Elon Musk's henchmen have reportedly installed a commercial server to control federal databases that contain Social Security numbers and other highly sensitive personal information.
The tech billionaire installed his associates — some of them fresh out of high school — in the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), where they have gained unprecedented access to federal human resources databases containing sensitive personal information for millions of federal workers, sources in the department told the website Musk Watch.
"According to two members of OPM staff with direct knowledge, the Musk team running OPM has the ability to extract information from databases that store medical histories, personally identifiable information, workplace evaluations, and other private data," wrote investigative reporters Caleb Ecarma and Judd Legum. "The arrangement presents acute privacy and security risks, one of the OPM staffers said."
The government outsiders were identified as University of California Berkeley student Akash Bobba, a software engineer who graduated high school less than three years ago and interned at Meta and Palantir, and Edward Coristine, another 2022 high school graduate and former software engineering intern at Musk’s Neuralink.
Musk also installed former xAI employee Amanda Scales as the OPM's new chief of staff, and he placed in the department longtime SpaceX employee Brian Bjelde, former Twitter engineer Gavin Kliger and former Boring Company software engineer Riccardo Biasini.
The civil servants in charge of the office's information technology services were instructed new chief information officer Greg Hogan, who took over after Donald Trump's inauguration, to grant full access – including "code read and write permissions" – to Musk's associates, according to the OPM staffers.
“They have access to the code itself, which means they can make updates to anything that they want,” the staffer said.
Musk's associates now have access to federal government’s official hiring site USAJOBS and OPM’s Enterprise Human Resources Integration (EHRI) system, as well as USA Staffing, USA Performance and employee health care website HI, which together store Social Security numbers, home addresses, employment records, birthdates, salaries, private health information, job description and disciplinary actions.
“They’re looking through all the position descriptions… to remove folks,” said one OPM staffer. “This is how they found all these DEI offices and had them removed — [by] reviewing position description level data."
"The health insurance one scares me because it's HIPAA [protected] information, but they have access to all this stuff,” the staffer added.
Staffers expressed concern about the safety of that private information because a new server used to control those highly sensitive databases was described as a piece of commercial hardware that did not undergo the legally required Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) to ensure its invulnerability.
"This application and corresponding hardware are illegally operating,” a staffer said.
The server is set up in a conference room where Musk's youthful associates have set up their command center, and OPM staffers say outsiders have already gained access to some of the massive email lists OPM created as part of Musk's effort to convince federal employees to resign.
“What [Musk is] doing will put so many government employees at risk,” said a former OPM director. “It’s not at all what the office is intended for. I just can’t believe what I’m seeing.”