Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, is attempting to access a heavily guarded Internal Revenue Service system through his Department of Government Efficiency, according to new reporting from The Washington Post.
Under pressure from the White House, the IRS is preparing to give a DOGE team member entry into systems that contain detailed financial information about every taxpayer, business, and nonprofit in the country—including Social Security numbers, addresses, and banking details. Gavin Kliger, the 24-year-old DOGE employee, had not been granted access as of Sunday evening to the Integrated Data Retrieval System, which contains hoards of sensitive information.
The White House says DOGE is moving into the IRS to better “shine a light” on “waste, fraud and abuse,” according to spokesman Harrison Fields.
The Post’s Jacob Bogage and Jeff Stein report that Kliger “arrived unannounced” at IRS headquarters on Thursday and was named senior adviser to the acting commissioner. People familiar with the situation said that IRS officials were told to treat Kliger, and other DOGE officials, as contractors. However, a White House official claimed on Sunday that DOGE personnel at the IRS were full agency employees and not contractors.
The move comes as the IRS is poised to lay off thousands of employees—in the middle of tax season—as part of Trump’s orders to slash costs across federal agencies.
Kliger, one of Musk’s young hires at DOGE, has come under scrutiny for his digital footprint. According to Forbes, Kliger has reposted white nationalist Nick Fuentes, shared content from self-declared misogynist Andrew Tate, called Hillary Clinton a slur, and defended both Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer found guilty in the death of George Floyd, and Daniel Penny, who was recently acquitted on charges of killing Jordan Neely on a New York Subway in 2023.
A Trump administration official told the Post that DOGE’s activities will take place “legally and with the appropriate security clearances,” though, as Bogage and Stein note, security clearances are not sufficient credentials for access to taxpayer systems. According to official IRS procedures, access to this kind of sensitive tax information is governed by what is needed for tax administrators to do their jobs, not by national security.
When he was still in office, former president Joe Biden and his administration were in the process of a multibillion-dollar project aimed at reworking the IRS’s antiquated systems for processing tax data; that initiative has been complicated by budget cuts.
