Stephanie K. Pell, Josie Stewart, and Brooke Tanner, Brookings; Privacy under siege: DOGE’s one big, beautiful database
"The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), according to reporting in the Washington Post, recently set its sights on creating “a single centralized [government] database” that would enable broad access across government agencies to vast amounts of information currently collected and held by individual federal agencies.
Government data aggregation and unification on this scale is antithetical to the purpose-driven requirements for data sharing among government agencies that lie at the heart of the Privacy Act, a 1974 law passed in the aftermath of Watergate and the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) scandals."