MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow pulled back the curtain on what she said is really behind the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency’s efforts to access sensitive government databases containing the personal information of millions of Americans.
The primetime host on her show Tuesday walked viewers through the various actions the Trump administration has taken at the request of DOGE – an agency which she called “bizarre” and “very mysterious.”
“Now we're getting to what I think of as the really heavy part of it – the really heavy part of this authoritarian project – because some of the stuff that they have been doing that has seemed inexplicable is starting to become explicable, is starting to become understandable.”
Maddow said after four months of observing DOGE as Musk and his team gain access to data inside government agencies, “it's not a pointless rummaging that they are doing there.”
“It’s not just rummaging around in there and flipping switches and seeing what breaks. Part of what is now emerging is that they've been in these government systems because they're trying to use the government to hurt people as much as they can,” the MSNBC host said Tuesday.
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Maddow came prepared with examples.
She first told viewers that it has become clear that DOGE went after government information on international students “so they could target individual international students to snatch them off the street and arrest them and throw them in immigration prisons.”
The same nefarious DOGE-led searches for information against immigrants took place inside the IRS and Department of Treasury, Maddow said.
She also flagged actions conducted by DOGE at the Social Security Administration “because they have taught themselves that one way you can really destroy people's lives in this country is if you take the names of living people and declare them dead inside the Social Security Administration.”
The host’s speculation left her to conclude: “As always, it is most helpful to watch what they do and not what they say.”
