A staffer from the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, recently got high-level access to view and change the contents of a payments system that controls tens of billions of dollars in government payments and loans to farmers and ranchers across the United States, according to internal access logs reviewed by NPR.
“When we talk about farm loan application records, there is no more personal information anywhere than in that database,” Scott Marlow, a former senior official in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, told NPR. “The farmer’s entire financial life and the life of their kids and their family, every time they’ve missed a payment, every time they’ve had a hard time, every time they’ve gotten in financial trouble … it’s there.”
A source working for the USDA provided evidence of DOGE’s high-level access to the payments system called the National Payment Service. The access is a highly privileged level of permissions that the USDA employee says no other individual at the agency has and goes against normal access protocols. With that access, DOGE can view and modify data entries inside the system, giving them a view into sensitive personal information and the power to outright cancel loans.
It’s unclear whether staffers previously employed by DOGE are now full-time employees at USDA. Another USDA employee who requested anonymity fearing retribution said that the group is now internally referred to as the “Efficiency Team,” or the “E team.”
The move is in line with an early command by Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins to give DOGE “full access and transparency,” though it may run counter to the agency’s long-standing policies around data protection and privacy.
The National Payment Service system is housed at the Farm Service Agency (FSA) — a part of the USDA primarily tasked with keeping American farmers and ranchers afloat with programs like disaster relief, conservation grants and loans.
Many across the political spectrum, including USDA insiders, acknowledge that the Farm Service Agency systems are complex and archaic and that some of its systems are in need of reform. But they say making changes would require a massive bureaucratic and political effort led by experts with intimate knowledge of USDA’s programs and technology. Making changes quickly and haphazardly could lead to disruption of services to agriculture producers, which could be crippling, especially to small, family-owned farms.
Given the complexities of USDA’s programs, the myriad challenges facing farmers and the lack of oversight over DOGE’s activities, it may be hard to unravel what the direct impacts of DOGE’s activities are for years to come.
In early April, Jordan Wick, a former software engineer for the self-driving car company Waymo who has been identified in the media and court documents as a DOGE staffer, got high-level access to the National Payment Service system, the USDA staffer told NPR, sharing access logs as evidence.
That level of access would allow Wick to both view and modify all the data entries inside the system, which tracks payments and information about loans for farmers, ranchers and agricultural producers across the United States. He could outright cancel payments or deny loans.
It’s unclear what DOGE is doing with the data it now has access to and how its employees are protecting it from theft.
A USDA spokesperson confirmed that Wick and colleagues on the “Efficiency Team” are now full-time employees who are working to fulfill Trump’s executive order on government efficiency. The spokesperson also confirmed the team “reviews many loans, guarantees and payments” for “fraud and national security concerns” though did not go into detail on specific examples of evidence of malfeasance. The spokesperson insisted those reviews were “prompt and without undue delay to the program recipient.”
“The abuse of USDA systems and data centers is a serious issue, and the USDA Efficiency Team has been immensely supportive due to their unmatched skillset in protecting our data and ensuring those that use their positions to access systems to defraud American taxpayers, will be held accountable,” the spokesperson told NPR.
Lambert here: On “abuse” as a “serious issue,” citations needed (as usual).
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