In recent weeks, the Department of Government Efficiency team has been making claims of “discovering” information about federal programs that was presumed hidden.
“We had no idea we were going to find this much,” President Trump said of DOGE’s work so far.
For the record: Federal program data is surprisingly accessible. For the last three years, I’ve worked closely with federal data systems. Anyone with an Internet connection can access user-friendly public data portals, like the Federal Program Inventory and USAspending.gov, that show the same information that DOGE is now posting on its new website.
The notion that one needs to access sensitive agency data to uncover federal program spending details is simply not true. These spending portals contain detailed information, like federal program goals, descriptions, funding streams and even recipient organizational names.
Let’s say you wanted to know how much was spent last year on food and nutrition programs in the Department of Agriculture. Just visit the Federal Program Inventory and you’ll find over 50 programs listed. If you wanted to dig deeper and look into the National School Lunch Program, for example, you will find that there were 4.72 billion school lunches and snacks served in 2024.
It gets incredibly specific: If you want to know how many of those school lunches were delivered in Alabama, you can click on the link that will take you to USASpending.gov, another important data product published by the U.S. Treasury to help the public understand where tax dollars are spent. Enter Alabama as the location and you will see the amount of grant money allocated in that state, as well as the organizational recipients who were charged with delivering the program.
All of this is available with just a few clicks. It’s designed for transparency and accessibility.
Unfortunately, DOGE access to backend program data systems is now actively undermining everybody else’s ability to monitor government spending. Until three weeks ago, a simple look at USAID’s Development Experience Clearinghouse would have debunked the “$50 million condoms to Gaza” claim, by showing that funding was going to Gaza Province in Mozambique, as part of an HIV prevention program and did not actually fund condoms. But now the the clearinghouse has disappeared.
By removing public data from government websites, the DOGE team is, in fact, creating the precise scenario of shrouding data in secrecy they claim to be solving.
Furthermore, allowing DOGE to access data systems that contain sensitive information about Americans is eroding public trust. There is strong historical precedent why data systems that contain personally identifiable information are not readily accessible to political officials. During World War II, political officials suspended confidentiality protections and unethically secured names and addresses of individuals of Japanese ancestry for surveillance and internment purposes.
Since then, federal agencies have created firewalls to protect the misuse of personally identifiable information. The DOGE team is breaking these firewalls. This is sowing distrust among American citizens, businesses, and even state and local governments when it comes to releasing their data for future federal data collections.
Even Trump himself has recently stated that the DOGE does not need to access sensitive data.
I fully support innovative approaches to improving government efficiency and effectiveness. I’m passionate about opportunities for reform, especially making government data AI-ready for streamlined operations and mission delivery.
If DOGE wants to accelerate existing momentum to improve agency effectiveness with data, I will celebrate that. There are many agency teams that have deep technological prowess, a strong commitment to improving mission delivery, and more than a thousand strategic AI-enabled data projects underway or ready to be executed upon.
But the claim that essential program data is not publicly available, and that DOGE is the only team to liberate that data, misleads the public and undermines real progress.
Shannon Arvizu is former senior advisor to the chief data officer at the Department of Commerce.
