President Donald Trump's close associate and billionaire benefactor Elon Musk is doing more than crippling the civil service and infiltrating government IT networks with his Department of Government Efficiency project, wrote Shane Harris for The Atlantic — he could be putting American spies, and the entire U.S. intelligence system, in jeopardy.
"To protect secrets, people who will be handling classified information or assuming positions of trust within intelligence agencies are vetted, often by law-enforcement agents, who interview friends and co-workers, review travel histories, and analyze financial information to determine whether someone might make an attractive recruit for a foreign intelligence service," wrote Harris. "Perhaps he’s in debt and would be willing to sell sensitive information. Or maybe she harbors some allegiance to a hostile country or cause and might be willing to spy for it. Looking for these red flags is counterintelligence 101, an imperfect, laborious, and invasive process that American presidents of both major parties have nevertheless accepted as the cost of doing intelligence business."
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However, the battalion of engineers Musk has brought in to work on his DOGE task force "do not appear to have been subjected to anything approaching rigorous scrutiny. President Donald Trump has also nominated to key national security positions people whose personal and financial histories contain at least caution flags. This deviation from past practice has created a new kind of counterintelligence predicament, officials and experts have told me. Rather than staying on high alert for hidden threats, the counterintelligence monitors have to worry about the people in charge."
Experts have sounded the alarm over this state of affairs, particularly given the lack of transparency behind how DOGE is using the data it has purloined from the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government's human resources department.
“The fact that people are getting access to classified and personally identifiable information who are not being vetted by our national-security system means it is more likely that there are going to be damaging leaks," presidential historian Tim Naftali told The Atlantic. “In his dark passion for retribution, Trump is making his own government, which is our government, more vulnerable to adversarial penetration.”
All of this is unfolding as the Senate voted to confirm former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard as Trump's director of national intelligence, despite her long history of pushing pro-Russia conspiracy theories, and as the CIA is offering buyouts to clean house at its workforce.
