WASHINGTON — Elon Musk’s team at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency has posted classified information about the size and staff of a U.S. intelligence agency on its new website, raising bigger concerns about where Musk’s programmers got this information and what they are doing with it.
DOGE, which President Donald Trump created to purportedly root out waste in the federal government, launched its website on Wednesday night with a feature allowing users to “trace your tax dollars through the bureaucracy.” People can navigate through all federal agencies and offices for details about their head counts, budgets and average ages of employees.
The website states in tiny print at the bottom that its database excludes information from U.S. intelligence agencies.
But an easy search shows that DOGE’s database provides details on the National Reconnaissance Office, the federal agency that designs, builds and maintains U.S. intelligence satellites. Not only are NRO’s budgets and head counts classified, but the prospect of Musk’s tech team meddling in sensitive personnel information is setting off alarms for some in the intelligence community.
NOFORN stands for “Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals,” meaning information in this category can’t be shared with any foreign governments, international organizations or foreign nationals without specific authorization.
NRO appears to be the only intelligence agency with its data publicly available on DOGE’s website. The U.S. intelligence community is composed of 18 organizations, and HuffPost searched DOGE’s website for details on all of them. None of the others had any data.
Musk can’t claim he wasn’t aware that the National Reconnaissance Office is one of the nation’s intelligence agencies. His company, SpaceX, has a $1.8 billion contract with NRO to build hundreds of spy satellites.
Two Senate aides who work on intelligence matters confirmed that NRO’s headcount and budget are classified, though they noted there have been debates within the intelligence community as to whether they should be. The reason to keep this information private at all, they said, is because foreign adversaries could use it to extrapolate how much the U.S. is prioritizing certain intelligence activities.
Nonetheless, DOGE sharing this information “is absolutely a problem under the current intelligence standards,” said one of the Senate aides.
And the real concern is that Musk’s surrogates are bumbling around in classified programs. “These 25-year-old programmers, I don’t think they have enough experience to know what they don’t know,” said this aide. “Really, the question is: Where did they get this information and what are they doing with it?”
A spokesperson for the National Reconnaissance Office punted questions about this back to DOGE.
“We defer to the Department of Government Efficiency for comment on the release of information posted on DOGE.gov,” said the spokesperson.
Hours after this story published, a White House spokesperson said in a statement that DOGE did not share classified information ― even as NRO’s classified information was still accessible on DOGE’s website.
“DOGE did not share classified information, any assertion to the contrary is a lie,” said the spokesperson. “Yesterday the accusation was DOGE was not transparent and today the accusation is DOGE is too transparent. Stop the fearmongering, DOGE’s mission remains to cut waste, fraud, and abuse and are doing so with the proper security clearances and following the law.”
