Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has gained access to a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development system containing confidential personal information about hundreds of thousands of alleged victims of housing discrimination, including victims of domestic violence.
Access to the system, called the HUD Enforcement Management System, or HEMS, is typically strictly limited because it contains medical records, financial files, documents that may list Social Security numbers and other private information. DOGE sought access, and HUD granted it last week, according to information reviewed by ProPublica and two officials familiar with the matter.
This is just the latest collection of sensitive personal information that DOGE has tried to access in recent weeks.
Few records in the HUD system are redacted or anonymized, and many contain deeply personal material about those who have alleged or been accused of housing discrimination.
HUD enforces numerous civil rights laws, including the Fair Housing Act and aspects of the Violence Against Women Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act. Such statutes collectively prohibit housing discrimination on the basis of race, sex, national origin, disability and other characteristics.
Civil liberties advocates expressed alarm about DOGE’s access to the HUD data, saying it may violate the Privacy Act. “It’s difficult to see why a system dedicated to civil rights complaints would have any impact whatsoever on a department looking for inefficiencies in governmental spending,” said Cody Venzke, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union.
Venzke suggested DOGE may use HEMS data as a basis for scaling back housing discrimination enforcement. “There is deep concern that DOGE is not there to identify government inefficiencies, but rather to shutter programs that the administration disagrees with,” he said.
John Davisson, director of litigation at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which is suing DOGE and other federal agencies and officials over DOGE’s access, contended that the department had gained access to HEMS and systems like it “under the false pretenses of identifying fraud and abuse, when what’s really going on is DOGE is trying to gain control over these databases to direct the activities of federal agencies.”
Access to HEMS is usually limited to Fair Housing staffers, HUD attorneys and auditors, and state and local investigators. However, DOGE requested entry, and HUD granted read-only access last week to Michael Mirski, who has a HUD email address and whom officials at the housing agency have identified in internal discussions as being affiliated with DOGE.
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