DOGE’s data “panopticon” pales compared to what’s next

If state governments surrender their datasets, there’s no telling how they could be abused

For the first time in American history, the federal government appears to be assembling a single, unified database on all its citizens.

As reported by Wired, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic, DOGE is building an unprecedented database on all Americans — a “panopticon” of data. By combining records on everything from Social Security to tax records to biometric data in a singular, AI-enabled hub, the government is creating a sophisticated tool for domestic surveillance, something that previously both parties would have considered unacceptable and illegal.

Still, this massive threat to privacy pales in comparison to what may be coming next.

While federal agencies hold a wide spectrum of information on citizens, state governments are the keepers of even more granular, specific data on Americans, including sensitive personal information. Data on everything from students’ education records to DMV files to voter history to sexual orientation and gender identity to data on abortion and other medical history — all of that is collected and managed at the state level, not in DC.

And now the White House aims to coerce states into handing over their data with the undeniable potential that it too will be added to DOGE’s growing, centralized database.

If states acquiesce to this pressure, there is almost no telling what this information about their citizens could eventually be used for. But once states hand over this information about their residents, there is no taking it back.

Why and how the federal government is demanding state data

In a March 20 executive order, the president demanded that:

Agency Heads shall take all necessary steps, to the maximum extent consistent with law, to ensure the Federal Government has unfettered access to comprehensive data from all State programs that receive Federal funding, including, as appropriate, data generated by those programs but maintained in third-party databases.

A huge proportion of state programs receive federal funding in some way. The White House wants states to hand over basically all such data or risk losing access to taxpayer funds.

This is already in motion as federal agencies act on the executive order’s sweeping mandate. For example, USDA is demanding access to state datasets on SNAP beneficiaries — including sensitive personal information such as dates of birth, personal addresses used, and Social Security numbers.

As NPR reported, not only has USDA made its demands of states directly, but it has pressured Fidelity Information Services, a vendor for SNAP electronic benefit transmission transactions, to turn over any of the relevant data it holds — effectively an end run around states. After the USDA published its FNS Data Sharing Guidance on May 6, FIS notified states that it would fully cooperate with USDA’s demands and gave states until May 14 to provide their written consent. The clock is now ticking for states who contract with FIS — and especially all of their residents who have participated in SNAP since 2020 whose sensitive data is under threat.

The cover story, unsurprisingly, is straight from the DOGE playbook – a combination of purported fraud detection and immigration enforcement. Many state leaders may be tempted to see the federal government’s demands as purely a fraud or immigration question, leaving everyone but undocumented immigrants unharmed. But the vast majority of state data pertains to citizens, not non-citizens.

There is no reason to believe the surveillance abuses would stop with undocumented immigrants.

The worst-case scenarios are dystopian

If states decide to acquiesce and share personally identifiable information about citizens with the federal government, they could eventually feed into some very plausible civil liberties abuses:

A registry to track people with autism or other disabilities. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. intends to create a national autism registry. The granularity of states’ medical data would certainly be an asset in making this plan a reality.

School-based targeting on political grounds. Other than some high school access for military recruitment, the federal government does not know where your kids go to school — but your state government does. In fact, it may even know details such as their classroom, their schedule, their disciplinary records, and their test scores. That information could easily be abused if politicized.

Location tracking data based on real-time license plate locations. Many states use automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) in law enforcement. Data pooling with the federal government would give the White House reliable information on specific real-time driver locations — not to mention all the other localized and individualized data held by local law enforcement.

Gender identity or sexual orientation lists. Currently, at least 10 states and the District of Columbia allow school districts to report a third gender category, and some school districts, like Denver Public Schools, collect that information on their own. If that data, which largely is collected on Americans under the age of 18, is added to federal government aggregation, it could be used to target specific communities.

Much more sophisticated voter suppression efforts. Because states, not the government, hold voter data, centralized or coordinated voter targeting and suppression efforts at the federal level would be difficult. That’s likely why getting access to state voter data has long been (and continues to be) a priority for President Trump.

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In the internet age, there are two additional risks — exponential factors that make surveillance-by-database efforts like this one even more dangerous than the sum of its parts.

First, the aggregation problem: While the federal government has long held significant amounts of data on citizens, that data crucially has never before been aggregated — and for good reason. Data silos are an important way to keep data secure while ensuring that specific information is used for only the specific purposes for which it is collected. In contrast, the more that government data is aggregated, the more insights and patterns can be pulled from it, especially in the era of AI. This in effect means that sensitive data is being used for a far broader range of purposes than it was collected for — and may even be put to work in a way that contradicts its original intended use.

(Trust me, you don’t want the federal government to have a massive master database with all sorts of information about you. Just think about how effectively advertisers target you based on your shopping preferences — now think of what that would mean if you could be targeted for your political ones.)

Second, the privacy risks: There’s a reason why in the wake of Watergate, Congress enacted the Privacy Act. As Senator Sam Ervin, the bill’s principal sponsor noted, “[i]f we have learned anything in this last year of Watergate, it is that there must be limits upon what the Government can know about each of its citizens.” Decades before the dawn of the Internet, Congress acted in recognition of a concerning emerging pattern in which the federal government was using data against citizens it deemed to be “subversive.”

Once data is released or leaked, it can’t be made private again. In this context, that dynamic could easily be weaponized — say, selective leaks of sensitive, personal information to retaliate against government critics. Or it could simply happen accidentally, as the young DOGE staffers attempt to build an unprecedented data infrastructure with few to no safeguards.

States can and should fight back

The threat of losing federal funding is serious — likely, state governments are alarmed by the prospect.

But they should not, indeed they cannot, allow themselves to be intimidated into selling out their citizens. These demands for data are almost certainly unconstitutional. Federalism and the Constitution should protect states from these sorts of incursions.

Moreover, there is plenty of bipartisan precedent here. Back in the first Trump Administration, when the Pence-Kobach Commission requested detailed, personally identifiable voter information from states, the pushback was swift and successful.

Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, a Republican, was unflinching in his response to the request for state data:

My reply would be: They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico, and Mississippi is a great state to launch from. Mississippi residents should celebrate Independence Day and our state’s right to protect the privacy of our citizens by conducting our own electoral processes.

Leaders in red and blue states today should reply similarly this time around. Otherwise, they’ll effectively have sold out their own citizens — maybe forever.