Trump pens executive order pushing agencies to share data

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday directing agencies to share data more broadly in the name of fraud prevention, including by tapping into data from state programs that get federal funding. 

The move has sparked concerns that the order could further embolden billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, even as the group is already facing a number of lawsuits over its access to sensitive government data.

“The Trump administration is escalating its effort to consolidate federal data across agencies, opening the floodgates for unplanned uses of information that go far beyond what people expected when they entrusted their data to the government,” said Elizabeth Laird, director of equity and civic technology at the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology.

The new executive order states that the heads of agencies should ensure that designated federal officials have “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, data, software systems, and information technology systems.” It gives agency heads 30 days to rescind or modify agency guidance deemed a hindrance to data-sharing for the sake of identifying and eliminating fraud, waste and abuse. 

“It is serving to legitimize what DOGE has already done and to ensure that agencies are following suit,” said one former government official who’s worked on federal technology and information-sharing policies in previous administrations. 

Just yesterday, a federal judge said that the Social Security Administration likely flouted privacy laws in giving DOGE aides access to SSA data about Americans as it searched for fraud “based on little more than suspicion.”

Within the agency, there’s a fear among staff that the order could be used to give DOGE access to sensitive data and systems, even when a court recently ordered that sharing to stop, one SSA employee told Nextgov/FCW.

At the same time, many have long seen data-sharing across government as overly burdensome and bureaucratic due to outdated privacy laws, to the detriment of efforts to prevent identity fraud or even proactively certify people as eligible for benefits without making them apply. 

“It feels like Christmas morning,” said Linda Miller, a fraud prevention expert who formerly served as the deputy executive director for the government’s pandemic oversight body. She and other oversight officials have long argued for better data sharing to prevent fraud.

Laws like the Privacy Act, which would likely still make the order’s implementation difficult, require specific data use agreements between agencies. Others simply prohibit the sharing of some datasets at all, she said. 

On its face, encouraging the sharing of data “is generally a good thing and can be used to increase transparency and reusability to improve government programs,” said Sonny Hashmi, a former Biden appointee at the General Services Administration who also served as the agency’s chief information officer before that. 

“The main concern here … is that data provenance and access should follow the intent of collecting said data,” he said. “Citizens should have clear line of sight into who is going to use the data they are providing and for what purposes.”

Without that standard, broad data grabs can be used “for really troublesome reasons,” Hashmi added, noting that someone applying for child support payments or food stamps might suddenly find themselves in an ICE raid or a tax audit.

“A lot of the rhetoric from DOGE and Elon Musk in particular is quote unquote fraud that has nothing to do with fraud, that has to do with policy priorities that the Trump administration doesn’t agree with,” said Miller. But “if [datasets are] truly being used in service to fraud, waste and abuse — which is a big if — then I can't imagine an American citizen or anyone receiving government benefits would say, don't access my data in order to protect me from identity theft … In an ideal world that’s what we’re trying to stop here.”