhere than in that database," said former USDA senior official Scott Marlow. "The farmer's entire financial life and the life of their kids and their family, every time they've missed a payment, every time they've had a hard time, every time they've gotten in financial trouble … it's there."

It's not clear whether staffers that had worked for DOGE are now full-time employees of the USDA, where they're now internally known as the as the Efficiency Team or E team, but agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins has said she would give DOGE staffers "full access and transparency," in apparent violation of the agency's longtime policies around data and privacy.

"Putting aside the serious privacy concerns, we've also seen what happens when DOGE gets its hands on federal assistance programs," said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR). "Funding gets cut off altogether with no warning or it comes in months too late. Letting DOGE staff — who have zero expertise in [agriculture] — call the shots on who gets a financial lifeline is an outright attack on rural America."

Jordan Wick, a former software engineer for the self-driving car company Waymo, has been identified by the media and court documents as a DOGE staffer with high-level access to the National Payment Service system giving him the ability to deny loans outright cancel payments for various subsidies, such as emergency or disaster assistance and incentives for conservation practices.

The payment system is housed at the Farm Service Agency (FSA), which publishes some information about farms and ranches that receive government subsidies, but the data housed inside the National Payment Service system is far more detailed and sensitive than what is made publicly available.

"Basically, what's in the [National Payment Service system] is everything," said Marlow, who served as the deputy FSA administrator for farm programs under Joe Biden. "I cannot understate the emphasis and the seriousness with which USDA had historically taken the handling of private information."

The dataset could include information that could be used to target individuals for their race or immigration status, experts told NPR, and potentially expose business secrets or other sensitive information about contracts.

"USDA has a lot of data that people should be very concerned about protecting for a lot of different reasons," said one current USDA employee on the condition of anonymity. "Farmers' financial and production data should be protected at all costs, for privacy reasons and because of competition. If you got access to disaster payments, you would be able to layer a lot of data and arrive at a lot of valuable conclusions about productivity and U.S. farmland, futures markets, and commodity prices. You can hedge a lot of bets and make a lot of money if you know what's happening with U.S. agriculture."

DOGE could potentially combine that sensitive data with other government information, including Internal Revenue Service and Social Security records, to create detailed dossiers about individual farms and ranchers, as well as their personal and business networks and the people they employ.

"If [the Biden] administration had said, we're going to share all your information with somebody that has access to everything across the federal government, it would probably have resulted in people with pitchforks and torches outside my office," said Zach Ducheneaux, former administrator of the FSA and a South Dakota rancher.

Some producers are already struggling due to disruptions caused by Trump administration policies, and any disruptions to the National Payment System could disrupt entire growing seasons if a farmer is delayed from planting crops by "even a day," Ducheneaux said.

"That [could've] been the one good day to get the crops in," he said, "and now you get a week and a half of rain. You're 10 growing days behind. We're behind the curve that actually impacts outcomes in the future. It's why these timely decisions are so critical."