The information security presidency

The unelected president and his junior high Ayn Rand Appreciation Society continues to just illegally seize access to a bunch of sensitive records:

Representatives of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have been working at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, where they have gotten access to key payment and contracting systems, according to people familiar with the matter.

The DOGE representatives have been on site at the agency’s offices this week, the people said, and they are looking at the systems’ technology as well as the spending that flows through them, with a focus on pinpointing what they consider fraud or waste. DOGE representatives are also examining the agency’s organizational design and how it is staffed, the people added.

White House and DOGE officials didn’t comment. Musk, on his X platform, posted: “Yeah, this is where the big money fraud is happening,” referring to the Medicare agency in a repost of another user who referenced the Journal’s reporting.

Musk’s allies have moved swiftly to exert control over vast swaths of the U.S. government, including at the Treasury Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. They have demanded access to sensitive information at federal agencies and laid out plans to block spending they deem excessive.

CMS in particular is a highly politically and economically sensitive agency. It is the nerve center of much of the nation’s complex healthcare economy, with outlays of about $1.5 trillion in fiscal 2024, or about 22% of the federal total. With around 6,710 employees, it oversees Medicare, the health coverage program for older and disabled Americans and Medicaid, for lower-income enrollees, among other areas. Many veteran CMS staffers have worked there for decades.

You may dimly recall, and this blog may have mentioned on one or two occasions, that Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 largely because the media was consumingly obsessed with the hypothetical possibility that the Democratic candidate’s imperfect compliance with information security best practices might result in data breaches. So you can only imagine the wall-to-wall, five alarm fire coverage the systematic takeover of a bunch of private federal data by a billionaire boy-king must be generating:

the federal government is being disemboweled and you’d never know it.

[image or embed]— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social) February 4, 2025 at 5:32 AM

I’m beginning to think — and bear with me here — that the coverage priorities of the 2016 election were not determined entirely in good faith.