Elon Musk’s DOGE goons have been using AI to secretly spy on government agencies to find people critical of the president and his agenda, Reuters reports.
Citing two anonymous employees within the Environmental Protection Agency, the outlet reported that Trump-appointed officials have been utilizing Musk’s AI chatbot Grok and the messaging app Signal to weed out employees whose work “did not align with the administration’s mission.”
Communications apps and software such as Microsoft Teams are among those reportedly monitored by DOGE. “We have been told they are looking for anti-Trump or anti-Musk language,” a source familiar with the EPA told Reuters, while a manager at the agency told employees: “Be careful what you say, what you type and what you do.”
The EPA is among the agencies under the heaviest scrutiny from Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency, and 600 of its employees have been placed on leave since January. Trump administration officials have announced plans to slash up to 65 percent of the EPA’s budget, which could lead to even more layoffs.
Critics have accused DOGE of using staffing cuts to purge the government of non-partisan employees and replace them with loyalists who will turn a blind eye to corruption, and the agency has come under fire from both Democrats and Republicans for its lack of transparency.
Reached for comment by the Daily Beast, an EPA spokesperson said: “Reuters’ reporting is categorically false; and they are well aware as they published that the ‘news’ organization was not able to independently verify any of the outlandish accusations. EPA is not monitoring or transcribing phone calls, meetings, or calendar entries.”
DOGE has operated largely in secrecy since its formation, and the Trump administration has argued that due to its status as an arm of the Executive Office of the President, it is exempt from record-keeping laws.
Reuters reports that DOGE employees are using this veil of secrecy to commit ethical violations and circumnavigate data security laws. As a special government employee, Musk is prohibited from using his position to benefit himself or his companies, and he has faced accusations that by embedding his AI bot in government systems he can harvest data that can be used to give his companies a commercial advantage.
Prior to President Donald Trump’s election last year, an insider claimed Musk had floated the idea of using his Grok AI to replace federal workers. “The concept was that through taking the government data that they could build the most dynamic AI system ever,” the source told Reuters, adding that AI could then “do the work” of government employees.
The DOGE team’s alleged use of the commercial messaging app Signal, which auto-deletes messages after a certain amount of time, may also be a violation of federal law. The app, which was recently at the center of a scandal in which a journalist was added to a top-secret group of White House officials, obstructs Freedom of Information laws if used for official government business, a lawsuit alleges.
Other methods used by DOGE to bypass federal record-keeping include using Google Docs to both work and communicate on a project simultaneously instead of circulating multiple drafts through official channels, according to a Reuters source briefed by the government.
“There’s multiple people in one Google Doc editing things simultaneously,” the source told the outlet, saying the method was partly how DOGE managed to work so quickly and avoid supervision.
A federal lawsuit against the government recently accused the Trump administration of violating the Privacy Act by handing over sensitive data from the Department of Education beyond its intended use. Plaintiffs argued DOGE had accessed the personal information of tens of millions of Americans without their consent, including people’s income and asset information, Social Security numbers, birth dates, home addresses, and marital and citizenship status, and had used the information “for purposes of destroying” the Education Department, the AP reported.
On March 10, a federal judge ordered DOGE to hand over its records to ethics watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington after it sued the department for access to its documents under federal freedom of information laws. As of Monday, the group has received no documents, according to Reuters.
An EPA spokesperson told the Daily Beast, “The agency is not using AI as it makes personnel decisions in concert with DOGE. The agency is however, looking at AI to better optimize agency functions and administrative efficiencies.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the DOGE and White House for comment.
