The government’s massive data dragnet isn’t about efficiency — it’s about fear 

Under the banner of modernization and efficiency, the Trump administration has launched a campaign to tear down what it calls “data silos” across agencies.  

A March 2025 executive order required federal agencies to eliminate these silos by sharing information within and across agencies. It also ordered federal agencies to take steps to ensure they have “unfettered access” to state data generated by federally funded programs — and they have since gone after data on food stamp and Medicaid recipients. These actions prompted states to sue, to avoid a culture of fear where eligible people are unwilling to apply for benefits. 

But when another IRS commissioner was pushed out this month — President Trump’s sixth since January — it wasn’t just another example of the administration’s notoriously rapid leadership turnover. The departure occurred just hours after the IRS and Department of Homeland Security clashed over the sharing of data to verify the addresses of 40,000 taxpayers DHS suspects of being undocumented.  

We are witnessing the construction of a massive surveillance dragnet, built on a flagrant disregard for legal safeguards and people’s rights. People should understand — and be alarmed — that once these data silos come down, they won’t go back up. The power to track, target and punish will exist for every future administration. Will a future Democratic president, for example, cross-reference state gun registration and license records against medical records from the Department of Veterans Affairs to identify unsuitable owners? 

Even those who support the current ramp-up of immigration enforcement should want a system that is targeted, precise and operating within the rule of law. But the administration is scooping up entire populations in the hope of catching a few.  

The now-departed senior IRS officials who pushed back were understandably fearful of violating federal laws that prohibit the sharing of taxpayer data unless the information is needed to enforce designated criminal statutes (most immigration violations are civil). As one former IRS lawyer told Pro Publica regarding an ICE request for the addresses of 7.3 million taxpayers, “There’s just no way ICE has 7 million real criminal investigations, that’s a fantasy.” 

There is nothing efficient about this process, either. Fusing datasets that were developed for different purposes requires a level of care too often lacking in recent efforts. The risks of mismatching and misinterpretation are high. Just as the administration’s overbroad immigration enforcement raids in Los Angeles resulted in the detention of U.S. citizens, so, too, will innocent people be swept up in the Trump administration’s digital dragnet. 

These data grabs will subject innocent people to the indignity and fear of government scrutiny. We learned this lesson decades ago, when the Nixon administration tried to coerce the Internal Revenue Service into auditing its political enemies. That episode helped motivate Congress to designate tax returns as confidential. The creation of this data silo served a democratic purpose: by ensuring that, for the most part, tax returns can only be used for tax enforcement and only by the IRS, thus insulating the agency from political considerations. 

But like President Nixon, Trump has made it clear that he believes he should be able to use any and all levers of government to go after his perceived enemies. This includes his drive to investigate and prosecute Hillary Clinton the last time he was president, and his threat to take away Harvard’s tax-exempt status this time.  

Republicans and Democrats alike put guardrails in place to protect against punitive, Nixon-era data sharing in the 1970s. They — and we — should all condemn these present-day data sharing schemes. Sadly, the current Congress has shown little ability to resist even the most outlandish requests from Trump — and the president seems determined to cycle through IRS leaders until he finds one willing to do his bidding.  

For now, the last line of defense may be the courts. They must see these data grabs for what they are: not as a campaign for efficiency, but as a vast enrichment of the federal government’s ability to track and monitor us all. 

Catherine Crump is clinical professor and director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley, School of Law.