In the early hours of Saturday, 22 February 2025, this email arrived in the inboxes of every US federal employee:
From: HR hr@opm.gov
Sent: Saturday, February 22, 2025
Subject: What did you do last week?
Importance: High
Please reply to this email with about 5 bullet points describing what you accomplished last week, and cc your manager. Do not send any classified information, links, or attachments. The deadline is this Monday at 11:59 p.m. EST.
When Kathleen Walters saw the email that Saturday night, she already had too much going on. The main thing was finding out whether a lump in her breast that her doctor had just found was a tumour. Half of her known blood relatives had died of cancer, and she was now 52. She needed to understand what the lump meant.
Her work life was harder to sum up in a list. For one thing, the details of her job at any given moment could not legally be shared with others, as she would have been the first to point out. She was the chief privacy officer at the Internal Revenue Service. She managed a staff of 650 people whose job was to stop any of the 100,000 IRS employees from losing, leaking, or even glancing at—unless they had permission—any of the 266 million tax returns they were processing from the previous year. “One hundred thousand people is a big-sized town,” Kathleen said. “In any big-sized town, you have some crazy people. I could easily see someone writing, ‘This weekend I audited Beyoncé.'”
Whoever sent this email asking her to list five things she had done at work was now demanding that all these people inside the IRS share information that, in many cases, should never be shared. She thought it was crazy.
She replied quickly and vaguely with five things she had done the previous week, all the while feeling sure no one would ever read what she wrote. Her phone was already blowing up with questions from her subordinates—a few of whom said their replies were bouncing back with a “mailbox is full” notice. Now she had to sit and think about how to limit the damage that might be caused by 100,000 IRS employees thinking they would lose their jobs if they didn’t give a detailed answer about what they had done during their work week. A significant number risked going to jail if they described what they did in an email. It was a crime for an IRS employee even to acknowledge that a specific person had or had not filed a tax return. “People don’t understand what the IRS does,” Kathleen said.
The email came as a surprise, but then the IRS was suddenly full of surprises. Nine days earlier, on Thursday, 13 February, the first Doge person showed up in the lobby without warning, and security called Traci DiMartini, who ran the IRS’s human capital department. There’s a kid down here who says he needs to get into the building, he said. The kid’s name was Gavin Kliger.
“If I had a kid who behaved the way he does, I’d slap the shit out of him,” Traci said—but then Traci was from Philadelphia.
Gavin Kliger. Photograph: Courtesy of CDAO
Traci called her counterpart at the Treasury Department, since the IRS sits inside Treasury, and Treasury always cleared any new political appointees; Treasury had no record of anyone named Gavin Kliger. Traci then called Tim Curry at the Office of Personnel Management—but he had no idea what was going on. Finally, she called security and asked them to escort the young man to her office.
Gavin Kliger came with a chip on his shoulder, it seemed to Traci. He offered not even the faintest smile or the most fleeting eye contact. Dressed in black from hoodie to sneakers, he was brusque to the point of rudeness. He looked, and was, just a few years out of college. Eyes on the floor, he explained to Traci that he had come to sort out the problems inside the IRS and root out the fraud. “That’s a big job!” she said.
Anyone who worked at theThe IRS knew it had problems, but fraud wasn’t one of them. Its technology infrastructure was a case study in government dysfunction, but its ethical standards were solid. Like all federal employees, its staff couldn’t accept more than a free cup of coffee from anyone who might want something from the agency.
Gavin Kliger, on the other hand, struck Traci as a problem. He had somehow gotten his hands on badges that gave him access to an absurd number of government buildings. His backpack was stuffed with government-issued phones and at least four laptops—and now he was insisting that Traci give him an IRS phone and laptop. He also demanded his own IRS email address, access to computer systems containing all taxpayer information, and a meeting with the acting IRS commissioner, Doug O’Donnell. As Gavin sat there, Traci called Treasury again. “That guy you said didn’t exist is now sitting in my office. What do you want me to do with him?”
The Treasury contact went away, then came back and said Gavin Kliger had been hired three weeks earlier by the Office of Personnel Management and was attached to Doge—whatever that meant.
In her nine years running human capital departments at various federal agencies, Traci had never seen a new political appointee just show up in the lobby and demand access to computer systems. “None of this is normal,” she said, “but we’re still trying to be nice.” She explained the IRS rules to Gavin: before anyone could work inside the building, they had to pass a tax audit.
“I don’t need to do that,” he said.
“Yes, you do,” she replied.
“No, I don’t,” he said.
“Yes, you do,” she replied.
They went back and forth like that for a while until Gavin finally gave in. Traci then explained that after he passed the audit, he’d need to sit through the mandatory presentations on ethics and taxpayer information. Gavin thought the IRS should just let him in. “He wanted access to our systems immediately,” said Traci.
Traci’s next call, at 6:30 that Thursday evening, was to Kathleen, to arrange for her to brief Gavin on data privacy laws and to warn her that the experience might not be entirely pleasant. “If I had a kid who behaved the way he does, I’d slap the shit out of him,” Traci said—but then Traci was from Philadelphia. She was always telling Kathleen she should try a little less hard to see the best in others.
By then word of Doge’s arrival at the IRS had spread, and Kathleen had read about them. Anyone who Googled Gavin’s name found more than usually came up about any given young Doge staffer. He’d grown up in southern California, where he was into Asian martial arts and the high school marching band, then went on to the University of California at Berkeley. After graduating in 2020 with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science, he took a job as a programmer at Databricks. He’d also been active on X, where he’d retweeted with apparent approval posts from white nationalists Steve Laws and Nick Fuentes. “One of Musk’s few Doge lieutenants who has embraced the spotlight,” Forbes wrote of him. Most of the other Muskrats scrubbed their internet presence. Gavin had written Substack pieces defending two Trump nominees, Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth. He’d deleted his X posts, but the Forbes writer John Hyatt had found a research tool, Web.archive, to revive and analyze them. “What emerges is a portrait of an internet edgelord and Musk and Trump superfan who has disdain for government spending, illegal immigrants, and who enjoys the odd racist and ableist joke,” he wrote.
By the time Traci called her, Kathleen was gone for the weekend and 50 miles away from the IRS bbuilding: she needed to find someone else to handle Gavin’s briefing. Kathleen was white; the two women directly below her were Black. “They’d both already read about him and were both already uncomfortable,” Kathleen said. Phyllis Grimes, her deputy, agreed to take the hit.
Phyllis, who loved working for Kathleen and saw taking hits as part of her job, never told her how this one had felt. She knew Gavin had expressed enthusiasm for white nationalists, and he likely knew that she knew. She tried to break the ice by walking in with her hand extended; Gavin stared at it and refused to shake it, though he had shaken the hands of the white men who had offered theirs. “He was kind of cool towards me,” Phyllis said. Before she could even start the briefing, he said, You know, I’ve heard these rules before at other agencies. Yes, she said, but these rules are different, because no other agency is governed by this privacy law, and this law can get you thrown in jail very quickly. As she walked him through the basics – how you can’t use your personal phone for business, how if you happen to so much as glimpse a form 1040 with someone’s name on it you must avert your eyes – Gavin played on his phone. “He’s multitasking right in front of me, typing and texting,” Phyllis said. “It was, here’s a routine that I must endure.”
It fell to Kathleen to draft the five-page agreement required by law for Gavin Kliger to be let inside the IRS building on Monday morning, 17 February. The memo that she wrote over the weekend, and that he signed, gave him access to some of the systems but, explicitly, none that contained taxpayer information.
Traci set him up in a conference room with an assistant at the beginning of the week. “People started getting these calls,” Kathleen said. “It was like getting the call from the principal’s office. ‘Gavin wants to see you.'”
Doge had its own private structure in addition to its official one. Officially, President Trump created Doge with an executive order on his first day in office. The president doesn’t have the authority to create or to fund an executive agency, however. Congress does. The Trump administration dodged that problem by taking an office inside the White House created during the second Obama term, the US Digital Service, kicking out the people inside and renaming it the Department of Government Efficiency. The US Digital Service had been given the power to hire talent from the tech sector without going through the usual slow federal hiring process. This now ensured that Doge could hire whomever it wanted without any questions being asked, and make it sound official. In effect, all that Doge had done was create a corpse for itself to occupy.
The zombie killed off the spirit of the original life form. Real Doge had nothing to do with Official Doge or the former US Digital Service or any other government body. Real Doge was more like Elon Musk’s pop-up restaurant. “None of us ever signed a piece of paper saying that we were in Doge,” said one Doge insider. The people who joined either worked for one of Musk’s companies, or knew someone who did, or knew someone who knew someone who did. To be truly a member of Doge was to be included in the group Signal chat and granted access to the sleeping quarters on the sixth floor of the General Services Administration (GSA).
Musk’s plan was: once you’ve terrified the employees, fire them in huge numbers. If it turns out you screwed up and fired the wrong people, hire some of them back.
Official Doge employed maybe 10 guys in their 40s and 50s who wore suits and could sort of pass as ordinary political appointees, but none had access to the sixth floor at GSA. “The older guys in the suits were not there to take risks or blow things up,” said one Doge insider. It was hard toNo one in the older Doge crowd did much of anything except step aside for the young guys who showed up with explosives. Most of Doge’s inner circle just wanted to be near Elon Musk. “It was, Elon is my prophet, and I worship the ground he walks on,” one older Doge insider said.
As a Doge member, you could get away with saying—or having said—almost anything. What you couldn’t say was that the government actually kind of worked. Or, if it didn’t work, why it didn’t work. This new game rewarded speed, not understanding. The plan was the same one Musk had carried out two years earlier at Twitter: make sweeping claims about the incompetence and dishonesty of the people working there before you know much about them. Once you’ve terrified the employees, fire them in huge numbers. If it turns out you screwed up and fired the wrong people, hire some of them back.
The people who rallied to the cause and felt qualified to carry out Elon Musk’s vision for the federal government shared certain qualities. They were mostly young white males. They were mostly from upper-middle-class or wealthy families. Most knew or pretended to know how to program a computer. Not all of them, but enough to form a pattern, had been rejected from the most selective colleges and universities and ended up feeling they’d been screwed by the admissions process. They landed at Penn instead of Princeton, or the University of Nebraska instead of Harvard, with a grievance that became part of the foundation of their politics. They thought of themselves as the smartest people in the room and couldn’t understand why the rest of the room didn’t just stand up and cheer. In Washington they borrowed their status and sense of superiority from Elon Musk. They also seemed to share his pleasure in the idea of people being afraid of them.
Even among the young men sleeping inside the GSA, Gavin was regarded as a force. “Wherever he went, entropy went through the roof,” one said. Just weeks into their new jobs as destroyers of government institutions, the Muskrats had given Gavin Kliger a nickname: the Chaos Agent.
Another surprising email landed in Kathleen’s inbox on 28 February. It was Friday night. “I don’t know why everything always happened on a Friday night,” she said. She’d taken her daughter for pizza and wasn’t supposed to be checking her phone when she spotted the emails. The first one she read had been sent at 6:34pm by a colleague in the IRS legal department. “Melanie requested a data pull,” it read. “It feels not quite kosher.”
Exactly 64 minutes earlier, at 5:30pm, Doug O’Donnell, the acting IRS commissioner, had left his post. O’Donnell’s successor was to be Melanie Krause, until then chief operating officer, who had been installed as acting IRS commissioner by Treasury secretary Scott Bessent. Like Kathleen, Melanie was a career civil servant, though 13 years younger. Kathleen had considered her a friend. “She was really smart, and I thought she meant well,” said Kathleen. “She wasn’t a mean person.” They were both working moms, and Melanie liked to share, and share in, the details of the difficulties. Now she’d apparently told the IRS research department to share taxpayer data. With whom, and for what purpose, became clear in the second email, which came from the IRS director of data management:
Kathleen,
DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] has requested if we could find addresses for 700,000 names of likely undocumented immigrants.
1. Do we have legal authority to use the tax return filing data for this purpose?
2. If the answer to Question 1 is yes, then my second question is related to a file we receive from the Social Security Administration (SSA) that contains Date of Birth (DOB), Date of Death (DOD), Gender, Citizenship, and Name Control Information for all issued Social Security Numbers (SSN). Would our MOU allow us to use this perPerhaps in conjunction with tax return data for this purpose? While it is likely that the use of SSA data is also needed, the technical feasibility of producing a reliable outcome is unknown but likely very low. Thanks.
Kathleen read the first numbered paragraph and stopped reading. The request was plainly illegal. The IRS couldn’t just hand over great piles of taxpayer information to the Department of Homeland Security or any other agency without a change in federal privacy law. Changing the law was not trivial. She knew that because she’d just done it – to allow the IRS to share taxpayer data with state child support enforcement agencies. The states wanted to know if former spouses who were failing to pay child support in fact did not have the income to do so – and the IRS alone could answer the question. What Kathleen had asked for in that case could not have been less controversial. Basically no one in American politics was willing to come out against child support enforcement, and the change to the federal law had passed Congress in December 2024 with almost no dissent. Yet it had taken 18 months to get it done, with endless meetings on Capitol Hill and the close involvement of the IRS commissioner and the secretary of health and human services. “Doge couldn’t imagine 18 months,” she said. “Doge didn’t have 18 months. Their whole thing was, If you can’t do it legally, we’ll find some way to do it illegally.”
This, Kathleen realised, is how they could grab taxpayer data illegally. By doing it on a Friday night. Using a woman, Melanie Krause, about to take over as acting commissioner, after a 10-minute meeting between her and Scott Bessent. Without informing the executive charged with protecting the information. “She went around me because she knew what my answer is,” said Kathleen.
The violation ran deeper than the law. The specific dataset sought by DHS was in a silo reserved for the tax returns filed by people without social security numbers. The IRS had created the so-called Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (Itin) back in 1996 as a mechanism for undocumented workers and other non-citizens who lacked social security numbers to file a return and pay taxes.
The programme had been a huge success. The IRS had collected hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes through it. Undocumented workers had been able to demonstrate their commitment to the country, and ease their path to citizenship, by paying more than their fair share. (They were still excluded from most federal benefits.) Now DHS wanted their private data, and it wasn’t hard for Kathleen or anyone else at the IRS to see why. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) had gone hunting undocumented workers but lacked reliable home addresses for many of them. The tax returns told you where roughly 7 million of them might be found.
Donald Trump during the signing of an executive order implementing Doge’s ‘workforce optimization initiative’, in February 2025. Photograph: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
The second Trump administration had a gift for creating such moments. It was as if all at once all these characters in a grand masked ball were forced to remove their disguises and reveal their identities. In the Great Unmasking, the nation’s leading law firms, led by Paul, Weiss, would cave to what amounted to Trump’s blackmail demands to avoid being shut out of federal business. The nation’s research universities, led by Columbia, would change their internal policies and even pay fines to avoid losing federal dollars.
The revealing moments in the civil service were lonelier. They occurred inside people’s hearts and minds, and seldom leaked to the press. After his arrival at the IRS, one of Gavin Kliger’s first acts had been to demand that the agency fire its 6,700 probationary workers, who had yet to be granted civil service protection. By law they could be fired only for poor performance. Gavin had asked Traci DiMartini, in her capacity as head of human resources, to agree to put her name on an email to the mostly young employees telling them that they had failed at their jobs. The Doge people played this trick often. They would use or try to use civil servants as a kind of ventriloquist dummy so that they, the Doge workers, could keep their names off official documents. But Traci took one look at the email, saw it was plainly a lie, and refused to have anything to do with it. The price of that single act of resistance was her job. Gavin didn’t have the authority to fire Traci, but his new acting commissioner did. “He asked Melanie to fire Traci, and Melanie did it,” said Kathleen. Melanie Krause’s predecessor, Doug O’Donnell, had been pushed out by Doge after he, too, refused to send the dishonest email to the IRS’s 6,700 probationary workers. When a Doge guy at Treasury called with the order, O’Donnell, who had worked for the agency for 38 years, said he wanted to sleep on it – then had trouble sleeping. “He was struggling with this notion of sending the termination emails with this false justification for the termination,” said a person in whom O’Donnell confided. The next day, he refused to send the email, and the Doge guy said something like, “Well, let me be the first to congratulate you on your retirement.” Melanie had been installed precisely because she was proving to Doge that she was more pliable. Standing outside the pizza place with her daughter in late February, Kathleen called Melanie. Ever since Melanie had arrived, in the fall of 2021, she had sought Kathleen’s advice. There had been stretches when they met daily. Kathleen just sort of assumed that, faced with a difficult choice, Melanie would do what Kathleen herself would do. “I don’t really get outraged,” said Kathleen. “But I think people need to be confronted when they have done something inappropriate.” Melanie, what are you doing? she asked. We already have legal opinions about this, and it is obviously against the law. I didn’t tell them to do it, said Melanie. I told them to think about how to do it – if it was legal. But she hadn’t asked anyone to find out if it was legal to send Ice the home addresses of 700,000 undocumented workers – culled, somehow, from the 7 million who had paid taxes. She’d told them to send the data over, on a Friday night. In such a way that Kathleen might never have heard about it – or heard too late. It’s not going to be any more legal on Saturday, said Kathleen. Let’s meet on Monday to clear things up, said Melanie. They didn’t meet. Instead, on Monday – 3 March – Kathleen and several other top IRS leaders were called into a meeting with Gavin Kliger. I’ve figured out something important about the IRS, Gavin said. He paused for effect. Oh no, thought Kathleen. Every agency has a superpower, said Gavin. The IRS’s superpower is data. Everyone in the agency knew that its data was valuable. That was the reason for the strict laws that prevented it from being exploited for profit or political gain. “He said this in a way that he expected everyone to clap when he was done,” said Kathleen. “No one said a word.” The people around the table – a group that included a woman who had worked at the IRS for 54 years, or 53 years and 50 weeks longer than Gavin Kliger – looked down, or away. Kathleen felt embarrassed for Gavin Kliger. But now it was clear what the meeting was about. Gavin wanted, in his words, “to explore how we can share our data with other agencies”. Interestingly, he never once mentioned Ice or DHS. Instead, that week, he sought to share data with himself, by trying to access files detailing IRS contracts with outside consultants that also contained taxpayer information. Kathleen denied him access. “Find the blockers between us and what we want, Elon told his young followers. Find the blockers and eliminate them.” The following Monday, she received a crypA text came in from a senior IRS official. “I’m going to call your cell, but don’t answer,” it said. Her phone rang, and she dutifully stared at it. Then came a second text: “Gavin is asking where your office is and is now trying to find you to fire you because he says you’re the blocker.”
The Blocker! It was one of Elon’s favorite terms. The blocker was the person who didn’t understand progress. The person without vision. The person who couldn’t see beyond the way things were to the way they ought to be. The person who didn’t want to live on Mars—or possibly even care if anyone ever got there. The inferior person. Traci had been a blocker. “Find the blockers between us and what we want,” Elon told his young followers. “Find the blockers and eliminate them.” Maybe more than anything else, Doge wanted the data. Kathleen was the person blocking them from getting it.
She wasn’t sure what she’d done to anger Gavin. It could have been limiting his access to the procurement contracts. It could also have been pushing back on his request to grant Palantir, Doge’s favorite federal contractor, the right to work with taxpayer data. What likely wasn’t the issue was her resistance to handing over to the Department of Homeland Security the addresses of taxpayers who lacked social security numbers. Gavin had never brought that up; this particular attempt to break the law wasn’t his idea. It was coming from somewhere else. Since she thought she had stopped it, she stopped worrying about it.
And so, roughly two weeks later, on Thursday, March 27, she was caught completely off guard by an email chain that popped up on her screen. At the bottom was its origin: a note from Melanie, forwarding some document from the IRS legal department, along with what sounded like an innocuous request. “Kathleen, could you help facilitate I won’t be able to join today?” it read, without explaining what she was meant to facilitate or why Melanie wouldn’t be able to join. Scrolling through, Kathleen couldn’t find the document but did see lots of bewildered replies from others who had been included—”What is this about?” “Happy to help but can you tell us what this is?” She called the two young lawyers in the IRS legal office who had authored the document referred to in the chain that had somehow gone missing. They explained that the thing Melanie wanted Kathleen to facilitate was a memorandum of understanding for the IRS to share taxpayer data with DHS. Kathleen was knocked sideways. “I thought that it had been stopped,” she said. “I thought Melanie had been caught with her pants down.” The young lawyers now told her that not only had it not been stopped: they’d been working on it since the end of February. “They told me that they were sorry but Melanie had told them to do it and not to tell me or their boss,” said Kathleen.
The situation was obviously bizarre. Kathleen had never heard of an IRS director asking young IRS lawyers to work on something on the side without telling their boss. And if Melanie didn’t want Kathleen to know that she was handing IRS data to DHS, why had she suddenly included her in the conversation? “I think she got scared and dumped it on me to sign off on,” said Kathleen. Melanie was doing to Kathleen what Gavin Kliger had done to Traci DiMartini. She was presenting her with her own unmasking moment and forcing her to make a choice.
“This was life or death stuff. At that moment I knew I had to quit. We all have boundaries. That was my boundary.”
Instead of signing off, Kathleen arranged a Zoom call that day with the people at the Department of Homeland Security who were requesting the data. The “ICE Innovation Lab,” they called themselves. She’d never heard of it. When she Googled it, nothing came up.
A few others joined the call—lawyers from DHS and a privacy lawyer at the IRS named Julie Schwartz. On the call, Kathleen explained that there were some very narrow circumstancesthat would allow the IRS to help. If, for example, an undocumented worker had murdered someone and the police had issued a warrant for his arrest. The ICE officials explained that they were looking for more than wanted criminals. “Just how many people do you want information on?” asked Kathleen. The ICE officials went back and forth among themselves before agreeing that the number was 7 million. They wanted the current addresses of 7 million undocumented workers who had paid their taxes. The most law-abiding, it turned out, might be the easiest to catch.
After the call, Julie, the IRS privacy lawyer, came straight to her office. Julie was usually ice-calm – someone who kept her wits about her. She hadn’t a trace of drama in her. But now Julie was not calm. “Kathleen, after that call I’m not working on this thing,” she said. “I’m not coming in tomorrow. I might not come in Monday. I might not come in ever again.”
“I don’t usually deal with life or death stuff,” said Kathleen. “But this was life or death stuff. At that moment I knew I had to quit. Either that or I’m going to get fired, because I can’t facilitate something that will break the law and is going to hurt people. We all have boundaries. That was my boundary.”
That weekend, Kathleen sent Melanie a note saying she’d be resigning. “I didn’t need to tell her why,” said Kathleen. “She knew why.” She’d be leaving just weeks before her 20th anniversary with the agency. If she’d waited until mid-May, she would have been able to retire and receive benefits for the rest of her life. But she didn’t want to retire. Federal law made it hard for a retired civil servant to return, and if the day ever came when the IRS was rebuilt, she wanted to be able to return. She’d just learned that the lump in her breast was benign.
Days later, Melanie beat Kathleen to it and resigned. Kathleen never figured out how much her note to Melanie – and with it the increased likelihood that the attempted data heist would wind up in the press – led Melanie to quit. On her way out the door, Melanie asked the IRS’s head of communications to plant a story in the Washington Post that she was leaving as a matter of principle. The story cast Melanie as a martyr who had quit rather than divulge IRS data to DHS, when Kathleen knew that she had been caught red-handed trying to do precisely that. “I completely misjudged her character,” said Kathleen.
The ICE agents came for the “illegals” long after the property managers had gone home. The only evidence left behind were grainy videos on security cameras and accounts of terrified residents. “They’re coming in the nights, unannounced,” said Antonio Marquez, who ran a company that owned and managed apartment buildings scattered across the south and south-western United States occupied mostly by lower-middle-income Latinos. “We don’t know how they are targeting the units. It’s wreaking complete havoc.”
Antonio’s apartment complex outside Austin houses a thousand people, mostly young families, at least half of whom are undocumented. It had been visited in the spring late at night by teams of ICE agents. They came in unmarked cars, reported the tenants who remained after the raid. They had no warrants and read no rights. They knew, or thought they knew, exactly which doors to jimmy and which locks to pick and which people to take. The next morning a bunch of tenants were simply gone. All that remained was a pile of discarded possessions.
Protesters rally at an ‘ICE Out of Austin’ demonstration in June 2025. Photograph: Brandon Bell/Getty Images
A man is detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Austin, Texas, in October last year. Photograph: Jamie Kelter Davis/Getty Images
After the first Austin raid, Antonio had erected a tall metal fence around the property. Occasionally, the IICE agents had taken in tenants with full documentation—including an older woman who always paid her rent on time and who had returned from ICE custody wearing an ankle bracelet. The big mystery for Antonio was how ICE knew where people lived. “These are fully targeted,” he said. “They already had these people in mind. They have their addresses. And we don’t know how they’re getting them.”
He was too busy doing his job to notice when, on 11 February 2026, the Washington Post reported that the IRS had shared the tax data of 47,000 undocumented workers with the Department of Homeland Security. Right after the Post’s scoop, a federal judge hearing a case on the matter summoned the IRS lawyers who had previously sworn that the agency had rejected DHS demands. Under questioning, the lawyers admitted that the agency had lied to the court and had in fact shared the data. “The IRS violated the [Internal Revenue Code] approximately 42,695 times by disclosing last known taxpayer addresses to ICE,” the judge wrote in her opinion.
On a hot, sunny afternoon in early March in north-east Austin, it is much quieter than it was a year ago, back when Kathleen Walters was still a blocker. Two small children play in a pool, and a worn middle-aged man squats warily in a corner, smoking a cigarette. The wall of the office where the remaining residents come for their mail is covered with posters advertising the services Antonio’s company offers. One looks more official than the others. Free File del IRS, it reads across the top—and just below, in finer print, it explains how easy and painless it is for a non-citizen to file their taxes. This is an edited extract from Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State by Michael Lewis, published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. Both Gavin Kliger and Melanie Krause declined to be interviewed for the book. Gavin Kliger declined an invitation to comment for this extract. Melanie Krause says that as a non-partisan public servant, “I did my job with integrity, honesty, and transparency.” She denies instructing anyone to send taxpayer information to the DHS or telling lawyers to work on a data-sharing agreement with the agency. She says that refusing to put her name on an email was not the reason for terminating IRS head of human resources Tracy DiMartini. She adds: “I never agreed or wanted to divulge IRS data to DHS. I resigned for personal reasons after I learned that the Department of Treasury had signed such an agreement.”
Frequently Asked Questions
FAQs Elon Is My Prophet How Musks DOGE Team Took a Wrecking Ball to Washington
Beginner Questions
What is DOGE
DOGE was a temporary government body created in early 2025 to slash federal spending Despite the name its not a real department it was set up under the presidents executive authority and led by Elon Musk
Who is Elon Musk in this story
Musk is the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and owner of X He was tapped to lead DOGE as a special government employee giving him sweeping power to cut agencies while avoiding normal disclosure rules
Why Elon is my prophet
Its a slogan used by some Musk fans who see him as a visionary savior of government Critics use it sarcastically to mock what they call a cultlike following
What does wrecking ball mean here
Its a metaphor for DOGEs approach fast blunt and destructive Instead of careful reform the team moved to shut down programs fire workers and cancel contracts with little warning
What did DOGE actually do
It froze federal grants fired tens of thousands of probationary workers gutted agencies like USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and gained access to sensitive payment systems at the Treasury
Did it save money
Musk claimed savings in the billions but independent analysts found many figures inflated doublecounted or based on canceled contracts that cost little to begin with
Intermediate Questions
How did DOGE get so much power so fast
Through executive orders The president directed agencies to cooperate with DOGE and Musks team embedded itself in departments demanding data and override authority over hiring and spending
Who worked for DOGE
Mostly young engineers and tech staff from Musks companies many with no government experience They were given broad access and told to move fast
What happened to federal workers
Hundreds of thousands faced firings buyout offers or forced returntooffice orders Unions and Democrats called it an illegal mass layoff
What were the biggest controversies
Treasury data access dismantling USAID canceled science and health research and Musks public feuds with cabinet members and judges
Did the courts stop DOGE
Sometimes
